Open letter to Michael Suppo (Suppoman)

Dear Michael,

My name is Arturas. I’m the COO and co-founder of WePower — the green energy project you have reviewed recently. I appreciate you taking time to share your thoughts about our project but I also see that important facts were missed out, which has lead to strongly expressed but misleading conclusions despite the fact that most of the needed information was available in the resources provided on our website and blog.

I do understand that thorough reviews take time, which is a scarce resource, but I also believe that much of it can be solved through an open conversation. It would have been great if we could have started it earlier but perhaps it is better now than never.

This is why in this note I want to clarify on some of the points presented during the video:

1. WePower key value proposition is not as vague and general as stated in the video. We are very clearly focused on creating a fundraising platform for green energy project developers during our first phase and building a set of digital services for energy trade and power grid management during our second and third phase. This is also what makes our business model unique and actually very different from Power Ledgers, which you frequently compared us to during the video. Power Ledger is a project in the green energy sector but the energy sector is slightly more complex than it would seem from your video.
2. You have mentioned that the energy space is crowded and that this is a concern, which again does not really represent a full picture. Energy sector is a very large industry with over 200 billion dollars invested in just renewables every year. There is enough space for 10 more WePowers and 10 more Power Ledgers even regardless of the fact that both companies run on different business models, target customers and geographies. These factors in the energy industry really matter;
3. Thanks for mentioning that we have strong partnerships. We are very fortunate to have such partners as StartupBootcamp, Elering, 220 Energia and renewable energy producers onboard. However, it is not true that we do not have a product. Together with our partners we are actually already working on 3-year road-map implementation. We have a whole article on our Medium blog covering the work that we are doing in-connecting WePower MVP platform to Elering’s Eastfeed platform (https://medium.com/wepower/wepower-in-partnership-with-elering-is-launching-a-pilot-project-to-tokenize-estonian-energy-7bb929eeed5c). This will allow us to tokenize all Estonian energy production and test trading high energy volumes on blockchain. Therefore, your claim that “no product, nothing” is incorrect and misleading. This is a big scale project with the learnings that will benefit the whole industry;
4. Our community — a community, that you were in doubt with, I am sorry, but without any valid evidence. We are extremely happy that so many people are supporting WePower due to its global impact to the renewable energy market. This is what we have been about from the day one. We grew our community organically by traveling and meeting people across the Globe, educating and getting excited about the opportunities in the energy industry. Many people joined our Telegram group and participated in active discussions with the team. Nick, my co-founder, and I were personally answering all community questions with the help of AmaZix team. Have you joined our social channels to see how real our community is yourself?
5. WePower’s soft and hard caps are based on our roadmap and technical development plan. Based on our extensive experience in the energy market, we have calculated the exact amount of funds we need to implement all 3 stages of our project. Due to the ETH price volatility we have only fixed ETH and token ratio (1 ETH — 4000 WPR tokens)*. Therefore, our token supply today is variable but we have explained in our whitepaper and on our social channels that the token supply for the sale will be fixed. It will comprise 55%* of all tokens. We are closing our private pre-sale early next week and then we are going to announce the token supply. We believe that this approach was a fairer way to accommodate both the early and late token buyers. It was also a strong request from our early contributors. The fact that you are comparing a pre-ICO token with the ones listed on the Coinmarketcap, in my opinion, is not really correct or fair.
6. Our team. Frankly speaking, the information on the team structure and key figures are listed on page 16 of our whitepaper. Kaspar Kaarlep and Heikki Kolk (both are extremely experienced industry professionals) are leading the development team of 12 people. Some of them are employed directly, some of them outsourced. It is not an unusual structure, especially for projects like ours. Our website and the white paper only lists people, who are leading the project and taking care of its operations. Therefore, I would strongly suggest to first reach out to people directly instead of judging project from LinkedIn profiles. Also, many of our advisors are working with us on daily basis and frankly not many projects have got an advisory board like ours, which again sounded like a trivial point during your review but it is not trivial at all;
7. Failed ICO — this is simply a false fact. We ran a public pre-sale in September and then continued with our private sale, which will be closed early next week. Results of public and private pre-sales are fantastic and these stages have been part of the same project from the very beginning. WePower is supported by both the biggest crypto and venture capital funds, which will be soon announced.

WePower is and always has been a fully transparent company. I am ready to talk to you about each point that was misleading/incorrect and really build a fair and well informed review. Just reach out next time.

Best regards,

Arturas

*- information updated on 2018.01.26