A fax machine is an odd place to look for a new company. Richard White found reason to look there. Working in lettings at Foxtons, he saw an industry asking people to print, scan and shuttle documents around while the rest of their lives moved online. Finding a home involved enough decisions already. The machinery for agreeing to rent it seemed determined to add a few more.
“People were still using fax machines and tenants were being asked to print and scan documents.” White’s recollection of the job makes Goodlord’s origin refreshingly concrete. No imaginary customer needed inventing. The agent, the tenant and the landlord were already there, trying to finish the same transaction through processes that made the job slower.
White had studied business and marketing at Oxford Brookes University between 2005 and 2008. His property career also took him to Capital Living. Those are useful details in a story often filed under technology: his encounter with the problem came through working in the business that would become his customer. He knew the paperwork from the side of the desk expected to get it done.
There is a small indignity in downloading a document solely to print it, sign it and send it back to a computer. Goodlord’s opportunity lay in making that indignity less necessary. A rental agreement might be important; the elaborate journey taken by its pages was rather harder to defend.
Three founders, one unfinished transaction
Goodlord was founded in 2014 by White and brothers Tom and Philip Mundy. Its platform launched in 2015. The distinction matters: a company can exist before its customers can use what it is building. Tom brought experience in accountancy and business, Philip brought programming expertise, and White brought the experience of an estate agent who had become impatient with the tools.
The early product brought contracts, electronic signatures and payments together. Referencing became another part of the service. Instead of asking every participant to negotiate a separate collection of disconnected tasks, the business offered a shared route through the tenancy process. The unglamorous work was the product. Nobody needed to pretend that a deposit form was entertainment.
White’s commercial choice was to sell through letting agents. That placed Goodlord inside the existing rental market, with agents as customers and tenants and landlords using the resulting process. It required a proposition each could understand: less administration for the agency, a clearer transaction for the people signing and paying.
By May 2016, the business announced £2 million in seed funding from LocalGlobe and Global Founders Capital. It said 200 letting agencies were already using the software. The money was intended to help recruit staff and develop the platform. There was ambition to expand abroad, too, although the British rental market remained the immediate task.
The attraction was speed at a moment when people were ready to commit. White described renters wanting to view a property, agree to take it and complete the transaction there and then. That was a much more recognisable ambition than a grand promise to reinvent property. It began with the interval between saying yes and being allowed to act on it.
The office fills up
In March 2017, Goodlord raised a further £7.2 million. Global Founders Capital, LocalGlobe and Ribbit Capital backed the round. The company’s promise was finding an audience beyond its founding team: the rental transaction contained enough repetition to interest investors, and enough frustration to interest customers.
The numbers from that period are snapshots rather than a single tidy dashboard. A 2017 account put Goodlord at more than 400 agency clients, nearly 37,000 tenants and almost £250 million in contract value processed. Those figures describe the business then. They do not measure White’s personal wealth, and contract value is a different thing from company revenue.
Growth brought a less visible task: replacing the improvised habits of a small team. Early recruitment had drawn on interns, relatives and existing contacts. White described short conversations followed by a beer, with job offers sometimes made before the founders had even discussed the candidate privately. It was sociable. It was also a hiring system with considerable faith in the pub.
Around the time the team approached 20 people in 2016, the process became more formal. A head of people role arrived, alongside CV screening, telephone and face-to-face interviews, and practical assessments. The company selling a more orderly way to transact property was learning to put some order into its own transactions with prospective employees.
By spring 2017, White was talking about a team of 82 and an ambition to reach 130 before the year ended. His comments also dwelt on support for founders as their jobs changed. He credited YPO with helping him and argued that founders needed to build networks and invest effort in their own development. Hiring talent was only part of the problem; learning to lead it took work too.
May 2016
March 2017
Funding raised by Goodlord, rather than a measure of its founders’ personal wealth.
When the rebuild becomes the problem
The smooth line on a funding chart does a poor job of describing what came next. In January 2018, Goodlord cut almost 40 jobs. The business said it was reducing sales and marketing and directing more attention to product features and automation. The software designed to remove friction had reached a difficult stage in its own development.
On 15 January, William Reeve was announced as the new leader. White was described as the former CEO. Reeve brought experience from businesses including LOVEFiLM and Zoopla, and the announcement framed the change as an agreement between the founders and board to add experience to the senior team. White’s directorship of Oh Goodlord Ltd ended on 23 March 2018.
Later, at a business discussion in Clerkenwell, White spoke about the hazards of rebuilding a platform. His example concerned one of his companies, which the account did not name. He described attempting a wholesale switch, trying again after the first effort failed, and burning eight times as much on the second attempt because the business had grown. He also described the painful reduction in staff that followed.
That account should stand on its own terms. Its force comes from White discussing the decision and its consequences himself. Making a large change all at once concentrates the risk into a moment when an organisation must keep serving its customers. A bigger business can make the same technical gamble with a much bigger bill.
White disliked treating failure as final. His objection was that a label could prevent people from examining what happened and learning from it. That is a useful distinction when it remains attached to the consequences. The lost jobs and spent money still belong in the story. So does a founder willing to discuss an expensive decision after the applause has stopped.
“I don’t like the word failure, it’s quite final.”Richard White, speaking at a business panel
A second encounter with the admin
After Goodlord, White co-founded Pickles. A later account of his work there concentrates on the practical business of getting people into a new team: documents, payroll and computers. At three employees, he introduced Zelt to handle onboarding and related tasks. Eight further team members subsequently received rental laptops through the service.
The detail has a pleasing circularity. At Goodlord, he had sold a way to remove repetitive administration from somebody else’s business. At Pickles, he became the buyer looking for a way to remove it from his own. A laptop ready when a colleague starts work is a modest achievement until you have spent the morning waiting for one.
His later venture also has a corporate history beyond its launch announcements. Pickles&Co Ltd’s filings record an administrator appointment filed in October 2025, followed by administration-extension notices in September and October 2026. White remains listed as a director. Those facts concern that legal company; they do not, by themselves, establish the circumstances of every operation using the Pickles name.
Alongside the formal record sits a lighter continuity: dogs. Goodlord’s Aldgate office allowed three of them to roam around, a feature White specifically welcomed when discussing the workspace. His interest extended beyond an office perk. He later founded Pet-Tech.org, and his subsequent work put the pet sector at the centre of another venture.
The idea survives the handover
Goodlord continued under Reeve. Its later history includes the acquisition of referencing business Vouch in 2020 and bill-splitting app Acasa in 2021. The company reports processing more than £1 billion in payments in 2021 and reaching £37 million in revenue in 2025. These belong to the company’s later chapter, built by the people leading and working there after White’s CEO tenure.
The original question remains easy to recognise underneath those additions. How much work should stand between choosing a home and completing the agreement? Goodlord began by joining up pieces that people were already obliged to handle. Its founders found a business in the gaps between them, where somebody was always waiting for somebody else to send something back.
White’s story is most interesting when the early insight and the later complications share the page. Experience in an industry can reveal an opportunity. Funding can help pursue it. Neither automatically supplies the management habits, technical decisions or operating discipline a growing company will need. He encountered those demands while the organisation was expanding around him.
The fax machine is an appealing villain: old, noisy and unlikely to complain about its portrayal. The harder part of White’s career began once the villain had been identified. Building something easier for customers meant building something demanding behind the scenes. His Goodlord years offer both the satisfaction of recognising needless work and the less comfortable experience of discovering how much work a solution creates.