‘I’m deeply sorry’: Entrepreneur opens up

Jake Millar talks to Damien Venuto about how his high-flying elite interview firm Unfiltered came crashing back to earth

Jake Millar has a problem. He’s being followed around by a pair of red Gucci loafers, treading wherever his name is mentioned online.

The ostentatious Italian shoes have become a common feature across comments sections and social media, emblematic of the schadenfreude accompanying the jetsetting entrepreneur’s fall from grace.

“They’re an uncomfortable curse,” an exasperated Millar tells the Weekend Herald during a phone interview from the United States.

“I don’t even like them. I only ever wore those shoes at a public event once, which I personally organised to raise funds for youth suicide.

“I would never mention names, but the individual who first sensationalised the story about the Gucci loafers attended that auction. And you can quote me by saying it’s disgraceful and disgusting.”

The reality is that the full story can’t be squeezed into the confines of a pair of highly impractical shoes.

Millar’s story is about a deeply ambitious entrepreneur with a tragic history, who through the force of his charisma was able to acquire millions of dollars in funding from some of the most experienced and sophisticated businesspeople in the country.

The company they backed was called Unfiltered, a business that offered viewers a series of video interviews with high-profile businesspeople.

In Unfiltered’s five-year lifespan, Millar raised around $4.6 million through a pair of capital raises.

The line-up of backers reads like the membership list for some exclusive club of the New Zealand elite. Kevin Roberts, Rob Fyfe, Garry Robertson, Guy Haddleton, Sir George Fistonich and Vaughan Fergusson are just some of the high-profile individuals who were involved with the business at different stages.

The recent intrigue in the business was driven by the sale of Unfiltered to Jamie Beaton’s Crimson Education for a figure understood to have been about $82,600 — a long way off the $12 million valuation once attached to the business.

That interest exploded into widespread morbid fascination when a number of former Unfiltered shareholders contacted the media to express their frustration at the sale of the business for such a measly sum.

Robertson, who held a 10 per cent stake in the company, was the most vocal among them, offering a scathing indictment of both the sale process and the price paid.

Millar concedes that the business did not get close to what he had hoped for but defends the decision to sell, saying it was backed by 90 per cent of the shareholders.

“It was the only option on the table,” Millar says.

“Back in September of last year, I told shareholders I was going to do my best to run a process to try and sell the company. I also said that if by January 31, 2021 we were unsuccessful, I would resign as CEO and let the board handle the asset.

“We [ran] a sales process and Crimson was the highest bidder. We approached multiple companies from all over the world, but due to the incredibly complex environment we were running in, in the middle of a global pandemic over the festive season, Crimson put in the best bid. And what else do you do in that situation? Do you sell the business for what was a relatively small amount of money? Or do you shut the company down and let it go into liquidation? It was a no-brainer.”

Much of the investment put into the business had been expended by the time it was sold, but it isn’t entirely true that all investors were left empty-handed.

One former backer told the Weekend Herald that before Unfiltered was sold to Crimson, some investors from the second capital raise, which came in at around $2.4m, were given the option to pull out what was left of their investment.

Millar won’t comment on the final figures, but most of those investors took out their money, clawing back what is understood to be in the vicinity of $600,000.

One investor who decided not to pull out was US-based Kiwi professor David Teece, who had put in what he refers to as a relatively small “symbolic investment”.

Teece takes a pragmatic view of the organisation’s failure and the loss of his money, saying failure is the norm in a start-up scene where only about two out of 100 businesses ever enjoy any longevity. Asked whether he thought the business was over-hyped by the founders in a bid to convince people to invest, Teece counters by saying exuberance and optimism is to be expected in the start-up community.

“All entrepreneurs are guilty of the cognitive bias where they overestimate the chance of something succeeding.”

Teece places the onus on the investor to consider what’s being offered and measure that against the level of risk they’re willing to take.

Those looking in from the outside had long sceptically wondered how the Unfiltered business model could ever scale and turn a profit large enough to justify its inflated valuation.

This was ultimately a question to which Millar and his co-founder Yuuki Ongina couldn’t find an answer.

“Covid-19 shortened the runway for a business that was still struggling to take off,” Millar reflects.

“No one is more sorry than Yuuki and myself that we did not deliver a better result for our investors. I will never apologise for my passion or enthusiasm, but I am deeply sorry for how it ended.”

So why has he left the impression on some people of fleeing to Africa rather than fronting up to his financial backers in person? “This is nothing but a sensationalised narrative,” says Millar. “I’ve never once said that I’m adamant about not coming back to New Zealand . . . at this point in my life I just have no interest in operating there.”

He says that in running the business, the metric for success was often in landing the next big interview with a high-profile investor rather than focusing on commercial concerns.

“If I had my time again, I would have obsessed more about our ability to get a scalable product to market faster while still caring deeply about the content. I think we obsessed too much about the interviews and not enough about the business model.”

Millar may be down, but he hasn’t lost the self-confidence and bravado on which he built his personal brand. “The sheer number of job offers coming in from multibillion-dollar companies has been overwhelming.”

Asked to name a few of these companies, Millar declines.

Asked for details about his plans, he reveals only that he’s eyeing Nairobi, Kenya, as his next potential destination.

“I’m ready for a new challenge,” he says, leaning again on that classic entrepreneurial trope. As he ventures out he will, however, have to become accustomed to the added weight of failure on his shoulders.

It could be a long walk to redemption. Gucci loafers are definitely not recommended.