Hi all, I'm the founder of the first UK company to be invited onto HackFWD and speaking for myself and my two co-founders I can safely say we're absolutely delighted to be on board. Since our first contact with David, the "Talent Geek" we've been treated absolutely fantastically and have been humbled by the level of support received. The join process was very straight forward, fast and informal, which allowed us to remain entirely focussed on developing our product without the worry of jumping through hoops X Factor style.
Reading the comments here and previous comments from other articles, it seems that most people consider 27% equity to be too large a chunk to give away. Of course everyone will have different opinions on this, but our reaction was positive. We felt that the larger equity stake would encourage the investor to really support our growth, rather than looking for a quick flip in a few months time. We're working hard to build a really awesome product here with long term goals and so the opportunity to have 12 months of support from some of the most respected tech people this side of the Atlantic was a no brainer.
Had we not taken the investment and continued to bootstrap, our project may never have gotten off the ground - juggling client work which always took priority made it almost impossible to get any focus. Our logic implied that 73% of a multi million pound company supported by hugely experienced technology and business strategists was a whole lot better than 100% of a half baked idea and ongoing client hassle. Now, we're entirely focussed on building something awesome and that feels great every day.
To be honest, I think that the people who come on here talking about the money, aren't really true entrepreneurs anyway. I know I'm one, and I know for sure that money is way down on my priority list. We just want to build something awesome and HackFWD is giving us a wonderful opportunity to do that.
In my opinion, anyone with a great startup idea and a passion to match should definitely start hunting down HackFWD referrers and I say that with absolute sincerity.