apple – Nick Grant

Nick Grant

Tag: apple

  • My Tribute to Mark Zuckerberg

    This is a story of imitation…

    Cambridge Union

    I pitched the Cambridge Angels in flip flops. They didn’t like this very much. It was a hot day in June though, so I thought it was appropriate. Perhaps I was a little over-inspired by The Social Network, but at least I wasn’t wearing my dressing gown.

    I also structured my company, so that my shares would be less diluted when the company received investment.

    I was even so paranoid about anybody wrestling control of my company away from me, that when I wrote and signed a vesting agreement for my co-founder in a pub, on a napkin, during the first weeks of the Springboard Accelerator Program, in Cambridge, I deliberately held the pen upside down for the photo. Plausible deniability.

    Napkins Away

    Anyway, so Hubflow is winding down operations, and that means I failed as CEO, despite the fact I stepped down a few years ago. Of course I wanted to give all my investors a big payday, so put a black mark against my name.

    People should remember that I always had one eye on the sales pipeline and another eye on the bills, taxes, and wages. I would never bankrupt a company. However, it’s all credit to my co-founder for getting things in order when I became unwell.

    It’s tough at the top, and I have nothing but respect for anybody who is in a CxO position. I’m not after anybody’s job… I know how much of a kicking the executives get from investors, customers, and the sleepless nights thinking about everybody who is depending on them.

    I’m also not so naïve as to believe that I should be telling anybody how to build a successful startup yet. I learned loads on the Springboard program, but those lessons have yet to express themselves in a useful and productive way for everybody who invested time & energy in me.

    I’m wrestling with an unquenchable desire to research and develop stuff, to innovate, to explore ideas. I know that I can deliver a project as a solo founder, or build something from day one with the right co-founder(s). Bringing people in later in the life of a startup, is very difficult.

    I also know that I can be a developer, or I can be a startup founder…  not both. Sure, I can write code, I can fix bugs, but the demands on a founder are so great that it’s impossible to do the development as well. I was writing and maintaining code for the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, web application, maintaining the database, doing sysadmin, operational support… it was too much, on top of raising money, meeting customers, pitching and meeting mentors.

    On the Springboard Program, Jon and Jess did a great job of supporting the founders. I know that Jon also went by far the extra mile for the teams that were dealing with issues, and the safety net that was there for me could not be faulted. I had bitten off more than I could chew.

    I was always torn between raising any kind of investment round (friends & family, seed) or bootstrapping. I also was conflicted about bringing anybody into my startup, except hired help. I didn’t trust anybody. I also couldn’t let go of control and empower anybody to help me.

    When you are bootstrapping, you don’t have any money. For anything. Making rent payments, wages, expenses… everything comes down to one thing and one thing only: how much runway have you got left for your burn rate? You run lean, but you also run stressed. That’s not an excuse for me not being a team player though. Hubflow probably could have been a bigger success if I had learned the importance of Team, as well as Traction and Technology.

    You live, you learn.

    What a Day to be Alive

    Photographic evidence that I did make people laugh as well as cry. I think we had great times in Cambridge. I know I did (May 2011)

    Tags:

     

  • Appearances Can Be Deceptive

    This is a story of unintended consequences: opportunities and serendipity…

    Brains

    The National Health Service is a wonderful thing. Universal healthcare, including free dentistry and glasses for children and vulnerable members of society. I benefitted from this, but not in the way that might seem most immediately obvious, from the picture of a bespectacled little version of myself, above.

    My parents were kind enough to not only care deeply about my eyesight – which was tested at a very young age – but also to impress upon me the importance of having ‘adult’ mannerisms: remembering my P’s and Q’s (“please” and “thank you” for anybody not brought up in the Victorian-era), thanking my host for letting me stay, complimenting the chef on meals, and other forgotten social protocols from previous generations.

    The combination of a ‘bookish’ appearance, precicely enunciated diction and good manners, plus a whole repertoire of “party tricks” could be guaranteed to have adults coo-ing and clucking over a “lovely polite little boy”. This was borne out of nothing more than any son or daughter’s natural desire to please their parents.

    I went to the local state school, in Jericho, Oxford, an area which was rapidly being gentrified by middle-class educated families who had discovered that the rental and house prices were excellent value, compared to the rest of central Oxford. This was on account of a stigma of living in “working-class terraced houses” near the canal and derelict, decaying industrial infrastructure of the City.

    In 1930’s Oxford, Jericho would have busled with coal carts, bringing up sackloads from the canal to heat the large, draughty houses of North Oxford, and the pall of coal smoke from Lucy’s Iron Works would have hung close to the water, and through the comparatively narrow terraces, versus the grand wide boulevards of St. Giles and Broad Street.

    Being ‘right-on’ liberals and socialists from humble backgrounds meant these families did not have the means to pay for expensive housing and private school fees. So it was, I ended up going to school with the sons & daughters of heart surgeons, Members of Parliament, bankers, lawyers, accountants and of course, academics, who achieved their place in the world by hard work, not by nepotism.

    Amongst my primary school friends, Danny’s Grandad, had been instrumental in bringing universal healthcare to the people of Britain, and in so doing, had ‘cursed’ me with the glasses, which I didn’t appreciate the value of at the time.

    When playing at the house of another friend, Joe, we were allowed to play on his Dad’s Apple Macintosh Plus. Joe’s Dad, Paul, is a famous Zoologist who used the Mac to author papers with the likes of Richard Dawkins. Joe’s mum, Anna, was a Systems Analyst, and my career aspiration – to drive a coal lorry – was inadvertantly redirected into the world of computing from this point, circa 1986 (age 6).

    I'm a Mac

    I can remember those first experiences with a WIMP (Windows Icons Mouse & Pointer) as so intuitive, so natural. It was joyful. Bell Labs invented the transistor, which gave us the modern computer, rather than the collossal rooms of valves that went before. Probably equally important is the work of Xerox in inventing the mouse, and finally Apple, for making a packaged instrument that can be operated by a 6-year-old. “It just works” really is as true today as it was back then.

    Sometimes – in fact most of the time – seeing is believing. But this sometimes isn’t enough. We also need the pretty packaging. Our computers need to have a rainbow-coloured piece of half-eaten fruit on them. Our nerds need to have a pair of spectacles and talk like they’ve swallowed a dictionary.

    Original Copyright Theft

    No, I am not comparing myself to Steve Jobs. My career is only just getting interesting. Plus I don’t wear enough black.

     

    Tags: