What actually lead to the loss of my vision and Innovation
The crisis we are seeing today is something we knew would happen if the world would not invest into innovation. We tried but everyone called us crazy.
My father was fascinated with the Long waves of innovation or Kondratieff waves. In very basic terms they represent the defining industries of their time since around 1800. Each wave consists of a period of prosperity, recession, depression and improvement.
Basis Innovations since 1800’s
The two most recent innovation cycles have been the automobile industry which was then replaced by the IT industry and I guess we are yet to find out what the next cycle might be, but with it will come a very prosperous time, which I am sure you can agree the world is currently not in right now.
As I was looking for graphics and shots from back then I stumbled over so much information and it quite shocking of how accurate my father’s were.
We desperately wanted to be part of the 6th wave assuming it would be based on energy production and route-less transportation…
I guess this is where our predictions were not accurate.
Did we miss the mark or has the time just not come yet?
My Father started his IT company, SER in 1984 and he was ambitious and he wanted his company to become the google we know today.
However, history has its ways of repeating itself and if you have been following my story for a while now, you will know that we lost that Software business.
Alexander the great was also ambitious and wanted to conquer the world but there came a time where people stopped believing in his vision and had their own agenda and as a result he was killed by his own men, that is at least how I know the story.
Whilst, my father wanted to become the google of today, executives wanted to sell off the company and become rich beyond their wildest dreams.
So they plotted and planned and were eventually successful and killed my father’s dream. Within minutes the business my father had built over 20 years, was lost.
But this is how we started working on the TU 523 our hybrid electric VTOL aircraft but developing something so innovative and technologically advanced to what was known to the world was challenging and it being challenging is an understatement.
So anyway, there was nothing left for us in the US and I packed up and moved back to Germany to start working on our new found purpose.
It was not easy working with my father but knowing what I know today about autism, having two children on the spectrum myself, I believe that my father was autistic himself and his choleric outbursts were out of frustration not being able to communicate.
Communicating with my father was challenging and he would always speak in code that not everyone understood.
Just as we got started, sh*t hit the fan. Loosing his life work that allowed us all to live in ultimate luxury must have been so hard to process.
Don’t get me wrong we all felt bad and very worried about the future but for my father, these were people he would have called his friends and they betrayed us all.
I don’t know if it was because of what happened or whether it would have happened one way or another but as my father took my brother to school and returned home, the only word he could say was “difficulty”.
My Father suffered an aneurysm, a bleeding in the brain, and was rushed to hospital. My father needed surgery that we didn’t know, he would recover from but he did.
Kind of at least. If communicating with my father was difficult before, this incident made it even more difficult as it effected his vocabulary and speech significantly.
After a bit of normality came back into our lives, my father was determined to continue with the development.
Concept design of the TU523
Some people, still tell me today that he should have left it and let it go and live out the rest of his life with what was left but I think that is very easily said, especially when you have a vision and belief that you can make a difference in the world.
I block out the criticism nowadays as it is counterproductive. We cannot turn back time.
However, I will say that my father engaged with an engineering company that he had worked with during the SER times and it all started very well but within just a few years this person too tried to take advantage of us and even ran off with 20k Euros.
And this really pissed me off.
Yes my father was difficult but he was always very kind and wanting to help people.
This particular person was struggling financially, with a baby on the way and my father happened to have 500 Euros in his pocket and gave it to him to help him out.
Why did he also betray us and take advantage. I believe he initially saw the potential of the project and thought it would save him from all his financial worries but he should have known that a project like this, is not realised within days and you have to play the long game.
Also Ego might have had something to do with it. Before he was boss about to lose everything, and there comes my father kind of taking over.
So, I think the choice of people we started working with wasn’t great. Also rather than financing everything ourselves, it would have been a good option to get investors involved a lot earlier on and take advantage of Government funded schemes that at the time I was not aware of.
But then relying on these are very dangerous too as I would learn first-hand. Returning to the UK after our time in Bolivia and my wife having worked for a cosmetic company for about 18 months, her health was deteriorating.
I promised her that if I don’t get funding in place by, I don’t remember when, I will leave it all behind and move on.
My strategy, apply for Expansion East Kent, an expansion loan by the Kent County Council and combine it with a crowdfunding campaign to make up the 40% of the business plan.
What a relief it was when I found out that our crowdfunding campaign was 100% funded the night before I was to present our proposal to the Expansion East Kent Panel.
However, they did not approve our application and I was shattered but now there was no going back and I had to move forward with what I had.
I hired a software engineer to work with me. He started working on the 24th March. I also started working with a local marketing company.
But nothing could prepare me for what was about to happen…
I remember receiving that phone call from my mother, telling me that my father had another stroke. I didn’t want to believe it and as previously was in denial about the severity of my fathers condition. He always recovered before I said to my mother as she is crying on the other line.
But my father passed away the 7th April and while I didn’t know it at the time, it affected me and my judgement drastically moving forward.
Something that I am very proud of is that we did manage to build a flying model of the TU 523, using self configurating algorithm, allowing the software to calibrate itself based on the aircraft dimension and power.
We achieved with very little money that large companies invest millions in.
Thor carrying the flying model of the TU523 after the keynote presentation at Lydd airport.
However, we made this progress after our Keynote presentation in September not leaving us much time to work on getting into the air but I knew we needed to raise new funds soon and out of this presentation came 2 investment opportunities.
I was offered £100k for the next development stage, leaving me in control of the development and vision for the aircraft for marginal equity
Or a £20+ million investment by a former BP executive but I was finding reasons why this was not a good deal. I was scared to loose my company, not to honour the vision that my father and I had for the technology assuming they wanted to pull us over the table.
I hear you shouting at me right now.. “you have issues” and yes I did have issues. I had just lost my father, not allowing myself to process his loss and I had become severely depressed.
As a result, I chose to work with investor one for £100k but you probably already know…
That money never made it into our bank account.
What saved us a little bit of time was a £15k Research and Development Tax Credit but for months this investor ensured me that he will transfer the money tomorrow followed by another tomorrow and another tomorrow.
We sold most things that had any value, like our car, tapped into our savings and so on, to pay the salary for our software engineer but soon even he lost all hope and told me that he was leaving.
The timing couldn’t have been worse, as I was in contact with the BBC, our new and improved circuit boards were arriving and the one person who could put it all together left. There are no hard feelings but I do ask myself, what if he could have shown the flying prototype to the BBC. I would love to know if it would have made any difference.
Anyway, it got a lot worse before it got better again. With my wife in and out of hospital and having 2 surgeries, me trying to keep my sh*t together, looking after our 2 girls and my wife with little to no income, we fell behind with our rent payments for about 6 months, while accumulating many other debts.
It wasn’t easy coming out of this sh*t with almost 5 years of struggle, But now, with all that is going on in the world, Innovation is needed more than ever, and if I am honest I am getting a bit tingly.
The famous Poet and Novelist Victor Hugo said…
“Nothing is more powerful than an Idea whose time has come.”
