Many of my clients are individual investors and they do get pitched private deals. Some of them have investors themselves for their own companies.

And over the years we’ve been sent some of these pitch decks as well. Some of which we’ve said yes and some which we’ve said no to.

Elizabeth Holmes’ reincarnation reminded me of the time that we invested in a particular startup. It’s a fun story.

Pretty talented founder that found product market fit in a hot niche. The idea worked and it blew up really fast. He raised a lot of money and drove a lamborghini during his peak fundraising year, and the company recruited employees out of Big 4 as well.

Startup success, right?

Unfortunately, he ended up getting dinged by the securities commission for misappropriating investor funds.

I completely forgot about the whole debacle because it’s been so many years, but he recently tried to reach out with an unchanged call display.

I am guessing he wanted us to “hear him out” and wanted to ask for more money again for his next idea.

The thing is, I actually consulted for one of his direct competitors that got bought out by a public company. I know exactly how things started falling apart with his operations. He’s just not worth associating with.

He also put the company logo onto the lambo which people do so they can write the car off for tax purposes.. meaning he most likely bought the car with investor funds.

Thankfully we only put in $10k and got a tax write-off, so now it’s just a loss to laugh off as I’m writing this email.

Fingers crossed that I encounter better founders going forward.

Anyways, I look forward to being entertained by the Elizabeth Holmes movie 😆.

Alice