It’s well over 5 years since I and Chris Sier founded AgeWage so I read this headline in the FT with interest!

In truth, the aspirations I had for AgeWage – to change the way we understood pensions- have not been fulfilled. We may have nudged the dial but we are now having to reorganise our strategy to become of value to our investors (of which we have nearly 500).

Since almost all of the investment is in tax-efficient EIS or SEIS, it’s possible to write off AgeWage in your portfolio and set your loss against gains, I wouldn’t be surprised if some investors have. But we were asking for patient capital and I and the current AgeWage management team are as committed to making our company a success today, as we were five years ago , when we came together.

The message is – it’s taking longer than we thought , but we are getting there and if investors call to buy a discounted stake in AgeWage, it will need to be in the interests of us all if we say “yes”. That’s crowd-funding for you!

Mission and/or agility?

As I have written before, the purpose of an AgeWage is to pay a Wage in later Age without fear of that wage being terminated at a point in the future. Inspiration came from Terry Pullinger with his “wage for life” promise made by Royal Mail at his insistence.

Our mission is to get people to think about their pension savings as future pension rather than inheritable wealth or  “freedom from a pension”.

Agility means finding new ways to fulfil the mission. We are doing that and working with organisations that are capitalised to make that happen. We are happy being small cogs in a big machine, so long as our cogs are essential.

Were we owned by a single large shareholder, which most pre Covid start-ups are (or else they’re bust) we would not be in a position to fulfil our mission or to satisfy the crowd of investors who saw what we were dong when we raised in early 2019 as essential.

I think the old cliché “keep your eye on the prize” – applies.

Should start ups settle up or settle down?

The conventions of start-ups suggest that you either become a unicorn or explode in a blaze of g(l)ory. I don’t expect AgeWage will do either. Like many good businesses , it will grow into something bigger over time.

This was not what I envisaged, sat in a WeWork this time five years ago.

But nor did I see AgeWage being a business that did simple things well for a happy group of customers.

I still aspire to great heights but we are finding the ascent of the mountain requires the same patience as we require of our investors.

Getting to the top does not mean abandoning your investors nor does it mean taking the cable-car, no matter how easy that looks. Simply swapping your ropes for a ticket on the funicular serves little purpose. We need to set a route that others can follow!

So I’m not settling up – I’m not looking down, I’m settling down to the long hard slog which is the year ahead and the year ahead of that”. You might call that “settling down” but it doesn’t feel that way!

As for the challenges private equity has with its start-up portfolios, I am very glad that that is not my problem.