10 Days. 10 Stories. Part 8–2017
Sustaining momentum and turning a company into a growth machine is hard. And it is dangerous to ignore the one fundamental rule of business:
- Money in > Money out
No matter how much cash you might have in the bank at a given moment, you need to have a viable plan to always ensure that funding flows into the company. Depending on the type of venture this doesn't have to be customer revenue, it could be investor capital or subsidies. We broke this rule so badly in 2017. Was it bad advice? Poor leadership? Magical thinking? Probably all of the above.
Basically we decided to throw caution to the wind, take a leap of faith and use the cash pile we had accumulated to ‘fund growth’. Up until end of 2016 we had been able to self finance a decent amount of exploratory activities (tradeshows, making prototypes, conferences, networking) as we pivoted out of the original oil & gas focus. Some good customer projects brought decent revenue but we neglected to keep our sales pipeline full.
There was another issue, our experimental Internet of Things (ELIOT) product line needed further refinement. The user experience was a bit rough. Our clients gave great feedback. There was internal conflict brewing about to best to proceed.
The idea was that our IoT kits would be used by clients to ideate, identify use cases, build prototypes and conduct experiments to measure the business value of the solution. It was a great concept but we found it difficult to go beyond basic prototyping.
We expanded the team again, adding a technical role. Before we had actually defined responsibilities and objectives. Bad idea. Our new hire wasn’t a good fit and left after two months.
It was somewhat ironic that our marketing collateral referred to “a jump into uncharted territories” — that was our situation, not necessarily the market!
The big highlight in Q1 2017 was the Grenoble Maker Faire. We had positioned fieldcloud as part of the Maker Movement, believing that this particular community was the future of product development and delivery (“This thing wasn’t invented. It was assembled.”). Perhaps we were ahead of our time, perhaps we hadn’t properly connected the dots between a hobbyist movement and the real industrial enterprise world.
In hindsight, there is clearly a compelling case for transforming traditional industry through new ways of working. The Maker Movement is a waypoint on the journey, not the destination. It was like we needed to learn this lesson the hard way!
During the Maker Faire there were two speaking engagements. I gave a Failcon talk about fieldcloud’s journey so far and some examples of where we had failed in our original mission in the oil & gas industry.
Second talk was during a panel discussion entitled “Les Makers refont le monde” (Makers fix/reshape the world). That was a definitely a cool experience.
A few weeks later it was time for the third edition of the SIdO IoT tradeshow in Lyon. We had a booth at the Minalogic digital cluster pavilion and ran a bunch of demos showing our original ns-box edge computing appliance, our ELIOT kits and tweeting Minitel.
There was a clear shift in the IoT landscape that year. The hype had passed and there was growing demand for real industrialized products and solutions. Prototyping was on the way out. Real applications were on the way in.
Was was very interesting and a bit disturbing was that we did not sign any new clients during SIdO 2017. Our offer was simply not resonating.
We ran a series of IoT hands-on experimentation workshops for non-technical roles at Grenoble Ecole de Management, educating business school post-graduate students about our view of how IoT will change the world.
In the meantime we were struggling, the decision to burn cash from our pile and the average size of client engagement meant that we started to lose money.
One of the more interesting IoT projects we did was for a Lyon-based startup building innovative parking as a service solutions. We had helped this startup in 2016 with a proof of concept and now we were building a real solution to go into a customer site.
Another corporate client signed up for a series of IoT discovery workshops in three countries, France, Germany & the USA. It was a great experience but a commercial disaster.
It was time to take break after our second client IoT workshop near Detroit, Michigan USA. I needed to clear my head and figure out a way to turn business around as fieldcloud was not in good shape in July 2017. The video below is raw, and from the heart.
Back in Grenoble after the break it was time to get serious and work out a different game plan. Our telecom operator client in London was one of the corporate sponsors of a Pan-African ICT development initiative called Smart Africa. Our client asked us to jointly run a series of workshops in African countries to raise awareness of IoT applications and kickstart the process of collaboration between government ministries/agencies, academic institutions and private sector. fieldcloud’s advantage is that we are a bilingual French/English company and can deliver solutions in either language. Now it was time to grab the opportunity and do something meaningful.
First stop was Niamey, Niger.
We ran a 3-day workshop, hosted by the Nigerien Information Society Agency, ANSI.
The advantage of working with a satellite operator is that you can be connected anywhere on the planet via their network.
The second and third workshop days was all about hands-on prototyping with ELIOT IoT kits and LoRaWAN connectivity, plus a session on collaborative project ideation and use case development.
The energy was incredible. Passionate people, great ideas and a desire to be sustainable. It was exactly the breath of fresh air and new stimulus for fieldcloud.
Each team was comprised of people from public sector, private sector (startups & established enterprises) & academic institutions. The output from the collaborative project sessions was compelling and actionable. We didn’t just grab attention but facilitated a whole new way of working together to leverage technology for sustainable development.
Next stop was Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire to run the same IoT for African Smart Cities and Connected Communities workshops for the Ivorian ministry of posts, electronic communications and digital economy.
Teamwork and co-execution between fieldcloud and our client was a real highlight. This is why it is so important to build relationships and align interests across the value chain.
The collaborative project use case sessions finished with a 5 minute interview with each team to present and review their output. It was a great way of capturing the deliverable.
The workshops were concluded with a wrap up session from the Director General for Digital Economy Mr Lassina Konate.
Then it was time to head back home to Grenoble and jump into another interesting activity organized by students from Grenoble Ecole de Management. If you haven’t heard of the Hult Prize, now you do. Change, sustainable development, youth — with a head full of insights from Niger & Cote d’Ivoire it was just brilliant to work with a bunch of enthusiastic young people pitching solutions for human society.
The following morning after the Hult Prize event it was time to fly to Kigali Rwanda for workshops and meetings hosted by the Rwanda Information Society Authority (RISA).
Telecom House is the epicenter of the ICT ecosystem in Rwanda, including data center colocation, a cybersecurity incident response center, the RISA HQ, Carnegie Mellon University Africa (before the campus moved to a new site), the Rwanda ICT Cluster and two very interesting organizations — kLab & FabLab Rwanda.
Making new contacts with people passionate about technology for sustainable development and human society continued to shift my mindset into a new gear.
Almost the entire top floor of Telecom House is shared between Fablab Rwanda and kLab. kLab is a pre-incubation space for digital skills and entrepreneur development amongst young people.
fieldcloud met with the University of Rwanda College of Science & Technology (UR-CST) and signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on developing the African Center of Excellence in IoT (ACE-IoT).
Even though fieldcloud had a disastrous year financially — we managed to wipe out our cash reserves and had to reduce our workforce — we found a powerful reason to not give up. Placing technology at the service of human society and sustainable development is the right thing for all of us to do.
fieldcloud was interviewed by the Grenoble Chamber of Commerce Magazine, Présences. The article was published in the December 2017 edition and we are proud of this public statement of record.
Heading into to 2018 was a scary time. It was time to reinvent the company again and find a way to survive. More on that in our next story…
10 Days. 10 Stories. A special feature celebrating fieldcloud’s adventure over the last decade and how we became the company we are today.
