On putting your own money in first

I have never been comfortable asking somebody to believe in a thing I had not already backed myself.

So Blowtrumpet was bootstrapped, and the first money in was mine. Not as a gesture — as the only honest sequence. If the idea is good enough to ask other people to fund, it is good enough to risk your own position on first. If it is not, you find that out while the only person who gets hurt is you.

What I actually think I am investing in

Four segments, and I do not think any of them is a modest business.

Advertising is one of the largest industries in the world, and one of the few whose core mechanism has not fundamentally changed in two decades. An industry that large without much transparency is not a dying business. It is a business waiting for somebody to build the version people do not resent.

Financial technology, because the hard part of advertising is not the ads. It is the money — funding, settlement, withholding, cross-border payment, getting a creator paid correctly and on time. We have built a payments and compliance business and called it ad-tech, and the infrastructure underneath it is as valuable as anything on the surface.

Video games and interactive media, where attention actually lives now, and where the advertising formats are barely invented. Nobody has worked out what a good advertisement inside an interactive experience looks like.

Content creation, where the people generating the attention capture the smallest share of what it is worth. Every structural imbalance that large eventually corrects, and the correction is usually worth more than the status quo it replaces.

Blowtrumpet sits where all four meet. That intersection is the bet.

What the company is an investment of

Years of it. Every mistake I made in the industry before this one, which is a longer list than I would like. Experience of what actually breaks at scale and what only looks like it will. The accumulated judgement about what to build properly and what to leave rough.

And effort of the ordinary, unglamorous kind — the sweat, the nights, and a fair amount of blood in the metaphorical sense and once or twice in the literal one.

Mostly, though, it is an investment of other people’s faith.

The people who came forward

A bootstrapped company does not survive on the founder’s money. It survives because people decide to back it with the thing they actually own, which is their time and their reputation.

People joined earlier than was sensible. People took work on terms that were fair but not generous, because the generous version did not exist yet. People stayed through the stretch where nothing was proven and the only argument for staying was that they believed it would be. People lent their names, made introductions they did not have to make, and told other people this was worth paying attention to before there was any evidence for that claim.

They did it while keeping the values intact, which is the part that matters most to me. It is not hard to survive by cutting corners. The people here survived without cutting them, and that is a far better predictor of what this company becomes than any number I could put in a deck.

I take these people’s belief seriously.

On commitment before capital

When people ask about investing, I would rather start somewhere else entirely.

Spend time on the problem. Tell me where the thinking is weak. Introduce me to somebody who will disagree with me usefully. If after that you want to put money in, we will have a real conversation — and it will be a better one, because it will be between two people who both understand what is actually being built.

Conviction that was earned lasts through the quarter when things go badly. Conviction that was pitched does not.

ir@blowtrumpet.com

*These are my own views — see [About](/about).*

Nothing here is an offer, invitation or solicitation to subscribe for or purchase any securities of Blowtrumpet Technologies, nor an invitation to the public to do so. It is a private limited company and does not invite subscription from the public. Any discussion of investment takes place privately, by invitation, with identified persons and under the Companies Act, 2013 and applicable securities law. Nothing here is a forecast, projection, guarantee of performance or investment advice.