from Hip-Hop to Exited Founder: How Jarvey Got Lucky, Again and Again

Most successful founders who have taken their businesses from nothing and scaled successfully or exited will tell you all the great things they did to achieve their success. Ask Jarvey Moss and he will tell you it's mostly luck, he never really had a plan. He got lucky, again and again. As he says, for a business to be really successful, you are going to have to get lucky multiple times, and if you look at Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, all of them had massive strokes of luck along the way. His own life is no different. He met the co-founder of his first company, Amigo Technology, through the music industry, and he met the co-founder of his second company, Saible, by chance at a construction conference. Neither meeting was planned. Before any of it, he was a musician. His band was signed to a major label almost against their wishes after unintentionally winning a Channel 4 talent contest. They recorded the last album ever made at Townhouse Studios in Shepherd's Bush, the same studio where Phil Collins recorded "In the Air Tonight". The album, in his own words, was not a commercial success. When the bank laughed him out the door for asking about a mortgage as a musician, he became a tour manager instead, and over the next few years he ran more than £5m a year of touring revenue through UK hip hop tours while building a piece of touring software on the side called Touring Machine, a pun on Alan Turing that he is still pleased with. He co-founded Amigo Technology in 2014 with Mike Adam, and spent the next eight years building it into a business with blue chip clients including Hertz, Diageo and O2. Covid dropped the company's revenue almost overnight from healthy and profitable down to close to zero, and it took a serious effort to keep the business alive. They sold it to Good Growth in January 2023, entirely on angel funding without a VC round, and he is still a shareholder in the company today. He started Saible the month after the Amigo sale closed. It is a construction fintech tackling a problem that costs the UK industry £11 billion a year and that drives two construction workers to take their own lives every working day. He has raised £2.9m in angel funding again, no VC, and the goal is to reach profitability rather than scale at all costs, because as he puts it, once you are profitable your runway is infinite. This conversation covers his time as a musician, the eight years building Amigo and the challenges they overcame before eventually selling the company and the problems he saw that led to Saible. About 23mile 23mile is a special situations fund for venture-backed startups transitioning from hypergrowth to profitability. We take stakes in companies with sound business models but weak cap tables, then work with founders to stabilise the business and keep it running.