Over the past week or so, Powa Technologies, a UK tech company once feted by Prime Minister David Cameron, has been slowly collapsing.

We have been covering it over on FT.com (see Related Links at the bottom for the full story) but in brief: after raising $175m from the likes of Wellington Management, the company struggled to get traction for its mobile commerce products, then had problems raising new investment, missed payments to staff at times last year and then again in January, and finally fell into administration last week when Wellington pulled the plug.

On Monday, administrators Deloitte made 74 staff redundant (they found out when their building passes and work email addresses stopped working). Founder Dan Wagner has gone to ground and wasn’t responding to queries yesterday. Last we heard from him was on Friday night, when he sent out a statement from his personal email address, just hours after news broke of the administrators being called in, saying Richard Thompson of QPR fame would buy up the businesses. (The statement went out without Deloitte’s knowledge, we are told. On Tuesday, the administrators said they were talking to “a number of potential buyers”.)

The remaining 237 staff are waiting to see if a buyer comes through and whether or not their jobs will be safe anyway — a pretty sorry tale for a company that once valued itself at $2.7bn.

But the important thing to remember here, says tech entrepreneur Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital in an email on Tuesday morning [since posted on LinkedIn], is that “in a world full of people threatened by, indifferent to and jealous of entrepreneurs, we stand with our friends in the industry who know that society works best when it’s organised around the entrepreneur.” (Emphasis hers.)

Meyer, whose bio includes an MBE in 2011 for “services to entrepreneurship”, says that we must not “piss on someone’s failure for once. We’re better than that“. (Again, emphasis hers.)

She goes on to quote none other than Nicolo Machiavelli. The Prince, Chapter VI:

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them.

Perhaps surprisingly, she does not quote from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, a book she says “changed the direction of my life” and is second only to the Bible in terms of being “responsible for my achievements”.

She says that Ariadne Capital has “always cared about how to get prosperity ripping through society” and says that while “we’ll never really know what happened at Powa [...] it’s pretty damn important Dan Wagner tried to do what he did”.

Read the Business Week Bloomberg story with the baby Elon Musk on the cover: one of the most honest depictions of entrepreneurial life I have ever read: the line between success and failure is a very thin line indeed. And most honest successful entrepreneurs will privately admit that. But what was amazing about Musk in Business Week was that he more or less admits it very publicly. I don’t think it helps the UK to call Dan Wagner a bad actor. We should welcome him to our stages etc and say, what next? Wellington and others investors put in hundreds of millions behind him, a major global corporation, China Union Pay, concluded a deal with him. I have been to Heron Tower and people there were passionate about building a great firm. We need more entrepreneurs who think that they can and try to build billion pound enterprises in the UK.

All this hype about entrepreneurship is just so much bullshit unless we realise that unless we support entrepreneurs in the trenches when they are being shot at, we might as well just go to the movies instead. Entrepreneurs are constantly being shot at in society. If entrepreneurs turn on other entrepreneurs as well when they are in their near death experiences, then we are no better than the rest.

Pity she didn’t find any room in her email to worry about any of Powa’s staff. That’s probably fair enough though: many of them have just not been paid, entrepreneurs are apparently being constantly shot at.

Related Links:
Powa Technologies missed staff and contractor payments – FT.com
Powa Technologies accounts show it had just $250,000 in bank – FT.com
Powa Technologies in administration after investor calls in loans – FT.com
Powa Technologies: from UK tech darling to administration – FT.com
Powa Technologies sheds UK staff after administration – FT.com

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