Why we founded a start-up

coming together and other irrational choices

“I will totally understand if you tell me now that you don’t want to do it”. Paul smiled at Dan and me over the table. “I mean I wouldn’t think any the worse of you. It wouldn’t change our relationship.”

I found this oddly charming. Paul is normally so — how can I put this? — so utterly removed from the social niceties of what people think of each other, that it was rather endearing to hear him offer this get-out clause.

“But then, if you back out later. I can’t tell you how disappointed I would be.”

Well, that was more like it. And I didn’t blame him at all. It was crunch time. The three of us had spent plenty of evenings in the pub after work discussing ideas for a start-up. We’d drawn up mad diagrams on the white board at work (carefully rubbing it clean afterwards). Numbers had been passed back and forth — how much we might each invest, how long we could commit to, likely contacts for further funding…

Our pub-driven hubris had known no bounds. Paul planned how we would follow the structure of Warren Buffet’s multi-billion-dollar company Berkshire Hathaway as we expanded. Dan laid down all the obnoxious behaviours we would never take part in. They had both announced that it was going to be about doing things differently, about fun and excitement, about changing the world. It was absolutely not, they both said, about the money.

I’m kind of about the money, I muttered.

Now, sitting at the table in an office where we’d worked together for 2 years, we were deciding whether we were actually going to turn those pub plans into reality. On the white board Paul had written the minimum cash commitment we would each put in, and the minimum unpaid time commitment — 1 year.

This was the point. Not the rather dubious paper agreements we drew up later and all signed, not even the constitution, which agreed matters like what happened if one of us died, or left, or we were bought… This was where we made the decision.

I thought about exactly what that lump sum of capital meant to me and how long I had worked to save it; about how strange a fork in my career this would look on my CV; about my dream of publishing my children’s book; about how my husband and I were going to manage without my income, and about how my daughter would feel with Mummy working even longer hours than I already did…

“I’m in,” said Dan.

“I’m in too,” I said.

Paul grinned. “Welcome to Gamevy,” he said.

Who on earth founds a start up anyway?

According to a Populus survey (gotta love a survey), 25% of 16-25 year-olds want to start their own company; 16% are actually doing so.

Reasons could range from the mundanely pragmatic (no-one’s going to give me a job in this recession) to the unrealistic (I wanna be richer than Zuckerberg!!!!). But either way, it’s a more cheerful statistic to focus on than the survey which found more than half of British teenagers refused to go into any job that offered no chance of becoming a celebrity.

For lots of people the ‘image’ of a start-up founder is some young dude with thick black glasses and a beard (why the facial fungus, hipsters, just why?). These are the guys who will work night and day coding from their parents’ garage, suddenly strike it big, and then spend the rest of their careers polishing the biography of a founder…

And there’s a reason this kind of idealised biography makes sense. When you’re young, you CAN work long hours unpaid. Nobody else is dependent on you. Plus if or when you fail, you can go on to have a perfectly normal career in something else — your start-up days will be a set of stories like people who spent three years teaching in Cambodia or scuba-diving in Honduras.

But for Paul, Dan and me, it felt different. When we met, we were all in our mid-to-late 30s, with spouses, kids and outsize mortgages. None of us were independently wealthy or could afford to just play at work.

Taking a massive risk with our life-savings was stressful; living unpaid was going to mean difficult lifestyle changes; 80+ hour weeks was going to wreck havoc with our family lives, and taking a few years out of our careers could be devastating. We were all doing very well as we were — earning good salaries and with career paths that were on track to realise ambitious plans.

But we decided to do it anyway.

Not so special after all

Be honest. Is the stereotype of entrepreneur as a young, workaholic male the one you had?

Before I sat down to write this, I decided to have a little look at the actual figures. And guess what — my stereotype was totally wrong.

According to a report that studied 549 entrepreneurs in the US, the average start-up founder is 40, married and with at least one child. Most are educated to degree level of above. There were a load of stats which basically boiled down to saying that the founder was clever and although from a middle class background was not rich. Most funded their own ventures.

Ha — well, I wish I’d read that report at the time of founding Gamevy, rather than now. It might have allayed some of my concerns about how odd we were.

Paul, Dan and I (Helen — hi there), tick all of those boxes in our different ways. Here’s a kind of potted biography of the three of us. Skip it if you’re not interested and if you want the shiny version about how brilliant we are then read our Linked-in profiles. This is the warts-and-all version.

Paul didn’t graduate from Bath University because he was too busy setting up a search engine company in the days before Google had been envisioned. It got bought before he was 21 but not for enough to stop working and start playing. He went on to work for John Lewis, Gap, Barclays and Pearsons. He ended up as a consultant for Emergn, telling other people what they ought to be doing and knowing they probably wouldn’t. Finally, he convinced Emergn that they could make a real difference by building an education programme that taught crucial thinking rather than a bunch of methods.

Dan dropped out of his Computer Science degree at Salford University and studied Manufacturing Engineering instead. Trying to find his first job, he ended up teaching himself Javascript and wondered why it felt so much more interesting than it had at University. From there he went on to become a developer working for companies including the BBC, Scoot and 7Digital. Following a typical career path of Tech Lead, Development Manager and Head of Development, he became frustrated by the very hierarchy that was promoting him. Dan became a consultant to build an education programme, which he really believed might help people work differently.

Helen had a shock when she started work. After a double first from Cambridge she discovered that passing exams and winning arguments were not as useful as she’d always thought. She worked in marketing for Unilever, Boots and other big companies, but never really felt it was right for her. After a few years she took an MA in Creative Writing and switched to the creative side of things. She ran her own copywriting and branding consultancy and enjoyed life much more. After mouthing off at a dinner about what a pile of nonsense she thought Agile was, she found herself hired to write a series of books on it for Emergn.

The right partners

On the one hand what brought us together was really simple.

· We’d worked together.

· We trusted and respected each other’s abilities.

· Together we had classic, complementary skill specialisations. Dan —technical; Paul — finance and entrepreneurial; Helen — marketing and creative.

· We also had a shared, although different, passion for product development and design.

· We all had roughly similar amounts of money that we could invest

For all of us, this felt like an opportunity that might not come again.

It is rare that you meet people who have the skills, commitment and money to partner you — and whom you trust enough to want to partner.

Now or never

What those bare bones portraits can never tell you is why you might want to do something. Why you’d rather be in a start up than earning lots of money, or following your dreams: writing books in my case, biking for Dan, taking over the world for Paul (OK, I’m joking, but only a little bit).

Key for all of us was frustration with the way normal business worked. It’s probably true to say that Paul was the one with the clearest vision of how he wanted to challenge this — with employee-ownership and a no bosses structure. But it was a vision we all bought into because it tried to address the things that had blocked and frustrated us in the various organisations we had worked for over the years.

So there it was. In the end — as Paul and Dan said — it wasn’t about money or the dream of money or even about a great product. Taking on the crazy risk of a start-up was about the desire to try and forge our own path, to put our ideas and ideals to the test, to do things differently.

And if that sounds like a dream — well it is. Because only dreams have the power to make people do things that don’t make sense. Things like giving up salaries and savings to work absurdly hard on something you know is statistically likely to fail.

Sustaining the vision

In the weeks and months that followed we would have plenty of opportunities to recognise how much it didn’t make sense. A lack of money would hurt all of us in different ways. Spouses and children would find our working hours — shall we say ‘challenging’? Hell, we found them challenging.

But the really funny thing is that the vision has been sustained. We all still feel we are doing something worthwhile and different. It’s been a lot more fun than I expected it to be. In spite of worries, work and rows, I’ve enjoyed days at Gamevy more than any job I’ve ever had (except possibly when I served cocktails from a tyre in a river — that was still the best).

Perhaps most encouraging of all, we have discovered no shortage of people who share our vision.

There are the 7 people who have joined our partnership. Together we own Gamevy and are committed to no bosses, a flat structure, shared risk and reward, shared ownership and responsibility — and a host of other radical rules you can read about on our blog!

Then there are all the other people — including you, perhaps, reading this right now — the people who encourage us, who send us articles and messages, who share their own crazy experiments in radical business and who want to change the way people work.

It’s this wider vision that sustains us through the difficult times. It’s the reason that all three of us are soon to face the question of whether we’ll carry on working for another year unpaid. I can’t speak for the other two…

but I know I’m in.

If you enjoyed reading this, please recommend and follow our adventures in radical business @gamevy.