Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Gori Yahaya, CEO and Founder of UpSkill Digital, a company providing inclusive, equitable learning programmes to empower people in the digital age. Working in digital advertising and while leading a training campaign for Google Design to empower UK businesses with technology, Gori saw a need to offer a more hands-on, personal approach to help people adopt digital tools to really grow their business. The idea simmered while Gori launched his first two companies, both using tech to engage people on a large scale. And in 2015, he founded UpSkill Digital. Known for their largescale inclusion programmes for the likes of Walmart, Microsoft and HSBC, Gori’s aim to drive more inclusive behaviours across organisations has led to global learning programmes across Europe, Africa, Asia and the US with UpSkill Digital now having trained over 630,000 people. Not bad. It’s very nice to have you here.
Gori Yahaya
Thanks for having me. Thank you so much.
Elliot Moss
What’s it all about this UpSkill Digital? I gave my, my intro but in your own words Gori.
Gori Yahaya
It was a very powerful intro so I really appreciate that to be honest. UpSkill Digital, we’re a learning consultancy where you build largescale learning programmes for organisations. You know, our real purpose, our real goal, is to really tackle the skills and representation gap in business, so we build programmes that help people feel more confident in technology and to be able to excel so we have bootcamps that get people learning about data science and cloud engineer, get them into organisations, we do very specific inclusion programmes for organisations to help their managers feel they can create more inclusive workspaces and we have a learning platform, and that learning platform helps us scale the learning that we deliver either on behalf of organisations or that we train ourselves with local communities and also individuals and organisations too.
Elliot Moss
And this didn’t exist eight years ago?
Gori Yahaya
No, the area in terms of training has been around for many, many years…
Elliot Moss
Sure.
Gori Yahaya
…but actually, in terms of…
Elliot Moss
Your business?
Gori Yahaya
No, we started, I started it eight years ago and I had this idea, I actually taught myself to build a website and was fascinated by you know what technology could do but I was also frustrated, I found it really hard to find any training courses, training materials to be able to learn how to do it so I thought why not build a company that does that and hopefully build a company that makes its own money, which makes it easy for me too.
Elliot Moss
And was the initial thing just about the digital skills gap and then did it become an inclusivity piece? Is that how it started or was it kind of both at the same time?
Gori Yahaya
No, it started with the digital piece. For me, I was, I just recognised that there was a gap in, well there was a level of intimidation towards technology, you know around 2018, 2015, there was a stat at that time that really hooked me that said 35% of businesses didn’t have a website and for the most part it was because they didn’t feel confident in the tools to build one, they didn’t know why they needed one, they couldn’t enhance the power of technology and I thought let’s help them with my network of trainers that I knew to help them build that but then it grew, you know what I’ve realised is I start to solve problems that are driving societal progress and inclusion came into it. We were doing some training trying to get some young, I guess marginalised individuals into organisations with tech skills and we saw some barriers and this was I guess highlighted early 2020 when the George Floyd incident happened that really flagged that there were organisations that weren’t investing in inclusion in their organisations at all so, or anywhere near as much as they should have been. So for us, we thought we can tackle the skills gap but if people can’t get into jobs or people in jobs that are really high potential, high performing people can’t progress because of the colour of their skin or because of their background, I run a learning company so I can educate people around this as well and that’s for me, that’s what kind of drove that need to build in that space too.
Elliot Moss
You mentioned the George Floyd moment and that was, was it 2020? 2020, it feels like yesterday Gori and that’s the weird thing about these seismic things that happen, whether it’s terrible war or whether it’s an incredibly, an awful event like that. For you, you said it was a catalyst or were things already in train, was it more of a thing that said you know what, I need to move quicker on the thing I’m already thinking about? Was it that rather than it sparking the initial thought?
Gori Yahaya
It was definitely a catalyst. I mean, we’ve been running training programmes specifically for ethnically diverse individuals in organisations to progress for about maybe six months or so before that and I was running a workshop for a large tech organisation, I was on my third session, sorry the day before my third session is when the George Floyd incident happened and I was about to do a session and I had to navigate the organisation to progress to be able to grow and when that incident happened, you know this was a huge shock for a lot individuals and we were, as a black individual I was familiar with these things happening across the US, it does happen but the way the world kind of banded together to say this isn’t right, really you know, it changed the shape of the conversation I was going to have. I was about to walk into a room with a number of people or virtually because of the pandemic, to talk a bit about how do we navigate an organisation where we’re talking about a murder that’s just happened very recently and the catalyst for me was that I could help individuals, employees feel confident in their skills to be able to take ownership of their career progression but there was a bigger challenge here. They can’t progress unless their managers knew how to help them progress and have better career conversations so we built a whole curriculum around helping managers feel empowered, equipped, enabled, educated around the challenges that certain individuals in their team face to build a more inclusive space. That was the catalyst for us. We built a whole, a very, very large curriculum and what we also recognised is a lot of organisations were just running unconscious bias training, that was the only thing they thought they needed and we said actually, you can go role specific, level specific and help people feel equipped and make it relevant to them so they can open the doors and make the workplace a better place for everyone to work in.
Elliot Moss
The way you describe it, it’s rational, it’s logical, it’s methodical. I imagine though your emotions at that time were none of those things. How did you and have you channelled your own personal feelings about inequity and we’re talking about one horrific incident then but we’re talking about years and years and institutionally issues, how have you managed to positively channel what must be frustration and anger into something so programmatic and so calm?
Gori Yahaya
Yeah, well I think there’s two sides to that so, for me, I like to solve problems in a way that helps it scale and to be able to scale you need to do so in a way that’s modular, that is easy to digest and that’s where when you’re thinking about learning, you can’t just go out there and shout about your problems, you need to help people be educated on them and progress. I guess there are two things that really got me thinking clearly in the space. Firstly, you know I just had a kid around this George Floyd incident and you know a little baby girl and when I started to think about what her future’s going to be like and the responsibility that I have to be able to shape that, it really got me thinking what I’ve got to do is really invest all my energy, my efforts and the skills that I’m blessed with to create this and that’s why with UpSkill I started to think let me invest in that space as best as I can. The other big thing is I love breaking stereotypes and I love trying to break systems and there is a huge system of oppression that exists in organisations where you know there are certain individuals that make it to the top and for them to make it to the top other people really should stay where they need to stay and I wanted, I felt really excited about breaking that but to break a system you need to understand the system and that’s understanding how do you make the right kind of impact in the right places with the right kind of learning and target the right kind of people to help you drive that change. So that’s really for me what allowed me to be very focussed in that area. The emotions are still there, I mean that’s what, that’s the energy I get and that’s the passion I get to drive that energy that helps me do what I do on a daily basis but realistically to really make impact in an organisation, you need to show value and you need to be able to show that what you’re doing can be scaled and that what you’re doing can help people achieve what they want to achieve, you have to be very methodical about how you do that as well so that’s what’s allowed me to navigate this in a more logical, logical approach.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much more from my guest, it’s Gori Yahaya, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes. He’s the Founder of UpSkill Digital. Right now, we’re going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions, they can be found on all the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Martha Averly and Matt Robinson talk about equality, diversity and inclusion with regards to recruitment and how employers can recruit in a fair but diverse way.
You can of course find all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest today is Gori Yahaya, CEO and Founder of UpSkill Digital, a transformation and training agency. We can call you all sorts of different things. I quite like the variety. The family, your family, would have said, I imagine, Nigerian family, ‘but you need to be a doctor, you need to get an ology’, I read somewhere about you went ‘alright, I’ll do chemistry but’. How much of the family has put your where you are today? Even though they said go be a doctor, which is, you know you hear that in Jewish families, you know in African families, Indian families, it’s a pretty strong ethnic thread, you’ve got to get a profession and there you were doing your own thing but underneath it I imagine there’s a lot of family influence in where you are now.
Gori Yahaya
Absolutely. Look, I’m incredibly lucky. My dad is a bit of an entrepreneur anyway so albeit you know the extended family were always like, ‘We’re only really going to appreciate you if you go down one of these professions’. I was always excited by what my dad was going to build next, you know he started his career in the film industry and so he was a film maker, he actually set up one of the first production companies in Nigeria back in the fifties and did some filming during the civil war and then he then shifted to running a pharmaceutical factory and he’s done lots of different things and for me, I just love that variety so what I tried to get under the skin of is, what can you build that can make money for itself, sustain itself but also drive some impact in the world. So I’m fortunate I never really had to battle that need to kind of fit into the engineering, you know become an engineer, become an accountant or become a doctor but I ended up doing chemistry because that was what I was good at school, right, and the school system didn’t really prepare you for the workforce and that for me was one of the bigger challenges, I said actually what do I study, how do I get to do something that I feel I can build myself and I started working for myself probably from Day 1 at Uni, you know I started doing lots of work outside of Uni, I then built my first start-up after you know the day I left Uni, like for me it was always about how do I kind of create something that I feel confident in that I can actually build and grow and that it can scale itself. So, family has never been as much of a challenge for me but I just feel it’s now on me to be able to impact others and get them excited about what they can do without the pressures that are around them.
Elliot Moss
So the entrepreneurial piece, you mentioned, oh I just started a business up, you know when I got out of Uni, that obviously you’ve seen dad do his thing and that’s a big piece over there but the, I think I read somewhere about you know you weren’t good at X so you brought someone in, that lack of ego, that honesty about what Gori is good at, where does that come from? Has that always been there or have you developed it?
Gori Yahaya
I think it’s come over time, you know I feel very confident in myself in a lot of things and it isn’t until you realise that you just don’t have enough arms to do everything and you need other people to come and help you but you need more expertise. It’s definitely one of the parts that I find most difficult to handle which is knowing what you’re good at and knowing what other people can either be better at or help you be better at as well so, yeah for example with my first start-up, you know I started trying to help build the app and you know I thought there’s only so far I can go with this app, it isn’t going to scale if it’s going to be me building it so, I found somebody else who was a bit of a CTO who was able to understand what I needed to build but also help translate to me the things that I really needed be translated into things that I could understand to help us build this properly and find the right developers and so on and so forth and to build it properly. Similarly in business now, I feel you know every day I’m thinking you know do I have the right people with the right expertise around me to get us to where we need to get to and reminding myself that that expertise will change over time as we grow as an organisation and I don’t have it all. We’re fortunate to have scaled quite a bit since we first started eight years ago and I’ve learned a lot about what I’m good at and I’ve learned about what I’m not good at and I’m lucky I have people around me that keep me honest and help me understand that I can also be vulnerable and say what I’m not good at and they can kind of plug the gaps and help me grow.
Elliot Moss
Gori, what are you not good at?
Gori Yahaya
What am I not good at? Err, I struggle with finance to be brutally honest, you know that’s an area that albeit I am very passionate, I like chemistry, I like data and stuff, when it comes to numbers I really struggle, I think there’s a big barrier for me so balance sheets and P&Ls and the rest of it, I try and get someone else who can do that really well and hopefully tell me story about data even better. You know, I’m always trying to hone my leadership skills, you know I think it’s interesting as a founder, you’re a visionary, right, you come up with great ideas, you get people excited and behind them but as a CEO it’s different, when you’re managing a company, managing a team and managing people around you and departments and that sort of thing, you know those are skills that I’m always trying to hone and be better at, you know as I grow.
Elliot Moss
But you prefer being a visionary.
Gori Yahaya
Oh I love being a visionary.
Elliot Moss
Much more fun isn’t it. Stay with me for much more from Gori Yahaya, he’s my Business Shaper today, Founder and CEO, let’s not forget, of UpSkill Digital.
I noted that you have not taken external funding. Many people I meet on their journey here on Jazz Shapers talk about the funding thing and how hard it is to raise. Why not?
Gori Yahaya
So I think in my first start-up and my second start-up you know I really understood the barriers of raising money and I sort of, I said to myself could I build something that was sustainable in itself that could grow without any external funding because then I feel like I’ve made it, right, then I feel like it’s a strong enough product in itself that would grow so, I built it thinking what can I do with the resource and the expertise that I have myself and that’s how we grew. So over eight years we’ve been able to scale, we’ve got about 50-odd people now across multiple countries but it’s not been easy because with funding comes advice, comes guidance, comes you know the focus that you need to have and those are sort of challenging pieces but I raised funding on my second start-up, that was difficult, it was my co-founder who went out there and got the money because you know for me as a black founder, you know I immediately felt that I wouldn’t be having the same conversations that him as a white founder would be able to have.
Elliot Moss
I just want to ask you, is there, because I, if you talk to all my female founders, they say 2p in pound goes to women. From a black founder’s point of view I imagine the stats are pretty bad?
Gori Yahaya
Yep, they are pretty bad.
Elliot Moss
Still. In 2023.
Gori Yahaya
It hasn’t, the dial hasn’t shifted. There is money out there but for black founders it’s really about relationships, it’s about networks and often a lot of black founders don’t have the networks that you need to be able to get that money. In my second start-up I definitely found that, you know my co-founder had, he had better networks than I did and I think some of the investors related more to him, you know, and you know I find myself a fairly personable guy and you know I had good conversations and I was confident in our product but I definitely felt in some of those rooms where we were talking about money and investment and whatnot, it didn’t feel like I was wanted, I didn’t feel like I was respected and it put me off massively, which is actually what sparked me wanting to build something on my own that I could go as far as I could without needing any funding at all.
Elliot Moss
Do you think that’s actually made you double down Gori? And go you know what I’m going to show you.
Gori Yahaya
Absolutely. Well look there’s the whole you know a lot of people that are from ethnically diverse background will know that concept of working twice as hard, right, getting your head down and really doing the hard work to be able to show that you can get there and there are some great, great black founders out there creating some incredible products and we double down but the challenges are you do have to get your head above the precipice and basically show people what you’re doing and build those relationships, right, and those relationships do form on people’s bias, they form on people's you know want of wanting you to succeed but yeah, having been through those situations in the boardroom with people that we did bring on as board members who were you know not as receptive you know perhaps and you know would make the odd joke here and there that felt just a bit out of place that made me feel like I don’t want board members, you know I want to build, I don’t want investors, I want to build it myself and see how far we can go with it.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with my guest today, it’s Gori Yahaya and Steely Dan will be Reeling in the Years as well, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Gory Yahaya is my Business Shaper for a few more minutes and we have been talking about stuff I guess Gori that I hadn’t thought about in the context of raising money and in your answer to that question makes sense to me. The downside of not having external capital, forget the money bit, as you said is around the advice you might get from those people, the smart money that people call it. How have you managed to grow personally and professionally when it’s you? When essentially the visionary looks in the mirror, so the visionary goes ‘Right Gori, what are we going to do?’ Have you managed to create a network around you of people that are mentors to you or advisors even if it’s informal and not behind the investments they would have made?
Gori Yahaya
Absolutely. I’ve had to build what I call a bit of a personal advisory board, right, people that they mean a lot to me, we share values and they’re people that believe in me to be able to grow, they’re also people that are experts in their space and so when I think about what I need to help us to grow UpSkill, to help grow any business that I’m working on, you know I’ve got people that are expert in marketing, people that are expert in sustainability, people that are experts in growth, right, experts in people management and I’m fortunate to kind of to have them around me but I’ve also had a hard way to reach out to them and build up that relationship as well. Because like you said when you don’t have the money back and you also don’t have the guidance you know the focus you often, it’s in you so you know I wake up in the morning and I get super excited by the learner stories that we hear, people who’ve changed their lives and the learning that they’ve got through our programmes, you know people who feel inspired to become something different, become something more that drives me but as you shape a company to be able to scale there are very specific things around business that you need to be able to feel confident in or have people help guide you so, you know my first two businesses I never had a mentor, right, the concept of mentorship actually didn’t really creep in until I started UpSkill and then after the first few years I was actually going to more events, more talks, listening to more people who you know I was just inspired by and then I’d reach out to them directly and say look I loved what you said you know whether it was about marketing or whether it was about breaking into a new market, you know can you tell me a bit more about it and then started to build up a relationship with them and help them tell, help them also tell our story which for me was I loved, I think there’s a thing that I always like to say which is people say, you know, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know but I always say it’s actually who knows what you know and if you connect with people and get them to know more about your story, they’ll either want to back it or they’ll want to tell more people about it and then it will grow itself and especially if we are driving a programme that is genuinely trying to change the world, drive society in the right direction, drive the economy in the right direction, I want more people to know about what we do and help us join us on that journey.
Elliot Moss
And I like, I love that phrase by the way, but I also like the fact that it is, you’re still impact driven, it’s what you talked about at the beginning, you’re a Board Trustee at Founders4Schools I think, a charity working to improve young people’s career prospects and skills, co-founder of the Digital Collective, a not-for-profit organisation partnering with public and private companies in Europe to address digital skills gaps. You mean it.
Gori Yahaya
It means a lot to me.
Elliot Moss
But you really mean it. I mean that is your thing.
Gori Yahaya
It goes deep for me. Like I said I wanted to build a world that I feel my daughter can thrive in and I want to break barriers for her to do so but I also want to put the responsibility on businesses to be able to drive that change. They have the funds, they have the way to invest, they have the resources so I do put the pressure on businesses and say either engage your employees, train them to help you grow but also look from a corporate social responsibility perspective, look outside, look to communities, help invest in them, invest in the way that’s going to help them truly thrive especially in such a rapidly changing digital world as well, so for me there’s um, it runs deep. It runs deep and I you know I have a lot more energy to give, you know, there’s a lot of me to come so that’s why I really try to make sure I get the right people around me to help grow this in the right way and there’s a long way for us to go.
Elliot Moss
Good luck. It’s been great chatting to you.
Gori Yahaya
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Elliot Moss
Keep the pressure on, I can see it, you’re like, he’s smiling going yep, there’s a lot more where that came from.
Gori Yahaya
Absolutely.
Elliot Moss
You ain’t seen nothing yet. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Gori Yahaya
Yeah, I’ve gone for Alfa Mist, I love this guy, I saw him perform at Village Underground in East London, such a cool, quiet, calm, collected guy. The song is called Keep On, it’s just the right kind of vibe for me and I hope this will help everybody enjoy the rest of their day.
Elliot Moss
Alfa Mist there with Keep On, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Gori Yahaya. He talked about the driving force of shaping a future for his daughter and that’s why he does what he does. He loves breaking stereotypes and systems and boy do you need to do that if you’re a founder. He talked about the founder’s role as a visionary is great but actually being a CEO is different and I think that’s a really important distinction. And finally, his take on the aphorism, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know, he said it’s about who knows what you know and that’s all about driving advocacy for your business. Great stuff. That’s it from Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You’ll find hundreds more guests available for you to listen to in our archive, to find out more just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.