The entrepreneurial Powa of Dan Wagner

How the company that was going to be bigger than Google burned through $225m and crashed in just three years

Less than 18 months ago, entrepreneur Dan Wagner was boasting that Powa Technologies, his mobile payments and e-commerce company, was worth almost £2bn.

Powa was not only going to compete against Square, Shopify and others, but would be bigger than Google and Alibaba, according to Wagner. Somehow, he managed to nab an estimated $225m in funding, including more than $150m from Wellington Management - which he burnt through in just three years, before Powa crashed into administration last month with just $250,000 in the bank and net debts of $16.4m.

Bentley driver Wagner, though, seems to have done all right - his previous company Venda racked up pre-tax losses of £53m on revenues of just £92m, yet still managed to pay-out £6m to directors before NetSuite, bafflingly, snapped it up.

Steven Prowse, who had been acting CFO for three months in 2014, described Wagner as "just a salesman obsessed with image - mainly his own", in a blog post on LinkedIn. He accused Wagner of using his parents' permit to park his Bentley in the disabled spot, and of employing his best mate from school, Ant Sharp, who he described as "Andrew Ridgely to Dan's George Michael". It was Sharp who was largely responsible for the company's terrible reviews on the employment website Glassdoor.

Indeed, the management he adds, "were the worst I've seen in over 30 years. Breathtakingly immature and bipolar".

Prowse then went on to describe an accounting system that would appear to have been an open invitation to fraud (although there is no suggestion of any fraud at the company).

"The main accountant not only put the invoices into the system, but could also make payments by themselves. The amount had no limit. So not only could they sneak through a small invoice and pay themselves, they could have taken the full amount from [investors] Wellington, tens of millions of pounds, and transferred it to their own account," said Prowse.

It took a lot of persuading to convince Wagner to tighten such practices, Prowse added, before he was abruptly fired when he criticised Sharp's management skills to Wagner.

He wasn't the only one. In response to a blog by Julie Meyer, the mysteriously successful founder of First Tuesday and Ariadne Capital, defending Wagner and Powa, a number of former employees descended to the comments section to have their say.

"I always loved the company-wide emails Dan would send out criticising people's work," wrote marketing manager Jacques Corby-Tuech, while software engineer Emma Burrows commented: "I particularly liked the bit where I was recruited as part of a development team that had 19 devs on it by the start of May 2014 and was the only developer left on the 'team' by the end of the year."

Others have suggested that Powa made staff redundant one year by leaving them a voice mail on new year's eve.

Of course, the real proof that Wagner has really made it as a tech failure is that he has his very own parody Twitter account, which can't be edited by "admirers" nearly as easily as his Wikipedia entry.