In 2014, I attended the Praxis Labs Accelerator where I was having many one-on-one mentoring sessions. At the end of one of those sessions, a mentor took a chance and told me that God had a message for me that day, and it would come in my next session.
When I met with Nancy and Mark Duarte for my next session, I hoped Nancy would help me improve my startup story. Instead, I shared with them what the previous mentor had said, and we shifted to a side room where they started praying over me. Then, Nancy sat down in front of me, looked me in the eyes and said something that left me stunned and a bit confused.
“The Lord does have a message for you, it is about your bank account, and it’s not good. What I saw was bad, like real bad. I think you need to move banks.”
I made a bad joke about all banks being bad, and our time ended on an awkward note. But, I pushed forward through the busy accelerator schedule before taking the redeye home at the end of the week.
The next morning, my CFO called me to say that we … had a problem with our bank account in Hong Kong. The account where all our investment money was and where all our clients paid into. The transfers were failing, and the bank said they needed to talk to me. We had payroll coming up for about 2,000 people in Nepal and Kenya.
I felt defeated and helpless. That night, I called the bank in Hong Kong, and they confirmed that our account had been frozen a few days earlier. It was the exact day I sat in that side room with Nancy and Mark. Was I supposed to have acted on Nancy’s word of knowledge? But then, I realized something.
God knew this was going to happen. He even told me about it in a pretty dramatic fashion. He must have a plan.
With increased faith, my CFO and I started to take action. I flew to Hong Kong to meet with our bank in person, but there was no success. It would be a long process to remove the restrictions, if we could do so at all. So, I took a second trip to Hong Kong where I bought two bags of food and walked into the lobby of the bank’s headquarters. I declared that I would camp in the lobby until someone came out and gave me access to our money.
I sat, I ate, I prayed, and a couple of hours later, a manager came out and gave me a 15-minute window to transfer up to $250k. My hands were shaking, but I managed to log in and make the transfer. It worked, and we could make payroll for our 2,000 friends in Nepal and Kenya.
We never did get access to that frozen account. However, somehow God made a way for us to keep the business going. A year later, when we raised a round of investment, we had to take the risk of wiring millions of dollars into that frozen account in faith. We were just finishing up moving our global headquarters to the UK, so we opened up bank accounts there, closed the Hong Kong one, and instructed in the closing letter for them to wire all the funds to our UK account. A few days later the money showed up.
It was the end of a banking saga that no startup can afford to deal with. There are enough challenges to deal with. Not having access to the few funds we do have as startups is not on the already long list of risks.
My prayer for everyone with accounts tied up in the SVB collapse is that you will remember you have creativity and grit that has allowed you to persevere through so much already. You will find a way, and you are not alone in this.