You’re not a real CEO until…
“Until you go through a near death experience.”
Says Hayes Barnard – Cofounder of Goodleap (via Forbes)
I read this post by forbes on what a real CEO is, so sharing this experience of my own.👇🏼
June 2021
I was in the UAE to present miPic to venture investors and the goal was to meet the key people in the region to provide miPic a strong marketing budget to scale.
On June 1st, I sent a Company Update email to @mipic_app shareholders and team sharing great news of an investment term sheet received from a #Dubai Maktoum Royal Family Office of £1-2m.
48 hours later our Servers went down on the Friday evening, killing our entire infrastructure. I was in the middle of presenting the app at a restaurant and noticed something wasn’t working. I called the guys Shabeer and Ash, immediatley left my seat and spent the evening diagnosing I passed out for the night.
The next day at 3pm, I received a call from my mother crying to tell me.
My Grandmother had passed away.
Sat next to her in a care home after a 7 year battle with Alzheimer’s. I cried for an hour and forgot about work.
That afternooon I went back to the laptop to rescue an entire infrastructure, like life depended on it. Copying and pasting code until 4am for a week and then another week.
Our Server was killed, to prevent the venture investment.
As the eldest grandson in the family, I was expected to carry my Grandmothers coffin. Instead, I couldn’t leave my desk, watching a funeral stream alone from a hotel room in Athens trying desperatley to bring our infrastructure back to life and understand exactly what happened.
miPic had not seen any downtime longer than 24 hours since I launched the company in 2014.
miPic was not only dead and offline for 3 months, but it was deliberate. Our Agency partners in the US confirmed a breach of IP and DDOS attacks. We spent the next three months attempting to recover services. This cost me personally £30,000.
I was the only family member unable to attend the funeral, which angers me today.
I arrived back in the UK to attend my sister wedding later that month, miPic was down and the loss of our grandmother was still hard to hide.
The company was due to launch our second Crowdfunding campaign, this was paused as a result and 210 investors who had pledged £700,000 were made to wait.
The Dubai and Abu Dhabi investment opportunity would have been used as our anchor to launch the Seedrs campaign.
Instead, every day for 3 months from an 11 meter squared hotel room in East London diagnosing and repairing with Engineers until 2am.
My body lost a stone in weight working 14-18 hours a day all summer, unable to support my parents and be home. But, the system was finally restored and 75 shareholders investments of £1.8m was saved from a deliberate sabotage.
This was my biggest achievement to date as a CEO. I persevered through what was undoubtedly the toughest summer of my life and focussed on solving the problem removing any emotion.
We relaunched the platform in September, much to the pleasing comments of Artists and customers who were left wondering what was going on all summer. This incident has taken 2 years to document and delayed the road map significantly investing in marketing.
I am however glad to some extent that this force majeure experience happened looking back, as we were able to expose a bad actor trying to prevent company success which we’d been anticipating this for some time.
I made a pledge to family.
That those responsible for the disruption to our service would be held accountable for blocking completion of this investment opportunity to scale our great brand.
My management style has always been to lead from the front, encourage people positivley and believe anything is possible.
When the sh*t hits the fan, some guys run, some guys stay. Surviving this ordeal, losing a grandparent was undoubtedtly more of an acheivement than completing the actual investment itself.
I’m a real CEO… and a proud grandson.