Former Monzo CTO Meri Williams joins Healx | Sifted

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For most founders and chief technical officers, the idea of doubling a tech team in just a year might sound fairly daunting. 

For Meri Williams, former CTO of digital bank Monzo and newly announced CTO of drug discovery startup Healx, that sounds “like a nice relaxing approach to things”. 

While at Monzo, she grew the bank’s tech and data team by five times in just 18 months; back in 2012, at the UK’s Government Digital Service, she took a team of 30 to 300 over nine months. She is the woman you want onside to scale your engineering team — and quite a steal for Healx. 

Those who have met Williams, however, will guess that it’s not the quiet life she’s after. She is, aside from being an expert at growing teams, a hugely influential advocate for diversity in tech and passionate about equality. 

And with Healx, which accelerates the discovery and development of rare disease treatments, she has a chance to help the 350m people across the world affected by these conditions (only 5% of which have approved treatments). 

“Healx can bring to this set of people viable treatments which were not economically feasible to develop previously. It doesn’t need to be a cure; even treatment can be life changing for those folks,” says Williams, who is speaking from experience; she hasEhlers Danlos syndrome, a rare disease which sometimes means she needs to use a wheelchair.

Joining the 50-person Healx team (22 of whom are in tech, data and engineering) is also an opportunity for her to dust off her half-finished PhD and “get back to the real bleeding edge of AI”. Drug discovery is usually a very long process but AI is now sufficiently mature for tech companies like Healx, whichraised $56m last October, to vastly speed it up. In order to do so, however, Healx will need a “world class tech team”, says Williams — and finding that team is her next challenge. 

Speak to some sages of Europe’s startup ecosystem, and at this point in the conversation they might bring up the continent’s great ‘talent shortage’. 

Not Williams. “I think it’s bullshit — and you can use that as a direct quote.” 

Europe doesn’t suffer from a lack of people in tech who are able to provide the skills scaling companies need; startups just aren’t looking in the right places, she says — or are looking at too narrow a pool of talent. “It’s challenging if you assume you have to find people who’ve already done this.” 

At Healx, Williams will need to build a team that has “startup-style momentum” without jarring with the rare disease specialists already at the company. She doesn’t think that means she needs to find product managers with a doctorate in genetics, though. 

“I care a lot about broadening opportunities and inclusion; you’ve got to get good at helping people rapidly understand this very complex area, rather than hiring people who’ve done a PhD in bio computation. There’s an opportunity to add some folks who have that fast-paced tech startup approach, bring them in and teach them about rare disease.”

They will, however, need different aptitudes to the product, engineering and data people she is used to hiring. “A lot of people have got good at product management in spaces that need to be so simple you don’t need training [to use the products],” she says: read digital banking apps, or government websites. 

But Healnet, Healx’s drug discovery platform, which has been used recently to identify potential combination therapies for Covid-19, isn’t simple and doesn’t need to be. “It needs to make a world expert even better at their job,” says Williams — and she’s looking for new joiners who’ll get excited by that challenge.

Working on a product which isn’t used by millions of people, 365 days of the year, will make for a pleasant change in other ways too.

“This Christmas was the first time ever I have not been on call over a major holiday,” says Williams, who stepped down from her full-time role as Monzo CTO at the start of the year, and has been interim CTO at Healx for one day per week since then. (She has also been working one day per week as interim CTO at LabGenius, a startup using machine learning to discover new protein therapeutics.) 

“Everyone would have noticed if Monzo went down… People really, really did notice.”

Holidays aside, however, her role will follow a familiar pattern.

“I spend about 40% of my time in conversation with company executives, investors and the board on strategic thinking. I’m the ‘how do we get this done person’,” she says — and the person who points out where certain projects might make the team hit capacity. 

She also spends another 40% of her time on tech strategy — and looking at how that affects the people strategy. “Even when I was in technical roles, I couldn’t stop myself fixing the people and processes challenges,” she says. For the size of teams she often manages, she’s still more focused on people than most CTOs, she adds.

That also means she meets with the people she manages regularly. “I really care about people management and development, so I spend a lot of time with my direct reports.”