It was Day 3 of the accelerator program I was in. 

I just had an incredible conversation that I thought would change the trajectory of my startup, and that of my entire life. 

The highs and the lows of this experience showed me the necessity of hope in startups and venture capital.

To set the stage, two days before this incredible conversation, I just entered the FIS Startup Accelerator Program. 

Days ones and two was getting acquainted with a cohort. Day three was meeting our FIS internal champions.

Our FIS champion was the perfect profile, call him Niko. 

Niko was just recently promoted to a high position within the company that had large responsibility for the asset management side of the business. It was a several billion line of Ahem. I'm on a call, so I'm onbusiness that he now oversaw.

Niko was really hot on what we are doing. He spoke in detail about the incredible alignment and value that we brought and how it could benefit FIS.

I recall one poignant moment. It was during the cohort and community dinner. 

Niko laid out some very clear goals.

During a break in the conversation in the meeting and the greeting, Niko said one-on-one to me.

"Matthew, this could be big." 

I replied, "Yeah you’re right." 

And he said, "No, I mean really big." 

It was one of those moments that startup founders live for. Like an "Oh my gosh, what is happening right now" moment.

Before that moment, as most startup founders understand, there are very few moments of clarity and breakthrough. One of the biggest inflection points in the company thus far was getting FIS to believe in us and to invest in our company.Now, the fact that Niko believed in us with all his status and expertise in the company, it was as if we had finally found our stride.

But on a personal level, It was a sense that someone got it. Someone gets us at what we were bringing to the world. This is the moment that the boulder starts to roll downhill. This is the moment we've been waiting for.

Oh, and it was only Day 3 of the accelerator program? 

I'm going to break from the story for a minute and resme in a second. I want to make a point here.

In startups, founders are largely starting with their back against the wall.

The fuel that keeps me and all of us going each day is, in a word, hope. 

There's an energy of hope and of emotional dynamism that we all live. 

As entrepreneurs who are already used to not being believed by investors or customers, We tend to latch acutely onto those people who show special favor and optimism to what we are doing. It's like they are affirming what we’ve believed all along - that the world does need this, that the market does want this, and that the tradeoff of life is very worthwhile.

In fact, that's exactly what I wrote in my journal that evening on May 3, 2018 after I got back to our apartment. 

I wrote, “I can’t believe this feeling of what just happened,” then I described the situation. 

Then I wrote,

“It’s more a feeling of ‘I’m amazed this is happening but not surprised.’ The shock is not there. In fact, it’s kind of like a feeling of, ‘I’m glad someone is catching on to this because this is what we’ve believe all along!’ It’s like you’ve spend your days and months believing in this vision and the problem we are solving, and it’s starting to catch fire.

For Niko and FIS, it’s a new exciting opportunity. For us, it’s a another realization of what we’ve believed all along - that this is a problem and we won’t stop until it’s solved. The gravity of what’s to come hasn’t hit me. And it probably won’t hit me until later.”

Back to the story. Unfortunately, something was about to happen that would have made Day 3 the highest point of the accelerator program.

It was all uphill from here.

After that night, we suggested meeting with Niko the following morning to gain some extra headway, but he wasn’t able to. Niko had to catch an early flight the next morning out of Little Rock. 

Niko indicated that he was going to introduce us to two other people on his team, one in sales, call him Brian, and one on the technical side of things, call him Timothy, that could help us Internally with FIS. 

He made those intros, and we got looped in.

After that, Niko virtually disappeared. 

We continued to follow up and send him emails, but to no avail. No response. 

It was as if Niko dropped off the face of the earth. The foreshadowing of our startup success nearly disappeared with him.

A week or two in, we looped the Managing Director of the accelerator program into how Niko had disappeared and had become unreachable. 

Several more weeks went on. With the Managing Director starting to express more poignant worry through his body language and words that we were Losing our champion and none of us could do anything about it.

To make it worse, none of the other startups in our cohort faced this issue. We would talk to the other portfolio CEOs, and everyone's champion was extremely engaged and was bringing them into deeper layers of the organization.

So what started as a "What's up with Niko" dynamic became a "What's wrong with our startup" dynamic? And that was equally painful.

If only we could have a conversation with Niko, we thought, we’d get the traction and future trajectory of our company back on track.

That MD was helpful in pulling together internal resources to sound the alarm enough that we needed support and help. He was able to bring together the call with Niko. I remember having that call with my father. 

Niko was on Skype but with the camera off ecause he was dreadfully under the weather with a bad cold.

But what captured my attention more than the sneezing or coughing was the absence of enthusiasm for what we were doing. 

The energy that marked the first conversation on day 3 of the accelerator was starkly absent. 

He apologized for his disappearance and noted that he had had many heavy weeks of travel. On the call, we pushed for specific questions around timing of implementation to FIS's systems. Niko was super hesitant. Instead of being met with energy, for the first time, Niko expressed concern about moving forward. 

It was as if we had spoken to a completely different person seven weeks ago. Who was Niko, really? And what do we now do with this vaccum of the energy of hope?

It was now probably about Week 8 of the accelerator program, and my father and I decided we needed to reignite the excitement of what we are doing to FIS. We decided to make a trip to New York City to see Brian and chat in more detail. 

We coordinated and edited time with him and found a time to meet. Brian initially indicated that it would be challenging for him to meet during the time that we were going to be in New York City. Brian wasn't the only reason we were going to be in New York, but he was certainly the primary one.

After a few media email exchanges, it seemed like he was able to accommodate us.

On the day of the meeting, we went to the FIS headquarters off of Madison Avenue. 

Brian was a well-dressed guy, with a full-piece pin-stripe suit and a pocket square. His on-trend glasses and a wave in his golden-blond hair completed the ensemble. 

Brian led us to a corner office where we sat at a circular meeting table. We chatted about some of the things that Niko was excited about and the things we were looking to do internally with FIS. 

Brian's energy wasn't as flat as Niko's energy had been on the call several weeks prior, but there was hardly any enthusiasm about what we were doing. 

I also observed something else.

Brian didn't have anything on the table. He didn't have a notebook. He didn't have his laptop. He just brought himself to our conversation. 

To me, that was a tell. He didn't want to write down any take-away notes and share them with Niko. He didn't want to write down any action steps. He had no business to do any business. 

Essentially, his posture was, "I'm just here because you want me to be."

That's exactly how it felt.

When the conversation was done, my father and I left, and took the Uber back. My father's comment was, “Well, I think that went pretty well!” I had a totally different read. I said, "I really don't think it went well at all. We came all the way to New York City to see Brian, and he didn't even bring a notebook and a pen to take notes during our conversation.”

Brian had totally lost the plot, just like Niko.

Whereas we came to New York City to resurrect the enthusiasm of our startup and its product, We instead essentially witnessed another pole bearer leaving the enthusiasm alone to die.

There's something about this entire experience that bothers me to the core.

Stories like this are hard for anybody.

But especially for high growth founders and sometimes investors, this turns a knife in a profound way.

I felt that the energy of hope of my startup’s future had been manipulated, by giving me lavish amounts of false hope.

Looking back years after this moment in May 2018 and knowing what I now know as an investor about the required maturity of companies of such enterprise clients, there is no basis to believe what Niko told us above. 

The truth of the matter was that our project was nowhere near close to implementing with FIS. We weren't even live with customers.

It was absolutely preposterous that we could sell to Goldman Sachs in 18 months. We hadn't even gone through a full cycle of compliance at a small community bank. 

It felt morally wrong that someone manipulated that hope by giving me false hope.

If you change the company name and replace the actors of the story, you've probably lived an anecdote like this. Truth be told, this isn’t about FIS, this is about how things happen like this all the time. I resonate with that.

Truth be told, things like this happen all the time.

But I also want to be careful because I don't want to give the impression that hope is only a liability. In fact, hope is absolutely one of the greatest intangible assets that a startup has.

Hope needs to be managed. It's often managed by being shared.

I have a word of advice to my former founder-self ten years ago. What I should have done is couch Niko's comments with somebody else who intimately knew my company well. I should have gotten their perspective, ran by Nico's comments, and asked if this made sense to them. I would have hoped that somebody who knew my company well was able to ask hard questions, such as, “How are you going to be able to integrate into FIS without a paying customer yet?

This would have allowed me to take hope, my greatest intangible asset as a startup founder and now investor, either to the bank or back to the drawing board.

Click here to access the rest of the newsletter articles.

Here are some of the recent ones!