How Tévo Became Ours to Build

That was where Tévo really began.

Karem and I took an early version of Tévo into a student business competition. We had met at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, where several of the relationships that would later shape the company first began. The organizers were building a shared tea-room business of their own, so the context felt promising. We brought them a full proposal: a different kind of night space, built around atmosphere, structure, and a social logic that did not depend on alcohol.

They responded well. That mattered. For the first time, the idea was being judged by people who understood tea, venues, and operations well enough to know whether it had real weight.

Then the terms came back.

They were so demanding that the opportunity changed meaning. What looked like support started to feel like surrender.

We had to make an early decision: move forward under the wrong foundation, or protect the logic of what Tévo was supposed to become.

We refused it.

That refusal came before the first store, before the full team, before anything visible existed. Looking back, it was still one of the first real acts of building the company. It drew a line early: if Tévo was going to exist, it had to be built under terms we could respect.

After that, I went to my uncle and spent half an hour pitching him the idea. When I finished, he said he would invest. What stayed with me was what he said next. He told me that if he had had that kind of courage at twenty-two, he believed he would have become even more successful himself.

That gave us the room to begin properly, on our own terms.

That was how Tévo Lounge started to become real.

The company then grew by bringing in the capabilities the idea actually required.

Karem had been there from the beginning. Over time, that early role became an operational one. As COO, his strength was turning strategy into standardized action — making sure what we believed could actually be executed, repeated, and held to a consistent standard.

Oliver brought financial discipline when ambition needed structure. He kept asking the questions young companies like to postpone: what has to be true for this to work, what cannot be assumed, and what kind of growth the business can actually carry.

Kira gave the company another kind of clarity. She made Tévo legible as a world — visually, emotionally, and culturally. She helped turn something people could understand in theory into something they could feel the moment they encountered it.

Dico strengthened the technological layer of the company. More importantly, he helped turn one of my early convictions into something operational: AI had to live inside Tévo's system, shaping how we learn, how we run, and how we think about scale.

Niyas came in formally later, but he had been part of the story much earlier. He and Karem had been childhood friends for years, so there was already trust and closeness around the idea as it was taking shape. At the time, he was in the UK, which made deeper involvement difficult. Once the timing aligned, he joined us fully. As CBDO, he brought the BD layer the company needed — partnership thinking, expansion logic, and a stronger link between growth and the wider business.

As for me, my role was never only to start the company. From early on, I was trying to hold several questions together at once: what kind of night we were trying to make possible, what kind of company would be required to sustain it, and how Tévo could grow into a system rather than remain a single successful exception.

We are still early in that work.

Tévo is not complete. A lot still has to be proven. But one thing is already clear to me: this company did not come together by accident. It was built through choices about what to protect, what to refuse, and who needed to be part of the work.

The competition was where the story opened. What came after is what made it ours.