Picture the scene. You’re an app developer, with a small team based in a medium-sized Midlands town. 4G and 5G coverage has yet to reach the area. You’ve managed to court the attention of a London investor, and he (for it is usually a man, and he’s usually from London) agrees to come up to look at the tech.
He arrives in a fit of pique. Signal was so patchy on the two-hour, delayed West Coast Mainline trip from a nightmarish Euston he couldn’t get any work done. Once he got there, it was fiendishly difficult to find your office, because WhatsApp calls cut out and Google Maps played up.
But at last he is here: you offer him coffee and get him set up on the app. Except — the App Store says it’ll be 20 minutes to download to his phone. To pass the time, he clicks on the pitch deck PDF you sent him — but it takes an age to open. You resort to offering him more coffee; you even reach for the posh biscuits you save for special occasions — but even they may fail to turn things around. The whole effort has proved a waste of time....