Pete Moore, Angel Investor

I founded my first company in 1998 after seeing how a *very* basic online banking website completely changed customer attitudes at Westpac. That startup was DOA and quickly morphed into a moderately successful consulting company that taught me the perils of customer concentration. Our biggest customer by far got a new CEO who declared that online retail would never work. As so often happens failure was the catalyst for something better. With colleagues from the solutions business, we founded a software company that was later acquired by Atlassian. After an extended earn out I took eighteen months off to look after my 3yo and newborn. It turns out that 100 hours a week at a startup is a cakewalk compared to that. An IOT startup captured my attention and I went from would be Angel to quasi-founder. This experience taught me as much about how not to Angel invest as it did about the insane complexity of full stack consumer electronics businesses and IOT (which was a lot - it is hard). It was one of those very painful experiences when I knew in my bones that there was a big opportunity but I never quite figured out how to capitalise on it. In retrospect we broke too many cardinal startup rules and squandered our opportunities.