kevinbracken

Background: this is a deck I made to explain to our investors why we killed Speakeasy, our event venue marketplace product. Now that our most recent product was acquired (Gymsurfing -> ClassPass) I am cleaning out our old assets and found this deck to share with HN

brilliant. a little grey hat, but very cool nonetheless.

Best reply.

Yup, we screwed up big! :)

This was our previous company, two years ago. It was an event product.

We each had equal equity and equal pay. He was a fine designer and developer and was able to rapidly prototype for us just fine before.

Our vision for the product was very similar, and this was our focus 100% of the time. We quit our jobs, moved out to California together, and were living in a house working on this product day in and day out.

But after our living situation improved (nice food, house, car) his motivation to work disappeared completely.

I'd say he got a pretty nice payout considering that company didn't end up going anywhere.

The ousted cofounder actually had no lawyer, he hates them.

As for our friend lawyer, he's a great attorney, but just for big corporate law.

It's a good question - we had wondered, will there be a situation in which a cofounder and investor could collude to get more equity for themselves? That sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories more than young startups with very little money, though

He became very skilled at making excuses, and saying he needed to "step back and strategize more." And it always kind of looked like he was working, but in reality he was producing 0 lines of code. That's when I brought on my current cofounder, who revealed that when he tried to work with cofounder 1, he got pushback, aggression, and eventually discovered from Github commits that he was doing literally nothing but living in our house for free and driving our car.

Completely agree. They seemed clueless about the fact that they could issue a restricted stock agreement and still allow us control of the company without having vested. It was awful.

I feel you. I book my Airbnb, rental car (and now gym) after I land, not before. Decision windows are shrinking for all travel verticals

totally! this problem occurred to us when we were traveling all over the country and found working out on the road annoying and difficult

damn I would use this all the time

Thanks, what's up fellow Kevin! That is a really awesome idea actually - will stew over it

Indeed. Our market back then was quasi-legal loft parties and house parties, so this was idea was definitely to fit the mood of the "modern speakeasy." Thanks!

I would like to reiterate that these were all house and loft parties - our events product was all about underground events.

Easiest way to get the sticky labels off!

It is worth mentioning, the recipients were all house parties and loft parties, which was our specialty for our previous product - find and discover secret events.

Our company is a little different these days. We had a team change and pivoted to a more professional customer segment (and from events to venues.) I thought this would be an entertaining story to share with HN from a scrappier time, though :)

Speaking of which, we are seeking a new lawyer for our startup, preferably based in New York. Please get in touch!

We were definitely pretty inspired by the Airbnb Obama-O's story

Thanks! If we were transferring milk I might be a little more concerned, but we sterilized everything in the dishwasher beforehand, and were using vodka to keep it extra-sterile ;)