I'm close to the ecommerce industry, and can say without hesitation that powa was an utter shower.
Their tech wasn't innovative. It barely worked. It required users to install qr code scanning apps - their entire product is a simple, pre-existing and minor feature in our platform and others. Not much demand for qr bullshittery.
They were painfully expensive to merchants, hostile to platforms and agencies, and often lied in pitches, telling clients we had partnered when the truth was we'd told them where to go hang.
I don't think it was ever intended to work - it was just a mechanism to part vcs with their ill gotten cash.
That's probably not that fair to lead the page with - if you read the rest of the wikipedia article you'll see that he founded Dialog in 1984 when he was 21 and it went public 10 years later. It looks like he made some major mistakes later on and during the dot-com crash, but building and running a multi-billion dollar company for 16 years is better than 99.9% of HN users achievements.
I wouldn't chalk off Powa's failure to one person.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
