That article reveals a story that's one <i>facepalm</i> after another. An example of the worst "rockstar founder" attitude backed by apparently clueless investors.<p>> 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.<p>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?<p>> 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"<p>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.<p>> According to several former employees, at one Christmas bash in Mayfair, strippers were hired to perform, to the discomfort of many present.<p>Grew up idolising the worst aspects of Yuppie culture?<p>> "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."<p>Certainly sounds like it...
There are some gems at the glassdoor site referred to in the article.<p><i>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.</i><p><i>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.</i><p>These were via <a href="https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Powa-Technologies-RVW3877050.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Employee-Review-Powa-Techn...</a> - looks like a signup would be necessary to get the full reviews.<p>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 had a meeting with their sales people back in 2013 or so, a few year anyway, and I remember thinking after the hour long pitch that the claims where entirely delusional and pumped up. It was "just" a QR code with an app behind it and ultimately nothing at all fancy but they spoke about it like it was a total paradigm shift in buying. I never got how they lasted so long, reading the glassdoor reviews over the past year it was clearly a sinking ship years ago.<p>I honestly can't understand how they got nearly $100m in funding.
One reminder I say to myself when reading stories like this:<p>It can happen to you.<p>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!"<p>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]<p>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.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66863.Only_the_Paranoid_Survive" rel="nofollow">http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66863.Only_the_Paranoid_S...</a>
I've worked with Venda (for two separate companies) and met Dan Wagner and their platform is truly an awful piece of software, and the man himself isn't much better, my job was basically to find methods of subverting the software in order to do what our marketing team wanted. It's roughly £6k per month, and account management is slow to respond and it's very difficult to do anything meaningful with the technology. One of the companies is still with Venda with the intention of moving away, and one moved to DemandWare after roughly a year.<p>Powa is Venda's answer to Shopify, trying to capture the smaller market, the software, and the management, was never good enough to compete.
I worked with them through 2014 and saw the NYE firing. Pretty brutal.<p>But at that point the 'agile' team hadn't delivered in over a year. Badly mismanaged...
The opening paragraph on the CEO's wikipedia page is a gem: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Wagner" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Wagner</a>
You need basically every merchant to sign up for your payment app to work.<p>Otherwise people would just use credit cards, who have been here since forever.
For those interested in seeing Dan Wagner in action, this is a video Christmas message (4.44 mins) sent to all staff in December 2015. Powa went into administration in February.<p><a href="http://youtu.be/sWhI5YK-_No" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/sWhI5YK-_No</a>
Wow, the letter of intent thing is kind of depressing. I mean, say what you like about Dragon's Den/Shark Tank esque 'business' TV shows, but that point comes up in almost every episode; a letter of intent is not a deal or contract. But no, a '2 billion dollar' business was rewarding staff for getting these.<p>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.
Story sounds quite close to what happened to boo.com <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boo.com</a>
" The start-up said that adding its PowaTag button to sites would reduce the risk of customers changing their mind before completing a purchase "<p>Instead they'll change their mind after it has been dispatched, costing the vendor more.<p>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.<p>[1] There are of course some exceptions for certain product types.
interesting insight here into how Powa's management tried to manipulate the reviews on the Glassdoor site, written by an ex-CFO of Powa.<p><a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/powa-glassdoor-reviews-were-manipulated-steven-prowse" rel="nofollow">https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/powa-glassdoor-reviews-were-m...</a>
Dan Wagner talking about an employers' responsibilities to its employees
<a href="https://youtu.be/Udc46TNfOtY?t=3m42s" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/Udc46TNfOtY?t=3m42s</a>
Sounds like the startup was run by Russ Hanneman. It's eerie that the characters in Silicon Valley (the TV show) can be pointed to real life people so easily.
> the deal".
Mr Wagner, who claims to have a stellar record as a serial entrepreneur, was still telling everyone who would listen that his was a company that would be bigger than Google or Facebook one day. As recently as last October, he told Evan Davis on Radio 4's Bottom Line that the business had been valued at $2.7bn by its backers Wellington. Evan suggested that was a meaningless figure because Powa hadn't made any money yet. "We're a growth tech business," Mr Wagner replied, maintaining it was other people who had set that value.<p>holy crap this reads just like the interview with Pets.com in a 1999 edition of some PC magazine