Pooled Energy

At the end of my time in Venture Capital, I was introduced to a company that went by the title of Pooled Energy. Something to do with swimming pool maintenance, electricity, bromine and no one gives a fuck.

It was founded and run by a couple of blokes in their seventies. They had been entrepreneurs and founders many times over, and they just refused to give up chasing that elusive winner winner, chicken dinner.

They seemed faintly ridiculous to me for reasons that took me ages to figure out. It wasn’t pure ageism, or even ageism at all really. Let me explain.

Firstly, by their age they hadn’t figured out that the tech sector in Australia is a sham and a joke, put up for appearances sake only – so we can pretend we aren’t just a bunch of fat lazy cunts living off the land. This lack of insight jarred, so by then it was clearly the right time for me to get out of the game.

Secondly, their company made sense. It wasn’t some stupid SaaS thing (the flavour of that day). Their proposition was far too lucid – I wanted to tell them this was crazy because A. It meant that its future value could be precisely calculated, and B. Its current progress towards its glorious exit could be accurately tracked to the millisecond, meaning any lack of technical or commercial progress could immediately result in funding being pulled, or not received.

Thirdly, they had absolutely no background or experience in the industry they had entered into, pool maintenance. By their age they should have known this is one of the preventable stupidities they could address, with no negative consequences.

As I remember, they pivoted left and right a couple of times (a tick-tack) before exiting stage left via a trade sale, which was probably based on a low multiple of EBITDA.

I sincerely hope they have, in their nineties, gybed themselves into a new agentic AI quantum computing vehicle.

Give them 500 years, as per Lazarus Long, and they would be perfect entrepreneurs. They will have figured out all the mistakes to avoid by then. But even then they would still require luck to be successful.

Or not; they could just announce success and go on a social and speaking campaign pontificating on the future of tech and VC 4.0 in Australia.