One month back I wrote about what I learned building Emilio, and a few updates have resurfaced.
Emilio is shutting down. Against my will, my previous co-founder Daniel decided to shut down the service, removing all the permissions I had on the technical project. Through several intimidatory emails he has been trying to get the business platforms permissions for him, which I vehemently denied to avoid him harming our customers.
But he still did. And now the Emilio customers are denied the service they paid for, some for a full year. I have been trying to understand the full rationale of Daniel’s behaviour for a few months. I genuinely think he is a smart person, probably one of the smartest I know. I see two angles here:
(the ugly one) He saw an angle to hijack the company because he didn’t see the value in my work. I definitely wouldn’t do it the way he did (hijacking), but it is a way of doing it. The issue is that the work we did together cannot be transferred elsewhere without an agreement on the intellectual property of what we built.
(the pretty one) He wanted out but didn’t know how to handle it. It was probably the worst way of handling it. And I told him multiple times we can let go of ego and solve this, but he brought lawyers instead of empathy.
I truly wish him the best. It sounds contradictory to my previous words, but I genuinely think he is a great and smart guy, that has a lot of potential - and I hope he lives up to it. This will all be a mistep in his life, and I hope he understands this is possibly the worst way of handling things.
As for me, I will continue building. I will make sure there is governance to protect the company from weird co-founder attitudes, but this only made me stronger.