Reflection on Chaos

Part of a founder's job is writing about what you do and reflecting on how you get there. One of the tasks I have been doing is applying for grants and accelerators to allow access to funds and networks. The other reason for doing this is it creates a forced activity of writing and creating clarity around what you are doing. Most follow two paths, one is the lean canvas model and the other is the normal pitch deck model that you would use to pitch to an investor.

Recently did the a16z Crypto application and this took a really interesting and very different path which allowed us to get a clear idea of where we came from and where we were going. The first part was your idea described which was very normal and being a16z you need to understand that they know so much more, so this is about educating them on your vision and why it matters in the big scheme of things. The second part was about using classic reflection questions which normally happen in a face-to-face environment. The likely reason is they are likely to have 8k+ applications, so filtering is more on you and your visions as the rest will wash out later as the building of a startup is about managing chaos and pivoting to find a clear path, and that comes down to two clear areas, the people and the vision.

Part One

This is the understanding of what you are building and why it matters, but from a different direction to the normal problem/solution angle

Describe your project. How will it capture value?

At the core of what we are doing “is killing business paperwork, not just making it easier” through direct peer-to-peers transfers that opens up locked-up GDP. We talk about how peer-to-peer payments has killed the banking middlemen and spawned a whole set of new business models, but you still have the middlemen of business who are also actually banks with their private ledgers, just don’t see that. What we have done is take part of the private general ledger and brought it to the fore to allow peer to peers (one-to-many) transfers where the customer is directly paying through to the end accounts (digital wallets) as part of their activity, not the business who then later processes this as they decide to all the other parties which could be days, weeks or even months later or not at all.

The impact of this is that GDP that is locked up in this delay can be opened up creating a “trust of value transfer” protocol that will open up new business models like we have seen in the peer-to-peer space creating massive value growth and new economic models.

We are executing this now in a Yoga Studio in which when students arrive to class, money is moved from their wallet to the teacher, landlord, operations, service and management companies there and then, with no delay, no excuses, just there and then in 3 seconds for $0.003 fixed cost.

Part Two - Reflections

This was a hard one to do as this is normally glossed over with a few minutes of talking, but doing this in writing for a16z makes you really dig into this and then pair back to just a few paragraphs which were even harder, but makes you dig even deeper which comes out with a great result and clarity.

My Reflections

Mine was hard as having 40 years of building startups and doing several personal activities as well made me think hard about what I had done. The one I came back to professionally was the UFC deal that brought iPowow to life and the other one was being a Surf LIfesaver on Bondi Beach and being a senior part of that community which has also created a major impact on the work I'm doing now.

What is the most impressive thing you’ve ever done?

I flew 16k km to Boston from Sydney to do a potential deal with UFC and did a five-minute product demo in the middle of Boston Stadium to the CMO. We walked out with an agreement ten minutes later to put on air next month when we hadn’t done it fully yet. Delivered it next month, which started the disruption of SMS in 2010 with live TV voting on an iPhone while watching the fight on live TV displaying real-time live voting data that no one believed anyone would do. Twelve months later, we had done events doing 65k votes per second and had 105k people interacting in a 3-minute window on Australian Cricket TV. We now take this for granted while we saw the death of the paid SMS voting industry.

As an extra, there is lots more colour to this as what we were told we would have at the first fight broadcast truck-wise, didn't turn up and had to rewrite a substantial part of the code to make it work in a 24-hour window. Made it work and as they stay the rest is history. The impact for me is I burnt part of my Rentina through too much adrenalin which taught me I need to manage my focus.

Question:- Describe a time in your personal or professional life when you failed at something. What did you learn from the experience and what would you do differently if faced with a similar situation again?

Answer:- Taking on investors who were unable to understand the power of a pivot. I lost two startups due to this, as they took over to make it work the way they saw it when we should have pivoted. The live TV project was one where the investors were primarily from the TV world. When streaming came along, I pitched we should connect into this, and they said no, live TV is where it was at with the $500k deals for shows. I was then pushed out, and three years later, they did a phoenix, staying in the TV space. I was disappointed in seeing an opportunity missed where we could have been a 1st mover.

This time, I have spent four years working with my cofounder, been through ups and downs together, and have bootstrapped this project to date, doing pivots as needed, learning fast, and failing fast to find out what we are doing before taking on investors who will be qualified in understanding the everyday life of a Startup is to do micro pivots based upon learnings quickly and that startups are messy as they aren’t a business yet, but working to become a business following or creating new rules. I have a habit of following new paths and disrupting whole industries which we are doing with our “trust of value transfer” project which will have a massive economic and behavioural impact. The core is “if something is done, I will have the value transferred to me there and then”, not depending on others or other systems and can be applied to money or other forms of value.

Phil, my co-Founder - Reflection

For Phil, this was harder to do as being 20+ years of being a Yoga studio owner doesn't give you much to work with, and before that being a trader is even less. But Phil had done something impressive which was the Eco-Village, and but was also his most painful time. Doing this reflection actually allowed Phil to see this as a major learning and made what we are doing now possible, ie had to go through the pain of failure to find the silver lining.

What is the most impressive thing you’ve ever done?

In Phil's words - In 2008, I ventured 400 miles north of Sydney to establish a green fields Eco Village in the wilderness, transforming a run-down resort on 200 acres of riverfront land. We created a beachhead with 20 families initially joining the village and planned for 200 while my core wellness business back in Sydney grew by 70% over three years and sent 500 paying guests to the resort village. We strived for 100% self-sufficiency, achieving about 70%. We developed a barter and cashless trading system, explored governance and value creation concepts, and learned to work together effectively. These experiences, though costly, provided invaluable insights that now inform our startups and communities.

Question:- Describe a time in your personal or professional life when you failed at something. What did you learn from the experience and what would you do differently if faced with a similar situation again?*

I faced a significant setback both professionally and personally due to my intense pursuit of an idea that led to the breakdown of my marriage and the eventual collapse of the eco-village. We incurred debt to acquire the property but lacked sustainable funding to make progress, which exposed the community to unnecessary pressures. Governance issues overshadowed crucial operational tasks, leading to a lack of trust among the community members and the directors' holding of ultimate veto power, which impeded community autonomy. As a result, the village imploded after three years.

This experience taught me the critical importance of debt-free assets for community success and the need for explicit trust in value transfer for a community to thrive. This understanding and Peter's experiences have helped us build a clear vision of what we are building: the concept of trusted value transfer, as that is the foundation to make anything work. This approach allows a direct revenue-yield model that can power the tokenization of physical assets. We are implementing this in our yoga and Pilates studios, solving the cold start problem and learning in a commercial environment. We prioritize the trust of value transfer, as it is the foundation on which the rest of the models can be built. This will allow decentralized control to develop and empower the community to take ownership as milestones are reached, using a trustless model that allows a long game of creating new business models that create natural resilience.

In Summary

In many ways, our journeys have given us the tools to build what we have now and have a deep connection in understanding on many levels. We both understand the dynamics of people, and technology but also the fears that exist to manage this process. And, as outsiders in many ways, we come without the industry baggage in our thinking, but then we also have barriers to breaking in as being outsiders get the common answer, you don't know enough. That part is fixable as we grow through the addition of the right people but understanding that they will be constrained as well to their past learnings and why these questions are so powerful. So we will build this into the interview process not as face-to-face questions, but something for them to write about if they get to the 2nd interview with the constraints imposed as well of keeping it short.