What To Do When Your Business Partner Goes To Prison
Pulling Yourself Out of a Creative Rut
Exactly this time last year I was coming home from my first trip to Europe to go meet Chris Do, Jonathan Courtney, and a handful of other creative badasses in Berlin.
In the coming weeks I’ll lose pretty much everything besides my girlfriend, my family, and a few friends.
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Despite the fact that I spent a few days in Amsterdam, I was also high on life. Years worth of built up momentum was at an all time high.
I was working with one of the hottest unheard of startups in Silicon Slopes. A few weeks earlier we had presented our patented technology at a booth for a government conference. We were hoping to land a contract with Uncle Sam in coming months. A contract similar ours was made for one million dollars. Our angel investor would cushion us until we got there. It looked pretty straight forward to me. So what came next I didn’t see coming.
In a meeting with our investor, our CEO stepped out of the room to take a phone call. The investor asked me why my team hadn’t fully completed the website yet, and I told him because we hadn’t been paid for the past month or two. I thought he knew that.
He said he was told we’d been all paid up. I’d been told the government conference had eaten up our current funds, so we were waiting on the next month’s funding.
The CEO was starting to fall apart, mentally and physically. He was in late stages of leukemia. Which is why we were pushing so hard to get this project completed.
Ultimately, I got so emotionally involved in the project that I lost sight of my rulebook of smart business tactics. I’d made myself vulnerable to being manipulated.
The purpose of the startup was to decrease the amount of veterans per day who kill themselves. I can’t really go into detail how it worked or what it did, but I will say it overlapped with some things Facebook can do– but without all the creepy spying and manipulation.
We were majorly concerned about the things movies like The Social Dilemna and The Great Hack have made public knowledge. Our data has become the most valuable product on the global market.
The House of Cards Comes Falling Down
Right then, I was told about six figures of money was missing. It was kind of a mind-f*ck moment. The investor and I both got up and left without saying much.
The funding was then frozen indefinitely.
We spent a month or two looking for other sources of capital, but I could see things starting to fall. Mostly the mental stability of the CEO.
I saw him one night last October at a night club downtown. I told him I had some ideas on how we could get some funding back. But I told him I wouldn’t talk business with him until we’re both sober. This had become a huge challenge. As things began crumbling, moments of sobriety were becoming rare.
My idea was to focus our on online educational communities, such as The Futur. This is why I was riding so high when I came home from Europe. I had just talked with Chris Do about pilot testing the Pro Group on our app. Which he had agreed was a good idea.
We ran a design sprint with one of the top agencies in the US (Toi), and had the first phase of the MVP prototyped.
I was determined to make this app happen. I knew it would save lives and offer an alternative to Facebook Groups and Messenger. I’ve had two close friends take their lives in moments where they could have used this app. I was willing to die to make this happen.
The Final Straw
Later that night after I’d told him we’d chat when he’s sober– there was an incident.
From what I heard from his girlfriend (now ex), he was drunk at the club and got kicked out. They got an Uber home– what resulted next was some sort of physical assault in the middle of the street. I believe I saw a portion of a video where he was punching himself in the face. He later blamed his girlfriend for hitting him.
It was something straight out of Fight Club.
I won’t go into the nitty gritty, but that was around the time I completely cut off contact. Being around him was a liability and it was time to cut it off. I had my girlfriend tell him my grandma passed away, which was true– then I eliminated myself from that situation.
A physical assault happened again a couple of weeks later resulting in his girlfriend getting hurt.
Charges were pressed. When they finally picked him up, and went through court, he got over a year in jail.
Over the next few weeks we all learn that the leukemia was made up. Along with a lot of other lies.
So here I was with me and my team out of a paycheck or two. I got them into this mess. I offer to help find new work, and ultimately come up short. The majority of them chose to resent me as a result.
The master plan of creating one of the top digital collectives in downtown Salt Lake City comes to a screeching halt. The last 7 years of my life turns to a pile of ashes. The only thing I walked away with was my girlfriend who I met because of all of this. So there was a glimmer of hope that it will all be worth it in the end.
I Deliberately Disobeyed My Sensei
Chris Do, for those that don’t know, is the Sensei of the digital design dojo. He is an Emmy winning designer, filmmaker, and professor, but more impressive than that I think is his cult following, which is quickly growing on Youtube and Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/thechrisdo/
A couple years ago I did a podcast with him, which was more of a therapy session than anything. We talked a lot about whether or not business parters are a good idea. Him and I both have had a lot of failed business partnerships.
Chris Do Jackalope Podcast — Pt I
Chris Do Jackalope Podcast — Pt II
Less than a year later, I took a decent sized chunk of equity in this tech startup, and gave this one client too much leverage over me by dedicating my life to its purpose.
I’m not saying the solution is to never partner up– but maybe to form different types of partnerships.
From now on– I’d like to mitigate the risk of every business partnership I go into. I no longer want to do huge equity splits. I’d rather do profit or revenue sharing, if anything.
If my business partner goes to prison for a year, will I still be able to run the company? From now on– yes.
I’ve had some crazy things happen during business ventures, but this one takes the cake for now.
I decided I wanted to start a business where nobody could suddenly ruin or take away everything. Not just any business, but a business with a real tangible product, that makes a real difference.
I’ve never launched my very own product. I have all the skills necessary to do so. Why wouldn’t I? Why haven’t I? What am I waiting for?
Well, I’m not the best coder in the world…
But I can code well enough to create an MVP. I do happen to know a SAAS company that is doing very well for themselves who uses my tech stack. My tech stack is the combination of tech that I develop sites, apps, and tools with. There’s no reason I can’t figure it all out myself. At least for the MVP version.
I can design, market, and produce the rest of it myself. Suddenly I don’t understand why I’ve been putting myself through so much bullshit over the past 8 years. For what? To have a partner?
Partnerships have consistently held me back. I almost always grow to resent them for some reason or another. They add another volatile human to the mix. I like doing things slow and calculated. There’s no reason to settle for volatility. I can only truly take ownership over myself.
I found the line between being too emotionally involved and being too little. I was manipulated, and my entire team suffered from it. I learned my lesson. Now I’m stronger for it.
Regaining My Stride
I was pretty low there for a minute. I’m grateful my girlfriend Skylar put up with my sad bag of meat for months while I tried to figure out what to do with myself.
I wandered around for months trying to find a new niche, new work, or even a job– something I hadn’t considered since I was in China working as a full-time consultant in 2017. Luckily I had some retainer income from previous clients to help me scrape by.
It wasn’t until COVID hit that everything changed for me. I know this might sound kind of messed up, but I was kind of glad that the playing field was going to be leveled. I felt like I had been eating shit for so many months at this point, that it was kind of a relief to know the reset button was about to be flipped. A could sense a huge wave of change and innovation was around the corner.
Due to lockdown, I didn’t have access to a gym. Even if I did, I was broke. Then my bike wheels were stolen. So my usual outlet of cycling my way out of depression wasn’t an option. I was going to have to find another way.
It was around that time I heard Tim Ferriss recommend The Artist’s Way on his podcast. I’ll jump off a bridge if Tim tells me to, so I picked it up and read it. It’s basically a 12-week journaling course that promises some interesting results. So I read it through. It was the day before April 1st. It’s fairly short, so the next day I started it again. This time, I was going to take notes and complete the 12-week writing challenge.
I did this every day consistently for a month. Every day my internal mental operating system cleaned out trash and optimized the code.
I think it was one month in when I had the idea for Bonsai LMS. It was like it started as a seed, I germinated it, planted it, and a tiny little sprout came out of the soil. I saw it for what it was.
I was to create an open source LMS that teaches people how to create itself. This idea was directly a result of my daily journaling.
Along the way, I developed an MVP. It took a couple months to get it functional as an LMS. Four months in, it’s now in Private Beta as I write this the last week of September, 2020.
This week I start building a private beta version of it for The Futur– I’m going to live stream it.
As part of my Smart Site Manifesto, I use the DRY principle when I code, which stands for Don’t Repeat Yourself.
I’m probably going to rebuild it from scratch a handful of times before I have the entire site automated with scripts. That’s how I got good at coding-
I would spin up a new project on DigitalOcean. I would mess something up. I’d destroy it and do it over again until I got the process down perfectly. Sometimes it would take dozens of tries.
If you aren’t interested in coding, feel free to stop in to give feedback on anything.
If you’d like to help me build it–
Or if you’ve ever been curious how to create a Learning Management System (LMS)–
Then feel free to drop into one of my live streams or subscribe for updates.
Bonsai LMS is an Open Source Learning Management System
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