#Virtual Reality Startup Near Me | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

awesomelephuoclocblog-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Hostinger Review 2020: Is "For all intents and purposes Free" Better than "Free" for Hosting?

https://lephuocloc.com/three-for-one-hosting-review/

On the off chance that you're getting this, you're probably pondering whether Hostinger is a web encouraging association that can be trusted – and whether there's a stunt about their strong advancement assessing.

In this extraordinary review, we will truly research Hostinger and answer the going with essential requests:

Around the completion of this study you can find a select advancement code which licenses you to save 15% from your Hostinger demand, on top of all as far as possible and excellent offers you would as of now have the option to find on their site. Appreciate!

Fortuitously, when Hostinger were picking their picture name, they no doubt didn't foresee the a wide scope of ways it might be mistakenly spelled.. so on the off chance that you're here a direct result of filtering for hostenger or hosinger or even hostiger – basically understand that surely, that is a comparable association we're talking about here, so you're in the right spot :)

The Story of Hostinger

To give you an idea of precisely how gigantic Hostinger is, here are a couple of figures: the association starting at now has practically 30 million customers not simply in the US, UK, India and Indonesia, yet what's more in 170+ various countries (this is essentially every single country of the world!).

In addition, there are no signs of moving down – according to their data, Hostinger is up 'til now stretching out at a pace of 1 client at normal spans.

Right now Hostinger has destinations high-performant gear arranged in a couple of datacenters around the world: specifically, in the United States, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Indonesia. An extra datacenter focused on Eastern Europe is foreseen the not all that far off future.

In any case, as you may expect, Hostinger hasn't by and large been the general goliath it is today. It started in 2004 as unassuming "Encouraging Media" in the little anyway rapidly creating country of Lithuania, arranged in the north-eastern bit of the European Union.

The originators of Hostinger didn't intend to follow the gathering and make basically one all the more encouraging organization – they set up the new association as for an innovative idea:

People would favor not to pay for our displaying – basically the encouraging: direct, strong, and as unassuming as could sensibly be normal.

After various years, this standard in spite of everything remains at the focal point of what Hostinger centers around, to be explicit extraordinary organizations at a close to zero expense.

Nevertheless, how does Hostinger achieve such reality? – you may honestly solicit – toward the end from the day, how might it make sense of how to minimize its expenses while keeping the quality high? I will explain soon – most importantly, we should look at the thing itself:

Which Hosting Plan Is Right for You?

There are a couple of kinds of encouraging offered on the authority Hostinger site, each with various assessing plans. This makes it a test to pick just one, considering that there are moreover extraordinary additional organizations and features included to no end cash based dependent upon the course of action.

We should center in and endeavor to understand the fundamental portions of encouraging – this will enable us to constrain our choice and reach the last final product.

We'll assess all of the three kinds of Hostinger's encouraging organizations, overall, examine this little table. It summarizes the most critical differentiations between encouraging sorts and gives the most generally perceived use cases:

Performance Sufficient for little and medium websites High execution for greater destinations and online projects Medium to high dependent upon the plan

Space for growth Rigid – need to climb to another encouraging plan Flexible – can incorporate more resources "on the fly" Very versatile – granular authority over resources

Cost level Low Medium Flexible

I accept that even from this table, the qualification between the three encouraging sorts that are offered by Hostinger is extremely clear, anyway we will moreover give hardly logically low down explanations underneath.

Before we go into nuances, nonetheless, we need to appreciate one key thought: the server. Essentially, it's a specific PC that stores locales and demonstrates them to your online visitors:

Any encouraging is a grouping of servers, mind blowing PCs which are moved up to stay online each moment of consistently/365 and show your website to any person who types in its area into their program.

Thusly, servers are essentially the standard section of any encouraging organization, and they can be used in different habits depending upon the client's necessities and money related arrangement. This is the spot the three encouraging sorts come in:

Common encouraging is a crucial structure for the people who are essentially starting or need to test their online endeavors with least employments. It's assigned "shared" in light of the fact that each server holds hundreds or even an enormous number of locales from various clients.

This gathers a lone server's benefits are used at the same time by various areas – fine for destinations which have moderate traffic, anyway can impact execution for greater locales.

On the positive side, shared encouraging is unfathomably unassuming and easy to use. This makes it ideal for private individuals and little undertakings which are just starting their way into the online world.

Business encouraging is a further evolved sort, sensible for greater locales which are required to have medium to high step by step traffic (a large number of customers for consistently and anything is possible from that point).

Hostinger's business encouraging uses what's called cloud advancements – your handling resources are not connected to a specific physical server, anyway are spread over different machines, which guarantees better adequacy and flexibility.

This also infers your encouraging resources are detached from each and every other site for this circumstance, which prompts by and large better, appeared differently in relation to shared encouraging.

All of these favorable circumstances incorporate some significant detriments, clearly – business encouraging is in a general sense logically exorbitant, with the most affordable course of action ("Startup" at $15.90 consistently) costing twice as much as the most expensive shared game plan ("Business" at $7.95 consistently). Unexpectedly, the last naming is very perplexing from my perspective – yet at this point we understand what's in store :)

VPS encouraging is the most versatile and the least straightforward encouraging sort offered by Hostinger. It signifies "Virtual Private Server", considering the way that for this circumstance a lone physical server runs a couple of individual conditions which don't get with each other using any and all means. It takes after having your own server, on the other hand, really it's an alleged "virtual" machine.

Such course of action thinks about most prominent flexibility – you can do almost anything you need with your virtual server, since you have official level authority over the entire structure.

Which appears fun, until you comprehend that you won't increase a beneficial force board with a VPS encouraging arrangement. In a manner of speaking, it's needy upon you to set up all parts of your virtual server.

This is the explanation such an encouraging is at the same time supportive for specialists who know absolutely what they're accomplishing (for instance programming architects and website specialists) and near futile for some other individual.

Given the specific features of each encouraging kind, I can make a reasonable proposal that you should in all probability pick the common sort. Why? In such a case, that you were addressing a tremendous business or a web progression association, you would realize all that I referenced in the past fragments.

That case aside, we ought to expect you need the basic encouraging – and see which of the three Hostinger Shared plans is the most reasonable choice.

On Hostinger's shared encouraging page you can see three offers: the Single course of action, assessed at $0.88 consistently, the Premium game plan, esteemed at $3.49 consistently, and the Business plan, evaluated at $7.95 consistently. I trust understand that these are remarkable progressions:

You can get these expenses if you demand a multi year pack, tinier periods cost hardly more (in case you ask me, a year group is commonly all that might be expected to grasp if you genuinely need a website, and test your online errand).

Such expenses are significant for the term of the group you demand, after that your encouraging will get deferred at a conventional rate.

Simply taking everything into account – these are both fundamental practices among encouraging gives, so nothing dubious about Hostinger in such way.

Every one of the three shared plans are equipped with everything that is significant for a basic start, including updated programming and hardware, so we will basically focus on the qualifications:

The Single game plan has too relatively few features and figuring power that is adequate only for the most diminutive of destinations, while the Business plan includes not a lot of focal points diverged from the Premium game plan while being twice as expensive.

Toward the day's end, the Premium game plan is the most balanced similar to features, over all it is the most economical course of action with a free space included.

What's more, it is the most affordable course of action to offer customized fortifications – and you will feel the handiness of this part the primary go through something happens to your site :)

To close, for the vast majority and little prescription

https://lephuocloc.com/three-for-one-hosting-review/

https://lephuocloc.com/

1 note · View note

flexospaces · 3 years ago

Text

7 Factors Driving The Success Of Coworking Spaces In India

Allow us to introduce the 7 critical variables in the below mentioned manner.

1. Admittance to Workspaces As A Service (WaaS)

A large number of us are as of now acquainted with Software As A Service (SaaS), yet with the development of shared offices, Workspaces As A Service is a new and arising idea. Today, Coworking Spaces are taking care of a wide assortment of requests and their client driven approach drives them to be so well known. The adaptability, the various bundles of coworking to select from alongside a large group of other comfort highlights accessible promptly something will undoubtedly be acknowledged earnestly.

2. Moving plans that energize development and improvement

A startup office space Mumbai is where numerous youngsters' fantasies go into a reality. The plan of the office is significant to rousing innovativeness and a feeling of freedom that will urge individuals to keep hustling in the workplace. A cutting-edge shared office ought to incorporate conveniences that guarantee your representatives that yours is a place of refuge to develop and investigate. Also, for that, you really want to utilize advancement and creative mind to concoct a few astounding plans to tidy things up.

Looking for Spacious Coworking Space in Andheri East – Check out Flexo now!

3. An amiable work environment for youthful personalities to prosper

At the point when your representatives enter their common workspace Mumbai, they shouldn't feel like they are being exploited, or are being forced into conveying more than they pursued. Making a vivacious climate in the office can bring forth innovative reasoning, particularly in a collaborating space where thoughts can move uninhibitedly starting with one division then onto the next.

4. The best extents of networking

Whenever experts intend to lease a work area for coworking, they naturally pursue upgraded networking that is imperative for their business to develop. In the present times, creating and extending one's network is the most ideal way to develop one's own true capacity and develop as an expert. Also, FLEXO coworking spaces offer the best environment for joint effort and networking.

5. Simplicity of the board

The best thing about coworking spaces is that they typically accompany a group that deals with the overheads concerning a common office space. They work together with different organizations to guarantee that the administrations offered are first class leaving no space for client protests. The whole errand of dealing with a common workplace turns out to be simple and powerful, and clients get the exact thing they are searching for.

6. Utilization of most recent innovation

With regards to virtual office space, the best of the most recent advances should be utilized. Today, organizations like Flexo take on and offer the best offices of innovation to flawlessly engage somewhat working groups to continue with their errands.

7. Cost improvement

In India, coworking spaces are for the most part liked by new businesses for cost-viability. You just compensation for what you use and the lease; not all that much. There are no issues and spending on framework support and fix which regular offices incorporate. Since new companies work on restricted capital at first, lower expenses of working works in support of themselves.

Searching for “Coworking Space Near Me” – Visit Flexo now! One stop destination for all your coworking needs!

#Coworking Spaces #Flexo #Coworking Space in Andheri East #Coworking Space in Malad #Coworking Space Near Me

0 notes

atakportal · 7 years ago

Text

Penrose Studios nabs $10M as the startup continues to create some of VR’s most beautiful stories – TechCrunch

New Post has been published on https://idealz.cloud/2018/07/11/penrose-studios-nabs-10m-as-the-startup-continues-to-create-some-of-vrs-most-beautiful-stories-techcrunch/

Penrose Studios nabs $10M as the startup continues to create some of VR’s most beautiful stories – TechCrunch

It’s been an interesting past few years for the virtual reality industry and while there is still plenty for insiders to pin their hopes on in 2018, it’s no secret that things have been progressing a bit slower than more bullish parties would have hoped for. Yet for all of what potential still remains unfulfilled, it seems fair to say that storytellers are still just as entranced (and occasionally bewildered) by the power of the fully immersive medium.

Penrose Studios has been one of the more shining stars in the narrative-based VR content space. Their work has drawn easy comparisons to Pixar’s and their efforts have seemed to influence other studios in the space as well.

The VR studio announced today that they have closed a $10 million round of Series A funding led by TransLink Capital. Also participating in the round were Marc Benioff, Will.i.am, Korea Telecom and Co-Made with returning investment from Sway Ventures, 8VC and Suffolk Equity.

While some competing venture-backed virtual reality content studios may be focusing their efforts on creating streamlined processes to build fast and cheap, Penrose seems to be more squarely focused on reaching its creative visions first and foremost.

The company’s latest major project, Arden’s Wake, is one of the more captivating VR short films I’ve seen to date. The ambitious half-hour animated feature pairs a tightly scoped storyline with a highly polished design that is whimsical and delightful in a way few other studios have managed to figure out. The startup began development of Arden’s Wake 18 months ago, sharing the finished product, which features voice acting from Alicia Vikander, at the most recent Tribeca Film Festival.

The film certainly seems like an expensive endeavor, and while CEO Eugene Chung didn’t talk numbers, he also didn’t confirm whether the startup would be charging users to download the film and view on home VR devices. The company’s previous releases, “Allumette” and “The Rose and I,” are currently offered as free downloads on major VR platforms.

Overall headset numbers are still fairly low however, and for venture-backed startups in this space I would imagine that there’s a strong desire to wait until there’s a more sizable audience size before both cutting access off to the potential new fans who wouldn’t pay to download anyway. While the unit economics of making money from individual downloads of narrative-based titles is still a bit of a Wild West in the VR world, it’s a critical issue that can probably only be punted for so long.

Chung, who previously worked on narrative storytelling at Oculus, seems optimistic about virtual reality hardware’s near-term prospects and the rise of so-called standalone headsets which integrate the compute power, display and battery into a singular device that is untethered and more powerful than past phone-based options.

The next of four new projects that Penrose is currently developing is being built with these standalone devices as their central focus though Chung tells me the startup is also starting to look more seriously about what there is to be done with phone-based augmented reality systems based on the ARKit and ARCore platforms and what does and does not make sense to bring to them.

Source link

#beautiful #continues #create #penrose #startup #stories #studios

1 note · View note

un-enfant-immature · 6 years ago

Text

Startups Weekly: Will the real unicorns please stand up?

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a newsletter published every Saturday that dives into the week’s noteworthy venture capital deals, funds and trends. Before I dive into this week’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the sudden uptick in beverage startup rounds. Before that, I noted an alternative to venture capital fundraising called revenue-based financing. Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to [email protected] or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets.

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about this week: Unicorn scarcity, or lack thereof. I’ve written about this concept before, as has my Equity co-host, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm. I apologize if the two of us are broken records, but I think we’re equally perplexed by the pace at which companies are garnering $1 billion valuations.

Here’s the latest data, according to Crunchbase: “2018 outstripped all previous years in terms of the number of unicorns created and venture dollars invested. Indeed, 151 new unicorns joined the list in 2018 (compared to 96 in 2017), and investors poured more than $135 billion into those companies, a 52% increase year-over-year and the biggest sum invested in unicorns in any one year since unicorns became a thing.”

2019 has already coined 42 new unicorns, like Glossier, Calm and Hims, a number that grows each and every week. For context, a total of 19 companies joined the unicorn club in 2013 when Aileen Lee, an established investor, coined the term. Today, there are some 450 companies around the globe that qualify as unicorns, representing a cumulative valuation of $1.6 trillion.

We’ve clung to this fantastical terminology for so many years because it helps us classify startups, singling out those that boast valuations so high, they’ve gained entry to a special, elite club. In 2019, however, $100 million-plus rounds are the norm and billion-dollar-plus funds are standard. Unicorns aren’t rare anymore; it’s time to rethink the unicorn framework.

Petition to stop using the term "unicorn" unless the company is valued at more than $1 billion *and* profitable.

— Kate Clark (@KateClarkTweets) May 22, 2019

Last week, I suggested we only refer to profitable companies with a valuation larger than $1 billion as unicorns. Understandably, not everyone was too keen on that idea. Why? Because startups in different sectors face barriers of varying proportions. A SaaS company, for example, is likely to achieve profitability a lot quicker than a moonshot bet on autonomous vehicles or virtual reality. Refusing startups that aren’t yet profitable access to the unicorn club would unfairly favor certain industries.

So what can we do? Perhaps we increase the valuation minimum necessary to be called a unicorn to $10 billion? Initialized Capital’s Garry Tan’s idea was to require a startup have 50% annual growth to be considered a unicorn, though that would be near-impossible to get them to disclose…

While I’m here, let me share a few of the other eclectic responses I received following the above tweet. Joseph Flaherty said we should call profitable billion-dollar companies Pegasus “since [they’ve] taken flight.” Reagan Pollack thinks profitable startups oughta be referred to as leprechauns. Hmmmm.

The suggestions didn’t stop there. Though I’m not so sure adopting monikers like Pegasus and leprechaun will really solve the unicorn overpopulation problem. Let me know what you think. Onto other news.

Image by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

IPO corner

CrowdStrike has set its IPO terms. The company has inked plans to sell 18 million shares at between $19 and $23 apiece. At a midpoint price, CrowdStrike will raise $378 million at a valuation north of $4 billion.

Slack inches closer to direct listing. The company released updated first-quarter financials on Friday, posting revenues of $134.8 million on losses of $31.8 million. That represents a 67% increase in revenues from the same period last year when the company lost $24.8 million on $80.9 million in revenue.

Startup Capital

Online lender SoFi has quietly raised $500M led by Qatar Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky just-raised another $200M for his new company Tempus Less than 1 year after launching, Brex eyes $2B valuation Password manager Dashlane raises $110M Series D Enterprise cybersecurity startup BlueVoyant raises $82.5M at a $430M valuation Talkspace picks up $50M Series D TaniGroup raises $10M to help Indonesia’s farmers grow Stripe and Precursor lead $4.5M seed into media CRM startup Pico

Funds

Maveron, a venture capital fund co-founded by Starbucks mastermind Howard Schultz, has closed on another $180 million to invest in early-stage consumer startups. The capital represents the firm’s seventh fundraise and largest since 2000. To keep the fund from reaching mammoth proportions, the firm’s general partners said they turned away more than $70 million amid high demand for the effort. There’s more where that came from, here’s a quick look at the other VCs to announce funds this week:

EV Growth closes $200M fund to cover Southeast Asia’s Series B funding gap

Northwestern Mutual has carved out another $150M for a fintech and insurtech fund

Future Positive Capital gets $57M to invest in European startups tackling the world’s ‘most pressing problems’

~Extra Crunch~

This week, I penned a deep dive on Slack, formerly known as Tiny Speck, for our premium subscription service Extra Crunch. The story kicks off in 2009 when Stewart Butterfield began building a startup called Tiny Speck that would later come out with Glitch, an online game that was neither fun nor successful. The story ends in 2019, weeks before Slack is set to begin trading on the NYSE. Come for the history lesson, stay for the investor drama. Here are the other standout EC pieces of the week.

Fundraising 101: How to trigger FOMO among VCs by Eric Peckham

Airbnb’s J Crowley on what makes a great product manager by Jordan Crook

The savage genius of SoftBank by Josh Constine

Equity

If you enjoy this newsletter, be sure to check out TechCrunch’s venture-focused podcast, Equity. In this week’s episode, available here, Crunchbase News editor-in-chief Alex Wilhelm and I debate whether the tech press is too negative or too positive in its coverage of tech startups. Plus, we dive into Brex’s upcoming round, SoFi’s massive raise and CrowdStrike’s imminent IPO.

#TechCrunch

0 notes

narcisbolgor-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Inside Palmer Luckeys Bid to Build a Border Wall

We’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a remote Texas ranch, a long patch of rocky desert stretching out below to the verdant banks of the Rio Grande, a silver ribbon 2 miles distant. On the horizon, a light haze shrouds the mountains of northern Mexico. The whistle of a stiff and constant wind cuts through a silence that gives no hint of the hostilities, both physical and political, that animate these borderlands.

Palmer Luckey—yes, that Palmer Luckey, the 25-year-old entrepreneur who founded the virtual reality company Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then left Facebook in a haze of political controversy—hands me a Samsung Gear VR headset. Slipping it over my eyes, I am instantly immersed in a digital world that simulates the exact view I had just been enjoying in real life. In the virtual valley below is a glowing green square with text that reads PERSON 98%. Luckey directs me to tilt my head downward, toward the box, and suddenly an image pops up over the VR rendering. A human is making his way through the rugged sagebrush, a scene captured by cameras on a tower behind me. To his right I see another green box, this one labeled ANIMAL 86%. Zooming in on it brings up a photo of a calf, grazing a bit outside its usual range.

The system I’m trying out is Luckey’s solution to how the US should detect unauthorized border crossings. It merges VR with surveillance tools to create a digital wall that is not a barrier so much as a web of all-seeing eyes, with intelligence to know what it sees. Luckey’s company, Anduril Industries, is pitching its technology to the Department of Homeland Security as a complement to—or substitute for—much of President Trump’s promised physical wall along the border with Mexico.

Anduril is barely a year old, and the trespassing I’d witnessed was part of an informal test on a rancher’s private land. The company has installed three portable, 32-foot towers packed with radar, communications antennae, and a laser-enhanced camera—the first implementation of a system Anduril is calling Lattice. It can detect and identify motion within about a 2-mile radius. The person I saw in my headset was an Anduril technician dispatched to the valley via ATV to demonstrate how the system works; he was about a mile away.

As Luckey and his team see it, Lattice will become not just a system for securing the border but a general platform for geographic near-omniscience. With the aid of artificial intelligence, it aims to synthesize data from potentially thousands of sensors and local databases, displaying the most relevant data in phone apps, on laptop screens, and in mixed-reality headsets. Anduril’s goal is to become a major tech startup that builds hardware and software specifically for the defense industry, a venture-capital-infused outsider challenging the likes of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman with their multibillion-dollar government contracts and strong establishment ties.

Related Stories

Peter Rubin

The Inside Story of Oculus Rift and How Virtual Reality Became Reality

Issie Lapowsky

Trump’s Wall Is Worthless if He Doesn’t Back It Up With Tech

Laura Mallonee

The Invisible Security of Canada's Seemingly Chill Border

The idea of the nimble maverick overthrowing lead-footed incumbents is, of course, the favorite startup narrative. But the people behind Anduril are not untested newbies; they have significant experience in tech and politics. Besides Luckey, who gave money to an alt-right group and donated to Trump’s inaugural committee, the team includes former executives from the secretive data-crunching company Palantir, whose work for many government agencies has raised alarms about intrusive surveillance. And Anduril’s lead investor is Founders Fund, the VC firm headed by Peter Thiel, a prominent Trump supporter and the guy who shut down Gawker.

The politics of Anduril’s founders may not be popular in liberal Silicon Valley, but they need to please a different audience: members of Congress and government bureaucrats. To win big border contracts, Anduril must beat out other companies peddling visions of an electronic border wall, including an Israeli firm called Elbit Systems, as well as traditional defense giants. Its advantages are operating cheaply and moving quickly. In a little over a year the company not only built and deployed its prototype in Texas, it has also launched a government-funded evaluation project under way outside of San Diego. It promises a system that would cost a small fraction of a physical wall and is cheaper than its digital competitors.

Of course, Anduril still has to prove its technology works in a more extensive test. But early signs look good. According to US Customs and Border Protection, in a 10-week period, Lattice’s test in Texas helped customs agents catch 55 unauthorized border crossers, a notable figure for a system still in development. If Luckey has his way, the border wall of the future will be Anduril’s.

At Anduril’s headquarters in Orange County, Palmer Luckey has been hands-on in building the company’s technology.

Benjamin Rasmussen

Luckey grew up in Long Beach, California; his dad was a car salesman, and his mother homeschooled him and his three sisters. “I was a PC gamer,” he told me in 2015, “and I was always upgrading my PC, getting the best monitors, the newest graphics cards.” He wanted to feel as if he were “actually in the game, like the game is actually real.” By collecting and sublimely tweaking the technology available, Luckey created a homegrown VR system. He called his system Oculus and described it on a Kickstarter page in August 2012 as “designed by gamers, for gamers.” But when Mark Zuckerberg tried it out in 2014, the Facebook CEO saw it as the social computing platform of the future. Facebook bought Luckey’s company for $2 billion.

In June of that year, a newly enriched Luckey attended a retreat hosted by Founders Fund, which had been an early Oculus investor, on Sonora Island in British Columbia. There he met an employee at the fund named Trae Stephens, then age 30. Earlier in his career, Stephens had worked at a government intelligence agency that he will not publicly identify; in 2008, he joined Palantir. In 2014, Thiel convinced Stephens to join Founders Fund and specialize in investments involving the government. Stephens found it ridiculous that almost no venture-backed companies worked closely with the government, with its billions of dollars to spend. “After Palantir and SpaceX, there’s nothing,” he says. Founders Fund also was an early SpaceX investor, and Stephens’ goal was to fund a company to join that duo. He was coming up empty. The Valley, it seemed, didn’t do government.

Over meals at the Canadian eco-resort, Luckey and Stephens bonded over a shared passion for defense tech. Luckey had once worked on a program that used VR to treat PTSD, which led him to think about how military tech worked—and how it didn’t. During his Oculus years, he had read up on projects like the troubled F-35 fighter, which had a problematic head-up display, and realized that applying lessons from the consumer world could improve its design and lower costs.

After the Sonora Island trip, Luckey and Stephens kept in touch, and in 2016 the pair began speculating about starting a company together. They threw around a lot of ideas, some of them straight out of comic books—What if we built a force field? As that year ended, Stephens was making regular trips to Washington, DC, from San Francisco. Donald Trump was the president-elect, and Thiel, who was on the presidential transition team, brought Stephens on to focus on the Department of Defense. It was a useful post for someone thinking about a defense business.

Meanwhile, Luckey’s political activities had made him the object of tech-press scorn. News reports claimed that Luckey was involved in an alt-right group called Nimble America, paying for billboards ripping Hillary Clinton as “Too Big to Jail” and allegedly penning vicious Reddit posts for the group. On his public Facebook page, he denied many of the allegations but confirmed that he donated $10,000 to Nimble America because he “thought the organization had fresh ideas on how to communicate with young voters.” He apologized for “negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.” When asked about this now, the normally buoyant Luckey drops his smile and chooses his words carefully, claiming that his politics are misunderstood. “The alt-right, as it exists, as it’s defined, I do not support, never have,” he says. He describes himself as “fiscally conservative, pro-freedom, little-L libertarian, and big-R Republican.”

On the last day of March 2017, Luckey was ousted from Facebook. Neither party is sharing the details of his exit. (The issue even came up at Zuckerberg’s April 2018 Senate hearing, when Republican senator Ted Cruz, who has received $5,400 in political donations from Luckey, demanded, “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” Zuckerberg said only that it wasn’t because of his politics.) And what did Luckey learn from his experience at Facebook and Oculus? “Be careful who you trust,” he says. “Be careful who has control.”

On his first day as a free agent, Luckey connected with Stephens, ready to start building the company they’d discussed. Stephens didn’t hesitate. Their guiding vision was something like Stark Industries—the mind-blowing font of matériel in the Iron Man movies. (Luckey is a voracious consumer of popcorn flicks; one of his favorites is Pacific Rim.) And it would probably involve VR.

A collector's version of Anduril, the enchanted blade from Lord of the Rings, hangs on Luckey's wall.

Benjamin Rasmussen

They began recruiting a team. Stephens suggested Matt Grimm, a former Palantir colleague. Luckey proposed a fourth cofounder, Joe Chen, an engineer who had worked at Oculus before joining a Hollywood VR startup. Chen had also served in the National Guard. Both men signed on. “I’d been an end user on some very, very bad VR military simulation systems,” Chen says. “Once Palmer said ‘Hey, we gotta fix this,’ I was like, ‘All right, cool.’ ”

On April 7, exactly a week after Luckey left Facebook, the four invited around half a dozen potential recruits to Luckey’s Orange County home. As the guests ate Chick-fil-A, the founders presented a pitch deck. By attracting “disruptive talent with a Silicon Valley vision, Anduril will be the next great defense company,” it promised. They would need “crazy mad scientists,” political connections, and lots of capital. “Almost every single person that was at that initial dinner is here right now,” Stephens says.

Luckey secured warehouse space in an industrial area of Orange County. When the team approached Founders Fund, Brian Singerman, a partner who was also the first Oculus investor, agreed to lead the fund’s $17.5 million seed round. “Palmer is an insanely brilliant technologist,” he says. “A little bit … out there. But most brilliant people are.” (This May, Founders Fund led a $41 million Series A round.)

Luckey, Stephens, and Grimm also made their pitch to Palantir’s directors. In attendance was Brian Schimpf, Palantir’s head of engineering. After the session, Schimpf told them he wanted in. He became the fifth cofounder and CEO, with Grimm as COO and Luckey as CTO. Stephens chairs the board (he never left Founders Fund).

The company’s name also has a Palantir connection. Middle-earth buffs will recognize Anduril as the enchanted blade that was Aragorn’s go-to lethal weapon; a palantir is a magical crystal ball from the same Tolkien universe. “All of us are Lord of the Rings fans, so it was a pretty fun name,” Luckey says. “Also, I have Anduril the sword hanging on my wall.” (Luckey procured a collector’s version, not the original movie prop.)

They had a name and an executive team. But what was the product? “The DOD has been asking for what some people describe as Call of Duty goggles,” Luckey says. “Like, you put on the glasses, and the headset display tells you where the good guys are, where the bad guys are, where your air support is, where you’re going, where you were.” (Pause to consider this Escher-esque scenario of soldiers clamoring for gear inspired by a game that mimics their combat experience.) But tiny Anduril—with no experience or history—couldn’t just barge into the Pentagon and demand to build battlefield tech. “We needed a quick win,” Schimpf says.

Anduril’s pitch deck offered a sci-fi fantasia, including autonomous long-range bombers, attack-drone swarms, and something they called “perimeter security on a pole.” The team zeroed in on this last notion. They figured they could build a surveillance tower using off-the-shelf sensors and cameras, connect them in a network, and make something in the spirit of Google Maps and Pokémon Go. By using AI, the system would identify what data was important. Stephens thought the Pentagon might see its value in securing forward operating bases—outposts in hostile territory. But Luckey had another idea: border security. A system to monitor America’s southern perimeter would require components similar to those in a combat awareness platform. What’s more, it was clear Mexico wasn’t paying for that big, beautiful wall that Trump had promised. The government, they realized, might be receptive to their budget-friendly pitch.

Silicon Valley, meet the US-Mexico border.

The border towers include radar, communications antennae, and a camera enhanced by a laser from a hair-removal device.

Benjamin Rasmussen

Screens show information about Anduril’s towers.

Benjamin Rasmussen

To find their way to the border, Anduril executives started by approaching a California office of the Department of Homeland Security in June 2017. “They said they could provide broader border security for a lower cost. We were intrigued by that,” says Melissa Ho, managing director of Silicon Valley’s DHS office. The DHS introduced Anduril’s executives to border patrol officials, and a border patrol team near San Diego was happy to brief them. “They saw us as their own SpaceX,” Schimpf says—that is, a nimble private entity that could provide specialized technology. Later, when the San Diego office of Customs and Border Protection was setting up tests of new border systems, it selected Anduril for a pilot project.

Anduril is suggesting a new way to secure the border electronically, but it is far from the first. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on comically ineffective systems (in one of them the radars would get activated by rain). In the mid-2000s, Homeland Security initiated a competition to create SBInet, a comprehensive virtual wall. In September 2006, Boeing won a contract to start building a system that was estimated to cost $7.6 billion. It began constructing 80-foot-high towers loaded with equipment. In January 2011, after a series of cost overruns, late deliveries, and a basic failure to catch people crossing the border, then Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano pulled the plug. With massive understatement, a DHS report said that SBInet “does not meet current standards for viability and cost effectiveness.”

SBInet was a case of government contracting run amok. “You learn lessons from failure,” says CBP commissioner Kevin McAleenan. Anduril, like both Palantir and SpaceX, seeks to avoid some common pitfalls. Instead of selling technology to the government for a huge up-front fee, it plans to own the system and lease it, with the data it collects belonging to whatever agency issues the contract. This arrangement, Stephens says, creates an incentive to keep development costs low.

Part of SBInet’s failure was that it came too early. Sensors that cost a few bucks today were thousands of dollars a decade ago. Artificial intelligence is no longer an aspiration but a tool that delivers results. But technological attempts to secure the border have also tended to rely on complicated technologies, such as Predator drones, that aren’t cost-effective for long stretches of the border. A much simpler surveillance system could work fine, as long as agents received useful alerts from it. “The key was just finding a way to get information in the hands of agents,” Schimpf says.

The camera mounted on Anduril’s surveillance towers takes still images in quick succession.

Benjamin Rasmussen

Its competitors in the smart-wall business were pitching taller towers with exotic microwave transmitters and other bespoke gadgetry. For Anduril, the key to making consumer tech work was to combine it with AI. The company taught its software to identify the patterns of a person on the move, allowing it to avoid the expensive zoom lenses and thermal sensors used in competing systems, Schimpf says. “The sophistication of Nest-level technology isn’t bad,” he says, referring to the smart thermostats and motion detectors designed to automate a home. “And no one has used AI for this purpose yet. If you can identify objects with AI, you don’t need to see as far.”

Within a couple of months, Anduril had a prototype. Schimpf and his colleagues took it to a test range in Apple Valley, a two-hour drive from their Orange County office. “We lived out of the trailer there,” Schimpf says. Using open source machine-learning training data, they taught the software how to tell humans from animals or tumbleweeds, and unearthed some glitches. In a certain light, for example, the system can mistake the rear end of a horse for a person.

What they didn’t find in affordable parts was a way to capture distant moving objects at night. Thermal cameras cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and fare poorly in the wind and dirt of the Texas border. But Luckey had an idea: Sync a laser beam to a virtual shutter, similar to flash photography. “We shoot a flash beam way, way, way out to where you are,” Luckey says. “It lights up you and the area around you, and then we’re able to pick that up with our electro-optical sensor.” Anduril discovered it could cheaply repurpose the laser, which it bought in bulk, originally meant for a 600-watt cosmetic hair-removal device.

To test their prototype, Stephens called Will Hurd, a Republican congressperson whose district includes the nation’s longest stretch of land bordering Mexico. Hurd has long argued for a digital approach to border security, so when he heard Stephens’ pitch, he perked up. “A lot of contractors say ‘Oh yeah, I can do this,’ but the federal government’s going to have to pay for the prototypes and all that kind of stuff,” he says. “When Anduril representatives explained their approach, I was like, ‘This is pretty cool.’ ” Hurd introduced Stephens and Luckey to a rancher on the border who agreed to host three test towers.

A screenshot of an Anduril mobile notification.

Courtesy of Anduril

Anduril Mobile App screenshot of a person walking.

Courtesy of Anduril

In mid-April, Luckey, Stephens, Schimpf, and I are sailing down Highway 90 in southwest Texas in a rented SUV heading to that ranch, a road trip that started with a pit stop at an El Paso Whataburger (Luckey’s choice). It’s a long drive through the sagebrush-covered desert, with Schimpf at the wheel. “This is a place where machines are supposed to live,” Luckey says, “not people.” Luckey has a cold, but he chatters between sniffles about movies and technology, and he tells a story about hanging out in VR with Ready Player One author Ernest Cline. He’s wearing his trademark Tommy Bahama aloha shirt, shorts, and flip-flops; the others are in the Silicon Valley cool-weather uniform of puffy jackets and jeans.

Schimpf takes a right at an unmarked intersection. We travel over roughly 30 miles of an unpaved road populated mostly by rabbits to reach a gate with a faded sign that designates the ranch as a member of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association. Beyond it, inside a comfortable farmhouse, waits Ed, the fifth-generation owner of the property. (WIRED is changing his name to spare him the attention of drug cartels operating in his area.)

With a sagging mustache and a wide drawl, Ed has the air of a canny retired sheriff in a Sam Peckinpah movie. Over coffee, he explains that for decades his land has been an unpatrolled gateway to the United States. Past trials of new technologies hadn’t worked out, but on Hurd’s urging he gave the Californians a chance. To his astonishment, their system seems to be performing well.

Take what happened on March 5. At 7:41 am local time, the system noticed activity in the valley. An alert popped up a thousand miles away, on Matt Grimm’s phone. “New person track near tower e1,” it read. Grimm, who was at his home in Orange County, opened Anduril’s app—and saw a dozen people making their way across the gullies and hills of the Texas frontier.

In an official installation, such alerts would go straight to Customs and Border Protection agents. But in this case, Grimm notified Ed. Ed called the nearest patrol station and settled into his living room couch with his laptop. Launching Anduril’s software, a wide shot of his land filled the screen. Blinking green rectangles highlighted the trespassers; zooming in, he could make out the group of figures more clearly. Between sips of his morning coffee, he watched the boxes inch across the screen as the people traversed his ranchland. “I can hardly operate a cell phone,” he later recalls. “This is beyond cool.”

Artificial intelligence identifies whether it has spotted a moving person, vehicle, animal, or tumbleweed.

Courtesy of Anduril

Later that morning, Grimm could see that a DHS helicopter was headed toward the scene. By then the visitors had traveled northeast of the towers’ range, so he couldn’t watch as border agents apprehended 12 people. In a 10-week span since the towers were installed, Lattice helped agents catch 55 people and seize 982 pounds of marijuana. (For 39 of those individuals, drugs were not involved, suggesting they were just looking for a better life.) The official test outside San Diego, ongoing at press time, led to 10 interceptions in its first 12 days.

Last July, Hurd introduced the Secure Miles with All Resources and Technology (SMART) Act, which would direct DHS to deploy technologies for “situational awareness and operational control of the border.” His nine cosponsors include two Democrats. The bill is awaiting a vote, but some of its key ideas found their way into the 2018 federal budget, which provides funds for border-security technology.

“Nobody is disagreeing with the smart wall,” says Hurd, a former CIA agent who is one of the few members of Congress with a computer science degree. The economics are an obvious factor. “A concrete structure 30 feet high that takes four hours to penetrate costs $24.5 million a mile,” he says. “A smart wall, a system like what Anduril is proposing, is about a half a million a mile.”

The prototype towers on Ed’s ranch are the epitome of cheapskate. A plain metal pole juts from the ground, propped up by a tripod and anchored by cinder blocks. Solar panels hang off its lower portion, and the top is a cobbled-together cluster of radar antennae, cameras, and more. The finished version will look more polished, but its bones will be the same. Unassembled, it can fit into a pickup truck and be installed in less than an hour. Anduril has since added small drones to the system. If the company wins a contract for the hundreds of miles of rural borderlands, where its tech is best suited, these towers will watch the movements of all who cross their line of sight—drug smugglers, job seekers, families, as well as Americans going about their business.

Staring down from our bluff toward the Rio Grande, Schimpf reflects on Anduril’s long-term goals, which include protecting private sites like oil pipelines and monitoring the battlefield of the future. “Looking at this helps you conceptualize what it would be like in Afghanistan, if you had a forward-operating base on top of this hill. It’s the same problem.”

Anduril is trying out small, cheap helicopter-style drones.

Benjamin Rasmussen

Anduril is unusual among today’s startups for embracing the defense business. In the Valley, many believe that “if you do defense you must be an evil person,” says Joe Lonsdale, an Anduril investor and Palantir cofounder. But that wasn’t always the case. California’s tech sector was once a virtual branch of the military. “Literally 100 percent of the early microchips went to defense use,” says Leslie Berlin, project historian for Stanford’s Silicon Valley archives.

In the 1950s and ’60s, “working for the defense effort meant working for the good guys,” Berlin says. After Vietnam, that changed. “Many people in Silicon Valley today don’t feel that way.” The most recent evidence came in April, when The New York Times reported that more than 3,100 Google employees had protested the company’s work on a Pentagon-backed AI effort called Project Maven.

Lonsdale and Luckey argue that building cheaper, more efficient systems is a virtuous pursuit, saving taxpayer dollars. Anduril’s Palantir pedigree may have prepared it for criticism. As that company grew to a private valuation of $20 billion, its technology has been portrayed as Big Brother–style surveillance tools. Anduril’s leaders tread lightly on the subject of deadly force—traditionally the purview of defense companies—and have a ready answer when I ask whether the company will ever build systems that kill people.

“We’re really focused on the intelligence and surveillance piece right now,” Schimpf says. But in the next beat: Not that there’s anything wrong with building weapons. “I wouldn’t say that’s a line we’re drawing.”

Stephens jumps in to clarify. “Part of the unintended shiftiness of our answer is that no one even knows what that means. In 20 years, are we still going to be filling bullets with gunpowder? Or is this electronic warfare? Is it like sending a pulse out that takes drones out of the sky?”

Put that way, warfare sounds a bit like a videogame, an echo of the drone pilots who execute deadly missions from behind computer screens many miles away.

MythBusters cohost Jamie Hyneman is building an autonomous firefighting tank for Anduril.

Benjamin Rasmussen

In a steampunkish workshop in an industrial area of Oakland, California, Anduril houses a project called Sentry that brings this parallel to life. Sentry is a fleet of autonomous firefighting machines meant to battle blazes on California’s hills, among other applications. The idea is to hollow out armored troop carriers to hold more than a thousand gallons of water. With crinkled aluminum skin, a Sentry vehicle looks something like a battlebot tank. That’s no coincidence—Anduril’s subcontractor for the project is Jamie Hyneman, the special effects expert and former cohost of MythBusters who built one of the fiercest battlebots in Robot Wars history.

Luckey passes me an Oculus Rift headset and a handheld controller to try driving a simulation of a Sentry vehicle. On my headset I see a stand of burning trees. I set the tank on autonomous mode and use the index-finger trigger, familiar to anyone who has used an Xbox, to shoot its water cannons at the blazes. It is exactly like playing a videogame. As the flames spread, I concentrate hard to rule over the conflagration, wanting to put in a strong performance for the Anduril team.

I leave the Oakland workshop pumped from the excitement of saving the homes of imaginary Californians. But as I steer my car through the battered chain-link gate, past graffiti-covered buildings, the lingering adrenaline from my digital immersion turns to a funny aftertaste. The California fires last summer were devastatingly real. So is warfare. Anduril is on a quest to build awesome tech, the stuff of comics and action films. But it will be deployed in situations of human desperation, a vast remove from the land of fun. Transforming consumer tech’s plowshares into swords is ultimately a dark pursuit.

It struck me after I’d wrapped up my visits with Anduril that, aside from the drug smugglers they helped intercept on the border, I had not heard the founders mention the people who might get caught in their omniscient zone. What is the right way to treat those individuals? What of the children and parents who are now being torn apart while crossing? Those are social and political questions, not technical specifications. But it is increasingly the case that the people who build new technologies trigger political consequences.

Though tech companies have been taking their knocks lately, even the ones now under the most scrutiny were launched in a glow of idealism. We once dreamed that an era of ultraconnected and infinitely empowering tech would solve the kinds of problems that lead people to flee their own countries or that propel terrorists or nations to attack. Those problems didn’t end. It now seems obvious that tech was never going to make us better human beings; we are still our flawed selves. Instead, those same technologies that once seemed full of promise are finding their way into all-too-human clashes—led by a company named after an avenging sword.

Anduril’s founders come from Oculus, Founders Fund, and Palantir.

Benjamin Rasmussen

Steven Levy (@stevenlevy) wrote about cryptographic back doors in issue 26.05.

This article appears in the July issue. Subscribe now.

Listen to this story, and other WIRED features, on the Audm app.

Related Video

Culture

How Oculus Solved Virtual Reality

The 1990s saw the rise—and fall—of virtual reality. While everyone could imagine a technology that allowed us to be somewhere else, no one was able to make it happen. No one, that is, until an 18-year-old named Palmer Luckey invented the Oculus Rift. We speak with Luckey and other Oculus employees about how they managed to crack one of technology's toughest riddles and make VR feasible for the first time. Music: "Disco Kerosene" Performed By Circa Tapes (https://ift.tt/1obvlv6)

Original Article : HERE ; This post was curated & posted using : RealSpecific

=> *********************************************** Read Full Article Here: Inside Palmer Luckeys Bid to Build a Border Wall ************************************ =>

Inside Palmer Luckeys Bid to Build a Border Wall was originally posted by Viral News - Feed

#Viral News - Feed

0 notes

savetopnow · 7 years ago

Text

2018-04-05 11 BUSINESS now

BUSINESS

Business Insider

Tennessee Titans unveil new uniforms including a new navy blue helmet

Jordan Spieth rents two houses at The Masters, and it gives him a competitive edge

Trump signs order to send National Guard troops to US-Mexico border

A student shot 5 times while protecting his classmates during the Parkland school shooting finally got out of the hospital

This timeline shows exactly how the YouTube shooting unfolded

Harvard Business Review

Research: When Being a Humble Leader Backfires

Why Apps for Managing Chronic Disease Haven’t Been Widely Used, and How to Fix It

When Your Boss Has an Angry Outburst, What Do They Do Next?

What Makes Entrepreneurs Burn Out

Make Work Engaging Again

Inc

Wisconsin's Sizzling Economy Created A Crippling Labor Shortage. A Team Of Productivity Experts Will Solve It

Millennials Officially Do Business Travel Differently Than Other Generations, and It Might Change Your Company for the Better

This St. Louis Startup has Raised $107 Million (Including an Investment from Mark Zuckerberg)

Content Remains the Most Important Aspect of Virtual Reality to Solve

Mark Zuckerberg Says He Made a 'Huge Mistake' and That Fixing Facebook Will Take Years

New York Times Business

As Spotify Goes Public, Sony Cashes In

Sinclair’s Boss Responds to Criticism: ‘You Can’t Be Serious!’

Stocks Rise on Wall Street Even as Trade Fight Between U.S. and China Grows

How Bill O’Reilly Silenced His Accusers

Facebook Says Cambridge Analytica Harvested Data of Up to 87 Million Users

Reddit Business

Selling my car online and this guy texted me to negotiate, how do I continue? I’m keen to sell it quick, tips please!

Exclusive: Starboard challenges U.S. mall owner Macerich's board

Corporate Governance Undergraduate Course - Final Paper Topic?

I work with a food delivery company. What are some ways we could increase our orders through our partners?

Stranger Things Creators Accused of Lifting Ideas—But Not by Whom You Think

Reddit Startup

How do I know if I’m ready?

I run a semi-popular site. It has a solid userbase, and gets a decent amount of traffic each month... but it's getting expensive and I'm losing that traffic to competitors. Need advice.

1 Startup tools - need help with macros/automation on mac - any good tools you would recommend?

How do you do customer discovery?

Looking to start up a business, I have NO idea what I’m doing. (New York)

The Economist Business and Finance

Spotify makes its stockmarket debut

Gulliver’s most popular posts on the world of travel

Wakandanomics

America’s trade strategy has many risks and few upsides

Technology has upended the world’s advertising giants

Wall Street Journal Business

Facebook Data on 87 Million Users May Have Been Improperly Shared

Shooting Raises Questions About Silicon Valley's Open-Campus Push

Car Makers Step Back From Cars

China Threatens U.S. Cars, Planes and Soy in Response to Trump

Boeing Warns on U.S.-China Trade Risk

Yahoo Finance

Civil jury says man responsible for woman's death at mansion

US F-16 crashes near Las Vegas, third crash in two days

Woman accused of shooting man in head on Facebook Live facing new charge

Erdogan: Turkey to keep pushing Kurds out of Syria's north

A Trade War Could Cost The GOP At The Ballot Box

#business

0 notes

novacabtaxi · 5 years ago

Text

PITCH DECK LIBRARY: Search through over 150 pitch decks that startups including Uber, Postmates, and Airbnb used to raise millions

Startups convince investors to fund their ideas using pitch decks — presentations that combine slideshows with storytelling.

Business Insider regularly seeks out and publishes these decks to give readers an inside look at how successful companies persuaded investors to fund them.

For the first time, these decks have been combined into a single, searchable library that you can explore below.

The more than 150 decks show companies at different stages in their quests for funding. Some are from companies looking for late-stage funding as they neared an IPO. Others show household names in their fledgling years.

Billions of dollars in venture capital flow every year to startups that can articulate their visions in a way that makes investors see dollar signs. Startups do this by creating pitch decks — slideshows that meld imagery, hard data, and storytelling to help investors see how their visions could come alive.

For some time, Business Insider has been publishing individual pitch decks to give readers an inside look at the business strategies of startups, and the particular ways that successful young companies showcased themselves to the investors who then decided to back them.

The complete collection has now been combined in a searchable database that you can access below. New pitch decks will continue to be added going forward.

This trove of more than 150 pitch decks, tracked down by Business Insider reporters over a period of years, covers startups at various stages of their quest for capital, from seed stage fundraisings to later growth stage funding rounds for pre-IPO companies. Some are from hot new companies that have just locked down millions. Some come from household names like Postmates when they were at the earliest stages of their existence.

You can browse the alphabetical listing, and just click the startup’s name to open its pitch deck and the Business Insider story about it. Or you can search the collection by startup name, or funding stage, or geographic region. Clear the search box to return to the full list.

Use these industry categories for the best search results: Cannabis; Cloud; Consumer app; Cybersecurity; Data management (includes analytics, AI); Ecommerce; Enterprise software (includes advertising, marketing, HR); Finance; Fintech (includes personal finance); Hardware; Healthcare; Hospitality; Media; Online learning; Real estate; Retail; Social media; Transportation; Travel; and Virtual reality.

To search by investment stage, type in: pre-Seed; Seed; SeriesA, SeriesB, etc; Growth; or post-IPO.

The searchable regions as we launch the library are: N. America, Europe, and Middle East.

Our searchable pitch deck database:

Join the conversation about this story »

from TAXI NEAR ME https://taxi.nearme.host/pitch-deck-library-search-through-over-150-pitch-decks-that-startups-including-uber-postmates-and-airbnb-used-to-raise-millions/

0 notes

ladystylestores · 5 years ago

Text

Surviving the new normal: What to do when a customer asks to see your startup’s financials

It was 2008 Redwood City, and my startup Makara was riding the early cloud wave born of virtualization, trying to create what is now known as “containerized applications.” Early adopters for this technology were the typical early adopters: financial companies, technology companies, and the occasional retail company reinventing itself.

If your startup is doing it right, you have a website, brochures, videos, and all kinds of materials that make your company look bigger than it actually is. We were 15 people in a $1.25/sq ft office above a movie theater. During the week, our neighboring unit had karaoke blasting, making our conference room sound like we were in a bad movie. We held sales calls on my Nokia cellphone in a little room in the back near the restrooms. We tried to present ourselves as if we weren’t next to the toilets but instead in a San Francisco highrise with the rest of the upper crust.

Startups use similar ploys today in order to present a better reality than really exists — we carefully select our Zoom backgrounds to cover up our kid’s toys and unmade beds. The tradition of putting your best foot forward while working with very limited resources is not an empty gesture; it’s an important test. In my current role as a venture capitalist, if an entrepreneur can convince me they are successful, then I believe they can convince the next person too, and so it goes until they actually are quite successful. If I’m going to take a risk on a new technology that might not be around next year, it should be with someone who can make things look better than they are. I want to buy that dream.

These memories of first starting out and taking extreme caution on how we were perceived came rushing back to me recently when a founder I work with texted me, “Hey, is it normal for a prospect to ask for financial statements?” Interestingly, an hour later a friend who is a VP at a startup called me and explained that while applying for a mortgage the bank had asked for financial statements from his startup. I asked around and this seems to be happening quite a bit more lately than normal. So my answer to the founder was, “Yes it’s somewhat normal, especially right now, but the way to handle it is probably not to just send them over.”

How to handle the request

Here’s how to deal with a request for financials if you get one:

Ask for a call to talk about it. Ask what their concerns are, and try to get a sense of what they really want. Do they want to know if you’ll be around? How can you help them understand that? Who needs to make the judgment? What criteria will they use? A certain amount of runway? Is this requirement actually optional and they just ask everyone?

Propose alternatives. “We’re a private company, we don’t generally share financial information. Could I have you talk to my investor instead? Are you concerned about our financial sustainability? You know we have over 25 customers, five in the Fortune 500, and expect to close 10 more this year — and we’re backed by the same VCs that backed big company X and Y.”

If they insist on financials, compress/redact them to get just to the point of whatever they’re looking for. If they’re looking for sales volume, only show that. If they want to know runway, show cash vs burn. Can you compress income and expenses to one line? Do they need it broken out for some reason? It’s really normal for financial folks to have long conversations about how much detail and what formats of information they’re going to share with each other.

Enlist your investors to help you. They are often masterful at explaining your company to their investors who are not usually knowledgeable about the particular market. Even getting them on the phone with your customer to help them feel a financial person’s excitement for the business and how they would be excited to invest more money if the customer consummated their purchase.

Find social proof. Enlist your other customers if you can to help explain why they found your product essential. Point to news articles, analysts, and other companies they may have heard of to help explain the wave you are riding. In our case with Makara, we were able to point to EMC’s purchase of VMware as a trend that illustrated how our business was riding a wave that would be around for a long time.

Explain your product’s usefulness without jargon or technical terminology in a way that sounds plausible to this purchasing person. Explaining how we were “just like Heroku but for enterprise Java apps” was lost on our customers’ purchasing departments. But teaching them how the latest Turbotax was being delivered on the web instead of in a box and how we would help that effort to scale up was something they could relate to.

The bottom line

Unfortunately few startups are in positions such as Notion, Preset, or Lattice where they have tens of millions in the bank that they don’t need and can just hand over their balance sheet and P&L statements without worrying how they might be perceived. Most are in situations where they have 6-18 months of cash in the bank, are losing money, and the income stream (in these times) is a bit unpredictable, as even stable longtime happy customers may suddenly go out of business.

The thing to realize is that by the time you’re in purchasing, the sponsor of this purchase wants to use your software. You don’t need the purchasing folks to love you or buy your grand vision. They just need to feel the risk is acceptable. But getting them there when your financial statements don’t look like that of a unicorn requires: more selling. Realize that you’re selling to the purchasing department and they probably don’t understand your product or market. You’re not selling them to use it for themselves, you’re selling the idea that other companies like them are going to need your product too, and therefore you will get more customers and receive more funding and stay in business for a very long time.

Issac Roth is a Partner at Shasta Ventures, an early-stage investor in enterprise, consumer, and emerging platform companies. He currently serves on the Board of Beautiful.ai and as an observer to Scalyr.

Source link

قالب وردپرس

from World Wide News https://ift.tt/3gp1lwb

#World Wide News

0 notes

officialmattw-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Week 15- The Near Future

After 15 weeks of talking about design and its history, I see a new era of architecture, art, and design coming to the world since we are becoming a more advanced world. I see more use of typography is signs for marketing in the metropolitan areas, more symmetrical style designs in architecture so they can cut costs on new buildings and be more efficient, and more multi functional modernist designs to consumer products like phones that turn into computers so that they can be more efficient. The future to me is going to look more technological and different than it is now. Since global warming and emissions are becoming a problem, governments and private industries is the near future might start designing cities in the sky bringing all new architectural style and approach to the field. Since holograms and virtual reality are becoming more prevalent for future use, i believe they might start using it to help make building, marketing products, and testing cars easier and more efficient while being consumer oriented. Holograms and Virtual Reality will make everything easier to access wherever and whenever we need things. Some projects I believe will be used in the near future is the Tesla underground transportation highway with car elevators for entrance and exit. I believe this project will be used in almost all metropolitan areas that are congested with traffic because the project will severally make the above ground roadways less congested and easier to move around in. This project will also create less emissions for the areas as well. Another project I believe will also been seen in the future will be the hyperloop one. Hyperloop will probably replace all city subways and long-haul passenger trains such Amtrak. The hyperloop is high speed train propelled by compressed air inside a tunnel tube. The third and last project I believe we will be seeing in the near future will be fully autonomous cars. Since so many private startup companies such as Tesla and Polestar are trying to create them right now along with the regular car makers like Mercedes Benz and others. Autonomous cars are the future for cars because they are marketed as the safest cars that so technologically advanced that will also bring the percentage of car accidents and deaths down dramatically. Overall, I believe the future of design will be the biggest thing in the history of the world yet with everything that will be made in the near future.

#designsuvery journal

0 notes

jonnynow · 5 years ago

Link

It brought me to write down this article, what if the future is not safe to roam around in the world. What are the possible changes, it might bring in. I love existing world and its practices, I also love to hangout with my friends and families. But due to recent developments, I thought these things will happen if things go wrong. World is beautiful place, people complaint about climatic change, eco warriors, green teams, wild life representatives already having their thoughts about existing world. Today I saw street dogs, which usually stay near to the roads, it came across all the hurdles, now living next to our streets. No one has fear if they bite us, they stood like, this is our boundary. What if the same scenario continues., Life is beautiful, no other living thing has its beauty like we own it., so in future births' will have so much complexities, also ensure healthy babies to this world. Schools will be cut down, students will go online and tests will be conducted in basis of their ability. Teachers will be online presenters, paid by online platforms. Platforms bring either Virtual Reality, 3D efforts to bring the live environment to students to enhance the materials. Here after BHK will be replaced with BHKGA, Bedroom Hall Kitchen Gym & Art room. So that people keep their health also Offices will be occupied by Art rooms. People start improve their soft skills through these art rooms, also convertable to the office rooms, where they can take care of day to day businesses. Social security and Aadhar will be connected with each and every citizens, their records will be in data. HR recruitments will take extra points, how the candidate managing the financial, family & facilities. So that he can manage office works at home. Many companies will start their startups or big companies change their strategy from working from company to work from home. Data will be arises that due to the school and office closures, green pasture lands were created. No Human couriers, parceling will be done by drones, which are self-sustain to clean themselves from external viruses and bacterias. People liked it very much, even cooking went with the help of AI and Robots started understanding the Un-classifed informations about their taste buds and keeping humans healthier. Surya Namaskara at morning will be mandatory so that, people will get Vitamin D from it. Home checker for cleaner environment will be installed, gives report to government about the molecules that home is in-taking. Social media platforms closed soon, also TV networks will fall down. People went more for games as they want to utilize the leisure period. Working from home, monitors, laptops, iPads, setup kit will be availed in induction. Login time will be captured in laptop login time, there will be no separate tool capturing it. Personal works detected at laptops and iPads employees will be warned. Employees were allowed to take the work which they are interested, Lot of collaboration with in companies, so that people use the synergy to work on other organizations with their favourite projects. Do you have more thoughts

#News Updates #Parallel world - Human habits

0 notes

mobileappdevelopmentservice · 6 years ago

Link

Give us a brief introduction to your company?

After a modest beginning in the year 2011, Solution Analysts has become a leading enterprise software solutions provider today. Our company has served over 350 corporate clients globally during our exhilarating journey of over eight years.

We provide enterprise-grade solutions across various industry sectors in the domains of mobile app, web, and eCommerce. I feel pride in mentioning that our team of experienced developers has quickly adopted technological advancements while making robust and futuristic software solutions.

What are the services you offer to your clients?

At Solution Analysts, we believe in providing end-to-end solutions in thriving domains of mobile apps, web and eCommerce domains. Therefore, our services are not limited to developing feature-rich mobile apps.

Our array of top-notch services includes

E-Commerce website development

Enterprise website development

Enterprise app development

Cross-platform app development

App store optimization

IoT application development

Consulting and Implementation

Maintenance and Support

In this intensely competitive era, what technologies, services and project model can give you an edge over your competitors?

When it comes to the software development domain, we never believe in competing with any developer company. Our focus remains on delivering client-centric and result-oriented solutions in a cost-effective way. We have supported many startups and SMEs to take their business to the next level. We feel that success lies in the client’s happiness and satisfaction. But, as a leading IT solution provider, we like to stay updated with the latest technology trends. For example, we have recently forayed into Blockchain and IoT app development. We have also embraced emerging technologies like AR and AI in our high-end enterprise software solutions.

Again, I will mention that we are not integrating advancements to get an edge over our competitors, but we do so to give our clients a competitive edge over their peers!

After service is a necessary part of development. How do you provide customer support to your client?

We believe in long-term business relationships. And therefore, our after-sales services are simply the best as we take care of every important aspect after delivering the solution. This is one of the major reasons why we have got over 80% repeat business.

We offer maintenance and technical assistance to our global clients in both ways: online and on-site.

What latest technologies and tools you’re planning to implement for mobile app development?

As I mentioned, we have forayed into blockchain and IoT app development domains. In the coming years, we intend to use cutting-edge tools and advancements in futuristic technologies like AR, AI, VR, and ML. In line with our vision to bring automation to the client’s business processes, we are going to use the latest techniques in developing custom-oriented software solutions.

What’s your approach to creating interactive and addictive UX/UI of mobile apps and websites?

Well, we always keep the end users in mind while developing mobile apps and websites. Apart from adopting an agile approach, our experienced designers take care of every aspect of UI/UX and the usability of our solutions. We do usability testing and ensure that our app and web solutions provide an engaging experience with visually appealing design patterns.

What are various technologies you used to make this app a reality?

We develop Android, iOS, and cross-platform apps that can meet the client’s business requirements. We use cutting-edge tools and technologies to transform our client’s creative idea into reality.

Here are technology stacks we use so far

For Android app development

Kotlin

Java

Android SDK

Photoshop

Android Material App Design

For iOS app development

Swift

Objective-C

iOS SDK

Cocoa Touch

AppCode

Cocoa Touch

Apple Xcode

ARKit

Test Flight Beta

For Cross-platform/Hybrid app development

HTML5

CSS

JavaScript

Grunt, Gulp, Bower

AngularJS

Ionic

React Native

PhoneGap

Xamarin

Native Script

How has being an entrepreneur affected your family and social life?

Luckily my social life was not much affected because of my wife’s proactive approach. Her cooperation has helped me to manage and improve the social relations in the initial years of establishment of Solution Analysts.

However, family life was somewhat affected as I could not spend much time at home at the beginning of Solution Analysts. Here also, I should mention that my wife has assisted me a lot. She handled all the administration-related activities so that I could focus on the project execution. After some years, everything has got settled and I could maintain the subtle balance between work and life.

Whom do you consider your idol or biggest motivator?

Well, to start with, my father has remained the biggest motivator throughout my life. His life lessons still guide and lead me toward achieving the goals. However, I do admire many people for various qualities like courage, innovative approach, and leadership.

Share best 3 applications which your company created or used for business.

In our exciting journey of over eight years, we have developed over 350 apps for the global clientele. We have made many innovative and outstanding apps to date. I would like to mention WYA App and Threadshare App from the array of best apps.

‎Way - #1 Best Parking App (Free, App Store) →

What are your hobbies? What do you do in your non-work time?

Playing Cricket and watching movies are my favorite pastimes. I am a family man and always prefer to keep the family members with me. For example, when I play cricket with my team, I like to keep my son with me as a player.

I spend the non-work time reading self-help books. I occasionally do meditation and other activities that keep me away from any sort of stress.

‎Thread: Share What You Wear (Free, App Store) →

Have you raised any funding? Or Have any plans for the funding?

No. We have not raised any funding yet. Also, there is no plan for the same in the near future.

Give your opinions on how far this app revolution can make a difference in the technology world?

One thing is certain, mobile apps are here to stay. The level of app complexity is going to increase amid growing competition and ever-changing business requirements. This app revolution is going to continue for a long time, and technological advancements will make an impact on the development process.

Thinking about the difference made by the app revolution in the technology world, I would mention that as we witness the paradigm shift from individual apps to an enterprise software solution, we will see the advent of more advanced and next-gen apps with futuristic features. Such apps will be capable of offering the benefits of IoT and AI to the users.

What are the challenges you see in the outsourcing industry?

The outsourcing industry is thriving, but unfortunately, many service providers still rely on traditional processes while working on the client’s projects. The suppliers are confused about selecting the right outsourcing partner amid the growing number of stereotype outsourcing companies.

In coming years, as the suppliers are getting more concerned about their projects, the outsourcing companies need to address the challenges related to timezone difference, integration of advanced technology, use of cutting-edge tools, and the like to survive and thrive.

What’s more, though the virtual world can make the life easy when it comes to finding an outsourcing service provider, the in-person meetings are still preferable to get a clear picture and build the long-term business relationships. Though online validation is good, the physical validation has an upper hand.

Mention the ways you use to introduce new updates to your team.

Well, I never enforce any new thing directly on my team. Whenever I come across any technology update, I get into it before introducing it among my team of directors. At SA, we have no constraints of predefined processes because technology keeps on changing.

Whenever there is a need to implement technological advancements, I facilitate a healthy discussion between our directors of different departments. I also define the accountability and responsibility of all the directors and project managers to keep their respective teams updated.

What’s your step to enter into wearable tech and IOT revolution?

We’ve already entered in these futuristic technologies. We are working on providing end-to-end IoT solutions to the clients. Right now, we are actively present in the prototyping of the IoT app and providing consultancy to our esteemed clients to get the most of this revolutionary technology. We aim at offering enterprise-grade solutions from devices to app development to implementing the IoT network in the business system.

Anything, you would like to say to our readers, upcoming entrepreneurs or Startup companies?

Well, I find the posts of App Story interesting. I am sure that readers can stay informed by reading the App Story blogs.

For entrepreneurs and startups, I wish them all success. They should always remember that there is no secret sauce for success. If you follow ethical ways and focus on your goals, you can achieve success for sure. Also, never expect to make money overnight. When you focus on raising funds without establishing your business, you may end up making a mess.

More details Visit : Solution Analyst www.solutionanalysts.com

The post Interview With Kalpesh Patel CEO and Founder Solution Analysts appeared first on AppStoryOrg.

via AppStoryOrg

#IFTTT #AppStoryOrg

0 notes