The Moola Brunch: Back to Our Roots

On Saturday, we welcomed fifteen people into my living room in London for the first Moola Brunch. Every spot on the sofa was filled, there was a waiting list, and for four hours we shared brunch, talked about money, explored investing, and discussed the financial decisions that shape our lives. Although Moola is now an AI-powered financial planning platform, the afternoon was, in many ways, a return to where the company began.

Long before there was a company, a product, or even the idea of building a startup, Moola started in another living room in Berlin. At the time, I was working on my investment company, Okta Investment GmbH, and I found myself having remarkably similar conversations with friends. They were doctors, consultants, engineers, founders and lawyers—people who were highly accomplished in their careers, yet often admitted that they lacked confidence when it came to making financial decisions. They wanted to know whether they should start investing, whether buying a home made financial sense, how much they should be saving for retirement, or simply whether they were on track to achieve the future they imagined for themselves.

What struck me wasn’t that people lacked the ability to understand finance. Most were more than capable of learning the technical concepts. What they lacked was confidence. They wanted someone to explain the trade-offs, help them think through different options, and reassure them they weren’t overlooking something important. We spend years developing the skills required for our professions, yet remarkably little time learning how to manage the financial decisions that influence almost every aspect of our lives. As a result, many people assume they should already know the answers and feel uncomfortable asking questions that, in reality, almost everyone else is asking too.

So one afternoon, I invited a group of friends over, prepared some snacks, and ran a workshop on investing in my living room.

Back then, there was no business plan, no pitch deck, and certainly no intention of starting a company. It was simply an opportunity to share what I had learned through my own investing journey and create a space where people felt comfortable asking questions they might not otherwise ask. Looking back, that afternoon shaped Moola far more than I realised at the time. The workshop wasn’t really about investing. It was about creating an environment where people could have honest conversations about money, challenge assumptions they had held for years, and realise they weren’t alone in feeling uncertain. The financial education mattered, but it was the conversations around the table that stayed with me, and they ultimately became the foundation for the company we are building today.

That experience was very much on my mind as people arrived at my flat in London last Friday.

We deliberately wanted the afternoon to feel different from a traditional networking event or product demonstration. Instead, the goal was to recreate the informal environment that had inspired Moola in the first place. We started with homemade brunch, coffee, and a glass of prosecco before picking up conversation prompts from a bowl.

The questions weren’t about stock picking or tax allowances. Instead, they explored the relationship people have with money itself: What is your earliest memory of money? What does financial freedom mean to you? What beliefs about money did you inherit from your family? If money were no longer a constraint, how would your life look different?

The conversations that followed were thoughtful, honest and, at times, surprisingly personal. People who had only met an hour earlier were discussing career changes, buying homes, supporting parents, feelings of financial anxiety, and the different ways our experiences shape how we think about money. It was a reminder that, despite how central money is to our lives, we rarely create opportunities to talk about it openly.

Only after those conversations did we move into an abbreviated version of our Investing Basics workshop before giving everyone a demonstration of Moola.

In many ways, that sequence reflects the philosophy behind the product itself. We don’t believe financial planning should begin with products or portfolios. It should begin with understanding the person sitting on the other side of the table: what they are trying to achieve, what financial security means to them, how they think about risk, and what kind of life they want to build. That philosophy has shaped Moola from the beginning and is reflected in the way the platform combines a person’s financial situation, long-term goals and behavioural profile to generate personalised guidance that is both practical and understandable.

One of my favourite moments came after the workshop had officially finished. People stayed.

Small groups formed around the dining table and the sofa, continuing conversations about investing, careers, entrepreneurship and life long after the slides had been put away. It reinforced something we’ve believed from the beginning: while technology can make financial planning dramatically more accessible, confidence often comes from conversation. Sometimes the most valuable thing we can do is create an environment where people feel comfortable asking questions and learning from one another.

The event was fully booked, and we were fortunate enough to have a waiting list. On 18 July, we’ll be hosting our next Moola Brunch in San Francisco, and we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation with a new community.

As Moola grows, we’ll continue building technology that helps people make better financial decisions, but we’ll also keep creating opportunities like these to bring people together. After all, the idea for Moola didn’t begin with an app. It began on a sofa, with a group of friends having honest conversations about money, and that’s still a philosophy worth holding onto.