I started Cubitts in 2013 with my own funds because I assumed that was how companies began. A few months later, having converted a decade of savings into software development, invoices and panic, I went looking for other people’s money to keep my newborn alive.
Our first investor was a customer. He liked our spectacles, and he liked the idea that a company might still try to make something properly in London. In 2014, he wrote a cheque for £100,000. It felt like the purest possible version of entrepreneurship: a person had seen the thing, and wanted the thing to exist.
Four years later, I was speaking to ‘institutional’ investors, and learning a new language. Drag rights. Tag rights. Liquidation preferences. Reserved matters. Investor consents. Good leavers. Bad leavers. The words sounded almost hygienic, but each contained a small moral universe. A drag right is not called ‘the right to make you sell when someone else decides.’ A liquidation preference is not called ‘the bit where we get our money back before you.’ The genius of investment language is that it makes power sound like stationary.
Until then, I thought entrepreneurship was mostly about effort. This is the story Britain likes to tell itself: the founder in the workshop, the laptop in the coffee shop, the brave little company building something against all odds. But what I discovered instead was a second city, hidden behind the first. Behind every shopfront was a quieter London of tax reliefs, family offices and men who spoke solemnly about risk while doing everything possible not to take any.
It is tempting, and not entirely honest, to tell this as a story of innocence meeting capital. I was not innocent. Nobody forged my signature. I wanted the bank transfer. I wanted the validation – serious people, in serious shoes, looking at the thing I had been building and saying that it should be bigger.
I read the websites of grown-up investment firms with an innocence that now makes me wince. I had built a business mostly by instinct, luck, taste, shame and occasional good judgement. The thought that someone might arrive with a system was intoxicating. As I began to talk more and more to these grown-ups, the phrase ‘100-day plan’ appeared.
The 100-day plan sounded like one of the sacred texts of private equity. I imagined that, once the ink had dried, The Plan would be revealed. Finally, someone would tell me how to run a business. And so, the deal completed, we had our first proper meeting. I sat there, ready to be inducted into the hidden order of people who knew what EBITDA really meant.
They sat across the table and proceeded to ask me what my 100-day plan was. I remember the silence that followed. Not externally. I probably nodded and wrote something in a notebook. But internally something shifted, and I realised I’d mistaken money for knowledge.
