I was a head of the internal product team, essentially a tech side of the operations, and she was a head of scaling operations for a while. And we oversaw a lot of growth and a lot of scaling operations at Monzo. When it was time for both of us to leave and we separately arrived to the desire to fund the company. And we started talking and it was natural for both of us to leave, and we separately arrived to the desire to fund the company,

and we started talking, and it was natural for us to go into the operation space,

where we thought, well, we scaled ops and customer support for Monzo,

and it was an award-winning customer support, like company very well-known for this.

So we know everything. We didn't know everything.

My name is Irina Bednova, and I'm the CTO and co-founder of Cordless.

This is Code Story, the podcast bringing you interviews with tech visionaries,

who share in the critical moments of what it takes to change in industry and build and lead.

A team that has your back.

I'm your host, Noel Lappart.

And today how Arena Banova sit out to use her customer service knowledge and build a better product around telepane.

All this and more.

OnCote story.

Arena Bednova started programming when she was a kid, starting out with the smash the cockroach game written Delphi, which is object-oriented Pascal.

She obtained her computer science degree in Russia and moved to the UK to work in a few startups,

including Monzo, a popular fintech product.

Outside of tech, she cycles her hobbies from time to time,

and has landed on guarding at the moment, along with interior design.

She's mentioned she's going to go back to

woodworking when the weather changes. Arena and her co-founder led teams at Monzo, specifically

in operations. What they noticed was the proliferation of chat tools for customer service,

but that telephony was largely ignored. Once they validated the problem, they set out to build a product in this space.

...