The Real World of Startups

The biggest realisation I have had in my career so far is that nobody operates the same way you do. If you are a man based on strong ethics and principles, then it is highly unlikely that you will meet others who are also so highly strung. Everybody operates on their own trajectory, and thus we all have a subjective approach to business.

The startup landscape is full of all kinds of people, from different upbringings, to unrelated industries. The beauty of the space is simply that; a mirage of the weird and wonderful, all coming together to solve a problem and help people in the process.

In my career to date, I have had the privilege of being apart of a few startup ventures. Most of which aren't reflected on my LinkedIn due to the nature of the business, individual ethics, and some Netflix-worthy scenarios that forced my exit, but there is significant value in the stories I am about to share.

The Beginning

I will take you back to my first taste of business.

I was about 13 years old and I had probably just read Richard Branson's - Losing my Virginity, and believed I could take on the world.

I wanted to make some cash, and I knew of a company called Avon which would allow me to learn a lot and afford the movies on the weekend. At the time I had no idea what it was all about, all I knew was that people liked buying things they didn't really need and I just needed to be the middleman.

If you don't know, Avon is an Anglo-American multinational company selling cosmetics, skin care, perfume, and personal care products, It is a multi-level marketing company based in London, and it was my ticket into making some cash as a teenager. It is a business built on direct selling, something I knew I needed to learn and didn't know where to start.

I would go out on my bicycle with a bag full of brochures and deliver them through people's postboxes. I focused on affluent areas, where people would most likely make an order. Once delivered, I would give it a few days and return to the exact same households and pick up the brochures with orders. While waiting, I would target other areas, leaving no stone unturned. I had a system, and it worked like clockwork.

If an order was placed, I would contact head office and process the relevant orders which would then be delivered to the client. I was the middle man, and I enjoyed it.

I would take a cut of every product sold, and I learnt very quickly how to process orders, track inventory, and understand direct selling. This was the beginning of my taste for business.

Local Car Washing - Keep it Simple

Not long after, myself and a friend decided that car washing would be a very profitable line of work. Low overheads, and each deliverable was time and quality dependent. We would cycle around the affluent areas and charge ￡10-￡20 per car, depending on the service. Lottery money at 13/14 years old.

The business was a success, but I was soon dropped for someone else. I lost my position and he wanted to wash cars with somebody else. It stung. I didn't understand, but in hindsight, I was lazy, and probably made him do all the work, or didn't want to wash as many cars as he intended to wash, and so he needed more reliability. This was my first experience at being side-lined, and not my last.

Ralph Lauren Jumpers - Fashion Stir

A little later on, another friend and I decided we wanted to try and sell Ralph Lauren jumpers and cardigans. We were testing the market and we found a supplier on eBay who had good ratings and fair prices.

We ordered about 5 jumpers, in various sizes and colours, and took delivery a few weeks later. When they arrived, it was clear they were fake, but I felt like I was a king. I had 5 Ralph Lauren jumpers and I was about to shake up the fashion industry. Oh, I was so wrong. The business died there and then. We never sold a single jumper. I think we both realised that selling fake jumpers wasn't really the right way to do things.

A beautiful lesson on failure.

Forex Trading

About 4 years later, I stumbled into the world of forex trading. I had now been living in South Africa for 2-3 years focusing on a rugby career, but my heart was always set on pursuing business. I had family who had been involved in business their entire lives, and so I was always inspired by their success. I wanted to do it myself. If they could, why can't I?

I was in the midst of studying my Bachelor of Commerce in Financial Management and I came across a company in Sandton City, Johannesburg, which was offering forex trading courses. It wasn't cheap, at about R10,000-R12,000 ($500-$700 USD) it was a huge amount of money to spend for a struggling student. But I put all my pennies together and made it happen.

I remember my first class like it was yesterday. Excited to understand how the financial markets truly worked, and how I could learn to make money buying and selling currencies.

I was a proactive client, and I decided to document my experience; journaling, recording, and sharing that with others. At the time I had a YouTube channel which was gaining traction, and many people were enjoying my content.

Here are some screenshots of the account:

Within a few short months the company approached me and asked me to manage the social media for the business. Any excuse to get on the payroll. At the same time I was still wrapping my head around the business, trading, risk, leverage and major and minor currency pairs.

Not long after, I started to mentor classes, and I was always told that if you can teach it, you understand it. I was in the deep end, hosting classes of 10-100 people at times. In all honesty, I was out of my depth, but my strategy worked. I was a day/long trader, holding currencies for extensive periods of time. Low maintenance, and low stress. I had a positive success rate, and due to my low risk approach, I wouldn't be over leveraged.

During this time, I was interacting closely with clients all over the world, but predominantly those in Johannesburg. I learnt a little bit more about the model of the company and how it relied heavily on a marketing strategy that enticed middle-low income earners to "get rich quick" through trading. I won't delve into it, but I realised the business was built on a marketing lie, and this was my first experience of true business deception.

Additionally, I soon learnt that many clients were using funds they didn't really have, and some clients even used their children's university funds to pay for the course and start training. This didn't sit well with me, and reality struck home as to the position the company was putting their clients in.

We were servicing the bottom tier of the market, and charging excessive amounts of money for a service that was questionable in nature.

However, in all the chaos, there was an opportunity.

I studied the business model and determined that there were overheads that were not needed and could be reduced. We were moving into the digital world, and people didn't need to commute when it could all be done online. This meant we could eliminate travel and an office space, our biggest expenses.

I started a small digital blueprint of this business, built entirely on free resources that allowed me to piece together all the moving parts. Initially, I wanted it to be free, because I wanted to help people access these resources and not hinder their personal financial position. And it worked. I was able to reduce the initial overheads down to a mere 1%, and operate the business digitally. No questions asked. My laptop now became my biggest asset.

WeTradeForex

I learnt a lot in this business, wearing all the hats from the day-to-day operations, marketing, accounting, invoicing, and more. It was an exhilarating experience, and I was able to do this while I was studying full-time and nearing the end of my degree. I would go to university in the day, and I would manage the business at night. It was a huge motivation for me, and made me feel like I was conquering the world, when in reality I was no Elon Musk.

After about 4 months, as my time became more scarce, I knew I needed to change the business model. It was no longer working for me. I offered a "freemium" model which was broken down into two tiers: a free tier, and a premium tier, and it worked predominantly on access to content, trades, and information. It was a slow transition, but we were building a community, and people wanted to be apart of it. I was 18 at the time.

It was also at this point that I decided to hire my first employee and structure his income on a commission basis, giving him 25% of every sale we made. I slowly stepped aside and gave him autonomy. A blessing and a curse at the time. In the peak of business, we had over 40 clients, based all over the world. It was exciting times, and it was growing. Although I was having long days and long nights, I was enjoying the process of building something bigger than me.

The model worked.

A friend reached out to me from the United Kingdom and wanted to see what it was all about. He was interested, and I was too generous with my information. I wore my heart on my sleeve and got burnt. I shared the model and the inner workings of the business and he went on to build his own version of it, servicing UK clients who had more liquidity than the clients I serviced in South Africa.

He has since grown the business into a success, which has given me confirmation that the model works regardless of the geography. Kudos to him.

However, I learnt a valuable lesson in that the clients you choose to service could make or break your business. For example, I could only charge my clients $10 per month, and he could charge his clients $100 per month due to the liquidity and model, and so his business was more scalable, while I was a prisoner of geography.

The business operated for over two years, and by that time I was beginning to fall out of love with it. I was studying my next degree at the Gordon Institute of Business Science and yearned for more.

At this point, I had already built and established another small business with a very similar model helping people create digital CV's. This business was not scalable and very time consuming, but serviced clients in Singapore, the USA and other countries. I enjoyed it because again it was built on free systems, so essentially I was just billing out my time, but it exhausted me and I no longer enjoyed it.

While running this business, I was approached by another individual to form a partnership and do something similar. I was excited by the prospect, and all I was focused on was growth.

The partnership operated for only a month, before it crashed and burned. Not because we failed, but because my partner tried to screw me in a double-deal. We made R15,000 ($800 USD) in a couple of weeks, and there was a lot of opportunity. Fortunately, we signed a contract and I got paid out my small, but important cut. It was at this point that I fell out of love with business, experiencing nothing but bad blood. It was just the beginning.

Entrepreneurship vs. Corporate

I was now in my early 20's and it was at business school that I began questioning the importance of a corporate career and whether it would aid me in any business ventures in the future. I sat long and hard and asked every lecturer, public speaker and business owner what they thought about this dilemma. Most people told me I didn't need to go into corporate to be a successful entrepreneur, but something inside me told me I had to experience it.

It was at this point that I decided to shut WeTradeForex down and invest my time and energy into my internship at a prestigious bank.

This internship eventually turned into a full-time gig, where I worked with SME's from a cash management perspective. I had a great team, an incredible manager, and a great taste of corporate life. I enjoyed it and I learnt so much. It was valuable experience that could not be learnt in a book, and it was great to be able to understand how the banks serviced business owners, so to experience it from a different angle was intriguing.

At this point in my career, I hadn't truly experienced the startup landscape. I wanted to see it for myself, and understand what it meant to be in a startup working with other people. The thought excited me, but it was never really an option, until the opportunity presented itself.

Ethics

While at the bank, I was headhunted to work at startup in the e-commerce space that had already received R10,000,000 ($500,000 USD) in seed capital. I was hungry, and my philosophy has been to say yes to everything because "I don't know, what I don't know". Absorbing and learning as much as possible has been the primary objective, and I still live by this today.

Although excelling in my role at the bank, bringing in over ￡9,000,000 in new business in my first quarter, and forming new partnerships, I decided to leave and join this startup venture.

I joined the founder of this e-commerce platform and we started building everything from the ground up. From painting the office, to buying furniture, forming partnerships, hiring staff, to building calculators, it was all happening, and it was a thrill. I loved it. Honestly. But, after 3-4 months I started noticing some cracks.

Before my departure, we had a small team of 4, enough to keep the wheels moving and not hurt our financial position. I calculated our burn rate and our capital runway, and we had about 2 years before we ran out of money. It was going to be a battle. But it was an exciting venture, and I believed in the business.

It has serious potential. It was maybe a little early for the African climate, but there was certainly potential.

An incident occurred in the office one morning which bypassed HR, a function of our seed investors, and I questioned the founder. We both knew HR was an integral function in any process, but not in this case. His response was "I do not want this to get back to investors." A breach of my ethical conduct as I believe things should be by the book when it comes to people.

At this point, a few signs had made me question this business, but more so the founder. I didn't really believe in him, and felt that there was a clear gap forming between myself and my team. Intuition told me to be careful, that something wasn't right. I decided it was time to leave. I did my due diligence and offered the founder a fair deal on my departure; of which was far less than what was owed to me, by law.

I won't get into the details, in order to avoid providing too much information, but this situation eventually resulted in a legal dispute. Fortunately for me, we initially came to an agreement and both signed a document that protected me if this were to be the outcome. I had planned ahead. After seeing how this individual was willing to turn on me and effectively find any way not to honour a fair deal, I realised I had dodged a bullet.

In the years that followed, I soon realised that my ethical compass was far different to most of the people I worked with. Where others believed it was normal to cut corners, I disagreed, and thus resulting in the dissolving of various startup relationships.

No Money

Fast forward a few more years and I was now living back in the United Kingdom as a mid-twenty year old, a little wiser and with a little more experience. I had worked in corporate finance, and completed some pro-bono work for an Indian startup which was interesting. I was eager, however, to break into the world of data, and so I knew I had to find a company that would be willing to take me on.

I wanted more exposure, and I knew that with my laptop I could work for any company in the world. Cue the data startup that I worked at for almost half a year. It was wild, working UK and US hours, but time became very scarce. I remember I would have meetings at 11:00pm. It was intense, the pay was alright, and I felt like I was part of something exciting.

I was pioneering into the European markets for an New York based company, and I felt important. But I wasn't. I was a small fish in a big pond, who was allowed to swim where he pleased. I would set up meetings with big financial firms, asset managers and hedge funds and knew that forming partnerships was the way to go. Our product was interesting. Unique. It seemingly provided value. But under further investigation, it was apparent that hedge funds and asset managers were struggling to generate "alpha" from our data. A clear sign that our data probably wasn't as good as on first glance, and which needed work.

Despite this, things were going well. I was well entrenched and planned to travel to some conferences in Europe on behalf of the company. I envisioned our own office opening in London, leading a team and expanding business operations, but little did I know there was trouble at home.

I woke up one morning and our co-founder (who also did payroll, hiring, etc.) had left our slack chat. This was right before pay day, so alarm bells started to go off. It is not uncommon for someone in a startup to wear more than one hat, but this company was 8 years old, and other areas of the business had established roles, so it didn't add up.

The team went into panic mode.

Our CEO called us into a meeting to let us know that the co-founder had been let go and that we had no money in the business. From what I knew this business had Series A investment from a well known investment bank, so things just didn't add up. We had clients, we were billing these clients (or so I thought), so to have missing capital just didn't make sense.

There was more to it.

My expansionary role became obsolete over night. I was redundant, and out of pocket. The next couple of weeks were wild. News spread fast, and I had news reporters contacting me to find out what was going on. I was reluctant to speak, as I didn't want to destroy any chances of getting what was owed to me, and I also had little knowledge of what was truly going on. I was an innocent by-stander.

Did our co-founder do a runner? Did he mis-manage $10,000,000 USD? Did he not process invoices and bill clients? Was he wiring cash to all of us through lines of credit? These were questions we were all asking ourselves.

The weeks that followed saw a mediator join the business. His role was to primarily clean up the mess that was made. Our CEO was back in the room with investors pleading for more capital, and praying the board wouldn't fire him. In all honesty, I didn't know who was guilty and who was not. Fingers were pointed, but things didn't add up.

It doesn't help that the individual involved was the whistleblower for a massive organisation that blew up over night almost 10 years ago. However, the data told a different story, and their model just wasn't going to survive the long run.

Long story short, they did right by me and we parted ways, but what an experience it was.

Identity

In the last couple of years, I have ventured across the world from South Africa to the United Kingdom, and have finally found myself in Australia. I have been here for less than a year, but what a year it has been. I have slowly learnt that business is business, regardless of geography. The same goes for people. There is no one place that triumphs the other, and bad behaviour will always be bad behaviour.

I had been headhunted the year prior to join this team and business while traveling in Australia, and I was intrigued by this exciting and revolutionary business. It was a forward thinking business model that harnessed real-world assets and digital assets altogether. Unfortunately, at the time, the shoe didn't fit, and I rejected the offer. The CEO wanted me to stay in the UK, or move to Gibraltar, or better yet, the middle east.

I wasn't ready for that kind of commitment, and I had already seen some red flags that urged me to proceed with caution. Ironically, and through pure chance, I met an individual almost 8 months later who had also been approached to work in the organisation. Despite his reservations, he joined them and persuaded me to consider it, once again.

After careful consideration, I thought I would take another chance and bet on the model and the team. I had a great opportunity to be apart of a revolutionary business that traversed the world, not just Australia. I was appointed as a C-suite executive and my obligation was to manage and oversee the day-to-day operations. I was excited. It was a thrilling opportunity, and one I knew I had to excel in.

And I did.

Within two months, we were incorporating in Abu Dhabi, and had already overcome many operational hurdles we once previously faced. We were on track to implement our model and execute on our scheduled ICO and our GTM strategy was coming together. I finally felt that all the years of failures, bad business, and a misalignment in ethics had come to an end. I was finally on track to change the world.

Or so I thought.

One fine morning, I received a message from our Strategic Advisor that there had been a project roadblock, but for business to continue as usual. Turns out this wasn't a roadblock, it was mount Everest. During a reconciliation our book keeper had uncovered a foreign name on a receipt, and it turns out our CEO wasn't who we thought he was. He had a completely different identity, and the man who he kept hidden had a long and extensive history with ASIC and nefarious business practice.

There was no way forward. How could I keep the company of a man who was happy to exploit his staff members and deceive people? It was an improbable thought, and one which I did not want to entertain.

Myself and a select group of individuals decided that it was best to exit the company. We cherished our reputations above any promised success. As someone who has always stayed true to his values throughout business and life, this was no different. The promise of a large payout and equity in an exciting business just wasn't enough to keep me invested.

Reputational damage is a real thing, and I stay clear when people or businesses have the potential to cause potential harm to a reputation I have spent years building. This was Netflix-worthy; the type of stories you read about. Our CEO's real identity was all over google, and the man who I thought I knew was a fraud. I couldn't trust him, and I didn't really know what was true and what wasn't.

I had no other option but to jump ship and save myself.

And here we are. The rest is history, and I know that I will likely be part of another story in the future. Although being highly stressful situations at times, they have been the experiences that have continued to shape me into the man I am today. I stay true to my roots, and believe ethics should be at the core of all business practice.

There have been a lot of beautiful lessons in each experience of which I am forever grateful. These experiences are the ones that will be apart of a bigger story, and have helped aid me in becoming a smarter individual.

There is nothing to gain in deceiving others.

If I have learnt just one thing, it would be to always stay true to myself.

There will always be somebody more successful, more beautiful , more talented. You have to realize, you're not running their race. You're running your race. - Joel Osteen