Doug Scott and I have a funny relationship. He was one of the investors that interviewed me for Techstars London in 2014. Then he became one of my mentors in the accelerator. When I say mentor, I mean he rambled a bunch of things in a Geordie accent that I only understood 53% of the time.
Naturally, when I set to out raise a round of funding he was the first one I asked. We had $600K committed, but a VC dropped out and there was a domino effect. I wrote about it extensively in a post which went viral:
I was a young first-time founder and didn’t realize how much work Doug put in behind the scenes to keep the deal together. His side of the story here:
People thought we hated each other after things didn’t work out. Of course we were upset and got in a slagging match, but we both learned from the situation. What most people don’t know is that he still funded us by being a customer of Good Audience. The revenue from him was more than the amount he committed to investing — haha sorry Doug for not getting any equity.
He never stopped being a friend. When I found myself back in the UK last summer, he welcomed me into his home. I made my way to Hong Kong a few months later to join the Zeroth accelerator. Guess who showed up the first week as a mentor? This loud mouth will not get out of my life.
When we thought about raising money for Rocco, we defined very strict guidelines for the type of people we want to partner with. They must be nice, have the same values, and want to help us get to the next level. We want to surround ourselves with world-class people.
Doug falls in that category. At the very least, I know we will have a good laugh on the journey. Then he goes and says he is taking a break from investing:
