aug 22, 2018 - Community update 22.08

Description:

"Dear community,

While we still did not get the final version of the full announcement approved by our negotiation partner for publishing, we would like post a bigger update to you this time. I am now in China with the team, getting everything ready for shipping all of the pending orders, accessories, and replacements out.

Now I would like to tell a bit more details about the situation.

As you remember, the key reason for this delay for some of you, has been issues with our working capital due to funds tied up in different places like supplier deposits, payment processors, etc.
During this time we have been focused on 2 things:

Shipping Vs in smaller volumes, balancing the funds available and units we ship. Shipping Vs is our number one priority, as we realize that everything depends on it.
Securing needed investment to get all of the units shipped out quickly and to make sure not to end up in the same situation in the future.

Since March we have had 100+ meetings with various investors of different types around the world. We’ve met Venture Capital, Private Equity firms as well as family funds, banks and strategic investors. Our top priority during this process was to ensure that we would stay customer-first and would not compromise on our vision of community developed products, no matter how big offer we would get. The biggest offer was from a Chinese fund offering 50 million USD for 51% of the business. (With a heavy heart we had to reject it as it compromised our vision too much; it would have ended all of this. Eve for our team is way more than just money, it’s something we are really passionate about and want to do in the future. We have devoted our lives on this for quite some time).
We had all kinds of meetings, some of them have been short 15 min calls ending with a polite “No, thanks”. Some have lasted for 5 months going as far as due diligence stage with lots of flights in-between, but getting cancelled at a very last stage due to some disagreement in the long term vision of the company. For example, one of the potential tier 1 investors wanted us to focus on our own OS instead of hardware devices.

What was the most frustrating during this process was extreme confidentiality of the discussions we had due to strict NDAs, and the nature of this business (it’s a small world and big investors talk to each other, if we would have spilled publicly information that was not supposed to be disclosed about one of the investors, the word would spread fast). Also their analysts checked community frequently so they would know who we are talking about. So we definitely did not want to ruin any potential partnership by posting premature info. It’s been a challenging process, as typically investors don’t invest alone, they invest in syndicates so sometimes it would be really hard to get a “no” from our potential lead, as investor would wait for others to say “no” first.

Since March we also got equipped with some of the industry experts (mentors) like Robert Krakoff (the Razer Guy). Once again I really want to emphasize that it has been really hard for us to stay silent regarding what we are doing, but it would put whole operation at risk. Getting all of the customer orders shipped is our top priority that is the reason we did not want to take such risk.

Now we are finally done with this process and we will be able to share great news as soon our announcement is approved. The reason it takes time is because it’s not only 1 investor that is investing in Eve.

I guess the key message of this update is that our slowness is finally coming to an end and you will know all of the details any moment now. We are truly sorry for all of the silence and delays from our side. At this point words are not enough, it’s time we act! I am now in China until all of the Vs get shipped out. In the next update, assuming we have received the permission to publish it, we will tell about our investors and what possibilities they open for Eve’s future. I can tell that they bring value way beyond money!

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Here I am in China with some of the team after long day of talks with the partners and investor parties."

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