Equity buys alignment. Availability costs money.
There was a time when I thought paying with equity was one of the smartest decisions a startup could make. Cash was limited, equity was available, and it felt like everyone would naturally work towards the same outcome because they owned part of it. On paper, it was capital efficient. Looking back, I wasnât really paying for execution. I was paying for belief, and those are two very different things.
I didnât understand the difference until one of my startups came close to being acquired.
Long before Orbix, I built a coworking platform called Campfyre. It wasnât another app for finding desks. The product sat underneath the business itself. It handled bookings, access control, RFID lockers that could be unlocked from a mobile phone, and the operational side of running a coworking space. The name came from the idea that a campfire is where strangers become friends. That sense of community was what I wanted the software to support.
Being based inside MaGICâs coworking space in Cyberjaya turned out to be one of the best decisions I never intentionally made. Campfyre became one of the systems they used, not because I had a brilliant sales strategy, but because I was already there. People knew who was building it because they saw me every day. Looking back, that experience changed the way I think about early-stage distribution. Sometimes your first sales channel isnât marketing or advertising. Sometimes itâs simply being close enough to the people who have the problem youâre trying to solve.
From there, the product found its way into Borneo744 through MaGIC Sarawak. Cyberview featured the project, and I started travelling to explore opportunities in Bangkok and later Da Nang, where coworking spaces were beginning to grow alongside the remote work movement. For a small startup with limited resources, things were moving much faster than I expected. It felt like the business had found its momentum.
Then an acquisition conversation started.
Nothing was signed, but it was serious enough that timelines suddenly mattered. Features that had comfortably lived on a product roadmap now had deadlines attached to them. Questions that once started with âWould it be possibleâŠâ became âCan you deliver this by next week?â That was the moment I realised the business wasnât constrained by ideas or customers anymore. It was constrained by how quickly we could execute.
Like many first-time founders, I had built the technical team around equity instead of salary. At the time it felt responsible. Protect cash, share ownership and grow together. What I failed to understand was that equity aligns people with the future. It doesnât necessarily align them with today.
When an opportunity depends on shipping something within the next two weeks, everyone involved has to move with the same sense of urgency. Equity doesnât automatically create that urgency because it isnât designed to. Someone working for equity still has a life, other commitments and their own priorities. None of that is unreasonable. The mistake wasnât theirs. It was mine. I had assumed that shared ownership and shared urgency were the same thing.
Theyâre not.
The acquisition didnât fall apart because of one missing feature. Looking back, it was probably a series of small delays that slowly reduced confidence. Every promise that slipped made the next promise slightly harder to believe. Momentum is surprisingly fragile. Once it starts slowing down, itâs difficult to recover.
That experience changed how I think about paying people. Today, if something sits on the critical path of an important opportunity, Iâd much rather pay for execution than trade equity for it. Not because equity is bad. Equity is one of the best ways to let people participate in building something meaningful. But it buys alignment, not availability. Those are different things, and confusing one for the other can become very expensive.
Campfyre never became the company I imagined it would. For a while I thought that meant it had failed. I donât see it that way anymore. It had real customers, expanded beyond one state, attracted attention outside Malaysia and came close enough to an acquisition that someone wanted to have the conversation. Thatâs more than many startups ever achieve.
What stayed with me wasnât the deal that never happened. It was a much smaller lesson that quietly changed how I build companies. Money can usually be found again. Equity can always be negotiated. Time is much harder to recover. Sometimes the fastest decision isnât the cheapest one, but it ends up being the least expensive.