Tales from a'near

Seems like for the last 2 years all I’ve done is have surgery after surgery. It’s probably because I have. It’s so hard to remain motivated when you feel like this all the time but I try.

My daughter is 5 and last week she completed her first ever ‘paid job’, a model shoot for children’s fashion and followed by a catwalk show. Some people have balked in horror but to me the greatest lessons I have learnt is to appreciate the value money through hard work and determination. Not to mention the amount of self confidence doing something like this will bring to a child growing up. So long as she is comfortable and willing then I have no problem encouraging it.

15th November was my last post. I didn’t just lose the enthusiasm for blogging the same way many do though, it has been all a bit ‘top secret’ but I’m excited to finally be able to share the news again.

One of the main themes of my blog is talking about my experiences as an entrepreneur, charting my adventures in starting and building businesses as a part cathartic process for myself and part helpguide for aspiring entrepreneurs who are perhaps reticent or fearful of taking the plunge.

Most recently, I’ve been talking about my efforts to raise finance for my new business www.YourPowr.com - a web-based energy management system. I’d met with numerous VC’s and Angels but interest remained just that; no offers.

I then, by pure chance, met an investor who already had an investment within the same sector. We met along with the founder of this company and spent a great few hours chatting away about our thoughts on the industry and how a new business might thrive in it.

After a month of negotiations an offer was made and I agreed to become CEO of this company, called www.CarbonGuerrilla.com and bring the YourPowr technology with me to create a combined Carbon Accounting and Energy Management system. Together we have investment and will build out this product based on our vision.

Carbon Guerrilla has a fantastic team and some great clients. More importantly, we share the same vision about what is wrong with the way in which consumers and businesses understand and manage their carbon and energy and we really want to disrupt it with a new way of doing things.

I’ll leave the juicy details for further posts but I just wanted to say it’s great to be able to share this news and that I’m very excited for the future

Cheers

A ‘edible garden’ I made last week for dinner

The children met Santa today. Absolutely priceless.

Cover shot of the new green house newsletter coming out this month

Where we used to live in London our neighbours were the Pop Band JLS. Girls used to line up outside and hide up trees just to get a glimpse of them. I used to stand at the window with a cup of tea muttering how unseemly I thought it all was and how I couldn’t understand what on earth would possess someone to do that.

Which is precisely why what I’m about to post will seem so contradictory it will entrench me in further in geekdom than those girls in the trees:

I was on the plane back to London tonight from Helsinki and spotted someone I recognised: Peter Vesterbacka - Chief Marketing Officer for Rovio - the makers of Angry Birds.

He looked absolutely shattered and was searching for his pick-up driver so probably not the best time for some business fanboy to grab a hold of him and demand a picture. Being the nice chap that he is though he happily obliged and we chatted briefly.

I like Angry Birds, sure, who doesn’t but I love Rovio, the company. This is for two reasons:

1. Despite their ‘overnight success’ they’ve actually been going since 2003 and have developed over 50 games. They know what they are doing and have stuck with it through iteration and iteration. Angry Birds was no fluke - it was a very carefully constructed product built from years of experience, product development and market research

2. Angry Birds is not a game - it’s our generations definition of marketing. So many lessons can be learned from how Rovio are skilfully blending all the available zeitgeists of social, mobile and gamification and using that to drive what is essentially a pretty old fashioned business model that most of us will be familiar with - merchandising. They are selling over 1 million units a month. 

So thanks @pvesterbacka and enjoy your trip to England!

What’s your favourite way to relax? For me you can’t beat a coffee, a piece of pie and a good book

For the detail nerds amongst you the book is ‘The Plundered Planet’ by Paul Collier, the pie is lemon meringue and the coffee is black :-)

Camping in the back garden with my children tonight. I feel 7 years old again :)

And a great view back East (considering my previous post from the East)

A reward for my guest speaker slot:private dinner by Nobu in Penthouse of Mayfair Hotel. Sometimes it’s nice to get the perks.

It’s a view I won’t ever get tired of: London at dusk

It’s been a hell of a week so I hope you’ll all forgive me for taking the night off and acting a bit of a dick

NOTE: A few people have still misinterpreted this post. We are not looking for staff. We are not looking for outsourced contractors. We are looking for a business partner who is looking to become a shareholder in a start-up

This could be a long blog post but I’m not going to make it one. Over the last month I have travelled to San Francisco, London and Helsinki to talk to developers, investors and Venture Capitalists. I came armed with a working application, an investment presentation and a winning smile. I’m leaving for home tomorrow with more questions than answers and this blog post is my attempt to resolve it.

We have a good idea. We have a good target market. We have a good business model. What we need to do is to upgrade each of those to ‘awesome’.

Amongst the many conclusions I have made these past couple of weeks the fundamental thing we are missing to help us get there is a strong technological leader who can hack and ship the ideas that are in my head and in our plans. The second is that unless you are a consumer facing business with a heavily scented social bent with the potential for a $1Bn valuation in a few years then you are going to struggle to attract VC funding at such an early stage.

A better plan for us would be to hack for 12 months - adding features as quickly as we can and market the hell out of our product to attract as many users as possible. If we decide then that we still want scale then we look to VC’s with a much bigger proposition.

So, how do we get there? We have already committed around £100,000 of our own money to this and there ain’t a lot left. Robert and I have our other businesses keeping roofs over our head and food on the table so we don’t need anything from YourPowr but what we do need is a developer. Someone who can share our vision and philosophy on how to get a business going (hint. it involves stupid hours, lots of coffee, macs and lots of clouds).

We don’t have the inclination to throw yet more money into this and just hire people as developers - we know we could do that but we think it isn’t going to be enough. What we are looking for is someone to join us as a partner. Someone with seriously good skills. It would help if they shared a passion for the environment and we don’t mean hugging trees but an appreciation that we live in a pretty fucked up world and that we could make it a slightly cooler and better place to live by building some amazing applications.

So, if you have the means to support yourself for the next 12 months at least and the desire to build a worthy, cool and, ultimately, valuable business and handle the responsibility that goes with that then please get in touch with us. It doesn’t matter where in the world you live either so long as you live online.

You can contact me via Twitter @philipmossop or email me philip.mossop at yourpowr.com