That part worked. Children coloured a page, the colours decided the animal's personality, the textures changed the sounds it made, and then they pointed a phone at the drawing and it got up.
Everything else about that company is the reason it is on this site.
I had left a games company after an acquisition and started something with a friend from there. He was going to be chief executive. I was chief creative and chief product. We had an engineer from a games studio joining as CTO.
What we were building, in 2012, was augmented reality on consumer phones. Markerless tracking. Recognizing tables and chairs and beds so a character could stand on them. Occlusion, so it went behind the sofa properly. Mapping a face so a character could be someone you knew. A layer of game over the real world.
Being right about the idea is the cheap half.
The chief executive was offered a job at a large entertainment company and took it. I was seven months in, doing validation, and the money was getting tight.
The art director left too, because the chief executive leaving is a signal and he read it correctly.
So I carried it alone for a few months. Deliberately, in part. I did not want to be the one negotiating contracts. I was chief creative and chief product and I thought that was where I should be.
Our engineer arrived later, having stayed at his games studio to collect a ship bonus, which in that industry is not a small thing to walk away from. Progress started again. We built a working prototype. We tested it. A year in, funded out of my savings.
Then a seed offer arrived, and it was agreed in principle.
Late in the process the investor added a clause: the right to buy an additional fifteen per cent later, at the price they were paying now.
It was takeable. Plenty of people take it. What it meant was that any meaningful round after that one would move control out of the founders' hands, because the dilution would land on us and not on them.
I read it as a question about control rather than a question about cash, and I walked.
Not the idea. Not the technology.
A founding team that never
committed.
The chief executive kept his job, then took a better one. He carried no personal risk at any point. I spent a year of savings. That asymmetry was there from the first week and I did not look at it.
We could have been Pokémon GO before Pokémon GO. I believe it was a billion dollar idea, and I simply ran out of steam.
A job came up running a design school. I took it. The engineer formed his own company and I went part time, and the colouring book shipped under that company as a small series of children's apps.
It did fine. It was not the thing.
A year of savings, and the person who left carried no risk at all.
Here is what I actually learned, and it is not the lesson I expected.
I had done the competitive work properly. Full tables on fifteen or twenty companies, monetisation models, where each one was weak. I had the market read right and I had the platform timing right, four years before the platform arrived.
I had done no work at all on whether the three of us wanted the same thing. Not their skills, which were excellent. Whether the company mattered the same amount to each of us, and what each of us was actually risking.
So now I do a value alignment exercise before going into business with anyone, including friends. Especially friends, because with a friend you assume the conversation already happened.
It is a slightly embarrassing thing to have learned at that price. It is also the reason I spend the first three weeks of an engagement on people rather than on product, and why I ask a chief executive who inside the company thinks their plan is a mistake.
The idea was not early. The commitment was missing, and that is a thing you can check in an afternoon.
If you are about to build something with people whose stake in it you have never actually asked about, that is the conversation to have first.