I was waiting for a decision to be made on a contract with government today. I have been told the decision is delayed. I am looking to move to a Plan B.
My project is a simple front-facing rail-network app with AI capability.
I have begun to examine three markets to parallel commercialise, bespoke develop, and white label.
I would be looking at the US, Japanese, and Australian markets, as three regions into which AI knowhow can legally, and therefore rightly, be transferred.
Simultaneous to this, it has been suggested I examine the option of re-purposing the app for the short-hop airline industry, in the three countries mentioned in particular.
In a previous LinkedIn post, I was moved to comment the following with respect to – in Liverpool, Britain, and Europe more widely – a shared absence of any real appetite to fund truly disruptive business-model change opportunities like mine.
I said yesterday, in response to a comment by my good friend Ben Simpson:
And finance has been what hasn’t happened here. Everything else, great ideas, great and cost-effective suppliers of fab digital … people … balls … ingenuity and imagination … everything steps up except homegrown finance. And in my experience, and you know some of the detail, mebbe instead proactively in detriment of disruptive success … which makes me awfully sad.
I have – and I now admit and realise this quite openly – been tracked by people who concluded I was a threat to their own business interests, even before I perceived I was intelligent, wise or interesting enough to be considered so.
The first contact made to me was in Dublin, via a family member who works for a large consulting. This was in 2016.
At the time I was beginning to move into the sector of security, via an MA in International Criminal Justice I was just about to start.
In hindsight, she aimed to distract me from anything that might impact her industry negatively by offering me some unspecified role in two years’ time.
Things turned out as badly as they could have – mainly my fault (for another post, this); but the people intent on my self-destruction didn’t stop there, and I now assume they didn’t stop in a very coordinated way.
The second was also connected with Ireland: a man this time. He told me he was in discussions with Bill Gates, to deliver a Liverpool University-invented product into health services for the Third World. Again, he suggested – if I worked for him – I would gain an executive role in his soon-to-be bouyant company, in exchange for an exclusive dedication – that, coincidentally, would mean I would stop my own activities.
This lasted over a year, and multiple visits to this beautiful country. In the meantime, my own financial situation was bleeding me and my loved ones dry.
In January 2019, I was abused verbally and intellectually by a young man whom I am pretty clear had at some point been the partner of the 2016 family member. He works in AI. I met him via LinkedIn. For all I know, he still is my family member’s partner, and they are in total cahoots, and have been all along.
Either way, I broke off all intentions to stay in touch with the Irish I knew, and with the country I had fallen so in love with.
Finally, I was approached by a Liverpool-based pharmaceuticals consultant in the autumn of 2018, prior to the final, fatal Irish meetup, to edit what was supposed to become a blockbuster along the lines of “The Insider”. Different industry and register; same objective.
In the first conversation this man had with me, he impressed upon me his immense wealth and influence. The. First. Conversation. These people really are mad.
He dragged in a supposed Isle of Man billionaire to edit another project, this time with an anti-vaccination stance, and with contacts as deep as an estranged member of the US Kennedy clan: estranged, you understand, because of this stance.
This Liverpool-based consultant proceeded to give me so much work that I was obliged to dedicate practically all my resources to his project, and the billionaire’s.
Then, after some time focussing on the both, it turned out the billionaire had to stop mid-process, being as he was apparently only a paper billionaire (whatever that meant). He couldn’t even pay the last invoice.
At the same time, I was offered more work by the consultant’s workplace, in exchange for giving a discount to the latter. (Btw, everyone most intimately connected with this third frame worked there, and I assume works there now.)
This I did, via an emailed PDF to the workplace coordinators, where the request had come from.
When my client discovered this was the case, he was mightily put out. Or made out he was, at least.
He began to float the idea of me running a new publisher for him by June 2019. It would require significant concentration of my time at the expense of other projects: at the expense of my AI consulting and security projects in particular.
You get this now, don’t you? You do get it?
I mean the pattern repeating, for the third time:
- 2016, consulting and security, Dublin.
- 2017-2018, consulting and health, Dublin.
- 2018-2019, consulting, health, and security, and Lord knows what else, Liverpool.
By February, my blockbuster guy changed the timeframes so dramatically that there was no way decent product would be delivered. His new editor and marketing guru demanded I carried out a further proofing for no fee (it should have been a minimum £1000), or lose all future work with this client, though other work with others was promised to help out (he did say that, despite everything, he valued my contribution).
I refused to work for zero payment, as you would.
No other work, since then, from the good offices or otherwise of the guru, has emerged.
A huge hole in my cashflow was the result. Meanwhile, three of my own clients in the publishing and marketing industries stopped sending me work, almost simultaneously, a week or two later. They had been named on the PDF I mentioned earlier, but even if I hadn’t mentioned them, the editor of my client is extremely influential in the sector, and everyone would talk about every person of interest.
Now wouldn’t they?
Lessons for the future?
It’s time to move on. This was a learning-curve. And I choose to apply my learning in the following way:
I reject the ways of doing business:
- of my family member;
- of the Irish CEO with alleged connections to Bill Gates;
- and of my fake client, and his editor mate.
When I set up business again, I shall no longer be a walkover, but I shall strategise not stamp on.
I shall never become un-nice.
And I shall make a better biz … even as, right now, I face a personal and family situation of extreme difficulties.
But I remain unbowed, quite determined as I am to do battle for a currently disorganised good, and against this organised evil.
You shall only change me in one way: make me better at fighting your crime.
Any other, no way shall I join you ever.
Somehow, some way, still I shall deliver – one day – an AI which expands humanity not replaces it; which makes and creates unknown worlds not reduces our futures to a mimicry of our pasts; and which wipes the wet financial dreams of the men of white upper-middle cage off the face of this awfully beautiful rock.
I shall.
I promise.
And don’t EVER doubt me again. Yeah?
eiohel 