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Building an Enterprise Software Startup
#Startups/Entrepreneurship
Abinash Tripathy
It seems every venture-funded startup wants to be an enterprise software company. Yet, selling to the enterprise is challenging and requires special skills and experience. This episode explores the challenges and solutions with someone who has successfully built a software startup with large enterprise customers.
Abinash Tripathy is co-founder and CEO of Helpshift, the world's leading customer support platform for mobile. Abinash brings more than 17 years of experience within technology, Internet and mobile, having created and run a number of early and growth stage companies. Prior to founding Helpshift, Abinash created and ran a number of early and growth stage companies where he was responsible for conceptualizing and delivering the world's first Unified communications platform, Mobile Photo Messaging and MMS products to the market.
Michael Krigsman:
Welcome to Episode 191 of CXOTalk! I'm Michael Krisgman. Today, we are talking about enterprise software, and how do you build an enterprise software startup? We talked with founders, we talked with VCs and entrepreneurs, and everybody wants to build for the enterprise, sell to CIOs, sell to lines of business across a company, but it's really, really hard to do. And our guest, Abinash Tripathy, who is the CEO and founder of Helpshift, which is a startup that has managed to cross that chasm, and is successfully working with very large organizations. And so, we're going to talk about enterprise software. As always, there is a Tweet-chat going on simultaneous with this live conversation, and so join us using the hashtag #cxotalk; and you can ask your questions of Abinash, and you can join the conversation!
So, Abinash Tripathy, how are you?
Abinash Tripathy:
Great! Thank you Michael for having me on the show!
Well, it's awesome you're going to be here, and you're the CEO and founder of Helpshift, so let's being by giving us a brief background about Helpshift.
Great! Helpshift is an in-app customer service product. We built this product because we saw something that was changing in the environment. Consumers are using apps, employers and companies are using apps, and apps are becoming sort of the mainstay in the mobile era. And what we observed is that user behavior is changing as well, that people don't want to be on the phone or email someone for customer service, but they want to engage in messaging-like behavior, which is very attuned to the mobile-centric world we live in. And, so we brought that paradigm into the app environment, and started working with very, very large brands like Microsoft and Supercell, who are sort of the leaders in the mobile space, and delivered the first mobile, in-app customer service experience and we have lots of customers now who enjoy the product every day.
So, tell us about the company in terms of how long have you been established, how much money you've raised, give us some of the vital stats about that.
Yeah, great. So, we've been around since mid-2012; the middle of 2012. We didn't have a product, we had a very small team; and we built the product, launched the product in the market in the middle of 2013, and then we've been selling the product since then. And basically, we're a post-Series B-stage company, we've got 20 employees worldwide, and we've got lost of customers, and it's a great feeling to be part of a company that's really making an impact.
Abinash, as I said in the introduction, it seems like almost every startup these days wants to be an enterprise software company, and it's not an easy thing to do. Can you summarize for us the challenges: Why is it so hard to sell successfully to the enterprise, and then, as we have this discussion, we'll talk about some of the ways of overcoming those challenges, and some of the things you've done and the lessons you've learned.
Sure. You know, I've been part of the Valley startup ecosystem for a while now, and you see this sort of cycle where the companies that want to be, sort of, B2C companies, you know, B2C is cool, and then there's a slump in the Valley, with B2C valuation, and then you see startups gravitating towards enterprise. And I think we're going through that right now and a lot of companies believe that they want to be enterprise companies, and to sell to the enterprise, as the focus right now is on making money and being profitable.
But having said that, I think enterprise companies, or enterprise startups that cater to enterprises - very different type of startup. So, take our startup as an example. We really focused on the very large customers from Day One. It's painful to be in that kind of space because it takes a while to build a company, it takes a while to close these deals with these large companies: they have a lot of process, they want to do diligence, they want to make sure that you as a company can meet their needs and be there for the long term because they're making sort of a long-term bet. So, the sales cycles are very long and you have to be very prepared to deal with companies like that and with longer sales cycles. And then, once you start building up your pool of reference-able customers, then your company starts to excel from a growth standpoint, because bigger companies or the bigger enterprises, the way they do business, is they look at who in their peer group you have on your logo board. So that's kind of important. And as you build a lot of social proof that you are working with a bunch of enterprise-class companies, then your sales cycles get shorter, and your growth starts to accelerate.
You say that you built the company from the ground up thinking about the enterprise market. What did that involve?
I think if you really look at the enterprise market and ask yourself what's so unique about the enterprise market, the first thing is, that we all agree on, is that enterprise is really the definition that we give to companies that have attained a certain scale. So, scale is a very important aspect of doing business with them. So, when we started selling to our first customer, it was in the gaming vertical, and in the mobile space, gaming had the most scale, so some of the customers we worked with had in excess of hundreds of millions of daily active users, and some of our largest customers in the gaming space generate about forty to fifty thousand customer conversations, or tickets, per chat, so whatever you want to call them, every day. And, they service that number of chats with about two thousand agents sitting in contact centers around the world. And, that sort of scale is something that smaller startups don't have to deal with Day One, because a lot of the enterprise-focused, or what I say B2B, startups focus on the sort of the long tail, Day one, And don't have to work on these scale challenges. They're usually working with companies that have about five to ten employees, a hundred contacts a day, and they build a solution towards that market, and then they can't really go and address the scale needs of larger enterprises. Scale is a very important aspect of enterprise software.
The second one is really being very flexible when it comes to working on some requirements that may be very a enterprise, integration or compliance-oriented requirement. So when you work with very large enterprises, they may have their own internal systems that you need to integrate with, that are not standard off the shelf, or Valley-standard stack of software. So, you need to have great APIs, you need to have, really, the flexibility to work with those companies in order to build, sort-of, integrations into their systems.
And I also feel like the compliance requirements - that those could be daunting to a startup trying to work with enterprises, right? So, for example, if you're trying to work with financial services, then PCI compliance becomes important, if you're working with the healthcare vertical then HIPAA becomes important; and we were working in the gaming sector originally and COPPA was very important. You know, COPPA is a law that establishes the rules for service providers about collecting information from children who play games, or whatever. And so we have to implement sort of, these compliances in our product very early in our life cycle to deal with verticals like gaming. So, that's another aspect of being flexible and being able to understand the need of the enterprise and being able to respond to it.
So, as you were starting the company, how did you get to the point where these large companies would take you seriously? Because you're providing in-app help, and so a large company like Microsoft or a large gaming company has an app, a mobile app, and you're providing the help infrastructure, so to speak, that allows users to interact and chat with that company to get customer service, and that's pretty mission-critical for those companies. So, how did you get to the point where they were willing to trust you with that set of jewels? Obviously, it doesn't happen overnight, so when you were at the early stages, how did you reach that point?
Yeah, I think the key here is differentiation. If you went and created a product that just was a just a better customer service platform, and was sort of the red ocean, what, you know Bill Black, one of our investors likes to call it, the red ocean. Let's say we were marginally better than the other customer service products out there, then we would have had a much bigger challenge in seeing these large companies; that they have to try this. But, what we did was we were the first in market with this in-app, native, mobile customer service experience that was modeled around chat, and nobody else did it, and we were able to convince large companies that this was a hugely differentiated service that customers would really enjoy.
So, our first large gaming customer, which was Supercell: they had the traditional, sort of very modern helpdesk that's available, that most of the companies in the Valley use, and then they basically saw the differentiation and they saw how much better their customers' lives would be to do it all in-app, inside the app, inside the game. And prior to this, the old customer service product they were using, the user experience was very poor. Basically, the users had to leave the game, they had to go online, on mobile phone, to a website that wasn't even optimized for mobile, search for FAQs there, fire off an email ticket, and then come back to the game. So there was a lot of friction, and we got through all of that friction and showed Supercell that a user could just press one button inside the game and have access to customer service, and natively just like a mobile app on their phone. And that really got them thinking. They gave us the opportunity to trial our service inside one of their newer games because they were not willing to risk changing their workflow. They had a team that was about one hundred to two hundred people at that point, and they were not willing to change the system unless they were convinced that the value was not marginal. It was a huge step forward.
And so, that first pilot that we did with them proved that the experience was so much better, the users loved it, and so they made the decision to switch their entire support offering. In fact, they were one of the boldest customers because they went out and turned off email as a channel, turned off every channel that they had and basically made in-app customer service the primary channel for all their users.
But, how did you get them to trust you? I think trust is the key factor here.
Yeah, so Supercell is a very, very interesting company. They're one of the largest gaming companies, you've read about them in the press, they make billions of dollars every year from their four mobile games, and at the point they started with us, they were already a multibillion revenue stream company; so they weren't willing to take big risks. But, because the experience we showed them was so powerful - actually, the way it all started was one of my sales heads, one of my sales cofounders, or one of the cofounders that had sales, basically nagged them for a demo, finally got to meet them at some sort of event, presented them with the experience, and they were sort of intrigued. And then, a few months later, their COO who was flying down from Finland, basically emailed us saying, "Hey, I'm going to be in San Francisco. I'm going to stop by your office, let's talk." And so, we were very excited, he came down to our office; and we sort of explained our company, our culture, and how we build products, and he was very intrigued and he said, "Ok, I'm going to give you an opportunity in one of our newer games without disrupting what we already have. And if you are able to prove in that game that you are able to perform and meet our expectations, solve all the pain we're having with our current solution provider, then we will adopt you in all our games." And so, that pilot ran for about three months, and once that pilot was done, basically the results were on the table for the company to make a very educated decision, and they decided to unplug their traditional CRM and move over entirely to Helpshift.
And that customer has scaled all the way from a few hundred agents to a few thousand agents, handling in excess of forty to fifty thousand contacts per day. When I say "contacts", I mean real tickets or chats per day, and a lot of our larger customers have that sort of scale.
And once you close a big customer like that in the gaming vertical like Supercell, it basically draws a lot of attention to you from their peers. Everybody wanted to be Supercell in the gaming vertical, and so they were curious as to who we were. And we have our branding prominently in the SDK that we provide, so when people open up a Supercell game and and go to "Help", they can actually see "Powered by Helpshift." A lot of people noticed that, and they called us, and wanted to learn as to why we were better and how we were able to help a company like Supercell, and that sort of drove adoption in the gaming vertical.
And so of the first set of customers, the early adopters of Helpshift were mostly gaming customers, and really that made a lot of sense to us because if you look at the app ecosystem, the market we were going after, eighty - ninety percent of the revenue in that ecosystem is generated by gaming companies. Just to be a dominant player there, we got to work with some of the major thought leaders of the mobile space. The gaming industry by far is one of the most advanced when it comes to mobile. And we took all of those learnings, put it into the product, and now we can go after non-gaming verticals. We have customers in the e-commerce vertical like Target, we have customers in the productivity space like Microsoft, we have publishing customers like Flipboard, and we have media companies like Virgin Media, we have IoT companies like Honeywell and Suunto as customers, Wordpress.
So, basically we have gone beyond gaming, but I would say that the initial part of our life was mostly gaming. Gaming had a lot of scale, it taught us a lot about how to work with companies that had a lot of scale, and which is very important to the enterprise. And then we started to work with companies like Zynga, who for example, were using another traditional CRM system and moved over entirely to Helpshift. And, they had a lot of customs for API kind of needs, they had integrations to a lot of their backend systems, and with Zynga we learned how to build integrations into their backend systems and developed APIs. So, we met a lot of their enterprise needs there, and then we already had started working on COPPA and things for compliance.
And so, I think that the focus we had from Day One to go after large enterprises, gives you the opportunity...Actually, it's hard, but it gives you the opportunity to go specialize. And when you specialize, it really shows.
And so, from the beginning, you specialized in the gaming industry, somebody made an introduction or one of your investors made an introduction, and they sort of tentatively adopted you, it worked, you grew it from there. And so you basically had an anchor foothold in the gaming industry, and from there, you were able to expand out. And during that early period, as you were going through that expansion, as they were trying you out, what kind of pressures or tensions did it create, or challenges did it create, inside Helpshift? Because at that point, you know, you've signed them up for a trial or a proof-of-concept, and you have to deliver, and then it only gets bigger. So, what kind of tensions, challenges, pressures did it create inside Helpshift at that time?
I'm glad you asked this question, because when we signed on Supercell, we had absolutely no idea who we were taking on. This was the largest gaming company in terms of active users, probably the toughest of the toughest to deal with. And having them as your first customer, literally, if you could not respond to a customer like that, could be a company-killing event. So, we didn't shy away from it, we took on that scale. It was incredibly hard, I still remember when they first brought on...so they were very satisfied with how we worked in their sort of, small new game. And the new game didn't have a lot of scale, because it was the new game. And they had this giant game called "Clash of Clans" which is basically this, hundreds of millions of daily active users, and while we knew of the scale, our systems were probably not ready for that level of scale yet. When they first brought on Clash of Clans, when we first launched Clash of Clans, our servers were going down because we couldn't handle the load. And I remember spending twenty days and nights with my engineers in the trenches, sort of keeping the system up, rearchitecting on the fly, adding capacity. We had to re-do a bunch of our software to meet that sort of scale. It's called "refactor" in the geek speak. We had to refactor a lot of code to make it work at that scale. And, I remember having a couple of conversations with the COO of Supercell, and he was like, "Hey, are you guys sure you can meet our volume?" And I had to convince him that we had it, that we could have it in a couple of weeks, we would be past all of that, and we would just keep scaling, and lo and behold, two weeks later our software just kept scaling. And so we're holding billions of events every day on our stack, basically today we are handling in excess of three to four billion transactions per day on our servers; and thanks to Supercell we were able to do that, and they gave us the opportunity, they were willing to be patient, they gave us a little bit of time, we were able to respond in that time; and then once we proved to them that we were able to solve these really hard problems, we really became very deep partners with them.
And that partnership - and this is another, sort-of lesson of working with large enterprises. So, we have weekly calls with Supercell's team. They have thousands of agents, use our system, so obviously they're the most demanding customer we have. We don't put them through the normal support process of raising tickets and issues with our company, our support managers talk directly with Supercell on a weekly basis, we take inputs from them on what's working, not working, input that directly into product and respond very quickly. And, we have quarterly business reviews with them, they come to our location once or twice a year, we go to Finland once or twice a year, and we work on joint roadmaps.
And so, it's very different from working with small enterprises, where, in the SMB space, a lot of the service providers don't even meet their customers, or have phone calls with them. They just email them, or Slack them and that's about the contact they have. But when you work with these large enterprises, they really are true partners in a very, very partnership-oriented sort of mode.
What about the sales cycle? So, for example, so it sounds like the sales cycle originally for Supercell was pretty straightforward, because you had that introduction. But, a startup having to deal with RFPs and RFQs and having to travel to meet decision committees, that often large companies have in place, and the sales cycle can be three months, six months, nine months; can be a year. As a startup, how did you manage that aspect of it?
Well, I mean if you're selling to the enterprise, and you're consciously building an enterprise to sell to the enterprise, all of those things are a given. You have to do those things to be able to sell to an enterprise, including the long sales cycles. So, fortunately for me, I started my career in 1995 Silicon Valley, and I was working for Oracle, where in my early days, I learned how to sell to very, very large enterprises. And from there, I went into extreme, sort of enterprise selling and I was part of a startup that invented WAP, and we put mobile browsers and mobile features back in the days when we had those feature phones - those flip phones. And, we used to work with telcos, which was an extreme level of enterprise sales. So, selling to large enterprises is one level of complexity and selling to a telco is sort of a next level of complexity.
And, so, having done that for many years, I think it's important to have that experience. If you don't have that experience in the Valley and you're trying to build an enterprise company, you won't see the value of working with these companies, being patient, and investing up-front to go work with companies of that size, and you'll always go after what's easy. So you see a lot of these B2B companies in the Valley, they do what's easy. They'll go after small companies - five, ten person companies - that don't have a lot of complex requirements, and build for them. Then they find that it's really hard to move upstream, and go sell to the enterprise.
And, you know, there's a reason why Salesforce is Salesforce, and Zendesk is Zendesk. They're two different-sized companies, from a revenue and size standpoint, and they probably have an equal number of customers, right? The revenue difference is 5 - 10x, right? Because one sells to very large enterprises, and the other one sells to sort of, you know the long tail.
What is the advice that you have towards startups who want to sell to the enterprise, but they look at these long sales cycles; in many cases, getting introductions is hard. But once they have an introduction and the sales cycle, the need to invest is very, very difficult. It's just that delay, that time, is so expensive for a startup and it's cash that they don't necessarily have and time that they don't necessarily have.
Yeah, so for companies that sell to the enterprise, the scaling and the growth is slower than those selling to the SMB, initially. So, let's say you take two companies: one selling to the SMBs and the other selling to the enterprise-sized companies, and they start their journey at the same time. Chances are the SMB-focused company will scale much faster than the enterprise-focused company in the initial years, right? And, so after the three-four year mark, it looks like the SMB company is ahead. But then, once that market starts to peak out, or, you know, bottom out, and it happens very rapidly in those sort of SMB segments where you run out of all the SMB that company can sell to, and then you make the decision to go up-market, and then your product is nowhere near close to being up-market at that point. Literally any company… I haven't seen a single SMB-focused company become a successful enterprise company. I haven't seen any examples of that. Nor have I seen examples in the reverse where you see enterprise-focused companies being really good at selling to SMB. I think they're two separate markets, they're two separate needs or requirements, and different types of companies will cater to those segments.
That's really…So, the biggest thing, coming back to your question, which is "What do you really need to do to be an enterprise-class company?" The first thing you need to do is you need to know that you are building a long company, or a long-term company. Basically, you need to go find patient investors, investors who have the patience to build a longer-term, enterprise-class company, and are not looking for that SMB, fast-growth kind of model. So, it starts with picking the right investor. In the Valley there are those investors that really want the rocket ship, B2C-style, no-sales kind of companies. They basically tell a founder, "Oh, you should not have any salespeople at all, it should only be inbound marketing," so there's investors that prefer that. And then there are investors that believe that, "You should start working with large enterprises. It's going to be slower. Build an outbound team."
And the two types of companies are very different. If you're looking at the SMB companies, they're investing a lot of dollars in marketing, in digital marketing, and not as much in sales. And you look at enterprise-focused companies: less dollars in marketing, more dollars in BDR [Business Development Resources], outbound, inbound, having account reps and inside sales. Very different models, right?
Now, the other thing I'd like to add is if you think about how we grew as a company, before we built our sales, the BDR, SDR machinery, the first thing we invested in was customer support and customer success. Because, when you work with enterprise customers, they are big brands, and you don't want to fail them, so you want to make sure you have the best customer support and customer success teams in place to handle these big accounts and make them successful, and they become case studies. They go around to the world telling them how good you are as a solution provider, and then companies in their class come in, inbound. And when that engine starts to work, it's very powerful.
So the focus, then, requires patience, and you begin with having a customer success team. And I'm assuming at the very beginning of the company, everybody is focused there, but quickly; and it sounds like you kind of specialized in having a customer success team, in order to make sure that the enterprise customers you're selling to, were just delighted with everything they were getting from Helpshift.
Yeah, and initially when we started, the founders… and actually I just want to correct you: Supercell we didn't win because our investors made an introduction, we won because our head of sales cofounder was extremely persistent, and he was a true hustler that went and literally stalked Supercell at events, and somehow got a meeting with some of their people. So, it was pure hustle that basically got us Supercell as a customer. And after that, it was a lot of keeping those customers really happy and engaged, and that happened. So, before we built out the success team, the product team, which was headed by me, and the engineers, we made sure that Supercell was a massive success. And then as we brought on bigger customers on that scale, we built out our customer support team first, before we started building out our SDR, BDR, AE teams.
That's really interesting. So, you found your first big customer purely on the basis of intense hustle, and then you made sure they were really happy.
So, what about building up inside the company, what kinds of people did you have to hire? What was the background of the folks that you brought into Helpshift as you were growing in this enterprise domain?
Yeah, so, if you really think about what kind of people we need, we needed customer success people, we needed a lot of SDR, BDR AEs who had done this before at other SaaS companies. So, when we hire in San Francisco into our sales and marketing teams, and our customer success teams, we look for people who have relevant selling or customer success experience in peer-group companies. So, when I say "peer group" companies, we would typically hire somebody who's left either Box or Salesforce than somebody who's worked at Zendesk, right? Because you deal with a different class of customers when you come from sort of peer-group companies. So, a lot of our initial people are people who left Salesforce, or Box, or those types of companies.
As you were going through the sales process, and I'm so focused on the sales process because that's really what everyone cares about, how much of your selling back then, and say today with your customers well-established, how much of it is based on referrals and relationships in terms of how you do your business development today?
Well, I would say a lot of it. If you look at people who sort of work in big companies, they move around every two years or three years. And, if they have a positive experience with a vendor, they take that to their new workplace, to their friends in peer companies. So a lot of our customers today are referrals from existing customers. And also, the bigger companies go through an RFP process, and in the RFP process, you typically have to provide references to companies that are of similar scale or of similar size. And these references are critical to closing these deals. And, when you start building up a base of these types of customers, I would say a referral in selling is very important, reference selling is very important, and it works well for a company that's in the enterprise category.
Now today, Microsoft is one of your customers, and you provide the in-app, the chat or customer service inside the very important Microsoft apps. So can you tell us, what are you doing with Microsoft? How did you get that relationship going, and frankly why did Microsoft decide to go with you rather than develop the capability in-house, which, I mean, they could do that if they wanted to.
Oh yeah, excellent question Michael. So, Microsoft is on such a great trajectory right now, and they're willing to look past what they've built internally, they're just willing to do the right thing for the customer. But, our story of Microsoft goes as follows. So, we started working with a small company called Acompli which basically got acquired by Microsoft, and is now Microsoft Outlook. And, one of the cofounders of Acompli, Kevin Henrikson, was a colleague of mine at my previous startup, at Zimbra and at Openwave. And, so I started working with Kevin when he first put the Acompli product out, and he was very far-sighted and he said, "Look, even though we're an email client, I see the value of doing this in-app, and I really want to be able to iterate and to build our product really fast in collaboration with our customers," when they were really small. And, I see this whole app thing as a very powerful thing, and he adopted Helpshift and put it in the Acompli app. It truly helped Acompli succeed, which eventually led to their acquisition by Microsoft and then becoming sort of the Outlook client on mobile, because they were really able to take advantage of the in-app chat capabilities and iterate on their products very fast. So, they would put out a build every two weeks, and in that two weeks, they would basically take all the input from customers, optimize the app, and put it out in the app store; and they really built a science around this.
And, when they became acquired by Microsoft and they became Outlook, there was obviously pressure from Microsoft to abandon a third-party product like Helpshift and move to an internal product, right? And so, a lot of products inside of Microsoft were already using existing products that Microsoft had, which were products that Microsoft had built, it's not even products that were third-party products.
So, Microsoft owns another customer experience company called Parature, which Microsoft bought for a lot of money, and Parature was being used by a lot of productivity groups inside of Microsoft, and but Kevin basically was able to convince the Microsoft peers that, "Look, in-app is where it's at, Parature was not in-app, Parature was still trying to drive customers into email as a channel," and then; more than in-app what they really saw for Acompli is that because we're embedded in an app, we could take all the information about a user inside the app, and pass it seamlessly to the cloud that the company can then have a view into. And we called that "telemetry", right? So, that telemetry was so vital to provide a great customer experience to the users that basically, Kevin was able to convince all of his peers that this was the way to go. In fact, Microsoft then became an investor, so they participated in our Series B round, which closed earlier this year, and they are an investor in the company as well as a customer.
And so, we've expanded our relationship beyond just the Outlook mobile client. We've built desktop SDKs now that work on Windows and Mac, and now Helpshift is going to be their in-app service provider for their desktop applications, for their Microsoft Outlook, for desktop Office, so we're working on a path with Microsoft to sort of get Helpshift embedded in all of their mobile and desktop product lines. And so, I'm just so fortunate to have colleagues or friends like Kevin who had the foresight, who had the ability to go prove to the world that the better solution has to win, convinced Microsoft internally that indeed, Helpshift is a better solution.
So, with Microsoft, you're talking about embedding Helpshift technology, customer service technology within Microsoft desktop apps, like Office.
That's right. So, we're working on a path right now to hopefully embed Helpshift into the desktop apps.
Obviously, that's incredible. That's just (Yeah.)
And then you have to think about the fact that Microsoft has two very large CRM products, one is Dynamics and one is Parature, in-house. And yet, they use Helpshift.
Yeah, that's pretty amazing. So now you've got kind of this relationship going with Microsoft. What does that mean internally at Helpshift in terms of how you organize the company? So, you obviously have a product that was a great product, great technology, and you somehow got it into their hands through a combination of relationships and hustle, and they bought it, and you did all the things that were necessary to keep them happy, to keep that huge enterprise customer happy. And now, you've got to organize the company internally inside Helpshift to have the right kind of customer relationships, and support for those relationships, management of those relationships. And so, how do you do that? How do you organize for the deep enterprise relationship?
Yeah, it's very hard, right? So, especially when you're in a startup environment and you're working with a lot of young people on the engineering side who haven't really had a lot of enterprise experience. When they get asked to do things that are unreasonable for some reason, right? So, you know Microsoft for example, to work with them, one of the first requirements that we had was that all of our infrastructure was hosted on Amazon. And you know, Microsoft basically said that if you want this massive contract from us, you're going to have to host at least Microsoft Tenant on Azure. And so, we had to go push our team internally, and basically have two deployments. So, we had an AWS deployment for most of our customers, and then we had an Azure deployment that we manage. And, so all these things you have to do, there's things around security, there's things around privacy, there's things around data storage, right? And there are so many compliance things you have to do with enterprises.
And it's so frustrating with young engineers to be able to not work on cool features but to work on these boring, sort of compliance kind of things. So you really have to go and have a massive selling inside your organization — to your teams — to explain the value of working with these large customers and do things that may seem boring on the surface, but have huge payoffs in the long run.
And, just to give you an example, the work we did with Azure, it's incredible! So, initially, as a company, as a startup, you're like, "AWS is, like, incredible," and we always looked at Azure as this thing that's kind of new and maybe not as good. And what we learned in our experience of deploying on Azure was that Azure was just as good, even as good as deploying on Amazon. And maybe we'll get better cost efficiencies with Azure. And now we're hoping to put a plan together to try and move most of our infrastructure to Azure, right? So, there's a lot of learnings that come out of large enterprises, and you just have to be open, flexible. The biggest challenge is really getting your team completely aligned with the enterprise focus, right — you know getting your young engineers to see the value of working with these big companies on things that may not be very cool.
You know, that's the thing. In the Valley, the engineers in younger companies want to work on the next cool thing, and for enterprises, you have to go solve really hard problems that may not be cool, and that earns you the right to do business with all of these companies.
So, we have just a couple of minutes left, we're just about out of time. But we have an interesting question from Twitter from Arsala Khan, and maybe you can answer this very, very briefly. So, Arsalan Khan asks: When you were starting out, or when an enterprise company is starting out, how good or useful is social media to help create that initial buzz, or in helping you establish relationships that will lead you to customers? So very, very quickly.
So, social media is kind of important, but not super important. So for B2C or sort of, long tail - focused companies, social media is more important than for enterprise-focused companies.
And, the last thing that I want to ask you and again, pretty quickly because we're just about out of time: Out of all of this, what is your advice, your best advice for startup founders who are wanting to sell to the enterprise, and they're at an early stage. What's your advice on how to get to the point that you have reached with Helpshift?
Yeah, I think my biggest advice is if you don't have a cofounder that has worked in the enterprise category or space, selling or in BD, then go get one. You really need a person that understands what it takes to work with enterprise companies. That's the first and foremost requirement. And, the second one is to find patient money. If you really want to build a long-term enterprise company, you going to want a VC that is patient and knows what you're going to be doing, and it's going to take some time, and is willing to work with you and help build the company. And so, patient money is really important. I think those two things, if you've got people who really have the experience that you need for enterprise, and you have patient capital, then I think you're on your way. It's not that those problems can't be overcome, it's that those are the two things, the foundational elements.
So, enterprise experience and patient investors who understand what the enterprise sales cycle and process is like.
Fantastic! Well, this has gone by very quickly. We have been talking with Abinash Tripathy, who is the CEO and Founder of Helpshift. He has been explaining what it's like, what are the challenges and solutions for building an enterprise software company; an enterprise software startup. Abinash Tripathy, thank you so much for joining us!
And, everyone, thank you for watching CXOTalk Episode 191 and we will see you again next week. Bye bye.
Published Date: September 09, 2016
Advice for SaaS Startup Founders: Jason Lemkin, SaaStr
Jason Lemkin from SaaStr shares important advice on starting, building, and growing an early-stage enterprise SaaS startup.
Enterprise SaaS at Scale, with Aneel Bhusri, CEO, Workday
Workday is one of the most successful enterprise software-as-a-service companies in the world. On this episode, co-founder and CEO Aneel Bhusri discusses technology and transformation in the enterprise.
Digital Transformation and the Subscription Economy with Tien Tzuo, CEO, Zuora
The subscription economy is a critical component of digital transformation, as organizations shift from selling products to offering services. Tien Tzuo, CEO of Zuora, is widely recognized as one of the thought leaders in this area.
A Unicorn Security Startup with Todd McKinnon, CEO, Okta
Security is one of the top priorities for every organization. On this episode, we speak with Todd McKinnon, the CEO and co-founder of Okta, an enterprise grade identity management service.
Build an Enterprise Software Startup: Jason Lemkin, Managing Director, Storm Ventures
Every entrepreneur knows that starting an enterprise software company is hard. Jason Lemkin, Managing Partner with Storm Ventures and founder of EchoSign (acquired by Adobe), shares his secrets for how to start and run a successful SaaS enterprise software company. Jason is also one of the most popular startup bloggers in the world on his site called SaaStr.
Vivek Ranadive, CEO, TIBCO
Vivek Ranadivé is Chairman, Founder & CEO of Tibco He is an entrepreneur, tech visionary, author, philanthropist, and sports team owner recognized for his outside-the-box thinking.


Susan Wojcicki, the director of YouTube, warns of significant negative consequences of the new EU copyright directive. According to her, there are impossible financial risks, so that content will be blocked. She also states that Europeans are excluded.
Wojcicki focuses specifically on Article 13 of the text adopted by the European Parliament in September for a new copyright directive. This article is also referred to as the 'upload filter'. The director of YouTube states that the creation of content by creatives is threatened by this filter, because internet companies are directly responsible for the violation of copyright.
She explains this with an example in the form of the worldwide music hit 'Despacito'. This video contains many copyrights, from sound recordings to publishing rights. Wojcicki says that YouTube has agreements with several parties, but that some rights holders are unknown. According to her, this uncertainty means that these kinds of videos may have to be blocked, because otherwise liability may arise in accordance with article 13. Wojcicki says that 400 hours of videos are uploaded on its platform every minute, so that the potential financial risks can become so great that no company wants to take. According to her, other systems such as YouTube's own Content ID are much better suited to respond to the issue of copyright owners.
In addition, Wojcicki states that Article 13 goes beyond just financial risks. She argues that residents of EU Member States run the risk of being cut off from this type of video because platforms do not want to take the risk of having to deal with the new EU rules. In October, Wojcicki predicted that the new directive is threatening hundreds of thousands of jobs , because platforms will be reluctant to continue publishing content from millions of content creators.
Article 13 is an obligation for internet platforms to prevent the possibility of uploading copyrighted material. The obligation to set up an upload filter does not appear as such in the legal text, but critics such as Wojcicki think that internet platforms can not meet the new rules in any other way. The director of YouTube says she can agree with the motives of the EU, namely to ensure that artists get paid more for their work, but she is reluctant to the 'unintended consequences', which in her opinion will have a strong impact on the income of hundreds of thousands of people.
On 12 September , the EU Parliament approved a text for the new copyright directive. The European Parliament, the Council and the Commission are still negotiating the final text within the EU. It is expected that the final text will be final no later than sometime next year, after which Member States will probably have to introduce the rules within two years. This means that the rules could be in effect from the beginning of 2021.


text: fails:Integer#round raises a RangeError when passed Float::INFINITY

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


For most horse crazy girls we have our room horse-themed. So today, I'm going to put some easy, cheap steps on how to make the ultimate horsey room.
1. Clean the room if it's not already.
2. Go to thrift stores and garage sales to find cheap horse pillows and toys and such.
3. Put up lots of horse posters.
4. Buy some model horses like schleich breyer.
5. If you ride, you can display your riding boots and helmet in your room.
6. Find or take horse pictures and put them in some frames on your desk.
7. Find a horse bedspread and sheets.
8. Make decorations such as drawings paintings hang a fishing hook at the top of your room and hang your ribbons on it. It makes a perfect border.
9. If you have not outgrown them, consider putting stuffed horses on your bed.
10. Try to find an old really cheap saddle for a few bucks at a yard sale. Put it up in your room.
11. There are some great websites out there for horsey rooms.
You could also paint mustangs on your walls.
I'm so going to make my bedroom horse crazy!
Feel free to add your own ideas!
Thanks Sydney for posting it.


Beaumark is a famous company which makes many home appliances, laundry items and kitchen items. Their products include the washers, dryers, microwaves, cookers, refrigerators, stoves, cooktops and so on.
We serve as the expert service providers for the Beaumark appliance's repairs. Our technicians come to your home to inspect your Beaumark product and diagnose the issue. They bring all the necessary Beaumark tool so that the problem is solved at the spot and much quicker. Along with that, they authenticate your appliance and do the repairs by providing the guarantee of one year for future.
Our professionals are highly qualified in testing any of the Beaumark appliances and ensure the best quality service. You can ask question to them if you have any and also place your suggestions to have best upkeep plan for the appliance.
This section includes a list of ingenious beaumark error/fault codes. Our professionals use these codes as they save a lot of time by identifying where to initiate the diagnosis of appliance.


text:
Cruising the Zeitgeist
By Robert Chilcott
Young Brits at Cannes
Last year during the Cannes Film Festival I was standing around the Petit Majestic bar next to an unnamed British filmmaker with two features to his credit. Attempting small talk, I pointed out to him the presence, some thirteen feet away, of the director Lynne Ramsay. He looked at her, grimaced, then turned back to me and said "Who's Lynne Ramsay?". After a pause of incredulity on my part, I explained that she was the director of Ratcatcher. There followed another puzzled look "What's Ratcatcher?". At this point I could have gone on to say that the film had been released in the UK several months earlier to glowing reviews, and that Miss Ramsay had received quite a lot of exposure in the broadsheets and style magazines. Or that, even if he had missed her this time round, surely, with his being a Cannes attendee for the last several years, he might have been aware that she had twice won awards there for her shorts, and that the aforementioned feature had played the previous year's directors' fortnight to great acclaim.
I could have also pointed out that she, like he, was a former National Film and Television School graduate, and lived in West London as he did. But no, his ignorance was defiant, so, rather than labour the point, I enquired as to what films he had seen whilst he was there. Struggling for an answer, as though the question had never been put to him before, he replied that he had seen Dead Babies, Sorted and "a great 30 minute promo reel for a Welsh gangster film called Shooters".
Some years ago I was idealistic and naïve enough to think that, in order to be a filmmaker, as with painting, you had to study the masters, or, rather, I was naïve enough to think that everyone who wanted to be a filmmaker would naturally want to study the masters – that is people making films before you were born – and desire to learn something from them. I soon learnt that the act of sitting in the dark at the Institute of Contemporary Arts watching Godard, Cassavetes or Antonioni, and being inspired to go out and make a film as a result, was a million miles removed from the process of hanging around in some networking event at BAFTA (the British Academy of Film and Television Arts) chatting to gratuitously confident grown adults who use phrases like "high concept" with the utmost seriousness, talk about what a great "Second" (assistant director) so-and-so is, and try so desperately hard to interest Duncan Kenworthy in the ninth draft of their romantic comedy.
Young British filmmakers don't watch movies and, rather than be slightly embarrassed about this, they proudly display their oblivion on their T-shirts. They certainly don't watch old movies, or, God forbid, foreign ones, and, as the opening anecdote illustrates, breeze through twelve days of Cannes year after year blissfully unaware that there's twenty or so films from all around the world competing for a little prize called the Palme D'Or. Indeed, rather than displaying any cinephiliac desire to see the new Michael Haneke or Tsai Ming Liang, they go only to see films on which one of their mates has worked as location manager, or films where there's a hope of snaring one of the producers at the post-screening party in order to get their own film off the ground. Indeed, all three films my director companion cited had given good parties, a substitute for any critical comments and discussion of the films themselves. This is endemic in the British film industry as a whole. High profile flops such as Mad Cows or Rancid Aluminium arrive heavily signposted, their awfulness broadcast well in advance, so much so that their inevitable function when they finally get a release is to back up the celebrity premiere, the Evening Standard Weekend Supplement spread, the film itself serving merely as a platform to support the PR company.
Whilst it is beyond the scope of this piece to analyse each of the three films mentioned above individually, and would be futile to pen specific, pithy and supercilious comedic diatribes about how ghastly they all are, what inevitably unites them in their failure, and what is symptomatic of what many British films of this kind suffer from, is their sheer desperation at attempting to push all the right buttons, making films to order, a new heritage cinema of unashamed mediocrity – cynically constructed recipes of gangsters, clubbers and drugs, with a seasoning of sub-Tarantino dialogue and a cool soundtrack.
Today, as with the novel, in order to have a viable (i.e. marketable or pre-sellable) post-modernist movie, all of the characters have to be completely bizarre, weird and wonderful, displaying ridiculous combinations of quirky personality traits and jokes which don't exist in real life. We have a culture of overstatement, exaggeration, hysterical realism. The insipid office mural "You don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!" has become a mantra for British filmmaking, a triumph of parochialism.
Revelling in small minded, national inertia, the current generation of filmmakers takes all its cues from the zeitgeist, pitching everything between hormonal twelve year olds and readers of Heat magazine. The language and grammar of film have been lost at the expense of a fart joke. Visual, rhetorical tropes of cinema are being used to absolutely no effect, stylistic techniques constantly used to hammer the audience over the head, everyone assuming that we're all so immune to sensation, that we need to be brutalised.
Even the freak successes of instant "classics" about northern strippers or precocious ballet prodigies illustrate the governance of the media, rather than the cinema, as the dominant influence on the demographic, and it seems highly unlikely that a Billy or a Monty will appear in critical pantheons of great films fifty years from now. However successful in the domestic market they may have been, their inevitable fate is to join combat trousers, tango ads or slightly dated high street fashion accessories in Saturday night retro TV shows as examples of great promotional strategies, championed by transient Radio One DJs and children's television presenters, and thus completely avoiding any lasting cultural significance. Did we really watch that!
Robert Chilcott is a freelance writer and filmmaker. He lives in London
Cartoons by Janis Goodman
Vertigo Volume 2 | Issue 2 | Spring 2002

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Sign up for your COVID-19 vaccine online
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Tennessee has opened its online sign-up tool for the COVID-19 vaccine.
There are three steps in the process.
Find out what phase you're in.
Find out what phase your county is in when it comes to administering the vaccine.
If your phase is up, make your appointment. Click your county on the map and then click "Make an Appointment" to register. If "Make an Appointment" is not available, contact your local health department. Those who register will be asked to enter their name and contact information to be notified of their appointment date, time and location as soon as vaccine becomes available.
The COVID-19 vaccines require two doses for the best protection against the virus. People who receive their first dose of COVID-19 vaccine at a county health department will be contacted to make an appointment to receive their second dose of vaccine.
COVID-19 vaccines remain limited at this time, and Tennessee's allocation plan prioritizes those most at risk of illness and death from COVID-19. Read the distribution plan here.


text:
Marta Calvo Case: "The worst suffering is when the child's body does not appear" | Society
Mariano Navarro Serer, 56, defines himself as a clinical psychologist and emergenist. Is the spokesman and the psychologist of Marta Calvo's mother, the young woman missing since November 7 whose alleged murderer, Jorge Ignacio Palma, says he dismembered. President of Psycho-Emergencies of the Valencian Community, he worked with the families of the victims of the accident of the Valencia Metro and with those of 11-M. Navarro asks EL PAÍS to send the questions by email to be able to respond calmly in the midst of media noise and countless requests for information you receive about the case.
Question. What is your main function and what did Marta's mother ask when she contacted you?
Answer. The initial contact with Marta's family was through a mother's sister. He had been missing for many days and the anguish at the lack of news was growing. My role was to hold the wait for uncertainty. The psychological intervention in these cases does not obey any protocol, there are no master formulas, we start from the individual differences of the human being. The main function is based on listening and the unconditional presence of the accompanying professional, understanding that many questions arise and unfortunately there are no clear answers to alleviate the suffering.
P. What is the priority when treating a mother who has lost a daughter in dramatic circumstances?
R. Each case is different. There are a whole series of determinants; who was the deceased person, what kind of link joined me to her, how many outstanding things have been left between us, what are my personal capacities to deal with the traumatic situation, what are the causes of death … Nothing has to do with loss of a child after an illness, where I could have the opportunity to prepare myself, for the loss of a child unexpectedly due to an accident, a sudden death or a death with more dramatic connotations such as murder or suicide.
Marta's death is not a natural death, it is also a death caused by a third person intentionally either directly or indirectly; making the body disappear and preventing the family from being able to bury it, pushing them into a state of extreme anguish and despair. Not only for not knowing what really happened, but for exponentially increasing the suffering by snatching his daughter twice, for his death and for the disappearance of his remains. If we add to this the possibility of a supposed dismemberment of the corpse, the anguish becomes an experience capable of leading a mother to the most extreme suffering and dragging her to the worst psychological torture.
P. Is the recovery of the body essential to start the duel?
R. It is essential, otherwise you can install in the family thoughts that, within their own defensive strategies aimed at alleviating the immense pain, favor irrational conclusions aimed at believing that at some point your loved one will reappear. In other cases, even with the certainty of his death, it is impossible to make a proper duel for not being able to bury him or not having a place to take flowers or go to pray. The first task for the healthy elaboration of grief goes through the acceptance of the reality of the loss, the absence of the body becomes a serious problem; There are open duels for life and although grief is not a disease, in cases like this if an appropriate professional intervention is not performed, it can kill you.
P. You have stated that the mother experiences a feeling of guilt because she thinks she could have done more. It is an inevitable impression, although fictional, isn't it? How can it be treated?
R. Guilt is the queen emotion, supported by irrational beliefs. He can take over you and plunge you into the worst of sufferings. It is absolutely normal to appear strongly in the face of the loss of a loved one and especially when the loss is due to dramatic and unexpected causes. Hundreds of questions gather in the head and a process of self-judgment begins in which you always lose out. Infinite phrases that begin in "Should" or "should" They take over the debt. Dismantling these beliefs becomes one of the priority objectives. The mistakes that, like everyone else, we make in life, take a magnified role and the attention, the care offered for years, the love and sacrifices made by the loved one remain in the background, because the guilt blinds you and sinks you .
Treating guilt is a complex task, but you always have to do it from forgiveness. Get forgiven for not having been perfect, for not offering permanent availability, for being wrong sometimes; It implies accepting your limits as a human being. The loss of a child is the most traumatic experience that a human being can go through. The circumstances of the loss do not matter, when someone lives this unfortunate tragedy they will always feel guilty and question their worth. When the death of the child occurs due to suicide or murder, the perception of having failed as the primary caregiver is multiplied by one thousand. It is important to dismantle this belief. Only if it is achieved, can the person begin to rest and give himself permission to continue living.
P. Does the mother follow the daily information about the disappearance of her daughter?
R. Although initially it was tried that this was thus it was inevitable that, with the passage of the days, part of the information arrived to him. She herself asks to know how the search process is developing and what are the novelties. The family continues trying to keep it away from certain information, but unfortunately it is already aware of the vast majority with all the suffering that this entails.
P. His work in this case is very different from the one he developed, for example, in the Valencia subway accident and on 11-M.
R. There are certain parallels; they are sudden, unexpected deaths; experiences that change your life in a matter of seconds. In all of them there was initially a previous time, more or less, in which there was hope to find your loved one alive, that news came that the victim had been identified alive and that he was not at risk, despite the injuries; and in the case of Marta, that this could appear after the first days justifying her absence.
P. What psychoemergence has marked you the most?
R. With more than 30 years of professional practice and 20 of them working in the clinical and emergency area, I have seen many very hard cases where one becomes aware of the reality of life and the proximity of death. There have been complex interventions with multiple victims, others due to accidents, illnesses, suicides. Many experiences where human suffering has been very present and with extreme intensity; also many accompaniments in duels. But I would say that where the suffering of the human being is most present is in the death of a child in unexpected circumstances such as suicide or murder and, if in the latter case the body does not appear, we would face the worst experience suffered by the that a person can go through.
Tags: Appear, bald marten, be, body, child, dismembered, emergency, exercise, expert, homicidal, mariano navarro, missing mother, presumed, psychologist, spokesperson, suffering, worse
Previous Poland's "temporary exemption" in the climate agreement in 2050 does not compromise the calendar
Next Healthy mouth … always
Health closes Gran Canaria and advances the curfew at 10 p.m.
Public transport faces the challenge of recovering from a 50% crash and attracting those who have switched to the car
Bonoloto draw for Saturday, January 16, 2021


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Hostess Banana Creme Twinkie - SINGLE
The famous Twinkie, it's been a hit in America for years, now available to you in the UK! They're individually wrapped, delicious sponge cake fingers with a smooth crème flavoured filling. Perfect for lunch boxes or snacking on the go!
Imported from the USA.
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Fig Newtons - 2oz (56g)
Fig Newtons are a well-known brand of fig roll, a delicious chunky pastry filled to the brim with a baked fruit filling of yummy fig paste. These tasty fig-filled cookies have been around for over a c...
Nabisco Barnum's Animal Crackers 2.125oz (60g)
Barnum's Animals Crackers have been loved in the United States since the late 19th century! For over 100 years, people have loved these slightly sweet animal-shaped crackers. Barnum's Animals Crackers...
Reese's Peanut Butter Rounds 110g
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Mrs Freshley's Cookies & Creme Mini Donuts - 3.4oz (96g)
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Discus and support Critical process died in Windows 10 Installation and Upgrade to solve the problem; Something wrong happend with my laptop It looks like windows 10 can't see the hard drive correctly (the folders are unseen). On linux bootable from... Discussion in 'Windows 10 Installation and Upgrade' started by TomaszZbrzezny, Aug 28, 2018.
Maybe somebody knows the reason?


text:
Burgers with Buck: The Optimist
Sheriff's department employee arrested in multi-state child exploitation operation
By Cal Callaway, FOX 5 News
JEFFERSON, Ga. (FOX 5 Atlanta) - One of the 31 people arrested in Georgia in a multi-state operation targeting suspects allegedly involved in child pornography or who sexually exploited children worked in a law enforcement agency, FOX 5 Atlanta learned Monday.
Jackson County Sheriff Janis Mangum identified the suspect as Carol Chellew, who has worked as a civilian clerk in the Sheriff's Office since January 2018.
According to a news release, Sheriff Mangum was notified on Tuesday, April 30, that officers from the Jefferson Police Department and agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation were conducting a search warrant at Chellew's home in Jefferson.
According to the sheriff, she later received a second phone call from Jefferson Police Chief Joseph Wirthman advising her that Chellew and her husband were being arrested on charges of sexual exploitation of children.
MORE: 31 arrested in Georgia as part of huge child-exploitation ring
Mangum said she began termination proceedings against Chellew after learning of her arrest.
According to the news release, Chellew bonded out of the Jackson County Jail on Thursday, May 2, on 15 counts of possession or control of any material depicting minors in sexually explicit conduct.
Chief Wirthman will hold a news conference at noon Monday to discuss the Jefferson Police Department's involvement in Operation Southern Impact III.
In the operation, law enforcement agencies in eight states arrested a total of 82 people and rescued or identified 17 children as victims.
Ten task forces that focus on internet crimes against children spent four months planning the operation, which led to three days of actions including executing search warrants, undercover operations, arrests and sex offense compliance verification visits.
A total of 171 law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies in Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia took part in the operation.
The arrestees ranged in age from 20 to 70. Some of their occupations included nonprofit employee, small business owner, store clerk, mechanic, daycare administrator, youth group leader, former high school band director, freelance photographer, construction worker and painter.
During the operation, 134 search warrants were executed and 215 knock and talks were conducted in those eight states. More than 1,600 digital devices were seized.
In Georgia, 31 people were arrested during Operation Southern Impact III. Most of those arrests involved the possession and/or distribution of child pornography.
Debbie Garner, special agent in charge of the GBI's Child Exploitation and Computer Crimes Unit, said "the dedicated law enforcement professionals that are part of the Georgia ICAC Task Force will not cease searching for those who are producing, trading and collecting this graphic material. We will continue to work together to find, investigate and prosecute these predators."
Seven of those arrested in Georgia allegedly traveled for the purpose of meeting and having sex with a minor.
During the operation, four registered sex offenders were arrested in Georgia on charges related to child pornography. One of them also had been arrested by the GBI during a similar operation in 2015.


I did an Alt D copy to create an instance of another object. I would like to make this object its own animal.
Under the Objects Panel there is the "Objects and Links" Tab. I see that 3 objects are linked. If I click that "3" it asks if I want to make it a "Single User." Is this what I want to do?
Just checking before I do it.
yes, that should be what you want, unless i understood you wrong.


Previous AFGROW presentations discussed the influence of retardation models and the resulting effective stress ratio, highlighting the need for additional crack growth rate data at negative stress ratios. As a result of these investigations, a test program was executed to develop crack growth rate data for common T-38 materials at multiple negative stress ratios. The presentation will review this new data, comparing and contrasting to previous material model extrapolations, as well as revisiting RLO. Concurrently, a structured material fitting process was utilized. Damage Tolerant Analysis comparisons will be presented to review impacts from new crack growth rate data and the material fitting process.
The AFGROW developers and some users have expressed interest in knowing how the Structures Branch (AFLCMC/EZFS) uses AFGROW. This presentation includes an independent analysis performed by EZFS in 2016 using AFGROW to assess potential impacts to a new development program of updated Fatigue Crack Growth Rates (FCGR) properties for Titanium 6AL-4V Beta Annealed (BA) developed by a legacy aircraft.
In general, fatigue crack growth rate testing is performed using one of a handful of standard specimens, all of which have a through-thickness crack. Testing was performed to develop near-threshold growth rates for 2024-T351 plate and 2024-T3511 extrusion at two different stress ratios (0.1 and -0.3) and two different specimen geometries. The specimens included an edge cracked plate and a centered hole in a plate, both with a corner crack instead of the typical through crack. This presentation will include some background information leading to the motivations for the testing, a description of the testing including the unique requirements necessitated by the two-dimensional nature of the crack, test results, and potential impact on analysis.
This presentation will give an overview of the new updates made to the AFMAT crack growth rate database. Some of the new features added to the database include: expanded search criteria, updates to the crack growth rate plots, and the ability to download tabular look-up material data files for over 50 materials. This presentation will also briefly go over the new test data added to the online database.
With being actively involved within the Afgrow community a number of Gulfstream requests have been implemented in Afgrow. Most of these requests have been related to plug-in development or implementing a secure way to load proprietary material data. With release of Afgrow version 5.3 all current requests have been implemented. At last year's user workshop, the bending factor for standard solutions was flagged to be too conservative. A brief investigation showed a reasonable correlation using the 2/3-factor for bending solutions for both center and edge crack standard Afgrow solutions. During this investigation, the behavior of cracks close to fillets were also looked at. Further a discussion of a spectrum development problem and concluding with a recent application of Afgrow for an in-service aircraft structure.
Democratization of numerical simulation through the development and dissemination of expert-designed "engineering simulation apps" is rapidly gaining attention for durability and damage tolerance (DaDT) applications. Such apps must satisfy certain technical requirements to ensure their reliable use due to the high accuracy requirements in the computation of fatigue crack propagation life. Proper application of numerical simulation procedures requires expertise in computational engineering that is not widely or readily available. Standardization deployed by means of Smart Engineering Simulation Apps (SESA) can leverage this expertise for recurring analysis tasks, similar to the expertise of specialists in applied mechanics made available through engineering handbooks. Because classical handbooks have limitations in model complexity and scope, SESA developed by expert analysts can deploy verified solutions obtained by numerical means allowing models of much greater complexity for users who do not need to have expertise in numerical simulation technology.
By Smart Engineering Simulation Apps we mean FEA-based software tools developed for standardization and automation of recurring analysis tasks and process workflows for use by non-specialists. Designed to fit into well-defined analysis processes, engineering simulation apps capture institutional knowledge and best practices, can be shared by engineering groups at different geographic locations and produce consistent results by tested and approved analysis procedures. When designed to meet the requirements of Simulation Governance, simulation apps for engineering use are "smart" because their embedded intelligence enables simple, accurate, fast, efficient, and reliable (S.A.F.E.R.) simulations with built-in quality assurance, essential for the non-expert user.
This is particularly important in the area of DaDT where life estimate procedures require accurate computation of stress intensity factors along the crack front and the shape of the propagating crack is solution-dependent. An example of a simulation app for the prediction of fatigue life for cracks emanating from cold-worked holes, developed in support of the AFRL-SBIR Phase III project "Deep Residual Stress Method Demo Program", and to accelerate the transition of new technology into professional practice, will be presented. The example simulation app has been connected to a residual stress database to facilitate the input of residual stress profiles and communicates with AFGROW via COM to determine the crack growth rate (da/dN) by interpolation, from the available da/dN-ΔK curves of the material, using the values of SIFs for the mechanical load and the residual stresses determined by the app along the crack front.
Engineered residual stress (ERS) is increasingly being applied as a way to extend the durability and damage tolerance performance of primary structure in various industries including aerospace and power generation. To reduce development costs, reduce the development time, and increase the effectiveness of the final design, methods that accurately predict residual stress for surface treatments are being developed. ERStoolbox® is a software suite which predicts full field residual stress for a variety of processes including conventional shot peening (SP), laser shock peening (LSP), and cold hole expansion (CX). An overview of ERS-toolbox® will be presented along with example applications.
The BAMF software, developed by the USAF (A-10/T-38), has evolved over the past seven years to take on unique and challenging fatigue crack growth analysis problems. Recent technological advancements include: complex geometries/crack scenarios, multi-point multi-crack analysis, and inclusion of residual stresses. Hill Engineering plans to facilitate the continued viability of BAMF for internal and external use. Hill Engineering plans to continue to update and maintain the software and support customer needs. This presentation will discuss the current state of BAMF, the near-term transition plan, and long-term thoughts to keep the capability relevant, viable, and growing. The presentation will also provide an opportunity to get input from the user community, similar to the framework established by LexTech with AFGROW.
Abstract: Research has been underway for the past few years to quantify the effect a fatigue crack has on the residual stress field introduced by the Cold Expansion (Cx) process. In an effort to quantify this impact the Contour Method has been employed to determine the residual stress state in two aluminum alloys (2024-T351 and 7075-T651) after a fatigue crack has been propagated in it. Each coupon had a 0.50inch centered Cold Expanded (Cxed) hole that was designed to hit the "Low" end of FTI's applied expansion specification. Eight (8) coupons were produced for each alloy and a range of fatigue crack sizes were propagated in them. This presentation will discuss how the residual stresses obtained through the Contour Method have been implemented into BAMF to provide a prediction of a fatigue condition and compare those results to fatigue test data. Two different methods were developed to define the modified residual stress traction stress equations which were utilized in the fatigue life predictions. The effects of the residual stress statistical distribution, as discussed at last year's AFGROW Workshop, was also be implemented into the life prediction matrix, thus showing the effect of both the modified residual stress traction equation and the statistical distribution of the residual stress state on the final life prediction.
AFGROW is a very powerful crack growth analysis tool which allows the fracture mechanics analyst to efficiently access dozens of standard crack scenarios (with tension, bending, and/or bearing loads) in both through and part-through crack geometries. Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs) for each crack scenario are computed with either curve fits or table lookups—normally derived from finite element solutions or classic crack handbook solutions such as Tada, et al, "The Stress Analysis of Cracks Handbook." Each of these methods assumes a specific far field load profile which causes a particular uncracked stress state on the intended crack plane—for instance, the tension loading of a plate with an elliptical surface crack assumes a constant tension far field, and causes a constant tension field in the uncracked state at the intended crack plane.
However, the fracture mechanics analyst will often need to have the SIFs for a crack embedded in a non-standard stress field; that is, the uncracked stress state does not match the uncracked stress state of any AFGROW standard solution geometry. Fortunately, AFGROW has an efficient method for adjusting the computed SIFs for the new, nonstandard stress field, either with Normalized Stress correction or Beta Corrections Factors in the Beta Correction Factor interface.
We demonstrate the use of the Normalized Stress correction on an elliptical surface flaw in the fillet of a 3D stepped flat tension bar. First, the uncracked stress at the intended crack plane in the fillet is calculated. Second, some minor calculations and curve fits are made to fit the data to the AFGROW specific format. Lastly, the data is read into the Beta Correction Factor interface and SIFs are computed for a few cracks. For comparison, SIFs are also computed with the p-version finite element software StressCheck.
Information on the latest research and development efforts and plans beyound AFGROW Release 5.3.


Waterfall Info: This is the upper of three falls on low-flow Falls Branch. It's best seen during periods of high flow. The falls is named after the nearby remains of a moonshine still and is marked on the old Hemp Top USGS topo map.
Access Info: To get to Moonshine Falls, first follow an unofficial horse trail from the Horseshoe Bend Trailhead off FS 51 (East Cowpen Road). Then, leave the trail and make a fairly open bushwhack to the falls.


Harley is a 1 year gray and white tabby Domestic Short Hair. He weighs approx 15lbs. Harley is very vocal and likes treats "whiskas temptations". He will come to "night night Kitty". He is very friendly and very approachable to animals and humans. His left hind leg might have blue candle wax on it. If you see him please call 866-699-3463!


Categories: Brands, Hand-held Tester, Lutron, Pressure Meter, Pressure Meter.
* SD card capacity : 1 GB to 16 GB.
* Sampling adjustment : 5/10/30/60/120/300/600 seconds and auto function.
* Large LCD display, easy readout.
* Microcomputer circuit, high accuracy.
* Low power consumption and long battery life when use battery power.
* Monitor with real time data logger, save the measuring data along the time information ( year, month, date, hour, minute, second ) into the SD memory card and can be down load to the Excel, extra software is no need. user can make the further data or graphic analysis by themselves.
* Show 3 channels ( CH 1, CH 2, CH 3 ) pressure value in the same LCD.
* Cooperate withthe optional 2 wires pressure transmitter.
* DC 1.5V ( UM-4, AAA ) battery x 6 PCs or DC 9V adapter in.
* Full range, optional 2 wires pressure transmitter.
© 2019 Advancom Electronics Technologies. All rights reserved.


Tequila Mockingbird – a great gift book!
I found the best gift book for book loving people who also love a cocktail! At this point, I can't remember where I first heard about it – I'm sure one of the bookish newsletters that comes to my inbox weekly – but I know that I bought my first copy (and second copy) at the end of April. I bought one for me, one for Sarah's birthday. I went back and bought two more, and have since bought three more. Yes, I'm keeping B&N busy stocking this book on their shelves!
The book is filled with cocktail recipes with a "literary twist." Classic literature humorously turned into drinks – Gin Eyre, Gone with the Wine, Bridget Jone's Daiquiri (classic? no, but classically funny). The list goes on and on! And the book also includes hor d'oerve ideas for book clubs and drinking games to play by yourself or with your book group (or in a library!).
Such a fun little treat of a book. Love it!
Have any standard books you love to give as gifts to book-lovin' friends?


Puberty onset is a complex trait regulated by multiple genetic and environmental factors. In this study, we narrowed a puberty related QTL down to a 1.7 Mb region on chromosome X in female mice and inferred miR-505-3p as the functional gene.
We conducted ectopic expression of miR-505-3p in the hypothalamus of prepubertal female mice through lentivirus-mediated orthotopic injection. The impact of miR-505-3p on female puberty was evaluated by the measurement of pubertal events and histological analysis. The results showed that female mice with overexpression of miR-505-3p in the hypothalamus manifested later puberty onset timing both in vaginal opening and ovary maturation, followed by weaker fertility lying in the longer interval time between mating and delivery, higher abortion rate and smaller litter size. We also constructed miR-505-3p knockout mice by CRISPR/Cas9 technology. MiR-505-3p knockout female mice showed earlier vaginal opening timing, higher serum gonadotrophin and higher expression of puberty-related gene, as well as its target gene Srsf1 in the hypothalamus than their wild type littermates.
Srsf1 was proved to be the target gene of miR-505-3p that played the major role in this process. The results of RIP-seq (RNA Immunoprecipitation-sequencing) showed that SF2, the protein product of Srsf1 gene, mainly bound to ribosome protein (RP) mRNAs in GT1-7 cells. The collective evidence implied that miR-505-3p/SRSF1/RP could play a role in the sexual maturation regulation of mammals.
Author summary The puberty onset in mammals is a vital biological process that signals the acquisition of reproductive capacity. The initiation of puberty is triggered by the activation of hypothalamic pulsatile GnRH surge. The dysregulation of pubertal development shows relevance to later health risks of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer and other health disorders. Recent progress indicates that a lot of genes play a role in the excitatory or inhibitory regulation of GnRH release. However, the detailed pathway of pubertal timing remains unclear. Our previous studies isolated an X-linked QTL that was associated with the timing of puberty in mice. In this study, we proved that miR-505-3p was a female puberty onset regulator based on data from positional cloning, ectopic expression and knockout mouse models. We also assigned Srsf1 as the functional target gene of miR-505-3p underlying this process. The results of RIP-seq showed that SF2, the protein of Srsf1 gene, preferential bound to ribosome protein (RP) mRNAs in GT1-7 cells. We propose that miR-505-3p/SF2/RP could play a role in the sexual maturation regulation of mammals.


Deal will give Bridgestone new insights into vehicle operating conditions; TomTom will focus on core location business.
Apple sends teams to gather data on foot to improve Map app On-foot data collection is underway to improve the real-life accuracy of mobile map services.
TomTom is selling its telematics business to tyre company Bridgestone for €910m ($1.03bn).
TomTom said the deal would allow it to focus on its core location business, including mapping, navigation software, and real-time traffic information and services as the industry moves towards autonomous driving.
Bridgestone said the deal would give it better insight into vehicle operating conditions via millions of data points a day.
"After a thorough review of strategic options, we have determined that the sale of Telematics to Bridgestone is in the best interest of both Telematics and our core location technology business," said TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn.
TomTom is facing increasing competition in the mapping space both from existing rivals like HERE Technologies but also increasingly from Google. For example, in September, Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi announced a deal to provide turn-by-turn navigation in new cars with Google Maps.
TomTom's telematics business includes its fleet-management system, which provides real-time information about the location of vehicles and focuses on industries including construction, utilities, haulage, and emergency services, with 49,000 customers and more than 861,000 vehicles. According to TomTom, it is the number one telematics service provider in Europe.
Bridgestone said the deal would strengthen its position in what it called the mobility-as-a-service landscape: "Bridgestone will gain unprecedented insights into vehicle and tire operating conditions and be able to leverage a growing installed user base of 860,000 vehicles communicating 200 million data points per day," it said in a statement.
The sale of the telematics business, which has 670 employees is expected to close by the end of the second quarter of 2019.
Autonomous bus Èrica has already transported 4,600 citizens.
From Wednesday, free rides can be booked on the Flinders Express (FLEX) between 10am and 2pm on weekdays during the first stage of the trials.
US paves the way for new rules catering to autonomous vehicles without human controls.
The university said its on-campus driverless bus trial proves Victoria is ready for autonomous vehicle technology.
Autonomous vehicle technology is an emerging issue for many cities, and more than 50% are already planning for self-driving cars, according to a new report.
NHTSA's deputy administrator called it "irresponsible" and "inappropriate."


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Blog Kiosk: 9/28/2017 - Dodgers Links - Some Odds and Ends
These guys had a great game yesterday. Austin Barnes, who is looking more and more like our catcher of the future, not only caught a great game but also pounded out three hits; including two doubles, to drive in two runs. Rich Hill is looking like his old self. He pitched seven shutout innings, struck out ten and walked only two batters to record his 12th win of the season. Per Cary Osborne at Dodger Insider:
"I think it all comes down to effort and comes down to the way you go about your business," Hill said of keeping his feel. "It doesn't matter when the game is or when the next outing is, for me it's about keeping that effort consistent and that intensity consistent. When you're doing that you're giving yourself a chance."
The photo above via @Dodgers on twitter. Below are more links to check out:
This Day in Dodgers History: In 1988 Orel Hershiser broke Don Drysdale's Major League record for consecutive scoreless innings pitched at 59. He went ten scoreless innings against the Padres in San Diego, but unfortunately did not walk away with the victory. The Dodgers eventually in the 16th inning, 2-1. In 1997 Mike Piazza set the Los Angeles Dodgers record for home runs at 40. He hit two homers against Rockies starter John Thomson in Colorado.
Happy Birthday, Jack Fournier, Whitey Witt, Glen Moulder, Todd Worrell, Héctor Giménez & Jerry Sands!
Video: Hear from Dave Roberts after the Dodgers 10-0 win over the San Diego Padres on Wednesday night. (video link)
Video: Alanna Rizzo speaks with Austin Barnes after his three-hit, two RBI night against the San Diego Padres on Wednesday. (video link)
Via Marty Hudtloff at NBC 29 Charlottesville; "UVa's Chris Taylor Having Breakout Season with Los Angeles Dodgers."
"You know my whole career I've always been a guy that thought about getting on top of the ball and hitting ground balls and line drives," says Taylor. "For the first time in my career I'm trying to hit the ball in the air and slug a little bit."
BTW, Taylor is doing fine after being pulled during yesterdays game. Per Eric Stephen at True Blue LA; "Chris Taylor leaves game with left knee contusion after slipping on first base."
"It was more of a scare," Roberts said. "It's not a good feeling seeing your center fielder and center fielder hobbling out there."
AGon isn't in great shape. Per Matthew Moreno at Dodger Blue; "Adrian Gonzalez Shut Down, Will Miss 2017 Postseason."
The Los Angeles Dodgers officially shut down veteran first baseman Adrian Gonzalez on Wednesday, electing to focus on the 2018 season. Manager Dave Roberts said he spoke with Gonzalez, who reported to the stadium with back tightness, and called the decision a "unified" one.
Per Bill Shaikin at the LA Times; "Dodgers will take steps to increase fan safety next season."
"We will be doing something," Dodgers president Stan Kasten said Tuesday. "We'll have more to say after the season."
The protective netting at Dodger Stadium extends to the near end of each dugout, but the cables supporting the netting extend to each foul pole. Major league teams have focused on extending protection to the seats behind the dugouts; Japanese teams extend the netting to the foul poles.
I still hate Jack Clark too. Per NBC Sports; "Former Giants slugger still hates Dodgers: 'This is where their a-- should be'"
David Hill at Call to the Pen tell us a little bit about the Baseball history of former Dodger George Pfister.
By ernest at Thursday, September 28, 2017
Labels: Adrian Gonzalez, Austin Barnes, Blog Kiosk, Chris Taylor, Dave Roberts, George Pfister, Jack Clark, Rich Hill, Rick Honeycutt, Stan Kasten
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