Colu’s Story — The Beginning

Today I’m leaving Colu.
A company that I founded 4 years ago together with my partners - Amos Meiri & Mark Smargon.
It is so hard for me to explain how hard it is. It feels as if I’m moving out of my home to an unknown future.
It’s sad and scary, yet full of hope and promises. I’m full of energy and feel the adrenaline rush through my veins.
It shows that life doesn’t always take you through the path you choose.
But when one door closes, few other opens.
I’m moving on to my next challenges, knowing I’m leaving Colu with good hands to run and manage.
My most intensive memory from Colu is the story of how it all began.
I want to share with you this story.
We all know Colu as the innovative, exciting and awesome company that it is today. With presents at 3 countries (Israel, UK & Gibraltar) and after $40M fundraising.
But the beginning was quite different.
I want to tell you the story of how it all began for me, and how we were able to raise our first funds.
I met Amos Meiri in 2012 at eToro while he was the head of eToro’s trading room, and I was the company’s co-founder and CTO.
Amos had also held another very interesting responsibility at eToro back-then. He was also in-charge of eToro’s Colored Coins project. The Colored Coins was a blockchain community project. It enabled peoples to issue and manage their own digital assets over the bitcoin blockchain. Amos managed it’s community and product, working with externals programmers and paying them with bitcoins.
He also worked with a most talented 19 years old guy name Vitalik Buterin, who later founded Ethereum.
As being eToro’s CTO, I had many long discussions with him. He totally caught me with his enthusiasm and passion for the Bitcoin and the Blockchain technology.
One day at early 2014 Amos came to me and told me he was leaving eToro and starting his own company that will be named ‘CoinPowers’ (that will later be changed to ‘MyPowers’).
He talked to me about the power of the Blockchain to change the world and to disrupt traditional markets, such as banks and financial institutes.
It was hard to stay apathetic to such statements.
I was already gotten familiar with the Blockchain technology and began to fell in love with it.
Amos was Preaching to the choir with me, I very much agreed with him.
After a few months of keeping in touch, Amos convinced me to leave eToro and to join him at his new company. He introduced me to Mark Smargon, the third co-founder, that had already worked with him on the MyPowers project. I joined the team and we were set to go.

The beginning was not so bright.
We began to work at Mark’s company offices (Creatix). It was crowded yet very productive.
We worked days and nights on the ‘MyPowes’ product.
MyPowers was a product for celebs to issue their own coin on the blockchain and manage their followers using this coin.
Our first coin on this system belonged to an unknown lady singer called Tatiana Moroz. Tatiana created her own ‘Tatiana Coin’.

It was so exciting for us and after a few months, we decided that it is time for us to raise our seed-round.
We also decided to raise it in the US.
After we have arranged all our things together, we set our course for the US. Our mission was to return with a shitload of money.
We were fully motivated and our excitement was skyrocketing. The reality, on the other hand, had hit us in the face.
We had hard times explaining to investors what is the Blockchain good for. It was in 2014, and most investors had heard about the Blockchain, but yet they had no idea what its advantages.
We traveled both to the east coast and to the west coast searching for investors that will understand our vision. We had approximately 30 meetings with venture capitals and with private investors. We had meetings in NY, in LA, in San Francisco, and in Boston. Many times we had meetings after a night flight without having any sleep.
Most of them had no idea what we are trying to accomplish.
We were very focused and targeted-oriented, but at many times at the roadshow that we had, it looked as if we were fighting a lost cause.
I remember meeting with Spark Capital in Boston after a night flight. It was the last meeting of our roadshow. We didn’t have any sleep and we were needed to present our best. The meeting was a complete disaster. We presented the product in a wrong way, got into arguments with Spark’s general partner, were having a hard time explaining why do we need the Blockchain for our product. Everything went wrong for us at this meeting.
At the end of this meeting, we found ourselves at the nearest bar with a glass of beer each. We were so depressed and disappointed with the entire US tour.
After three hours and heaving three beers each, I thought to myself that we will never raise fund for our new startup.
Eventually, all turned out to be quite well. In the end, Spark Capital invested. Aleph also joined. And we also managed to raise money from two other US funds (DCG and Box Group).
Luckily for us, we found some amazing investors that believed in us and agreed to make a $2.5M seed-round investment in our new company.
We realized that we were needed to change our product direction, to close the MyPowers activity and to focus on the blockchain technology that we owned — the Colored Coins.
We also decided to restructure MyPowers to a new company called Colu (which is a shortened to the ‘Colored Coins’ phrase).
And this is how Colu was born.

