When I say I was trying to build a business, I mean exactly that. Build from nothing. I had no income, no customers and no revenue. I had an idea and I was trying to make it a reality. I wanted to create something of value. Honourable but foolish.

I thought fortune favoured the bold and if you wanted to succeed you had to take big risks in order to receive the big rewards.

I was wrong and the risks were real. It cost me everything.

For every rags to riches story or wonder kid that defies all odds to make headlines there must be hundreds of thousands of failed attempts that you will never hear of. Out of those hundreds of thousands, I would say most people were quite capable but things just didn’t align.

I am one of those failed attempts that you have never heard about.

I will write more about how my life disintegrated into dust another time. But for now I will just say I was so committed, so tenacious and so focussed that I was blind to everything else in my life. There was a drive in me that even if I wanted to, which I didn’t, I could not stop. It was an unlimited belief, belief in the idea, its simplicity and its value to the world that kept me going…

And going…and going, until I was over the the edge, life’s guardrails destroyed, all curtains torn, all veils pierced. I was on the other side of acceptable risk. I was burnt out, washed up, and when I finally stopped to look up, there was nothing but scorched earth where my life had been.

I felt I had been the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. But I wasn’t able to make them see. Why? Because nobody knew about me or the business.

There is one thing that all the hard work in the world cannot replace. It can be described in one word:

Network.

And I didn’t have one because I had shunned technology.

It wasn’t enough that I had all the conviction in the world, I needed others to believe in the idea too. But who was going to believe in an idea from an unknown? Honest people see the world through an honest lens, so I personally did not see a problem. I thought the idea would speak for itself. However, I was about to enter the murky world of finance. If I say I loathe Big Tech and the tech industry for what it has become, it is because the finance industry gave birth to it.

I had built a team of professional volunteers and technical advisors, secured exclusivity contracts with suppliers and had an idea that could tackle a real global problem, it was scalable and had huge potential for positive impact.

This was the point I needed some seed funding to run a pilot project and prove the concept. Without it, I couldn’t make any sales and I wouldn’t ever get the project off the ground.

I was asking for such a small amount of money as far as venture capital goes (Only $300 000) and the merits of the project were so good I thought it was a no-brainer. This was especially true when I looked at the kind of projects that were raising multi-million dollar rounds for the latest iteration of smoke here or the next generation mirror there.

I thought investors would be excited that a real game-changing solution had landed on their desktop. But just like in tech, there is the pretty GUI façade that we all see and then there is the backend with all the complexity, bloatware, bugs, bots and hallucinations. The same is true for The Start-up Scene