Episode three of the UKTN Podcast is out now. This week’s guest is Richard Mabey, co-founder and CEO of Juro, a legal tech platform that automates contract signing.
During the show, Mabey tells UKTN Podcast host Mark Mcdonagh the importance of picking the right VCs and explains why conviction in your product is crucial for a founder to succeed.
In Mabey’s case, that conviction can be boiled down to one statement that he shared with investors: Juro’s goal is to “dethrone Microsoft Word as the way to agree contracts”.
He added: “In framing the competition, I went in pretty bullish with everyone on ‘we’re going to kill Microsoft Word’. I think the VCs like that – they exist for the big outcomes.”
Throughout the episode, Mabey shares everything he has learned about securing investment – from Juro’s $750,000 seed round in 2017 to its $23m Series B in 2022.
Mabey, a former corporate lawyer at Freshfields, has evolved from being “foreign” to the VC fundraising process to an angel investor himself.
He shares what he would have done differently in his first pitch, and what he looks for now in a pitch deck as an angel investor.
“Some of these VCs get 5,000 to 10,000 pitch decks a year,” said Mabey. “Somehow, you’ve got to be pretty compelling just to get in the door. And then when you’re there you have to give a really good reason why they should take what was at that point a really big risk.”
The Juro co-founder tells the UKTN Podcast about the time he pitched to Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikust at the fintech’s London office and his one chance to pitch to the founder of Gumtree.
“When you get these shots, you’ve got to make it count,” Mabey said.
Away from funding, Mabey talks about expanding Juro to over 85 countries and growing the business to over 6,000 customers.
Mabey explains the hiring challenges that came with that growth, from attracting “highly skilled” data scientists and finding the “perfect match” of experienced people who are prepared to take the initial risk of joining a seed-stage startup.
You can listen to the latest episode and all previous episodes of the UKTN Podcast here.
The UKTN Podcast is sponsored by Uncapped, which provides no-equity investments from £10,000 to £5m to the founders and companies who are changing the world.
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