Since I announced that Emilio team would be unwinding, I have been asked by several about exactly what happened. Whereas I have shared with the closer ones, the situation (explained below) didn’t make me comfortable enough to share it to the public. Now that I have mentally processed it, I am writing it down.

Disclaimer: in no way I want to paint badly the image of my ex-co-founder, but will rather have a neutral and factual tone.

The beginnings

When D (my co-founder) and I started Emilio in December’23 we had been discussing co-founding for 5 months. The idea was generated by a month-long brainstorm, being productivity a topic we both felt passionate about. I interviewed 20+ middle managers that were overloaded with email and found out there was an opportunity to add some intelligence to their inboxes - but without having to make them change their UI, for that there are plenty of good options in the market.

The launch

Fast forward 4 months, we launch Emilio at the beginning of March with a press release in Portugal (Eco, Sic Notícias) and Spain (The Objective). The first impressions were good for an AI product: 2% conversion to paid (vs. benchmark of 1% for AI tools) with only one feature deployed. With the second feature we jumped that conversion rate to 3%. The roadmap was clear (with a lot of contributions from paying customers), all we needed was to execute.

The round

That was the moment that I suggested to D to raise a family & friends round to hire 2 developers to accelerate the development. D and I had agreed in the beginning to bootstrap the business until we could, but I saw the opportunity to accelerate - which D agreed with. It was Easter time, so it was the moment to convince our families to invest 💰

The breakup

This was the turning moment. Even though D had agreed to raising the round, he delayed speaking to his family and started speaking about extending our shareholders’ agreement. I started feeling there was something fishy there, and after a week he told me he didn’t want to with me anymore. I was caught by some surprise (the latter events made me suspicious of what was going on), but I immediately accepted it and sat down to discuss next steps: we agreed to selling the company.

In the next week D went bust and started avoiding communicating with me, until the point where he removed my access to the platform in which we were selling the company (and also to the codebase!). From this moment, and fast-forwarding to 2 months later (today), his interactions have been via lawyers and with the intention to shut down the legal entity (I suppose he thinks he can proceed with the intelectual property). I will continue fighting for our clients, who want the service up and not down. I am happy to sell my stake (I was since the beginning, the last thing I want is to work with someone that doesn’t want to work with me), but he seems to want to keep going down via a darker route.

The learnings

The important part is the learnings:

• These things happen. I didn’t probably expect it to be this ugly, but these are the times we have to show our grit.
• I want to continue down the building part. I cannot picture myself going back to a larger company where I cannot have the freedom to build and drive the mission.
• I want to find great people to build with. The majority of the people that go through a break-up tend to want to do it by themselves, to avoid another situation. I internalized these situations happen, and there is a bunch of great people to do this with - it’s much more fun than alone.
• I can build. I took these 2 months to build Meeting Reminders and AI Blog Articles to overcome the stigma that I am not a technical co-founder. But I also learnt that even though I can build up to the MVP stage, I just don’t think I know enough to scale it (nor I feel very happy doing so).
• Equity and governance needs to be very clear from day 0. Even though we had some governance, it was not enough to make Emilio survive to its co-founders.
• I know a bit more of what avenues to explore (e.g., what’s easier to sell, what’s a side business). Which makes my next moves a bit more intentional.

I wish I could have written this article in a more positive tone. Maybe I should have written it in a year, when all bad vibes are gone. But it would sound less authentic and would make me soften my learnings - which are the most important things here.

Thanks for reading 😊

(I recently added Part 2)