Elliot Moss
Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Welcome to the brand new season, our Tenth Anniversary season of Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss. I must tell you, it is exceptionally good to be back. Jazz Shapers is where I bring you the pioneers shaping the business world, together with the musicians shaping the worlds of Jazz, Soul and Blues, and as you come to expect, we’ve got inspiring, risk taking, problem solving guests joining us over these next few weeks to keep you company and to keep you sane.
What better way to kick us off in these challenging times and with the focus on business for good. Our guest today is Paul Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Bethnal Green Ventures, an investment firm backing early stage tech companies tackling big social and environmental problems. Paul became interested in activism, then thinktanks at University, realising how drawn he was to the potential of new ideas. In 2006 he started running weekend hackathons, bringing together people at the sharp end of problems in healthcare, education and sustainability with developers, designers and others who wanted to make a difference. But as Paul says, “People were always asking, ‘How do I quite my job and turn this into something I can work on fulltime?" Bethnal Green Ventures was founded in 2010 as Europe’s first tech for good accelerator programme, aiming to radically improve millions of lives. They have now backed 127 tech for good ventures across sectors such as AI, education, healthcare, energy and retail including DrDoctor, an appointment rescheduling app that has reportedly saved the NHS thousands of years’ worth of missed appointments, and Bright Little Labs, a kids media company whose Founder, the brilliant Sophie Dean, was a guest on Jazz Shapers. “Every six months,” Paul says, “we get applications from hundreds of tech for good entrepreneurs, it’s like a torrent of optimism coming our way." Well, you, me and everyone else is absolutely open to a torrent of optimism right now. The star of the show today. Hello. How are you?
Paul Miller
I’m very well. Thank you for having me.
Elliot Moss
It’s an absolute pleasure and we say, ‘having you here’, of course in 2021, I’m in my son’s bedroom, the new HQ for Jazz Shapers in 2021, Paul is in a very erudite, cerebral looking… where are you?
Paul Miller
I’m in our improvised home office which just happens to be in front of a bookshelf that makes me look a little bit more intellectual than I probably am if I’m honest.
Elliot Moss
He’s looking more intellectual and I have got my son’s electric guitar on the wall, his electric drums and a synthesiser as well so between us, Paul, we have books and music covered. Now, I mentioned in the introduction of course that you, as the Founder of Bethnal Green Ventures – I love this notion of you being the guy who created the first tech for good fund. Tell me about why you care about the world and about what happens in it.
Paul Miller
Oh, that’s a great question. I think it was from a pretty early age, and particularly actually I was sort of influenced by my family who have always been involved in activism and global issues as long as I can remember, you know, I remember mum raising money for sort of international development charities and campaigning on climate change and all those kind of things when I was a kid and then as a teenager, I got more interested in those issues and actually was really luck to sort of meet grown-up activists when I was a teenager and just be really inspired by them. I sort of remember meeting some former sort of anti-apartheid campaigners when I was, you know, thirteen/fourteen and just sort of being amazed at what they’d achieved because obviously, you know, I was a teenager in the nineties and that was a hot issues but also how much fun they’d had, like you know, it was sort of, you know talking to anti-apartheid activists who you know you might sort of think of them as serious sort of people but actually, you know, there’s a really wicked sense of humour in some activists that I loved as well and, yeah, that inspired me to always be interested in social and environmental issues and those issues have changed over time but ultimately, you know I think the common thread is like, you know, you can help people so let’s do it and you don’t have to be totally earnest and serious about the way you do that, you know, having a sense of fun about how you can improve the world is something I think has run through all of the things that I have done as well, so, yeah, I think that’s where it started and then it’s taken various incarnations over the years through till now like running a VC firm, who knew but that’s what’s happened.
Elliot Moss
It’s funny you mention the anti-apartheid thing, the reason I originally wanted to be a lawyer was because of watching a film called ‘Cry Freedom’ back in the eighties which of course was about apartheid and I joined Amnesty International the very next day, literally, and began a journey of sorts and I guess many people listening will have issues, especially raised through this pandemic, that really matter to them. Tell me in your own words how those issues that matter have surfaced through this, as you said this venture capital firm that you have created. Just tell me the beginnings of the journey of 2010 and you started converting that into a real business.
Paul Miller
Yeah, so I was, at the time I was running an education technology business which did very well up until 2008 when we were basically hit very badly by the financial crisis and the whole venture capital world sort of went into a stasis at that moment and we never really recovered from that but alongside my day job you know on that education technology business, I had been running these weekend events as you mentioned in your intro, and it was just amazing who was turning up to those, you know, they were just called social innovation camps and we said like, come along and if you’ve got an issue that you really care about, you can come and pitch it to everybody else who comes and along and see if they will help you to build a prototype that does something about that and it was always like super, super talented people who were turning up, people who had day jobs in banks or advertising agencies or the big tech firms and they’d come and spend their whole weekend, for free, working on this and I think we just started to get the feel that there was potential here and we didn’t have any money to invest it them at that stage so we just decided well, what can we build that helps them and so we ran an evening school really like kind of an after school club almost on Tuesday evenings, we used to get a bunch of people together who we’d selected who were more serious about turning their ideas into actual start-ups and we met together in Bethnal Green in a place called The Young Foundation just near Bethnal Green Tube and everybody would put a fiver in and I’d got out and get a takeaway whilst they chatted about, you know, how to get their businesses going and they really were able to help each other and I think that was the lesson from that protype if you life of what became BGV in 2010 was that cohort effect, that effect of bringing a group of people together who are all committed to try and change the world using business and technology, that was what we learnt from that year. And then we tried raising some money, failed, you know nobody got it at that point, there was no such thing as like impact investment, even ESG investment was always a new thing then but eventually we did get a little bit of money together from Nesta, the Innovation Foundation, and in 2012 we put that to work investing in six companies, one of which was DrDoctor that you mentioned in your intro who have grown to be a really important service for the NHS in terms of saving them money, time, all those overheads around scheduling appointments and actually already they have scheduled hundreds of thousands of appointments by text message for people to get their first jab so they are really amazing company that’s grown from, you know, tiny beginnings back in 2012.
Elliot Moss
When you were buying the, I think it was pizza and drinks and stuff for you for the…
Paul Miller
Fish and chips.
Elliot Moss
…fish and chips, well I tell you what, it’s East End isn’t it.
Paul Miller
I still have a bit of a reputation in Bethnal Green because I walked in and asked for thirty portions of fish and chips in the shop by the station.
Elliot Moss
Made you very popular in that shop.
Paul Miller
Yes. They still remember me ten years later.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, I bet. Here he comes, it’s the fish and chip man. Where do you put it all? You’re quite a slender fellow. Did you think at the time, although you saw the cohort working well together and, you know, you’d huddle people in a room and all that. Did you really think that that could become a business rather than a sort of a nice pastime?
Paul Miller
It’s interesting, yeah. So, we were talking about this the other day that we always assumed that it was going to be an investment business, we never thought it was going to be a sort of not for profit or a charitable thing, for us there was always just this assumption that actually you could do well by doing good. I’m not sure where that came from. It was a sort of part of our thinking was that the businesses that we were supporting, the businesses we were backing, could be really big and could be profitable, they could have large revenues and large user bases and I think we didn’t really realise that that was an unusual point of view, it was only when we came up against other investors who were like, ‘You’re doing what?’ that we realised that that actually wasn’t the norm if you like so, coming into the investment world, because I certainly didn’t have any background in investment and we were a bit naïve about this idea that you could make money from doing good in the world, delivering social and environmental value as well as financial value, and I don’t think we realised how that that was actually quite an unusual point of view in the investment world but… and now obviously it’s actually become a much more acceptable way of thinking in the investment world.
Elliot Moss
But I’m even thinking more simply than even before you get to the, you know, investing for good. Did you think you could pull off the notion of creating a fund and know what to do to get to the point where you were a business that was investing for good. In other words, just the nuts and bolts of, yeah you’d set up your other business so I guess you had some knowledge of what it takes to get an idea into some kind of shape that’s real but was there any, I mean these obstacles of actually becoming a regulating body I imagine of some sort or you know who do you raise the money from because it’s other peoples money, all those questions early on, evidently not insurmountable because here we are talking about them ten years later but at the time, were they daunting?
Paul Miller
I think we didn’t know what we didn’t know and so we just ploughed on and step-by-step and ticked those off as things… challenges that we had to overcome and if we’d known, yeah, things like you know well obviously we’ve got to become an FCA authorised, you know we’ve got to do all those kinds of things, we’ve got the fundraising side of being a VC firm and all those kinds of things, they are really hard don’t get me wrong but we just didn’t know how hard they were so we just got on with it and that naivety about, again, coming at the investment industry without having really any investment industry experience, was actually a bit of an advantage I think because we didn’t know how hard particular things were going to be, we just knew that we had this supply of great Founders who we believed in and we believed that they would do good stuff and we went with that. To be honest, we were driven by the fact that we knew there were great people who wanted to work with us to develop these businesses and that drove us and, you know, I mentioned it already but that energy you get from Founders who want to change the world for the better is just incredible, you know, every few months we open up applications to BGV and you do just get this torrent of ‘practical optimism’ we sometimes call it, you know people who are not just idealistic but want to get stuff done and that’s always been what’s driven the growth I think of BGV.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for much from my guest, it’s Paul Miller, he’s the Founder of BGV, Bethnal Green Ventures. He’ll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we are going to hear a taster from the Mishcon Academy Digital Sessions and they can be found on all of the major podcast platforms. Mishcon de Reya’s Tom Grogan and Alastair Moore discuss artificial intelligence and machine learning, their possible application and the key things for organisations to consider when seeking to implement them.
You can enjoy all our former Jazz Shapers and hear this very programme again by popping Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice or if you have a smart speaker you can ask it to play Jazz Shapers – and I am sure you have been asking it to do lots of things, it certainly has been used and abused in our family over the last few months – and there you will find a taste, once you ask it, of our recent shows. But back to today and our first guest of this brand new season, it’s Paul Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Bethnal Green Ventures, an investment firm backing early stage tech companies who are taking on the big social and environmental problems. First investment?
Paul Miller
So, we did six all at once and that’s part of the strategy of BGV is to do these kind of batches of investment all at once. Of those six, two have gone on to be really good investments, one of them was DrDoctor which we talked about, the other was a company called Fairphone who came to us, again a bit like me they had a background in campaigning around fairer electronics, so, you know the conflict minerals that are included cell phones and also the environmental issues around the disposal of smart phones and so on. So they came to us with the idea of well, you know we’ve been campaigning on these issues, trying to get Apple and so on to change their policies and we haven’t really succeeded so what we’ve decided is, we’re going to start our own smart phone company, we are going to start selling, you know, building and selling our own smart phone that’s fairer, and I remember calling a few people who I knew who worked in the mobile phone industry and saying ‘I’m thinking of backing this’ and they all said ‘that is absolutely crazy, there is no way that…’
Elliot Moss
You’re nuts. Good luck with that.
Paul Miller
‘…a tiny little company could take on these big manufacturing companies’ but we backed them anyway, as you do, and the hack there was that they managed to convince customers to do pre-sales so they managed to raise their investment, other than ours and from a few angels, from their customers so they, I think nearly 10 million Euros they got in pre-sales for their first phone which then enabled them to go away and design and build a phone and they’d got these great relationships with suppliers who could provide them with fair trade materials and also do the recycling properly and so on, so they are now a company, they are based in The Netherlands, doing really well and they’ve definitely had an impact on the whole mobile phone industry because, you know, we know that they’ve been talked about at Board level in the other phone companies because they’ve gone, what’s this little, tiny company doing? They’re doing really well and they’re just selling themselves on the where the materials in the phone come from, they’re not selling themselves on usability and all those kinds of things and that really had an effect I think on the whole industry so, that was another one of our…
Elliot Moss
And I was going to say, that you know, sometimes people, the metrics in a for profit only business obviously financial but the metrics in a for impact business are actually, how can we change the industry? So success is measured in did everyone else follow us which is an interesting thought, isn’t it, it’s not the long-term change is actually of more value than the financial value.
Paul Miller
Yeah, and if you can be a pioneer as a company then you become a very valuable company. If you can pioneer a change that happens in an industry, whether that’s in the way that the NHS organises its time or whether it’s the way that the mobile phone sector addresses sustainability, I think those companies that pioneer change become valuable and that’s part of the idea behind BGV is that we back those companies to make those changes in those industries and hopefully we profit from them.
Elliot Moss
First investor as well, I wanted to ask you. Who were the first people to actually say yes, we are going to back businesses and you can manage our money?
Paul Miller
It was Nesta which is the UK’s Innovation Foundation so they were originally set up with some lottery money, I think, in the nineties using some money from the National Lottery and then they’ve continued to sort of back innovations in the UK since and, yeah, they were the first people and the reason they did it was interesting which was that they wanted to do impact investment, as they were calling it, they knew that they were going to be writing million pound cheques but they were like, where are the businesses going to come from that we are going to write million pound cheques for? So they backed us to basically try and help create those businesses that they might then invest in down the line and what’s happened over the last ten years is that idea of impact investment of investing in businesses that have both financial return and a social and environmental benefit has really grown, it’s hundreds of billions of dollars globally now and it was almost nothing ten years ago. So that’s been a really interesting journey just to watch the growth of impact investment which Nesta spotted very early, to be honest.
Elliot Moss
I mean the interesting thing about what you’ve just is said is of course it’s gone mainstream, you know, caring about environmental, social and governance issues, about the planet, about people in a different way, is no longer at the fringes, activism is central, right? I mean we’ve seen this over Extinction Rebellion and the whole climate change issue and way more places and of course the huge injustices that have been, surfaced, we knew they were there but they’ve been surfaced in the last year plus through this pandemic. When it goes mainstream, do you think your job is done or does it just give you more energy to carry on?
Paul Miller
It absolutely gives us more energy. I still don’t think it’s quite mainstream if I’m honest. I think were at the point where people are starting to really eliminate the bad stuff from investment so they are starting to say okay, we are going to pull out of coal, oil and gas or tobacco or whatever it might be, so there’s that side of things, that’s almost mainstream now, that’s you know most big fund managers will have a very large proportion of their investments will be run like that so they’re ruling out the bad stuff but the positive side of things, the side of investing in things that are going to have a positive impact, that’s still a tiny fraction of overall investment so I think we’ve still got a way to go in terms of making that mainstream yet but, yeah, when we’ve got there, I’ll be very, very happy.
Elliot Moss
You can retire. The team thing, often I ask people about you know the first people they hired and so on and so forth. It strikes me that you’ve got the easiest job in the world Paul in terms of hiring people because who wouldn’t want to come into a tech driven invested vehicle which wants to change the world for the better. How do you find, from the hundreds I imagine, if not thousands of people that apply to you, how do you choose the ones that you really believe are going to make a difference because you are a weird synthesis of both ideas, activism as well as practical application? Do you find people in that mould or is it something else?
Paul Miller
Well, there’s no one type that we’ve tried to hire at BGV. You are right, we do get a lot of people wanting to come and work for us which is really heartening.
Elliot Moss
You are still sitting on my application by the way. I’m a bit disappointed you haven’t come back to me. I’m still keen.
Paul Miller
I’m sorry about that. We do get a lot of people who want to work for us. I think very early on actually we knew that we wanted a team that didn’t look like other investment firms because, trying not to be rude about other investment firms but there is a white, male, affluent background, highly educated, probably got an MBA sort of, you know, type of person who tends to work in VT firms, you know, it’s got a bad name in terms of like diversity basically and we knew that we wanted to build a firm that was different to that and we’ve ended up with a team that is, you know, majority female, it is 40% people who identify as coming from an ethnic minority, it's certainly a mixture of educational backgrounds, there’s no, there’s quite a lot of different subject matter in there as well and different places that people have come from as well, and part of the way that we’ve done that is through using blind shortlisting when we do advertise jobs and that’s been, I think, really helpful, I mean I know it’s a bit more common these days but we don’t know what gender or what age or you know the educational background of people is when we are shortlisting for people to work at BGV, it’s only we get to interview them that we know those things so, and I think that does make a real difference in terms of the diversity of people that we hire.
Elliot Moss
Stay with me for my final chat with Paul Miller, my Business Shaper today plus we’ll be hearing a track from the brilliant Quincy Jones. Don’t go anywhere.
Paul Miller is with me just for a few more minutes. We’ve been talking about impact investment and about tech for good and about all other really excellent things. Do you as a leader live up to all of this because the challenge is of course when one is doing good that you need to be a good person and there is of course a nice spectrum of good, medium and quite positively bad leadership out there in different organisations. What would your team say about you as a boss?
Paul Miller
You should ask them.
Elliot Moss
Ha ha. I have. I just can’t reveal.
Paul Miller
It’s super important to me that like everything we do is aligned with our mission and I think that involves doing it well and doing it right. I think it would be difficult to be a bad person and do what we do for long. I think actually impact investment is starting, and social entrepreneurship, it’s starting to eject the bad people if you like. There’s an element of this has got to be right now because it is on its way to going mainstream, it’s got to be subject to real scrutiny, it’s got to be subject to outside eyes looking at it and seeing that it all lines up in an ethical and moral way and so I think stepping out of line as a leader in terms of like being bad to the people who work at BGV or being unethical in the way that we do deals even, in terms of investing, just we wouldn’t survive. So that’s why I think it’s important but also it’s more fun isn’t it and you know, running a team where everybody actually, you know, there’s respect for different opinions and different ways of thinking about things but it’s much more fun if you genuinely get on as a team and I think that comes from a leadership that’s open to just collegiality than may be a sort of more top down hierarchical telling people what to do kind of leader wouldn’t foster. I also think it has made a difference in lockdown if I am honest that I think it’s difficult to transition to being a remote team and everybody else has felt that as well but actually it’s much nicer to transition to being a remote team if you have that culture of people being nice to one another, to be honest, it makes life a lot easier and we’ve been lucky in that.
Elliot Moss
Do you think there’s a nice comfortable balance between the being nice to each other, being ethically driven and also being quite hard on the data, hard on the numbers, hard on the actual returns? Do you think that that is why BGV has succeeded over the years or is it something else because obviously there is an inherent contradiction, or there was, between doing good and making a fair return?
Paul Miller
Yeah, I mean, we’ve never thought of it as a spectrum so we’ve never thought that you’ve got one end of the line where it’s doing good and the other end of the line where it’s making lots of money, we’ve always thought of it as like a Venn diagram if you like, there’s a crossover, there’s a group of companies who do just make lots of money and there’s a group of companies or organisations that do lots of good but there’s a crossover in the middle where companies do good and do well and that’s the bit we’re interested in, we’re sort of exclude the other two bits and that’s been the strategy and it’s the simplicity of just looking for those businesses has made our life a lot easier I think so, you know we can rule out lots of things quite quickly in a way that perhaps some other investment companies can’t, they spend a lot of time thinking about whether it, you know how much money it’s going to make and all that kind of thing whereas actually we’ve got a very specific group of companies that we are looking for, a specific group of Founders, and that simplicity has helped us over the years.
Elliot Moss
And do you think, I mean we are obviously in the middle of a pandemic, we are in the middle of something that none of us have experienced or even our parents’ generation have experienced, yes of course it’s been the great accelerator and everyone talks about that and they use other kind of great headline grabbing words. In ten years from now, do you think this thing that we are in now would have fundamentally impacted what you have been doing or do you think it’s merely on another step on the journey towards continuing to be bigger and better and delivering more and more businesses that do things for good?
Paul Miller
It feels like it’s accelerated people’s understanding of a lot of problems so, I think it’s highlighted and surfaced problems of inequality, of climate change, of, you know, all these things have… people have really understood them more over the last twelve months than perhaps they did beforehand and for us, that’s a good thing, we knew the problems were there let’s be honest and the problems haven’t really changed because of Covid, they have got worse but the actual nature of the problems hasn’t changed but awareness of them has gone up masses and that’s really good for our business because it means that there are both investors and potential Founders who know much more about these problems and are learning much more about them and want to do something about it and that is great for what we do at BGV.
Elliot Moss
Good luck in doing what you do at BGV. You are an OBE, as of the first time I met you actually, you had just been made it, I think it was about eighteen/year ago or so.
Paul Miller
Yeah, just over a year. I still haven’t got it.
Elliot Moss
Well, that’s down to “due to the recent pandemic, we will find that the service has been somewhat affected." If I hear that again, literally, I am going to cancel every single direct debit I ever paid. I hope you get your gong but more importantly, keep on doing what you are doing, it’s brilliant and have fun with it as well, as you sound like you are doing. Just before I let you go, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Paul Miller
So, I had an aborted jazz career, actually, when I was I think about fourteen where I thought that playing the saxophone would be very cool and would, you know, make everybody love me. I wasn’t very good, I was never very good but the one thing that really inspired me was Autumn Leaves by Cannonball Adderley. I remember just hearing that track, that album, it’s on Somethin’ Else, and just thinking these were a bunch of people who were genuinely changing the world at the time, they were changing the music world but like you know, that was amazing and so I’ve got very fond memories as a teenager of Autumn Leaves and the beginning of something else.
Elliot Moss
That was Autumn Leaves from Cannonball Adderley, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Paul Miller. He talked about BGV being all about practical optimism and boy do we need both of those right now. He talked about diversity and this notion of blind shortlisting for his team, not a new idea but one that he was using quite a few years ago and that many businesses are using now and it's brilliant. And finally, he talked about that collegiality, that bringing together of people both in terms of businesses and in terms of investors and now of course in terms of the wider community and the world itself. All fantastic stuff. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, I hope you have a lovely weekend.
We hope you enjoyed that edition of Jazz Shapers. You will find hundreds of more guests available to listen to in our archive, just search Jazz Shapers in iTunes or your favourite podcast platform or head over to mishcon.com/jazzshapers.