Relishing challenges, grasping opportunities and learning from experiences are what makes an M&A adviser. Marc Mullen speaks to Deepti Patankar about a career that has already taken in more than most.
Three months after she had moved to the UK from Bengaluru, Deepti Patankar admits she was struggling. She’d completed her LLB at the prestigious National Law School of India University and upped sticks for London to start a training contract with the Magic Circle law firm, Linklaters.
Indian law prevents international law firms having practices in India. So each year the multinational firms visit, looking to recruit the best students and offer them international opportunities domestic Indian law firms cannot. In the final year of her studies, Linklaters ran interviews with students for places in London and Patankar was one of four students in her cohort to be offered a training contract.
However, at her first appraisal her boss, who was generally supportive, “didn’t mince his words” she says: “He told me I had to up my game. But he gave me really good tips on what I should do. So I did it. It all worked out and I had fantastic training after that.”
“I actually had no idea what the Magic Circle even was at the time. And I had also never left India. So it really was something of an adventure to come to London,” says Patankar. “Many of the alumni from the National Law School have worked in big UK law firms, and are still here – some are partners.”
It was 2007, just pre-smartphone, and so she says she had little general cultural understanding of what it would be like to live in a city such as London. “I didn’t know about football clubs or pubs or what to do to fit in, and I had started work in a serious law firm. Linklaters had a huge modern office, nothing like law firms in India – it was a global powerhouse; everybody was so bright and hardworking. It was quite challenging to say the least. And then I had to adapt to the weather.”
In at the deep end
She started in public company, which is one of the most coveted places to work in Linklaters – but, of course, that meant added pressure during her first three months. “It’s the graveyard shift – that team can just work all the time. I slept in the office on so many days.”
It certainly was a baptism of fire. She was almost immediately working on one of the largest M&A transactions involving a UK business – the €71bn RBS takeover of ABN Amro. While it was successfully completed, the aftermath was an even bigger story, with RBS receiving a £45bn taxpayer bailout in October 2008. “Obviously that wasn’t so great, but working on public company transactions and seeing your deals in the newspapers – at the time it was quite thrilling.”
After public M&A, she moved into banking and derivatives, completing her training contract there and spending four years in the banking team. This included a nine-month secondment to BNP Paribas, where she worked as in-house lawyer in its global loans team. “I supervised the work of external counsel on large corporate loans worth billions of pounds, which the bank was making to blue-chip companies. Often they’d be part of a syndicate and I negotiated on behalf of BNP Paribas with the other banks in the syndicate and the borrower. I had to make sure all terms were equal, while protecting the interests of BNP Paribas.”
Working on public company transactions and seeing your deals in the newspapers – at the time it was quite thrilling
Having been involved in the biggest banking transaction going into the global financial crisis, she continued to cut her teeth on somewhat infamous deals, including the Lehman insolvency: the Linklaters banking team acted for PwC, administrators of Lehman Brothers’ European business. “As an associate, I spent six months working on that insolvency. I acted as agent on all Lehman’s syndicated loans where they had to release security or ask for money or give extensions.”
Immediately post-2009, Patankar’s time as an associate was occupied by a lot of restructurings: “The years before had been insane in terms of big M&A transactions and LBOs. Lots had gone sour and they had to restructure.”
She provided legal advice on the administration of Petroplus, the largest independent refiner and wholesaler of petroleum products in Europe. UK-headquartered, the business had entered into various insolvency proceedings in Switzerland, England and Wales, France, Germany and Belgium. Patankar worked specifically on the Swiss insolvency, which was part of a major restructuring of the whole business.
But she reached a stage where she wasn’t getting fulfilment from her work anymore: “I loved the firm and the people and mostly really enjoyed the varied work I was doing. But I had got to the age of 30 and thought: ‘There’s more to life than banking and banks – I want to explore.’ I didn’t have children and I didn’t have a mortgage, so it was a great time to go and look at other things. If it didn’t work out, I felt I could always come back to Linklaters, or somewhere else because I had Linklaters on my CV.”
Fresh start
She left the firm with a ‘half-baked’ plan to start a company importing furniture from India. “I am quite a detail person, so I had met some suppliers and had a few ideas about what I wanted to sell. But when I quit my job, I realised I didn’t really know anything about selling sofas.”
She went to sofa.com in Chelsea and asked for a job. “When I said that I was a lawyer looking to break into the furniture business, they were puzzled. But they gave me a job for £7.50 an hour, eight hours a day, selling on the shop floor. I also managed inventory and got promoted. I only did four months, but it was my first dip into an actual operations business. I learned a huge amount, such as how to deal with a customer who’s angry, happy or sad and you’re trying to sell them a product or help resolve an issue. You don’t get that experience in a big law firm.”
When I said I was looking to break into the furniture business, they were puzzled. But they gave me a job
But while she could see the large margins on the high-end products, she also realised she’d need a lot of working capital, which she didn’t have. So in 2014 she joined a business her husband had just started – Hostmaker, which provided services such as cleaning to Airbnb hosts. He had just signed up his first customer, so they decided to build the business together.
“At first I just did whatever needed to be done – supervising staff, customer service – learning as I went along, and the business kept growing.” They raised £250,000 a few months after she joined and a year later, in November 2015, sold a 33% stake to DN Capital, Avala Capital, DSG Consumer Partners and business angels for $2m.
“From there on it was just growing the business, expanding into different jurisdictions. We were in six countries and raising more money to fund more growth every year. It becomes something of a treadmill.” There were four more fundraisings, including a series B raise of £3.84m with Silicon Valley Bank in August 2018. That year she was also recognised by Management Today as one of ‘35 under-35 Women of 2018’.
Hostmaker was looking at another fundraise at the start of 2020, when COVID-19 reared its head. Lockdowns were already in place in Italy and Spain, where the business had its two biggest subsidiaries. It looked like business would be a challenge in the immediate future, with lockdowns about to be introduced in the UK. “We managed to find a buyer, sold our business and got out just before the UK went into lockdown. The buyer was our competitor – Houst. It was a great decision because the next two years were not a great time to be in the travel business. We were very lucky with our timing.”
Law returns
Patankar took a year off, in part because of lockdowns, but mainly because she was completely exhausted. “I can tell you that running a business is far harder than being a corporate lawyer. I spent the time off really digging into what I wanted to do next. I wanted to find a job with some purpose. I spoke to different types of employers, from McKinsey to Uber and other big US scale-ups. And I kept coming back to being a lawyer, but this time for start-ups.
“One of the best things that had happened when we were raising money was having help from our lawyer, who was from Olswang. He gave us lots of good advice. I thought if I did something like that, I’d feel really happy about going to work every day.”
She contacted Taylor Wessing: “I told them I was a founder, not a trained corporate lawyer, but I had done corporate law at Linklaters. They said they wanted lawyers and wanted to nurture people who had done different things, who bring different skills to the table.”
Our lawyer gave us good advice. I thought if I did something like that, I’d feel happy about going to work every day
She joined Taylor Wessing’s corporate technology team in 2021. “They offered me a junior associate role because I hadn’t practised law for six years, but promised that if I did well I’d be promoted quickly, and they have been true to their word.” Within two years she was senior associate. Now with more autonomy, she works on ‘life-cycle advisory’, advising start-up founders, companies and VC investors, from seed round onwards, on M&A and all the way through to exit.
She also manages to fit in some mentoring for Strive, an organisation that assists with social mobility, helping ethnic minority and underrepresented law students gain training contracts at City law firms. “I help people improve their CVs and applications, and give them tips for interviews. Then I help them prepare for the process of the training contract, which I found so tough at the start of my career.”
