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 serial entrepreneur, Paul Mankoo, Founder of Unified, an e-discovery business along with others as well as being that an investor in early stage tech companies. A self-professed academic under achiever, it wasn’t until university that Paul managed to combine his fascination for technology and marketing on a ground breaking new course, Business and Information Technology, that’s what they used to call it, where he was given apparently a course laptop back before more people even had a PC at home. The digital revolution was quietly on its way and Paul has since set up no less than five tech enabled businesses from scratch. Scaling them from start-up to multiple exits with the legal sector his most long standing focus. He founded Unified in 2010 providing e-discovery and document review services to Fortune 1000 Corporation law firms, including Mishcon de Reya and Government agencies across Europe. It’s great to have you here.
Paul Mankoo
Hi Elliot, thanks and nice to be here.
Elliot Moss
Paul, in your world, the non consumer world, the business to business world you have done a whole ton of stuff and people listening go ‘I wonder who this fellow is’. Tell me about the first business you set up. I just want to go there for a moment and then we’ll jump around a little bit.
Paul Mankoo
Well arguably the first business I set up was selling sweets and drinks to my friends on their BMX’s. That was probably the best business I ever had because it had a 100% profit margin and my mum bought all the stock and I sold it and kept the money. But in reality the first business I set up was way back I was working for Xerox in their outsourcing division and a few of us colleagues sort of looked at what was going on there, Xerox was a hot bed of technology, innovation you know, great kind of delivery of services outside of the photocopy that they are kind of known for, photocopier division and we kind of recognised that actually a lot of our clients weren’t really well served by this kind of great monolithic corporate structure and so ventured out on our own and that was my first experience into the legal world so it was a company we set up in the 90s, a small company called IGL which we built up and kind of after a few years sold to a company called Icon, which is like a mini Xerox and then that became sort of a centre of what they called legal document services back in those days. So it was working on big cases like BA versus Virgin, BCCI versus BO – Bank of America, where you know, you had so much information in those day proliferating in document form in paper that to get anything done you had to get control of that and there was no way of manually going through that kind of stuff, you know, it’s just impossible, physically impossible to do within the confines of the Court case or whatever it was, the litigation. So at one point we had you know, a hanger given to us at Heathrow and we set it up with you know, 100 people with a scanner and a PC and they were literally scanning the paper in, running character recognition on it and creating searchable databases so that was the first business we had and set me on the course to entrepreneurship but also you know, the legal world.
Elliot Moss
And when you did that, what did you know about running a business?
Paul Mankoo
Absolutely nothing. Absolutely nothing. I mean, I think as I said to you joking aside, I think from early days I always found as a youngster, a sort of natural bent towards entrepreneurship business if you want, I was attracted to it. Now obviously you and I of a certain vintage, we grew up in the era of 80s films and you know, greed is good and Gordon Gekko and the Stock Market, the Big Bang and all of that kind of stuff and that was the bit that I was kind of drawn to, was the business side of things so you know, I worked on Camden Market selling jewellery on a stall you know, that kind of thing and, and really was always towards that direction of building brands and selling things. So that was that but in terms of actually corporate structure, how do you set up a business, what do you do, how do you manage people, how do you employ people you know, how do you go and market yourself, how do you create a brand, all that kind of stuff, I had very little experience of that. I remember like as a kid I was obsessed with brands so like I used to chop out, cut out the brands out of the sweets that I was eating and stick them on a piece of paper and I’d have sheets of paper just with the brands and I used to look at them and I came up with my own logo; I used to design my own brands and then I was very prou… this was the year obviously of Japanese technology, another thing which I was really interested in and so I created my own brand and spent hours doing it and it was called Fisae – F I S A E you know, I’d look at all Hitachi’s and all of these kind of other brands and Sony and come up with this name and then my dad who’s a doctor, pointed out that it’s pretty similar to faeces and it probably wouldn’t go down very well. So at that point I abandoned my electronics career.
Elliot Moss
You just reminded me and we will go to Eddie Harris on the next piece in a moment but I wasn’t as original as you, my interest was in EMI, EMI the record label because it was Elliot Moss Inventions.
Paul Mankoo
Right. Very good.
Elliot Moss
Pathetic but I thought that’s what I am going to create, I’m like ‘they’ve got it but I’m going to be that guy’. School I know from you was not your, your highlight. University probably not your highlight in terms of aca… you know you feeling like you’re not an academic performer. Whether that’s true or not I don’t know, maybe you are being hard on yourself but do you think your relationship with academia has propelled you into proving yourself in the world of business?
Paul Mankoo
Definitely, I think you know that and also probably allied with a bit of a cultural kind of background and being you know, son of an immigrant into the country um…
Elliot Moss
Dad Indian?
Paul Mankoo
Correct, yeah my dad’s Indian, was born in Nairobi and Kenya, became a doctor went to medical school in India and then emigrated to the UK. But growing up with that kind of environment where you know I was told, ‘You have to achieve twice as much as the next person in order for you to be recognised and to be able to do it’.
Elliot Moss
Did you hear that message very early on?
Paul Mankoo
Yeah very early on, repeatedly. My dad’s great at repeating things but he drummed that into us from very early on, look you know, you’re… even though my mum’s English right and, and was born in Bournemouth, slightly less exotic um, but you know, the idea that you had to go and achieve something. Now I didn’t apply that and yet don’t get me wrong, I had a very good education etcetera, good schools but it just didn’t grab my, my goat you know, the academic side. I had a great time, I really benefitted from the social kind of interactions and really focussed on that, you know the relationships which I think actually was really useful for me in later life and in business but certainly you know, the drive to prove both things, you know, that I didn’t have to necessarily be the top academic achiever to achieve something worthwhile, I think you know, Dad is Indian and probably on surprise to anyone that he wanted me to be a professional right, doctor, dentist, lawyer, accountant, that was basically…
Elliot Moss
Quite right too.
Paul Mankoo
…drummed into us.
Elliot Moss
Ridiculous you failed miserably.
Paul Mankoo
Exactly so those things you know, were really, were really useful in spurring me to sort of say… I remember actually the course that I, that I ended up doing at university, business information technology, I remember going to dad and saying, ‘listen I am going to go and do this’, up to that point I think he was despairing because I took a year out, was kind of pretty aimless in that year and I said, you know, he said, ‘computers, do you think there’s a future in that’ or you know, I mean like it, absurd now right when you look back on it but for him it was kind of this idea that if you weren’t a professional you know, you’d struggle.
Elliot Moss
And the technology thing and the relationship with it you know, again you mentioned we are of a similar vintage, very similar. I was less interested in technology than you, I could see it coming but it didn’t, I didn’t want to go learn about it. You went and if it wasn’t academic you went and practically went into the world of software and you were looking at kind of inferred learning and all these, all these things in the early 90s, why? What drew you to that?
Paul Mankoo
Yeah so I think, well two things, I think I was very lucky, I was really lucky that Manchester Met – Metropolitan University – the old polly um had put together a really ground breaking course you know, early on, that was focussed on that kind of vocational side of not just developing, building programmers but really building rounded individuals that could look at business and look at technology and put the two together. So I mean I know a lot of Founders and kind of you know, established people later on in life and successful business people kind of like to credit themselves as being self-made but I think without being hackneyed about it you know, I think there’s contributory factors all the way through that cycle right and I think you know, luck is a big one of them you know, and being in the right place at the right time and having those other influences, you know someone who had the foresight to put together that course and have people come on it who weren’t necessarily A, straight A grade students etcetera so I think that and of course I think everyone’s interests are different right, in terms of what they take from the environment around them and yet I happened to be very interested in technology early. I wasn’t really ever a great programmer, I mean you know, walking into Dixons and write, ten print pause, twenty go to ten and having the screen filled with err, with lots of pause was probably about my limit but you know, I did learn about those things like expert systems, inference engines, relational databases in 1990.
Elliot Moss
I was going to say, way before people even knew what they might have meant. Stay with me for much more from my guest, it’s Paul Mankoo and he is a serial entrepreneur, he likes technology and he likes business too. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now though we are going to hear a clip from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions which can be found on all major podcast platforms. The Mishcon de Reya’s MDRX, Tom Grogan talks about Web 3.0, the next iteration of the internet and what businesses and individuals need to be thinking about when formulating their Web 3 strategies in pursuing valuable, impactful projects.
You can hear 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 serial entrepreneur Paul Mankoo, Founder and CEO of amongst other companies, Unified, an e-discovery business and he’s an investor in early stage technology. I want to talk about Unified for a moment because that is where from a business point of view I met you, I met you outside of that and we are friends as well. It’s good to say, I like friends, friends are important. Unified though, tell me about that because that was the first big one as far as I can see looking outside in for you. Did you think it was going to be as big as it got when you set this thing up?
Paul Mankoo
No, in a word. I mean looking back on it, it was a lot of serendipity around it, in terms of timing, both good and bad. We set it up at the height of post 2008 crash.
Elliot Moss
Just give me the one line so people who don’t know what e-discovery is, just give me your, what did you used to say when you were coming into law firms and other big companies, what were you selling?
Paul Mankoo
Sure. So…
Elliot Moss
I want to hear the salesman here.
Paul Mankoo
Absolutely. Here comes the pitch. So e-discovery quite simply is using technology to handle large volumes of information and data associated with legal cases in a nutshell.
Elliot Moss
You’re still good at it. That was good.
Paul Mankoo
So I have still got it. So you know the idea is really being able to enable lawyers to do other stuff other than looking through reams and reams of documents or you know, gigabytes of dates and really for their clients to be able to pay for you know, the stuff they care about which is you know, what’s going on in the lawyers head and connecting the legal dots rather than for hours and hours of quite mundane and low value work.
Elliot Moss
And that business now, where is it today? Because I know it’s gone through a number of hands hasn’t it?
Paul Mankoo
So it now, that business now has ended up as part of a much bigger e-discovery in legal technology business called Concilio, which is a global business but as you say, it went through many iterations, we sold it originally in 2015 and it became part of, it was bought actually by a company called Clearlake Capital, the guys who backed the Chelsea bid and are now in Chelsea. And eventually through a few iterations, Inventors Logility, ended up as part of Consilio.
Elliot Moss
And that was a public company at one point?
Paul Mankoo
So yeah, it ended up, when it was invented it was acquired by a company that was listed on Nazdaq and so we ended up going from you know, two of us screwing desks together in an office in Old Street to you know, sitting in an office in San Francisco overlooking the bay and doing investor calls you know, post results every quarter.
Elliot Moss
Did you, I mean at that point is it a ‘pinch me’ moment or is it just because there is so much background history you just are where you are. I am just wondering how much of a ‘what the…’
Paul Mankoo
Yeah, I think, look I think there were pinch me moments definitely but I think a mixture of never really ‘oh wow isn’t it amazing what I’ve achieved’ kind of pinch me moments. I think more sort of ‘how am I going to get through this’ pinch me moments right or actually I can’t even think about it because I just need to get on with this you know and I, I, there was some interesting times as part of an Nazdaq listed company, there was a bit of a boardroom kind of tussle and the CEO of an Nazdaq listed company left and then the head of, of our part of it was moved aside and left and then they said, ‘can you run this globally?’ and you know again, you know I mean my answer was yes and then ‘oh good how am I going to do that right’. So I think you know, there were those moments where to your point earlier you know, what was your experience? Well none you know, had I ever run a global company, no but did I have the confidence that focussing on the key things that were making that business successful, did I understand that, yeah and the rest of it I’d figure out.
Elliot Moss
You talked about lots of successes Paul and it’s that you know, and every time I ask you, ‘what did you know?’ ‘I knew absolutely nothing’. Did it both you? No because I had a confidence and this inner confidence that I could work it out. Where’s that inner confidence from do you think?
Paul Mankoo
That’s a good question. I, I think…
Elliot Moss
Because it’s not arrogance, it’s definitely not arrogance, it’s just a, yeah alright I’ll it then but you’ve never, a lot of people push for the next position, they push, push, push. You are not that person, you’re the guy that dossed around in his year out and that isn’t you and yet.
Paul Mankoo
Yeah, yeah. And it is a really good question, I don’t know and, and you know, my wife, Noleen often says to me, ‘you just seem to just kind of be calm about it and kind of do it’ you know you don’t seem to get nervous about stuff and I said, ‘that’s not true’, I think you know, everyone gets nervous, it’s just a question of how do you channel that, those nerves right and do they become overwhelming or do you just channel them into, into doing what you need to do. In terms of where the confidence comes from, I think a lot of it comes from, I think a lot of it comes from my dad and my mum, I think my family and this coming back to sort of educationally being an under achiever from an academic perspective but you know, I went to good schools that instil you with confidence and I think that’s you know, one of an important aspect of schools that is often overlooked, it’s not just about what grades you get but it’s about you know, you come at them with a ‘can do’ attitude in the real world. I know a lot of people who are immensely confident throughout their academic career, especially in legal right and they follow the, the traditional path and they go to top uni’s and get top scores and then they end up in a top law firm and they get into their mid-40s and they just have a crisis right and they are just like ‘actually I haven’t achieved what I wanted to achieve and actually I’ve just followed this path blindly and now I have zero confidence as to what I want to do in life’ and I think you know, it’s a very different kind of confidence and I remember in my, one of my first roles and this is back in Xerox’s outsourcing division, back in those days Xerox had great training and they used to make you, before you could even go out and sell something, they used to make you pitch for your job even though you had the job. They said, ‘look you’ve got the job but until you pass this, what they called a review board, you are not allowed to get out on the streets and represent Xerox’. So you had to go in there and pitch to six people from the senior management team and it was a very nerve wracking thing right, I mean it’s your future career etcetera, you are very early on in it. But I remember actually that my boss at the time said to me you know, ‘you’ve got something’ and she called it ‘street’; ‘you’ve got something street about you Paul’ and yeah I never really kind of knew what it meant at the time but I think what she meant was that both from an interpersonal perspective in terms of dealing with people, sending things to them, you know, finding out about their business problems but also in terms of being able to sort of navigate commercially what needed to be done, you know that was something I just had. So I think my confidence came from the early success in those areas as well but I am definitely someone who seeks or builds my foundation on understanding. So yeah, I have to understand something. I am not a… I am seat of the pants maybe in some aspects of what I do but really I have to fundamentally (1) believe in what I am doing, (2) have a kind of North Star as it were in terms of what I am trying to achieve and (3) I need to understand you know, the fundamentals of whatever it is I am attempting to do.
Elliot Moss
There you go, he’s not just seat of the pants after all. Stay with me for my final chat with Paul and we’ve also got some Bando Black Rio for you as well, that’s in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
I’ve just got a few more minutes with Paul Mankoo here on Jazz Shapers. You talk a lot about the successes and the skills and people call them soft skills, they’re not, they are just people skills, human skills. You’ve built great teams Paul and you know, your relationship with those humans as you’ve gone along the way is they are deep, they’re meaningful, they are almost familial because of the nature of the start-up journey. What do you look for now when you invest in people. Is it one of them or are you open enough to go ‘it doesn’t have to be the way Paul Mankoo does it’? I am just interested because now you are in this quite privileged position where you can say, ‘I will invest and I will help you’ but you’ve obviously got to see something in that.
Paul Mankoo
Yeah. Look it definitely, definitely doesn’t have to be Paul Mankoo you know, 2.0. I mean I think the, there’s a lot of things I am not good at and you know actually my, my Co-Founder when I founded Unified was much better at the people skills than I was. You know, people, people, people obviously is the, is the kind of mantra when you’re looking at early stage tech companies. I look for something other than just persistence and you know, I, I call it resilience right, in the sense that my idea of what resilience is, is the internalisation, it’s persistence but its internalised right, so you know, you can be an early stage Founder and you can keep knocking on the door, knocking on the door, knocking on the door with the same message but I think you know, the real skill is internalising what you’re hearing and the feedback and the market and taking all of those inputs, internalising it and adapting but being resilient about it. Having lots of no’s, having setbacks, when you talked about successes, I’ve had failures as well in business as well and I think that’s a really important point you know, anyone who hasn’t had a failure in business I think is less successful especially in the start-up community but I think you know, having, having people who have that ability for that resilience but also people who are understanding that they are not the key determinant in the success of that enterprise, they are a factor in it so someone who is willing to acknowledge and treat fairly the people around them to go on that journey with them.
Elliot Moss
Which I know you have also done as you’ve built these businesses, you’ve been very clear about giving people equity, about ensuring that they are also going to benefit from them which is obviously another characteristic I guess of a Founder that you look at, how they treat their team in a financial way.
Paul Mankoo
Yeah and it’s very interesting, absolutely I think we were very clear from the outset in all of the businesses but particularly in Unified that whilst I had a 50/50 Co-Founder you know, we ensured that the people that were on that journey you know, participated in the, in the long term benefits when the equity of those businesses. One of the interesting factors I think now with more experience under my belt seeing different start-ups and also seeing the US versus the UK for example, there are very different approaches to the crystallisation of reward so from a US perspective for example, you know, there’s much more of a sort of ‘CEO is king’ kind of culture and really you know, the CEO decides what they want to make and then everyone else kind of flows from there you know, I think that’s, that’s a very different approach than I’ve seen from a UK, Europe and elsewhere.
Elliot Moss
Really quickly because I want to get to your song choice but there’s a thing I’ve got in my head about your relationship with money and it’s not something we’ve ever spoken about. You’ve obviously been successful in monetary terms and you are now in the position as we said, to invest and you are also sort of semi, semi-retired, you know you can think about what your next thing is. What is that relationship like and where does it go from here?
Paul Mankoo
Yeah I, look again you know, coming back to kind of my early life you know, my father as well as wanting me to be a professional, you know really instilled in me that money gives you choices you know and, and not a love of money for money’s sake but just for what it would do for you and I think you know, without going too deep about it, that probably comes from him not having that really, you know, he was a doctor but he was you know, my grandfather was a mechanic, ran a garage in central Nairobi you know um, and then when he came down here he kind of worked, worked as a mechanic in Chiswick in the Ford garage there but I think you know, he had to pay his own way through medical school etcetera and went to Bombay and all of this kind of stuff so I think you know, that idea of money giving you choices and meaning you don’t have to worry about money was really important to him. My relationship with money I think absolutely the same thing you know, I like it for what it enables me to do, I like what it enables me to do for my family, for my lifestyle, etcetera but you know, I’m not obsessed with being you know, kind of the richest or, or you know, there have been times on the way that you know, I probably could have made a lot more money but I made choices not to push for it to your point earlier and it wasn’t about necessarily not wanting it, it was just that I just felt that I was happy with what I had right and I think you know, we talked about sort of you know, the personal aspect of this, of business and you know for me I think you know, that’s more important than necessarily the money. I think the journey and the people along the way and what they add to you and your life.
Elliot Moss
It’s been great talking to you Paul, thank you. I’ve heard a lot of stuff that I didn’t know about Paul Mankoo and I am sure you have too. It’s been brilliant. Just before I let you disappear, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Paul Mankoo
I chose Sly & The Family Stone, Family Affair, probably obvious from the things I’ve said here, but for me family has been ever so important in my life, also the family, the business family as it were, the people along the way so from that perspective. It also happens to be one of my favourite, one of my sister’s favourite songs, she, my elder sister sadly passed away last year at a very early age so yep, it’s a great song as well.
Elliot Moss
Sly & The Family Stone with Family Affair, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Paul Mankoo. He talked about the importance of belief, the importance about understanding issues so you can resolve them, and the importance of having a North Star. He talked about someone describing him as having something ‘street’ about him and it’s that personableness, that ability to just rub along nicely which is deceptively powerful for him. And really nice phrase about what resilience really is, resilience is persistence but internalised, that ability to take on feedback, to take on the no’s and to adapt and to flourish. Really good 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.