Entrepreneurial failure is “badge of honour” to US investors but in Europe failure means you’re toast, says dotcom boss

A high-profile English tech founder, who has sold businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars, says US investors see business failure as a “badge of honour” while in Europe failure means you can end up on the scrap heap.

Tech entrepreneur Dan Wagner, who is described as “colourful”, started out as a hi-fi salesman in London before founding several ventures.

These include Maid, one of the first online information companies which he founded in 1984 and floated in 1994 becoming the youngest boss of a London-listed company and Venda, an e-commerce services company, which he sold for around $50m.

However, another of Wagner’s companies, mobile ecommerce company Powa Technologies, praised by former British prime minister David Cameron and a British unicorn, collapsed in 2016.

Comparing the US and European investment markets, Wagner said:

“The European VC and private equity capital markets have developed fantastically well in the last 40 years.

“I remember when I was trying to raise money for Maid my first company in 1984, people laughed me out of the room, when I was 20 years old.

“There is now a proper capital market to fund entrepreneurs with a bright idea in technology or in anything and given the opportunity to succeed.

“However, the level of capital that is avaialble in the US is of a material nature greater, the level of understanding in the United States is of a material nature more sophisticated.

“And entrepreneurs, who have had a failure like I did are given actually a kind of badge of honour,  it’s almost like ‘you’ve failed so you have learnt a lot of lessons Dan’.

“Whereas here I think if you have had a failure, particularly when you are in your mid-50s, I am toast. You are good for nothing, put you on the scrap heap kind of thing.”

Wagner’s latest venture, called Rezolve, is a mobile commerce business, which offers a suite of products to help “merchants engage with customers better”.

Wagner says Rezolve, which listed on Nasdaq via a SPAC earlier this month, aims to “level up” e-commerce.

One of its key products, called Brain Commerce, leverages Gen AI to offer human-like advice and recommendations to customers buying online.

Its other products are checkout tech Brain Checkout and Brain Assistant, a Gen AI trained support function to handle post purchase questions.

Rezolve, which is primarily targeting the US and European market, has its own patented propriety Gen AI technology.

Wagner says:

“We help customers be more knowledgeable in their purchase decision when buying online.”

Wagner says Rezolve is using distribution partners-like Adobe Magento, the enterprise platform, ACI Worldwide, payments provider and Fiserve, the payments giant- to sell its tech to merchants.

However, Tech.eu was not able for find these distribution channels promoting Rezolve on their websites.

Rezolve, founded in 2016, suffered a setback after Wagner says it chose to demerge its Chinese business, where its distribution partner was with state-owned financial services firm China UnionPay, after Wagner says it got caught up in the Chinese US trade wars. Rezolve is no longer running in China.

Wagner says:

“Unfortunately we had to demerge that business unit and our relationship with the state of China because the US and China have a bit of a spat going on.

“And the output of that was we could either not list on Nasdaq, given that our main revenue source was China, or demerge the Chinese business. And I took the decision to demerge the Chinese business.”

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