Why I pay for speed now instead of trading equity for it

Before Orbix, before any of the government work, I ran a startup called Campfyre. Small story. I do not think I have told it properly anywhere, so here it is.

Campfyre was software for coworking spaces. RFID lockers you could open from your phone, bookings, access control, the operational layer underneath a coworking business rather than the desks themselves. The name came from the actual idea behind it, the feeling of sitting around a fire with people you just met and somehow already trusting them.

Where it actually landed

I was based in MaGIC’s own coworking space in Cyberjaya at the time. That mattered more than I expected. MaGIC used Campfyre first, and a large part of why is simply that I was already sitting inside their building every day. When they needed exactly this kind of system, I was right there to build it. Small detail. It taught me something I still rely on now, that being physically inside the place your first customer already operates in is its own distribution channel, long before you have a sales team or a marketing budget.

From there it spread. MaGIC Sarawak picked it up at Borneo744, a coworking hub built out of an old public works depot in Kuching, around 2017. Cyberview ran a piece on it. I flew out and tried to sell it into Bangkok’s coworking scene, and separately into Da Nang, which was just starting to fill up with the first wave of Vietnam’s remote workers. Two states, regional press, interest from two other countries, on a first product built by a small team.

It went well enough that we got close to an acquisition conversation. Close enough that I let myself believe it was going to happen.

It did not. The reason has stayed with me for every company I have built since.

The growth outran the team

The product was not the problem. The market was not the problem. People wanted it, used it, and asked for more of it faster than I expected.

The real gap was that my technical side could not keep pace with how quickly the opportunity was moving. I had built it the way a lot of first time founders build the technical side, a programmer working for equity instead of a full salary. On a spreadsheet that looks like a smart, capital efficient decision. It is not the same thing as having someone whose calendar is actually yours on the day the business needs it most.

When the acquisition conversation heated up, I needed features shipped on a timeline the deal required, not a timeline anyone had actually agreed to in writing. Equity had bought me alignment on the big picture. It had not bought me urgency on a Tuesday afternoon when a term sheet was sitting there waiting on a feature that was not done yet. So I made promises in the room that the team had not really signed up to deliver on my clock. That gap, between what I had committed to and what was actually shippable in time, is the whole reason the deal cooled instead of closing.

What I would do differently

If I ran that same startup again today, I would pay for the work instead of trading equity for it, at least for anything sitting on the critical path of a live deal.

Paying for speed is not a moral position. It is just more honest about what you are actually buying. Someone holding equity can reasonably decide that this particular Tuesday is not worth rearranging their week for, because the payoff is years away and diluted besides. Someone I am paying by the sprint has a shorter, clearer reason to show up.

I would also stop shipping promises I had not priced against what the team could actually deliver. That part is entirely on me, not on anyone I had hired. Nobody made me tell a prospective acquirer we would have something ready by a date I had not cleared with the people actually building it.

The lesson that stuck

Campfyre never got acquired. I do not think of it as a failure the way I might have described it a few years ago. Real customers across Selangor and Sarawak. Interest from Thailand and Vietnam. Close enough to sit across the table from a buyer, on very little capital.

What I actually take from it is narrower than “it did not work.” Equity is a fine way to share the upside of a business with someone. It is a poor substitute for paying someone to be available on the exact day you need them. The growth I was chasing arrived faster than an equity-only team was ever going to match. If I ever catch myself relying on the first to get the second again, that is the moment to go write a cheque instead.