I sold my startup for millions without a single dollar in revenue. Here’s why that’s the point

The house I grew up in was being knocked down. Rollins House, a rundown Art Deco former factory in south-east London, was the kind of building that looks like nothing until you know what it is: unglamorous on the surface, full of history underneath. It was where my mother lived and where I was raised, and a developer wanted the site for flats. We had to fight, but couldn’t afford lawyers. 

I decided to teach myself planning law in between school exam revision. I pored over archives nobody else had opened, putting together a dossier of precedents that would help our case. 

I stood in front of a council panel, making our case opposite a law firm with more experience than I had years alive. We won. 

The experience taught me about the value of detail, how research wins out, and that outsized odds shouldn’t be intimidating. 

A decade later, I had to channel that upstart teenager once more, sitting across from Thomson Reuters, which wanted to buy my AI research startup, Safe Sign Technologies. 

The journey to get there had been bruising. I had trained as a solicitor at Allen & Overy while building Safe Sign on the side. I was up at 4:30 am to build the company, spent full days on legal training, before returning to startup life after I got home. A&O were remarkably tolerant, but it wasn’t sustainable. 

Many nights Safe Sign had effectively run out of money, needing funding again........

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