A step by step guide to start-up failure: The untold story of the Beee platform (Part-1)

I am a sucker for great success stories, from rags to riches, from ramen to lobsters, from eggs to calamari; I think it will suffice to assume that you get my drift. I've been reading up on the lives of inspirational entrepreneurs, business leaders, political personalities, letting myself be transported into a realm of effortless perfection, steely nerves and relentless focus. What a thrill it is! The Richard Bransons, the Steve Jobs, the Sam Waltons, the Jack Dorseys, the Herb Kellehers and the list goes on. I often sit and wonder how they had the calm and focus to steer the ship through stormy times only to come out to the other side unscathed and ready to move on to the next challenge.

I too then decided to, rather naively, steer through the same waters in December 2014, i.e embarked on my own journey of entrepreneurship. I decided to “start” my own startup, if there is such a thing, which according to Eric Reis “is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty” Extreme uncertainty, I discovered, was a rather nice way of saying how fucking hard it really is and how almost all the moving parts of the system are totally unsexy! So this is a short story of unremarkable wins, shoddy decision-making and flawed product development in times of extreme uncertainty; the untold story of the Beee platform.

Making ridiculously hard things infinitely harder to understand

December 2014 had brought on a very interesting fork in the academic road for me; it was decision time. The year had progressed at a pace resembling a speeding snail wildly swinging from left to right in order to avoid a head-on collision with other snails, it was time to really sit down, think and push things forward. I was stuck with choices and decisions; the ambiguities surrounding the circumstances were in fact as ambiguous as the man behind them.

Over the last year I had found myself creatively tickled by the idea of really understanding an aspect of life I had not previously paid much attention to technology. The only exposure I had had with technology was the dozen or so softwares I used for my design work. Although I was better in most soft wares than my contemporaries (easy to imagine my understanding of the field by this sentence!), it was not the front-end but the brains behind it, the back-end, which was starting to rock my boat and make me really perk up and pay attention.

Being bombarded with abstract concepts and technological advancements rampant in today`s society courtesy my professor, who had a knack of talking about abstract things together with the rational, without committing to a common thread of common sense, i had to take notice. It was this interesting tendency that made him stand out from the crowd as he had an uncanny feel of what was going to be the next big thing. I was rather bluntly introduced to Bitcoins just before a short three-day academic break along with a few Youtube video links and a whitepaper from Satoshi Nakamoto . However late to the Bitcoin party, crypto currencies and the Blockchain technology, I realized how little I really knew about things that had a real potential to affect the status quo of a lot of industries. By that time, almost all of the interesting, fascinating ups and downs of the Bitcoin story had already happened, the sudden disappearance of Satoshi, bitcoin hitting an all time high, the Mt. Gox debacle and everyone creating a currency based on their business model.

What I found interesting was that even after attempting to read the infamous white paper by Satoshi numerous times and every time not understanding what it meant, I still felt it was going to be the next most interesting thing to understand and somehow implement in what I wanted to do. And thus began a short journey of complete emersion into a world totally alien to me.

The other aspect of technology to really appreciate, of course was why everything was becoming obsolete before I could afford to buy it! It had been easier a few years ago; I could still sort of save enough money to get the latest, a few months later than the actual early adaptors, but I would be the first person in my surroundings to get it. That flow of things, that I had become accustomed to, had been totally disrupted over the course of last few years, and I had almost given up on chasing the next thing as the next thing was overtaking it almost instantaneously. What I figured out was that it was due to what is know as the Moore`s law; a strange doubling pattern in the computing power of technology every 18 months with a decrease in price, or in other words, technology was getting cheaper and faster. That still didn’t explain why I couldn’t buy stuff fast enough although it was getting cheaper; I guess it had more to do with my buying power not compatible with Moore`s law.

The big idea hit me when I drew out three big overlapping circles on a piece of paper; in one I wrote technology (Exponential technologies, Blockchain, Automation, ICT), design (systems design, service design, management, logistics, platforms) and education (a decentralized model). The sweet spot generated inside was something I really got excited with.

Fast forward a couple of months and the stage had been set; I had made industry contacts and readied a team of experts to work on the project. We had leading academics from Visual Arts, Philosophy, Design, ICT professionals, Heads of departments of different institutes from the university I was studying in and myself as the Man who would make it happen! In the next two months I had designed, created and presented to a funding foundation that was to, on paper, give us one-third of the money required to mobilize, while the rest was to be covered by my university. Awesome, we were set to revolutionize the education industry, from within the education industry.

“With the world transforming at an exponential rate, aided by great technological progress, education must adopt relevant information and communication technologies along with innovative methodologies in order to keep pace. The project “Resign Republic” encompasses an education-technology platform focused on producing digital solutions which are based on three core concepts: Consensus, distributed networks, and automation. In cooperation with a team of international multidisciplinary team of experts, the aim of the project is to create an evolving intelligence supported by digital products that will help students capture, connect, transform and visualize individual expertise. The project philosophy has its roots set in the principles of democratic production of knowledge and innovation in education, in line with the values appreciated and practiced by Switzerland.” Abstract taken from Resign Republic paper.

Of course, as it is with most initiatives seeking funding, we got a big fat rejection stating that we were too ambitious and ambiguous and that we had no idea of what we were talking about! Although my professors were devastated by this news, willing to just take one more on the chin, I decided to go for a second round of submission with an altered version grounded in reality and much more tangible, to which they readily agreed and I set to work to make more sense!

The Singularity university conference I had attended in November in Amsterdam with the professor of mine had given me hope what I was on was still very much within the executable realm of a few global experts. Singularity was upon us, and it was only up to a handful of Americans to save us from the clutches of AI! It wasn’t that gloomy though, infact the conference turned out to be was rather positive, the future looked bright and there were no alien invasions speculations!

As I had settled into re-writing the boring part of the thesis I was working on, ie, the second project proposal for a research grant that, spoiler alert, I never eventually could secure (AGAIN!), my mind was completely focused on two parallel projects that had to accompany the research proposal for my Masters Thesis:

1) A literary parody of the work that I had been doing in the form of a piece of fiction that illustrated the ridiculousness of the ideas I had and make it accessible to a much wider range of people.

2) A Spinoff of all the ideas I had and to make it into a startup, incognito and on my own..that would show them for rejecting me!

It was the first point that got me my Master`s degree but it was the second point that was to put me into the uncertain orbit around the entrepreneurial blackhole and propel me on an intergalactic journey filled with tears, deceit and love in the time of extreme uncertainty!

(End of Part one)

Full Disclosure: I closed Bee platform in July 2015 and am currently the founder of Dezo (www.getdezo.com)