6/2022: he pitched me to be CEO of his venture, I wasn’t interested as I was committed to a very good U.K. startup ( Revolut equivalent ). That didn’t work out due to cultural fit.
12/2022: I was soloing then he pitched me to join his venture. He said it wasn’t a job so i thought it means partnership. I was interested so I fly to Asia so work on this in immersion. I didn’t know what the deal was. Simply I was trying to work out how legit this is and provide values. I only took $1000/ month to cover food and living expense. My market rate is £90k/y. Along the way, i shared all my knowledge from working with Revolut team and previous startup. I said I’m looking for partner and aim is to make $100M in personal return in 7 years. He thought $100M was a lot but I said I would make him $500M at least given the time he spent in it already (the research project was proposed in 2011, 2021 he incorporated the company), if we don’t get that magnitude, the ratio of our return is based on our time. He remained quiet. And I believed he held a different preconcieved idea but was never clear to me.
He was pretty wavy and vulnerable, nothing was working. He was fairly undriven, depressed and needed a lot of hand holding. Coaching even. He can’t articulate his vision and make a compelling road map and offer to investors. And is constantly frustrated that other people don’t see. I was 25, he 42. I came in, think critically through the deck, pull out his vision into words. Set 10x the valuation of TAM, drastically simplified and upgrade the company’s value propositions and kicked start the motion of talking to investors. It was moving and the team finally gained optimism.
Then after two months of work, he pitched me at 4% with 2 years of my time commitment with a base of $30k/year and him at $50k/year. In my mind, this is a huge opportunity cost. Mind you, I’m a full engineering scholar graduate from top1,2 uni in the UK with proven market rate at £90k and has work experience at top startup in the UK.
2/2023: I was deeply offended so I left for San Francisco to explore startups ecosystem and talk to investors. In Asia there was no one who was interested in this deep tech project. While I was there, I reconsidered that maybe I need to prove myself more. So I pitched the company to YC and some investors there. Basically, gained market intelligence. No one was interested while the guy paralysed in Asia.
2-3/2023: He likes the market intelligence I brought back. Then he pitched me part time at 2%. At this point I thought the joke can’t get worse. So I terminated the deal after exhausting SF’s investor connection. During this time, I explored YC cofounder platform. Figured trust was important so couldn’t do business with the co-founder I found on there. 3-4/2023:Number 1 was stuck for funding and put all his resource to a US conference hoping to find an investor. This didn’t work. Meanwhile, an entrepreneur from my college network in the U.K. reached out to me, I thought, finally, this can work. I can get UK investors and prove myself as a partner. I let number 1 knows that we have UK investor I can make intro to. Number 1 said for my work back in Asia, he would give me 1%. Then I thought, this perhaps could work.
4/2023: I took number1 to college still trying to prove myself as partner, I pitched the people there. At this pitch event we got £600k of verbal agreement. I also researched out of my own initiative and found 2 grants worth (£2.1M) that he could win. After the college pitch, he then asked if i could help making a list of all VC and angel in the UK. 5-7/2023: That work took 1-2 months (lead sourcing, qualifying and ranking) including reading on how investors thinks, pitch deck polishing and research how the angels think to tailor the pitch appropriately. Now he would never do this himself as it is too ‘manual’ and was very happy I do the dirty work. I was building this all up to make a case for partnership. When my personal cash starts to run out and I borrowed money from friend, i said to him i need to start discussing renumeration else i cant possibly work. The guy took 2 weeks to come back. Then he offered 5% for the next 2 years which i didn’t think was fair given what I’m bringing to the table where all of his partners couldn’t, one commercialisation guy at 11%, chairman at 5%, a co-inventor at 8%, another inactive co-inventor at 6%, he’s at 67% all failed to raise fund in 2 years. 8/2023: We didn’t agree on the 5% yet, as I said I needed to think about this. I then met up with an investor who can do £2M of PE investment ( he’s a mentor and the term he shared is harsh and that the information I shared for mentorship purposes is no way not going to be used against the company so I didn’t make an intro).Meanwhile, the £2M investor said to me we don’t know about our competitor as he has done his due diligence, that we have 8 not 1 and we have 0 clue what the market thinks. So I was concerned with the new info and I think we need to find out for ourselves. The commercialisation exec brushed it off thinking the investor just spook me to get himself a better deal. He didn’t talk to me he talked to no.1 so I was in the blind. I think it matters that we know for ourselves. So I did my independent research and expanded the definition of “competitor” to not only similar technology but also substitute. Then I uncover more. But I never really understood market sentiment on these technology because I’m not a physician, the commercialisation guy is. How would I know how the market value each products before pouring £2M of post tax money into it and get my investors involved? This was never clear to me. Then number 1 said best he could do is 6%. I didn’t agree on this just yet, I essentially said, this is too low for me, he got pissed because I didn’t appreciate it. After a while, number 1 proceeded to ask me to update my college investors without devoting resources to confirm or deny new information from the £2M guy. He acted as if he owns those investors who are associated with me. I basically said I can’t update them with unconfirmed intel because that’s manipulation. He said it’s a process and we should let them know that we’d be confirming the intel. In reality, he wants my investor to spend their resources to do due diligence and update us on whatever we miss and he wants to use the investor to leverage the commercialisation exec, who is busy with his corporate job and is losing interest. We initially pitched my college investor the idea that we only see one competitor and they aren’t on the market and if they are, the market is big enough for 2 players. The new info if true will completely change the picture and I think we should do better work before requesting for investor’s money, and this too is for our sake as the commercialisation strategy may need to change. He then got pissed because I wasn’t sold and said I was too difficult to work with. So he killed the deal.