Jamie is one of Paul’s old bosses. He started a company while he was at university selling glasses online. It became big. Not sure but I think he sold most of what he owned but is still a chairman.
Paul had emailed him explaining our app. He loved it and hinted at getting on board helping with the start-up costs. So we met up in a pub to discuss further.
He’s very well spoken but also laid back. I raised my eyebrows when he pulled his phone from his jacket and it was a Blackberry. The bit covering the battery was missing off the back of it too. Apparently he’d been mugged. But only for the back of the Blackberry!
We told him that the development costs were going to be 15k. He said he would love to go thirds with each of us putting in 5k and then splitting the equity of the company three ways. We said cool, we’ll be in touch soon.
Me and Paul went to another pub where I had a freak out about someone who will contribute nothing (what’s 5k really?) yet will own a third of our idea. And that I’d rather get a bank loan. And that it wasn’t fair. Paul explained that this is how business works and that he’d be contributing a lot more than just five grand (Jamie had said he’d top the money up when the development needed it). Paul explained that ideas (basically all we have right now) are cheap and that Jamie knew a lot about actually starting and running companies and knew a lot of people (lawyers/tech people etc.)
I realised I was being an amateur and accepted that this guy would be a great guy to partner up with. It also helped when he confirmed he didn’t want to get in our way in the day to day running of the app. He’d leave that all to us. A silent partner.
So that was £5000 sorted. The other ten was easy. Paul borrowed five from his wife. I borrowed five from my parents. My dad said something about owning 10% of my 33.3% but I think he was joking.
Everything is becoming very real. We are talking to one of Jamie’s expensive lawyers to write up a simple contract splitting the equity between me, Paul and Jamie and we are deciding on a company name.
We probably won’t be able to get just ‘Story’ so may try for ‘Story Board’, geddit? Yeah you get it!