Powa: The startup that fell to earth
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> Powa occupied two floors of the prestigious Heron Tower at the heart of the city of London, and had equally lavish accommodation in Hong Kong, New York and across Europe.
Before having established proper cash flow?! When all their "sales" were just "letters of intent". How were investors even remotely convinced it was a good deal?
> One of the more printable comments is this: "You don't employ intelligent, highly experienced people to treat them like something unpleasant under your shoe by telling them to forget everything they know, as your way isn't working"
I wonder what the staff turnover was like? The only time I worked for a CEO who treated his employees with that little respect, they had a 90%/2 years turnover. No one was prepared to stick around and support someone who would send motivational emails saying "Ask not what your company can do for you, ask what you can do for the company" as the CEO was screwing up sales deals. I always wondered if he'd ever figure it out. Even burned my bridge there trying to help him understand what was going on during the exit interview.
> According to several former employees, at one Christmas bash in Mayfair, strippers were hired to perform, to the discomfort of many present.
Grew up idolising the worst aspects of Yuppie culture?
> "While the company was going under, he's fooling around in a photography studio pretending to be Ziggy Stardust. The guy is a narcissistic idiot."
Certainly sounds like it...
I had a similar experience with a startup out of college. On reflection, I should have noticed that among all the photos on the "mentioned in the news" billboard, the only familiar faces were the founders...
I know of one company that did better than that, 100% in one year. And they're of course blaming the employees for that, lack of loyalty and so on. Fairly incredible.
The caption is delivered with perfect English understatement:
> One member of staff described Mr Wagner as an "idiot"
It is true, CTO did make whole team of people redundant on New Years Eve via voicemail - maybe 'how to' book on leadership taught him redundancy procedure.
Led by a truly odious individual, this attitude is prevalent throughout the company. Senior management are relics of the 80's living off their success in the last dotcom boom (and bust), who believe the film 'Wall Street' is a training manual for management, business practices and team leadership.
These were via https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Powa-Techn... - looks like a signup would be necessary to get the full reviews.
I noticed, though, that clicking through to the full reviews page, the most recent are glowing ones from Powa's head of development and head of sales ;)
I honestly can't understand how they got nearly $100m in funding.
The PoS product was actually pretty good...
But a new entrant trying to sign up merchants individually?
Their users group call themselves "the prisoners of Venda"!
It can happen to you.
Dramatic failure, maybe not: but there are plenty of startups out there in that gray zone of "we don't really know what we're doing but we have several redeeming qualities!"
That zone, the upper 10% of "hyped" startups shall we say, are far more deceptive, and therefore dangerous, than the "obvious" bad companies, the bottom 90%. It's easy to laugh at all those investors who got hornswoggled by an out-and-out narcissist. It's less easy when the team is super- smart, the founders super-motivated and the only factors missing just happen to be what separates the 10% from the 1% who are truly successful. It could be product-market fit, work-life balance, or whatever the team needs at the moment. The only way to know is to be super-paranoid[1]
Much like the stuff on /r/subredditdrama or /r/cringe, spectacles of human foibles convey "I'm better than the worst, so I am good." which, for me, translates into a false sense of confidence.
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66863.Only_the_Paranoid_S...
The traditional way maybe longer : minimal investment and constant self sustainability, but it seems also better at helping founder adapt to changes in costing and technologies.
When you have 50 customers it is easier to recognize you made a mistake in architecture and change it. While aggressive market spreading with freemium lock you in faster and makes you less agile.
Also you get very soon aware of your real costs.
But, the problem is VC+startup tends to aggressively compete with sound business in a way that has nothing to do with pure merit but often just the capacity to access capital (which according to most studies relate to birth).
I am an hardcore historical liberal, I don't really think that birth is a merit that is leading to a competitive market. Else, most of the leading economical nations would have remained monarchies. I also accept people have the right to live in dignity from their work and do not have to be all entrepreneurs.
I kind of think people misunderstand what liberalism is.
It is the right for people to choose a dignified existence through work with a clear contract of one hour worked has to be paid, and the right if people wishes to be entrepreneurs that have the possibility to access to a truly competitive market based on their merit without distortion.
And like any liberal I think it contributes to prosperity wealth and happiness of the Nations in an efficient way.
True and that's the approach I'd take but there is a benefit to the other way if you have a product that is a first or is the first to do something well, first mover advantage to grow big fast required a lot of capital (the costs to do that have dropped hugely but are still not trivial).
Some businesses grow best organically and some require a shot in the arm.
It is basically both ploutocratie and major life changing decision who are escaping the control of the people. Hence not driven neither by the interests of Nations nor of the environment.
We are supposed to live in democracy where the people are free to decide to not trigger a massive extinction of species or fuel wars based on biasing the access to oil or cheap enslaved workforce.
I think we have the right to decide our own destiny. But, it is because I am an idealist still believing in the rights of the people, freedom and fair competition.
Powa is Venda's answer to Shopify, trying to capture the smaller market, the software, and the management, was never good enough to compete.
https://dockets.justia.com/search?parties=Venda%2C+Inc&cases...
We had herman miller aeron chairs and a prime piece of real estate in central london (by the Noel Coward theatre) but had never turned a profit, the Venda application was 2million lines of perl that could "sustain" 1 hit every 30 seconds, so most of my job was maintaining expansive arrays of caching systems.
The upper executives and thick layer of middle management were smarmy and entitled, and the operations staff took it as a challenge and a matter of personal pride to make it work "Smooth seas do not make skilled sailors" was a common motto.
I was once publicly berated for helping a customer on the phone because the management wanted to bill time for what was literally a 30 second change (I did it WHILE on the phone with them).
They do a good job of soaking up all the perl developers in London though.
also, FWIW: they sold the company to someone shortly after I left, it may be better managed now, but I can't be sure.
I can't remember the exact syntax, but I used to find it hilarious that each Venda tag had to have a unique label, and since the code was notoriously difficult to navigate, everyone just ended up using random numbers and hoping that it wasn't used elsewhere.
<venda_something label=5318008>
...
</venda_something>But at that point the 'agile' team hadn't delivered in over a year. Badly mismanaged...
Sounds like this guy took it to the extreme though, and lost all perspective on reality along the way.
Otherwise people would just use credit cards, who have been here since forever.
I probably make most of my purchases with a very small group of retailers - for example, in terms of number (not value) of transactions, the sandwich shop by my work and the corner shop by my house probably account for 80% of my offline transactions. (I go to the supermarket about once a week, and although I tend to buy more, that's all in a single transaction.)
If you could sign up those merchants, and give me a compelling reason (convenience, discounts, rewards) to use your payment app, it might not matter that I couldn't use your payment app on those rare occasions that I go shopping somewhere else.
Just a thought. (I'm not in the payment industry.)
[* ] I've only once in my life ever had to sign for a transaction, it's not a common method, I just mention it here because I know some countries still use it.
If your phone can do everything that your card can do (and a lot more!), why carry the card?
(I also print out airline boarding passes unless it's not convenient to do so for some reason. I'm not fanatical about it, but if it's just 30 seconds of effort, I figure that I might as well.)
It's also more secure because you're authenticated by the fingerprint scanner, and it's anonymous.
There have been several times I've got stuck behind someone using their Apple phone to get through the gates on the London Underground and have noticed two or three people get through the gates on either side in the same time as the one with the Apple phone. And it isn't just me - according to http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/16/tfl-cautio... the iPhone "has led to irate commuters and queues at the gates".
The transaction will stay authorised for a couple of minutes, at least, and then the gates will open nearly instantly when you put your phone near the sensor.
This isn't an issue for using Apple Pay via the Apple Watch, since that device skips the Touch ID requirement (instead, it will de-authorise if you take it off your wrist).
no it's not.
Apple Pay doesn't really compete with Contactless - they are the same thing! Any merchant that accepts contactless therefore accepts Apple Pay as well, whether they advertise it or not. (Here in the UK, at least)
Apple Pay is a bit more secure because transactions are authenticated with your fingerprint via Touch ID, and the merchant gets a special device card number rather than your real card number. But as far as the payment terminal knows it's just like any regular contactless card.
Whether it's more convenient to take your contactless card out of your pocket/wallet, or use an Apple Pay device is a matter for debate. I find that I usually already have my phone in my hand while standing in a checkout line, so I pay with that rather than fumbling for my card.
And yeah, all the expensive office space, fraternity esque atmosphere, manager posing for photoshoots stuff... it's like the company was set up and run by people who wanted the glamour of running a large company rather than those who wanted to actually make a viable business out of it. The whole thing feels like something you'd read about a dotcom business in the 90s, right before the crash.
"Wagner remained on the board of MAID until 2001 and founded Venda Inc later that year.[6] Venda Inc is provider of e-commerce software originally built using technology from the defunct company Boo.com.[1][4] Wagner had acquired Boo.com for £250,000 in 2000 following the dot-com crash.[12]
...
In 2007 he also founded Powa Technologies, an e-commerce business based on Venda Inc's small business solution, but with additional services for in-store and mobile point of sale and software for mobile payments called PowaTag and PowaPOS, formerly known as mPowa. Wagner introduced PowaTag in 2014, after receiving more than $100 million in funding.[15] Users of the service can make purchases using QR codes, audio watermarks and iBeacons.[6][16]"
So Boo.com -> Venda Inc -> Powa Tech :)
It's from a comedy pilot called 'Golden Years' which is very clearly a development step towards 'The Office'.
Instead they'll change their mind after it has been dispatched, costing the vendor more.
In the UK at least distance selling rules mean that anything[1] bought on the internet can be returned up to 14 days later without requiring a reason.
[1] There are of course some exceptions for certain product types.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/powa-glassdoor-reviews-were-m...
holy crap this reads just like the interview with Pets.com in a 1999 edition of some PC magazine