Is Vulnerability the Best Weapon a CEO Can Have? with Richard Mabey Co-Founder & CEO of Juro [Podcast #83]
Teams appreciate honesty, vulnerability, and transparency more than a leader who acts like everything is great, says Richard Mabey, Co-Founder and CEO of Juro. In this week’s episode we had a lovely chat with Richard about investment (and how to do it right), being open to learning, the importance of honest communication, company culture, and the changing nature of how people approach employees.
Juro is the go-to contract platform for companies that need to process large numbers of legal contracts. It enables legal teams to seamlessly create, approve, manage, and sign contracts in a single workspace. Among its customers are Trustpilot, Deliveroo, Secret Escapes, and Cazoo, with over 400,000 contracts in over 65 countries.
Can Investments Change the DNA of Your Company?
As usual, we started our chat by asking Richard to introduce Juro. Richard briefly explained how Juro helps legal teams to streamline their processes and how his own background in law comes into play. And since Juro is a scale-up we wondered what kind of a funding journey they went through. We talked about how different funding styles affect or change the DNA of the business. Richard walked us through how their initial idea of bootstrapping quickly changed once they realised just how much work was required to achieve a semi-finished product.
Then, we talked about their investment rounds and the approach they took when selecting their targets. In case your startup is on a similar investment journey as Richard’s, we strongly advise you check out the many insights he generously shared about their investment journey.
Company Culture and Its Effect on Your Growth
Another interesting topic we discussed was the CEOs. As well as being the co-founder, Richard also stands as a scale-up CEO. Thus, we couldn’t help but ask about how companies can benefit from different kinds of CEOs. Richard talked about how his experience has been like so far and what he does to “upskill” himself as he calls it.
According to Richard open and honest communication is key in advancement of any kind, whether it is for your own as a CEO or for the overall growth of the company. But, how about their work culture? Our conversation focused on the ways they used to establish values within the company and to identify behaviors that corresponded with them. Richard says they keep a close eye on things and employ activities that really implement them within the team. You can listen to learn about what kind of things they do at Juro to honor their company culture.
We also talked about the outdated way of looking at employees, which considers them as people who have to work there rather than people who choose to work there. This kind of view creates companies with toxic environments and high employee churn. Richard explained that they view Juro as two products. One is the automated contract platform and the other is the company itself as a product that the employees might want to purchase. He gave detailed information about their high headcount retention and described the ways in which they make it happen.
Lastly, we touched upon the topic of building startups. If you are curious to know what Richard thinks about whether the time of building startups easily has passed or not, you can access the episode above.
