A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let me summarize here. You got about $800,000 from these hedge fund guys. Let’s call it angel financing. What year was that?

Jonny Nicol: It ended up at $1.6 million. That was 2013.

Sramana Mitra: You had already run this company with your own money for three years before you got the angel financing?

Jonny Nicol: It started in 2011, so it was for two years.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a good amount of time that you ran with your own money.

Jonny Nicol: Yes. Then we hit this brick wall. I knew at the beginning that it’s going to take a long time to build these algorithms but what I haven’t considered was that I was actually pushing the laws of physics in terms of computing power. The problem was I couldn’t make it parallel. I couldn’t just have lots of servers because the order of the calculation tends to be sequential. You can only start the next one once you finish the last one. It wasn’t entirely true, but that is the gist of it.

What I certainly couldn’t do was just have lots of different calculations happening on lots of different servers. We ran the first test. It was 16 minutes. I was working on the code base with a guy called Alex Sweeney. He’s one of the most talented coders I’ve ever come across. We were slaving away 18 hours a day trying to get this down. We were shaving off a few seconds here and a few seconds there, but it wasn’t making any real difference at all. Then we needed more money because this went on for a year. We needed some more cash.

I remember very clearly going out to dinner with Alex who was my first investor. He had been watching. He said, “Look Jonny. You’re killing yourself. You just have to accept that it can’t be done.” Everybody in the industry told me it couldn’t be done. He said, “Don’t worry about us. We’re okay. When we make these investments, we realize there’s a risk associated with it.”

One of the huge emotions you have as a CEO who has taken funding from individuals is you have a huge responsibility to them to see it through because they’ve given you a huge amount of cash because they believe in you. They haven’t done it because they believe in the business. They just want to make sure it’s an okay idea. They’re investing in the person. That weighs heavily on your shoulders. He took me out for dinner and said, “Just give up.” Here’s the thing. When you have that kind of pressure, when you are trying to change the world, and when you’re trying to build code that everybody says is impossible, the reality of the situation is that dedication is not enough.

Somewhere, there is a line between dedication and obsession. I remember sitting in that dinner and I knew I was way beyond dedication. This thing that I was trying to build had taken over every part of my sleeping and waking day because I had to figure out a way. We ran out of money. The investors gave me a little bit more but not very much. We burned through that very quickly.

Then we ran out of cash. I got the team together and said, “Look guys, this is not going to work. I’m really sorry. I thought we can break through. I’m going to have to let you go now.” To their credit, and I’ll always be deeply touched by this, every single person in the company refused to go and decided they’d work for free. It took us six months from that moment to getting that time down to 12 seconds.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Pilot’s Heroic Journey: Jonny Nicol, CEO of Stratajet
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