5 years update

Loads happened in the past 5 years… got married, got a daughter, got an apartment, got into crypto, got into NFT, got slightly rich, and got rug-pulled (thankfully only a small portion of the portfolio), but it’s nothing compared to Florence’s (my dear wife) journey, and I am glad I got to be part of it and had a front-row seat during all this time.

The startup

Florence was pursuing a PhD when we got married 5 years ago, and she took a year off when pregnant with our daughter. During a sleepless night nursing the newborn, she and her friends decided to found a startup, focusing on helping the disabled. (Some background: Florence had been working for nearly a decade as an industrial consultant and industrial engineer before pursuing her PhD in engineering, so it’s not some start-up fads that seem prevalent at that moment.) Thanks to her previous work in a quasi-government organization, Florence was familiar with the funding support available from the government and other agencies, and she was able to secure funding from the Technology Start-up Support Scheme for Universities (TSSSU), amounting to a little more than HK$1 Million (~US$150,000) over 3 years. Of course, like many other government funding schemes, there were pre-defined scopes of funding and the majority of the funding was reimbursement-based, meaning that you would need to spend your own fund first before getting it paid and the whole reimbursement generally takes anything from 6 months to a year. Any funding at this stage is useful, but a cost-reimbursement grant and the subsequent paperwork do limit the impact on the startup. After all, with 2 of the other 3 co-founders in the last year of their PhD and the remaining a Research Assistant Professor at a university, Florence was the only one spending any meaningful time at the startup, and she was looking after a newborn at the same time!

Dealing with government paperwork was a nightmare. Forms after forms after forms; two, three, five quotations required for purchase above arbitrary thresholds; exacting format for the list of expenditures and receipts, emailing a softcopy AND submitting a hardcopy of your accounting documents to the office within one week after the quarter ends, the list goes on. It was and still is, a massive drain on business time, but especially true when it was a one-man team and for a relatively small amount of reimbursement grant.

Things started to go south quickly after the grant was approved.

Long story short: There were 4 co-founders with equal shares and Florence was the only one who spent any time on the company as she took a maternity break from her PhD. 2 of them (one of them was the research assistant professor! OK, it’s really just a glorified post-doc position, but still!) were only interested in spending the funding with laptops, iPads and other gadgets for “research purposes”, whereas Florence and Steve, the remaining co-founder, wanted actually to do something meaningful. An ugly power struggle ensued, but luckily we were able to get hold of some damning evidence against the glorified post-doc, and he left the startup with his tail between his legs. His crony soon followed suit. Unfortunately, capital which would be useful for the company was wasted on legal fees and months were lost.

Lesson learned: I know it’s a cliché, but only work with people with integrity, and never ever go for an equal share split if you are co-founding. Someone needs to take charge when shit hits the fans! Stalemate is bad news, and it can be catastrophic for a startup.

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I am going to use this blog to record what I saw in my wife’s startup journey. The startup is actually more than 2 years old, but we also have a spoilt 3-year-old insisting on “sharing” my laptop whenever I go near it.

I was going to write it in Chinese but then I could not type Chinese fast enough and it was so frustrating!