IMHO, this was not cheating. This is a phenomenon called success. If you are fortunate (?) to be around in the entrepreneurial world long enough, you will realize that intelligence, hard work, good time management etc are not adequate. They just qualify as deserving. There are serendipities that separate those who succeed from everybody else who was deserving. Survivor bias [1]. Calling Eli was your serendipity. The opposite is also true: killer asteroids hit the planets of otherwise deserving individuals and initiatives. I was co-founder of a municipal fiber-to-the-home initiative in 1996. We had both a winning technical recipe and also a financial engineering recipe. (Extremely rare even today) We were then fortunate enough to acquire a customer that was a newly minted public company, representing a whopping 65% of our business. Banker's dream, but in actuality a big mistake. Then the double-whammy of fraud by that public company (wiping it out completely before our contract was realized) AND the dot-com crash. Killer asteroids are real.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Qd3erAPI9w