Michael Batula

After 15 years working at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, Michael Batula (Class of 2006) launched his own start-up , Milo, harnessing AI to supercharge finance teams and do 10x more. Here he reflects on the art of deal making and the impact of his transformational bursary to attend CLS for Sixth Form.

How did coming to City of London School change your life?

Until I came to City, at 16 years old, the furthest north I’d ever been was Waterloo Bridge. I’m from Elephant and Castle; I went to school in Peckham. I’d never been to southwest London. I don’t even know if I’d crossed Waterloo Bridge! I spent a lot of time on Saturdays in the arcade by the London Aquarium next to the Bridge…

At that point, I had massive aspirations, but I didn’t really have any detail to them! When I came to the School, it was my first big eye-opener. It was across the river, people were doing different things, and it seemed like a place of hustle and bustle.

The whole environment really sparked me – I hadn’t really thought of going to university but when I got here everyone had already completed their applications, so I thought, OK I might as well jump onto this too.

The experience of joining CLS encouraged me to leave London and go to York University – my experience in broadening my horizons at school just made me want to do it again, on another level.

But you had no notion of what you wanted to do, specifically?

No, I didn’t have doctors or lawyers or accountants or investment bankers around me. I didn’t know what they involved. Even though I grew up in a Nigerian family and kind of roughly knew you could become a doctor.

Of my A levels, Biology, Chemistry were for the old-school Nigerian thing of being a doctor – but I also took Maths and Economics.

When you grow up in south London, you don’t know the full breadth of things you might be able to do. Most immigrant children, first generation, look to very traditional careers: be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an accountant. Although I didn’t even really know what being an accountant would involve.

I knew I wanted to build something, but I knew I was naïve to the world. When I got to City, I realised how much I didn’t know. When I got to university, I realised how much I still didn’t know!  Goldman’s was a great training ground to learn how the world works; to mix with people from different backgrounds, to extend what school had first given me the opportunity to do.

I was always looking for the right time to get out of the City and build something on my own. There have been several waves of new tech that maybe I was too young to get involved with, business-wise: cloud software; the iPhone. I just missed out. But when AI came, I thought I’m not going to miss this one.

Can you say what your new business is doing in the field of AI?

We want to enable brands, whether Coca Cola or the local corner shop, to have a one-person finance team. No-one should be held back by the ability of their finance team. We will build AI workflows that allow businesses to focus on their core work, not on recording financial details.

How is it going?

Fortunate to have been inbounded early by investors who have been involved with some of the biggest successes of the last 15 or 20 years, so we’ll see where that leads to. We have gigantic aspirations. We are already talking to big brands as potential clients, as well.

As soon as AI came out, I knew it would be the next mega wave; a new opportunity.

I thought by working in the tech team at JP Morgan, I would see how start-ups work. But the reality is when companies listing or you’re advising Facebook on whether to buy WhatsApp, that’s not really the “Zero to One” part  of startups. You don’t get a sense of the early days of building a company.

When you are starting with nothing at all, as I am now, how do you get from zero to 1? When you cover high growth companies in investment banking, they’ve already gone from 1 to 10 or 10 to 100 and you’re trying to tell them how to go from 100 to 1000. But the nature of going from zero to 1 is something very different and magical and most people are never involved in making that happen. It’s the hardest thing to do, to create something from nothing.

How do you feel differently, now you’re running your own show? Should you have done it sooner?

People think I’m crazy! The last thing I did at J.P. Morgan was advising Jim Ratcliffe on his acquisition of Man Utd. That was my final deal at J.P. Morgan.

Why do you think you have come to this point in your career but other people haven’t?

Great fortune meets hard work. When I was in my final year at secondary school, before GCSEs, I sat next to a guy called Andrew Ezeanaka I had never sat next to him before, and he told me he’d applied to a new school for Sixth Form and that school had offered him free transport and free lunch (he didn’t mention that the fees were also paid!). I was like, deal me in! I asked him for details, and I sent an email – my mum didn’t even know about it; I was running my own applications.

I then told two other guys and in the end four of us joined City at once, all from Nigerian backgrounds and all in receipt of a 100% bursary. We all came here and had the urge to do more and go to university. City of London School raised the bar of expectations of yourself.

Did you feel immediately at home at school?

I just saw huge opportunity. A huge number of things I would love to have seen in life but had never had the opportunity before. Just being beside the river every day. Seeing the City of London. The Millennium Bridge. Tate Modern. I was inspired by the whole environment. And the kids all had something to them. And I now realise that’s unique to CLS, even among other independent schools. Because of the location –  no-one is from any one conclave. People come in from all corners of the city, all different backgrounds. Although, having said that, it maybe did also help that I was with three other guys who did come from the same background as me.

What was the first point in your life, when you thought of going into finance or banking?

I’ll be honest – I was still very raw even when I went to university. I think I knew I wanted to get into the city and make some money while I was thinking what my own big idea was going to be.

So you had a plan with several steps…

Yeah, I knew what sphere I wanted to get into, but not what role I would do. I studied Economics at York. In the holidays, I had standard student jobs in call centres or the Apple store. I thought I was winning, making £8 an hour. But when I got back to Uni ahead of my third year, I had a friend who’d had an internship at Morgan Stanley – which was next level. I thought I needed to look into that – so I wrote 100 letters, maybe more, to try and find work experience. I ended up the next year with an internship at Goldman Sachs.

What do you love about working in the finance environment?

My first days reminded me of how I felt when I first joined City or university. To be in a new place I hadn’t seen before, with all these bright young people from all over the world. I love that and that feeling sustained throughout my career. Plus, I was working on companies that I know and have heard of. I was in the middle of something big and relevant.

I moved to JP Morgan after a couple of years.

Joining the Technology, Media and Telecoms (TMT) team at JP Morgan, I realised I needed to be entrepreneurial even within that corporate environment. I love sport – could I make that passion a part of my work? As an Arsenal fan, I knew the club needed someone to come in and buy them – why don’t I go and find that potential buyer?

There were big changes in sport: streaming meant that the value of rights was increasing. Brands were becoming increasingly global. Technology was creating new ways to monetise fandom… But at that time, it felt like people in sport didn’t yet know exactly how huge the potential was.

So that was my pitch to my bosses.

The first deal I did was AS Roma, I helped a US family called the Friedkins, who went on to buy Everton earlier this year. But at the start, they were just a wealthy family in Texas who had a license to sell Toyota there. So, I was speaking with Roma, who I knew wanted to sell – and my colleagues in the private bank suggested this family who they thought might be a good fit. We knew their son had just shot a film in Rome and we arranged a meeting between AS Roma and the family.

So it’s almost like a detective case, a jigsaw, bringing things together using contacts and knowledge?

Yes, it’s the art of deal-making. The first thing is to figure out who to do a deal with. You need to read signals, find people who have a connection to, say, Roma. Or find people who have just sold an asset and may be looking for somewhere to park that cash as a long-term investment.

It’s like selling a house: first find someone who loves the neighbourhood and is looking for a house. And then you can consider the right price and all the details.

Once I’d done the Roma deal, the interest in what I was doing snowballed. People see there’s work to be done: people didn’t realise you could sell football clubs for that sort of money. Roma was bought for £200m+. The Everton deal was well over half a billion

There will be a lot of companies like yours, trying to get in at the start of the expected AI revolution…

Fortunately, most people are building tech tools in more exciting areas than us! Finance isn’t that exciting – there is a gap for what we are doing. It’s quite boring. But it’s where I’ve spent my whole career. Can I go and build this new tool using the next technology to work in the space that I’ve been in all my life?

I subscribe to the marginal gains philosophy. If you can do something that makes every task one per cent better you’ll have an extra hour a day. And then you can use that hour in a productive way, then over five years that will add up to something big…

That is literally what our company Milo is working on. Changing workflows to increase profitability by 1 or 2 per cent.

To make the same increase by increasing sales, one current client would have to increase their net profit by half a billion revenue equivalent

How is it different running your own company?

When I was at Goldmans or JP Morgan I could get access to most people on the planet. But now I’m out on my own it’s the complete opposite! I don’t have the halo of the firm. I have my background and my CV and my experience. I know my stuff but it’s a different process. For me, that’s how I started in life and I’m very happy being in the mud again!

Who were your favourite teachers at City?

Miss Murphy. She was Head of Sixth Form so she was the person who had the biggest impact on me.

One of the things that tied me back to City after I left was the Old Citizens football team. I was 21, I played centre back. And I saw people like Tim Levene (Class of 1991) start his firm, which helped to show me the way to doing something of my own. One of my first angel investors is an Old Citizen! Very much welcome more

You want to do community work going forward. Not everyone in the City is doing that – why is it important to you?

I realise I’ve been lucky – good things have happened for me that have changed the course of my life. And I am very grateful for all that. I’ve always wanted to do that for the world in my own way – starting with my family then extending, in the end, to everyone else who needs support. That’s why I think of being a primary school teacher – the impact you can have on kids at that age.

The other way I think I could help is by creating wealth, because I think it’s a better way to have an impact on the world than by being in politics. If Milo does well, I can create my own bursaries at City of London School.

What personal qualities would be useful for a 16-year-old going into the world of work?

I’ve tried to push myself. Put yourself in environments that may be uncomfortable, but you know you can grow in. Join a committee you wouldn’t normally join. Join a football team even if you’re not great at football – you’ll make great friends and even business contacts.

Also: don’t shoot, don’t score. Give things a go. I asked the guy in the front of the class for more details. When I heard about internships at Uni, I followed it up; I wrote 100 letters. You need to put yourself forward for selection. Be the man in the arena.

I didn’t realise when it came to starting a business – you don’t need to be the smartest person. Pure intellectual power isn’t alone going to get you over the line.

It’s getting into the arena, hustling  and having some luck when you get there.

I realised during 15 years in investment banking that the people at the top are good at grabbing opportunities. There comes a point, after school, where people stop giving you opportunities

And then you must be ready to find them for yourself.