His equity would have been worth way more than the money he extorted out of us. We ended up growing it to about 100 people with an annual turnover in excess of 20m before selling it.
Before the relationship soured I had talked about offering him equity in our company. So after a huge amount of effort, a lot of money spent, and a lot of angst, I was left with something that I could not use and I ended up rewriting it again from scratch myself. When all was said and done, and we had nearly been bankrupted, I finally got the source, but the guy never did give me the source to the libraries of his that he had offered to include. In the end he held us to ransom and extorted a lot of money out of us to release the source of what he had been working on. I should have seen the signs however as he always released built dll's rather than source code for what he was working on, despite being paid along the way, and I never forced this because I trusted him. He was new to Australia and I had gone out of my way to help him meet people and settle here, so I considered him a friend. I was quite naive back then and being Australian, mateship is deeply ingrained in us, so I trusted this guy. So my friend says to me, hey I can include my COM libraries in your project to speed up the development, and I go, hey thanks man, awesome! It was crazy ambitious project, startup timelines, and we ran into issues.
The guy was a gun developer who understood COM deeply, and charged us commercial rates for his time. To continue the derailment briefly, once upon a time I engaged the services of a friend to help me build what you would now call team viewer.
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