ChargeSpot

The pitch Goh gave the April 2018 TechTO stage was deliberately unglamorous — you put your phone down on a surface and it charges, which he called simple, boring and the reason they loved it. Google was the first customer, banks and large service firms followed, and the company built a sales team of 40 reps across the United States. The talk itself was about what happened next. Goh showed the actual cash-balance graph, noting founders almost never do, and said eight years in finance at Ernst & Young and CPP Investments had not given him the fiscal discipline he assumed it had: the company misjudged where its market sat in its development cycle, misread channel incentives, and met competition from players it hadn't expected. It recovered without raising outside capital, by building a forecast good enough to price every decision, cutting hard, and concentrating on the channels that worked.