
Powa failure – where did the money go? - techterrier
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36070904
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youngtaff
It's not the first time Dan Wagner has done this -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Wagner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Wagner)

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pjc50
"He is best known for his leadership of Dialog and its subsequent 95% share
price drop in 2000" \- well that's kind of a brutal biography there.

Powa does seem to me to have all the hallmarks of a full-vaporware company
intended to scam as much funding as possible before the bubble bursts.

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notahacker
"Wagner became known for becoming a CEO of a public company in his 20s which
is even more impressive given at the time he was 31"

Someone's had fun writing that biography

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cmdkeen
I'm surprised Dan Wagner was being so upbeat about things in the immediate
leadup given the UK's "trading whilst insolvent" ability to go after
directors. A £25m a year salary bill and £200k in the bank sounds rather close
to be negligent rather than merely optimistic about raising more money.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
And going bust and being unable to pay owed pay and statutory redundancy is
fishy.

From bitter experience if any ex powa employees are reading check that your NI
payments are up to date (you cant claim benefits if they are not) and that any
pension contributions have been made.

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buro9
The numbers don't sound crazy... if you think of it as a well-established
business.

But... it wasn't.

The rent was silly (South of the river in Southwark, or even in the
Clerkenwell gap West of the City is far cheaper). The salaries sound like a
mix of expensive contractors and averagely paid FTEs.

For a startup, those two figures alone can and should have been halved without
impacting anything that the business did achieve.

That they didn't do this does strike me as negligent. Where is the
bootstrapping? Where is the close eye on the finances? Where is the "only hire
at a rate that allows us to maintain a £nk revenue per FTE"?

That's the reckless part, presuming that the tap of funding was never going to
close on them.

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arethuza
You would think that all of that would be uncovered by the due diligence
process performed by their investors or that the investors would have some
kind of ongoing visibility of what the company was doing?

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MindTwister
Does anyone else find the writing style kind of odd?

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spacecowboy_lon
No whats the issue you have?

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MindTwister
I dont know, it "feels" machine generated, or translated.

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radiorental
Not sure if this is what you're picking up. Some bbc news articles are formed
from ongoing coverage. What you end up with is a new lead into copy/pasted
paragraphs from older articles followed by updated conclusions.

There's definitely old copy in this article, so maybe it's the lack of flow
that seems off to you?

~~~
MindTwister
Sounds plausible, the whole article had a disconnected feel to it, possibly
due to lack of narrative.

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Nursie
So I'm going to mount a tiny defence of some of the stuff at Powa - the PoS
platform was not a total bust. Delivery of it clearly was a total failure as
it never went to market.

But as a cheap card reader to compete with iZettle at the $30 price point, it
wasn't awful. The wider PoS terminal product with the stand, printer etc could
also have been good and brought the price of PoS equipment down considerably.

But this effort was de-emphasised as the much more exciting (and IMHO pretty
worthless) qr/soundprint/beacon-driven sales app.

And management were clearly living in cuckoo-land.

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tommccabe
This company boasted of so many clients but couldn't show any as an example
because they were all "pre-launch". Seemed like a big pyramid scheme that no
one bought in to.

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Nursie
I only wish I'd charged them more when I contracted for them...

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poooogles
Can you add anything as to what the culture was like internally?

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Nursie
When I first started working with them there was an agile failure underway -
teams dedicating multiple hours every day to the supposedly 'agile' process
and getting nothing done. Nothing had been delivered for a year at that point.

Management must have got sick of it because they fired tens of people
overnight. Also they then switched direction to their low-friction payment
app, which was a solution looking for a problem (IMHO).

Didn't interact with management much. The 80+ inch tv, liquor cabinet and
leather sofas on the upper floor tells me it wasn't always much about work..m

