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As funding slows in Boston, its early-stage market could shine

Published May 8, 2020

Chris Lynch, a founder and former general partner at Boston-based seed-stage fund Accomplice, remembers “VC Mountain in Waltham.”

Back then, entrepreneurs on funding quests would visit a building overlooking the Waltham Reservoir near Boston where they pitched to a few investors: Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

“And if they didn’t invest in you, you weren’t getting money to start your company,” Lynch said.

Since then, Lynch has watched the area’s startup ecosystem reach the point where seed-stage firms are ubiquitous, but in a city populated with firms waiting to make first bets, the scene is unsurprisingly undergoing a funding drought. Crunchbase data indicates that the city’s Q2 venture capital pace slowed dramatically, with April seeing far fewer rounds and dollars invested in 2020 than in 2019.

Boston saw just seven known equity funding rounds in April, investments worth a hair under $60 million. In the year-ago April, Boston recorded 24 equity funding rounds worth more than $500 million.

Yet, while the numbers are slow, some Boston tech leaders think seed startups will continue to thrive thanks to accelerators and a healthy base of local early-stage investors. And Lynch, who left Accomplice in 2017, says the venture slowdown might help firms recalibrate their appetite for new deals to a more healthy pace.

“The advantage of more access to capital without a proportional increase in great ideas really waters down the fort,” he said, referring to upmarkets. “A lot of money has been invested in companies before they even proved their ideas were right, and I think even I fell into a trap of competing so hard for deals that I lost sight of a good deal.” He estimates that in our COVID-19 world, investors will start to again take three months for due diligence on a deal, versus three weeks to a signed term sheet.

If Boston’s seed investors becomes more conservative, that means that accelerators — homes of the brightest founders, often before they even have their first customer — will be pressed to react.

Accelerators

Venture Lane, a co-working space and startup incubator for early-stage companies, was nearing its one-year anniversary in the heart of Boston when COVID-19 hit the city.

The incubator, which traditionally hosts 10 startups at a time, made its whole program virtual and reworked existing content to help navigate the climate. Plus, per founder Christian Magel, its tips and workshops were opened up to any early-stage founder, not just the ones enrolled with Venture Lane. Hundreds have signed up, he said.

CRV’s Saar Gur wants to invest in a new wave of games built for VR, Twitch and Zoom

Published May 8, 2020

Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass.

His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment themes focused on the next generation of games: those built for VR, those built on top of Twitch and those built for video chat environments as a socializing tool.

TechCrunch: We’ve been in a “VR winter,” as it’s been called in the industry, following the 2014-2017 wave of VC funding into VR drying up as the market failed to gain massive consumer adoption. You think VR could soon be hot again. Why?

Saar Gur: If you track revenues of third-party games on Oculus, the numbers are getting interesting. And we think the Quest is not quite the Xbox moment for Facebook, but the device and market response to the Quest have been great. So we are more engaged in looking at VR gaming startups than ever before.

What do you mean by “the Xbox moment,” and what will that look like for VR? Facebook hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for Oculus Quest headsets, and most VR headsets seem to have sold out during this pandemic as people seek entertainment at home. This seems like progress. When will we cross the threshold?

How will coronavirus change the world? — Parlia launches to help you find out

Published May 8, 2020

“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the chaos of myriad search results. Let’s face it, many have tried to really crack Q&A (remember “Mahalo”?), but few ever got very far — and most became zombie sites.

But look again and you will notice something. A site called Parlia sits at No. 3 on that search result for “Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite.” But Parlia only launched (in stealth mode) in October last year.

So how can this be?

Well, this upstart in the Q&A space has now closed a pre-seed round of funding from Bloomberg Beta, Tiny VC and others (amount undisclosed).

And as founder, and former journalist, Turi Munthe tells me, the idea here is Parlia will become an “encyclopedia of opinion.”

“We’re a wiki: mapping out all the perspectives on both the breaking stories and controversies of the day, as well as the big evergreen questions: does God exist? Is Messi really better than Ronaldo? The way we’re building is to also help fix today’s polarisation, outrage and information silo-ing,” he tells me.

While most Q&A sites are geared around X versus Y, and focused on rational debate, Parlia is trying to map ALL the opinions out there: flat earthers’ included. It’s aiming to be descriptive not prescriptive, and is closer to a wiki, unlike Quora, where the authors are often selling “something” as well as themselves as experts.

The site is already on a tear. And also highly appropriate for this era.

Right now top subjects include “How to stay healthy during quarantine at home?” or “What are the effects of spending long periods in coronavirus isolation?” or “Will the coronavirus crisis bring society together?” The list goes on. Users see the arguments calmly, dispassionately laid out, alongside counter-arguments and all the other arguments and positions.

Says Munthe: “In 2016, I realized the age of political consensus was over. I watched as Britain spilt maybe a trillion words of argument in the build-up to the Brexit Referendum and thought: there are no more than a half-dozen reasons why people will vote either way.”

He realized that if there’s a finite number of arguments around something as huge and divisive as Brexit, then this would be true for everything. Thus, you could theoretically map the arguments around gun control, abortion, responses to the coronavirus, the threat of AI and pretty much everything.

So why would anyone want to do that? It’s, of course, a good thing in itself and would help people understand what they think as well as help them understand how the rest of the world thinks.

Luckily, there is also a business model. It will potentially carry ads, sponsorships, membership and user donations. Another is data. If they get it right, they will have surfaced foundational information about the very ways we think.

Munthe thinks all the users will come through Search. “The media opportunity, we think, is 100 million-plus pageviews/month,” he says.

Munthe’s co-founder is J. Paul Neeley, former professor of the Royal College of Art, and a service designer who’s worked with Unilever and the U.K.’s Cabinet Office. Munthe himself has been exploring the systemic issues of the media ecosystem for some time. From founding a small magazine in Lebanon, reporting in Iraq in 2003, then starting and exiting Demotix, to launching North Base Media (a media-focused VC).

The temptation, of course, is to allow bias to creep in return for commercial deals. But, says Menthe: “We will never work with political parties, and we will set up our own ethics advisory board. But that understanding should be of value to market researchers and institutions everywhere.”

So now you can find out how coronavirus will change the world.

Owkin raises $25 million as it builds a secure network for healthcare analysis and research

Published May 8, 2020

Imagine a model of collaborative research and development among hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, universities and other research institutions where no one shared any actual data.

That’s the dream of the new New York-based startup Owkin, which has raised $25 million in fresh financing from investors, including Bpifrance Large Venture, Cathay Innovation and MACSF (the French Pension Fund for Clinicians), alongside previous investors GV, F-Prime Capital and Eight Roads.

The company’s pitch is that data scientists, clinical doctors, academics and pharmaceutical companies can all log in to the virtual lab that Owkin calls the Owkin Studio.

In that virtual environment, all parties can access anonymized data sets and models exclusively to refine their own research and development and studies to ensure that the most cutting-edge insights into novel biomarkers, mechanisms of action and predictive models inform the work that all of the relevant parties are doing.

The ultimate goal, the company said, is to improve patient outcomes.

In its quest to get more companies and institutions to open up and share information — with the promise that the information can’t be extracted or used in a way that isn’t allowed by the owners of the data — Owkin is replicating work that other companies are pursuing in fields ranging from healthcare to financial services and beyond.

The Israeli company Qedit has developed similar technologies for the financial services industry, and Sympatic, a recent graduate from one of the recent batches of Techstars companies, is working on a similar technology for the healthcare industry.

Owkin makes money by enabling remote access to the data sets for pharmaceutical companies and licensing the models developed by universities to those companies. It’s a way for the company to entice researchers to join the platform and provide another revenue stream for research institutions who have seen their funding decline over the last 40 years.

“We have a huge loop of academic universities that have access to the data and are developing algorithms and we share data,” said the company’s chief executive Dr. Thomas Clozel. “At the end what it helps is developing better drugs.”

Declines in federal funding for scientific research since the 1980s (Image courtesy of The Conversation)

The investment from Owkin’s new and existing investors takes the company to $55 million in total capital raised through the extension of its Series A round. In all, the round totaled $52 million, Clozet said.

“We are exactly where we need to be because it’s about privacy and privacy is more important than ever before,” said Clozet.

The COVID-19 epidemic has emphasized the need for closer collaboration among different corporations and research institutions, and that has also increased demand for the company’s technology. “It touches everything… We have access to the right data sets and centers to build the best models for COVID,” said Clozet. “We’re lucky to have the right traction before the COVID happens and we have the right research that has been done.”

In fact, the company has launched the Covid-19 Open AI Consortium (COAI), and is using its platform to advance collaborative research and accelerate clinical development of effective treatments for patients infected with the coronavirus, the company said. All of its findings will be shared with the global medical and scientific communities.

The initial focus on the research is on cardiovascular complications in COVID-19 patients in collaboration with CAPACITY, an international registry working with over 50 centers worldwide, the company said. Other areas of research will include patient outcomes and triage, and the prediction and characterization of immune response, according to Owkin.

“Since we first backed Owkin in 2017, we have been sharing its vision to apply AI to fighting one of the most dreadful diseases on earth: cancer,” said Jacky Abitbol, a partner at Cathay Innovation. “Owkin has risen to become a leader in digital health, we are proud to grow our investment in the company to fuel its ambition to pioneer AI for medical research, while preserving patient-privacy and data security.”

How will digital media survive the ad crash?

Published May 6, 2020

When I first met Bustle Digital Group’s Jason Wagenheim, it was right as New York City was beginning to go into lockdown. The BDG offices were empty thanks to the company’s newly instituted work-from-home policy, but it still seemed reasonable to meet in-person to learn more about BDG’s broader vision.

At the time, Wagenheim — a former Fusion and Condé Nast executive who joined BDG as chief revenue officer before becoming president in February — acknowledged that we were entering a period of uncertainty, but he sounded a note of cautious optimism for the year ahead.

Since then, of course, things have been pretty rough for the digital media industry (along with the rest of the world), with a rapid reduction in ad spending leading to layoffs, furloughs and pay cuts. BDG (which owns properties like Elite Daily, Input, Inverse, Nylon and Bustle itself) had to make its share of cuts, laying off two dozen employees, including the entire staff of The Outline.

And indeed, when I checked back in with Wagenheim, he told me that he’s anticipating a 35% decline in ad revenue for this quarter. And where he’d once hoped BDG would reach $120 or $125 million in ad revenue this year, he’s now trying to figure out “what does our company look like at $75 or $90 million?”

At the same time, he insisted that executives were determined not to completely dismantle the businesses they’d built, and to be prepared whenever advertising does come back.

We also discussed how Wagenheim handled the layoffs, how the company is reinventing its events sponsorship business and the trends he’s seeing in the ad spending that remains. You can read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below.

TechCrunch: We should probably just start with the elephant in the room, which is that you guys had to make some cuts recently. You were hardly the only ones, but do you want to talk about the thought process behind them?

Jason Wagenheim: Yeah, we ended up having to say goodbye to about 7% of our team, and we had salary reductions to the tune of 18% company-wide for those that made over $70,000. And then we had 30% pay cuts for executives.

You’ve read about all this, I’m sure. It was a really, really hard decision. We spent two weeks in planning, dozens of spreadsheets, negotiating with our investors on a plan that would keep the company moving forward, but [had to] be very sober to the reality of what was happening around us. But also most importantly for us, for our executive team, we weren’t about to disassemble the company that we spent the last 12 to 18 months building.

More debt, improving margins: How startups are retooling in the COVID-19 era

Published May 6, 2020

A new data set from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) details how startups are reacting to the post-unicorn era as COVID-19-related disruptions upset the global economy and remake the risk tolerance of private investors.

What SVB’s new report shows is unsurprising: venture capital deal volumes are falling, startups are tapping existing debt capacities to add cash to balances while they still can and some upstart firms are curtailing spend to reduce unprofitability. The last data point comes via the lens of startups that recently raised, making the data more a snapshot of what companies that are successfully attracting capital may have accomplished with regard to improving profitability — the directional shifts are material regardless of that particular nuance.

Let’s briefly examine what the data says and what it tells us about the state of the startup market.

Spending less, borrowing more

Venture capitalists are pulling back, SVB data indicates. A chart from its Q2 markets report notes that the “SVB Deal Activity Index” had fallen from a rating of 160 in early March to just over 70 by mid-to-late-April. That staggering decline means fewer rounds are getting done and that there is less capital going into startups of all sizes.

The rise of the human-centric CEO

Published May 5, 2020

Romeen Sheth
Contributor

Romeen Sheth is president of Metasys, a workforce-management firm based in Atlanta.

Steve Schlafman
Contributor

Steve Schlafman is founder, coach and angel investor at High Output, a boutique leadership-development company based in NYC.

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO by Ben Horowitz is one of the most commonly cited management think pieces of the last decade.

And for good reason; Horowitz surfaced a fundamental distinction in operating philosophy that is necessary for companies to survive, reinvent and ultimately win when macroeconomic environments shift. The framework is especially useful given how counterintuitive the advice is — behaviors of a peacetime CEO and wartime CEO are often on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum; it is rare to find a CEO who can successfully emulate both personas.

While in concept it is easy to understand these principles, as with most things in life, nothing can replace the visceral comprehension that comes via learned experience. We are at the onset of enduring the most challenging startup environment of (at least) the last 15 years. COVID-19 is an indiscriminate event that is systematically wiping out businesses, whether “atoms” or “bits.”

For most startup operators, this is the first taste of true systematic adversity. The undercurrents of frothy valuations, the social milieu of early-stage investing and stores of excess capital are coming to a grinding halt as the bull market of the last 12 years is dramatically disrupted. We have an entire generation of founders/CEOs who may conceptually understand the peacetime CEO/wartime CEO ethos, but now, they’re going to actually live it. At the same time as every other founder/CEO. Brutal.

Since the onset of COVID-19, we have spoken to more than 100 founders and CEOs. Naturally, we are hearing frequent allusions to peacetime CEO/wartime CEO as a framework to help navigate the landscape. We’ve even used it over the last few months. While we believe it is a helpful framework, it is also incomplete. Further, we believe its application can lead to deeply problematic outcomes.

At a micro level, the misplaced application of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO can fundamentally change a company for the worse. A wartime CEO, as Horowitz notes, is “completely intolerant, rarely speaks in a normal tone, sometimes uses profanity purposefully, heightens contradictions, and neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” In the strictest application, we are seeing this align with a common false trope that has plagued the tech industry: “To change the world like Steve Jobs, I need to emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality.” A classic logical fallacy many founders/CEOs have learned the hard way — if you emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality, it doesn’t mean you will change the world like he did.

Each company is driven by its own unique culture and values — in a crisis situation, while it is important to be adept and agile, it’s equally, if not more important, to triple down on the strongest elements of your culture established pre-crisis. Many of the strongest founders/CEOs we have had the pleasure of coaching and investing in are uniquely world-class in their patience and tolerance, their ability to make the abnormal normal and their commitment to inspire with clarity. It is the adherence to these principles that will help carry their companies through this time.

At a macro level, peacetime CEO/wartime CEO conjures outdated themes that are at best inaccurate, and at worst, counterproductive. War implies “destruction, ruthlessness, blood, death;” there is an innate sense of machismo and bravado in this language reinforcing a homogeneous tech community. This type of vernacular and attitude increases barriers to a more inclusive community excluding women and underrepresented minority participation.

Now is the time for us to propagate community, resourcefulness and generosity.

One of the most common takeaways we have heard in reference to the framework is, “now is the time when real founders are made.” If Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Away, the Wing and the countless other women-led/minority-led startups that have been adversely affected by COVID-19 are not able to bounce back, we highly doubt it is because “they weren’t able to cut it as real founders,” a ridiculous assertion to make under any circumstance.

The peacetime CEO/wartime CEO framework is clearly valuable — it forces us to dissect the behavioral shifts necessary to survive in a crisis. That being said, it needs to evolve. Being firm, decisive and staring down an existential crisis is not mutually exclusive with applying empathy, gratitude and generosity. You can be an intense, laser-focused and paranoid CEO without losing yourself or fundamentally changing the culture of your company.

We know dozens of leaders who are leading their companies through these challenging times without leaving a wake of carnage or damage to the foundation they have spent years building. They are leading with their heart and values and will be remembered for how they carried themselves, treated their employees and guided the company through the crisis. COVID-19 presents us with a unique opportunity as an industry. Now is the right time to retire the false dilemma of peacetime CEO or wartime CEO and empower the rise of the human-centric CEO:

The human-centric CEO considers and balances the needs of her organization, employees, customers and other stakeholders in good and bad times;
The human-centric CEO recognizes she cannot change the macro environment or competition so she focuses her effort and energy on what she and the team can control and manage;
The human-centric CEO internalizes his mission, vision and values in the face of difficult challenges and critical strategic decisions;
The human-centric CEO views and manages her company as a complex and dynamic human system with nuanced inputs and interdependencies;
The human-centric CEO believes employees are the single most important stakeholder — that is reflected in how the organization hires, coaches, trains, incentivizes and retains;
The human-centric CEO orients around decisive and bold decisions that impact employees rather than a series of micro maneuvers that damage culture and trust;
The human-centric CEO creates shared meaning and purpose by reiterating the mission and vision over and over and over again;
The human-centric CEO fosters an organization that values and cultivates psychological safety;
The human-centric CEO develops self-awareness and inner resilience to weather the emotional ups and downs of company building;
The human-centric CEO invests the time and energy to go deeper with her employees at strategic junctures and times of crisis;
The human-centric CEO distills and simplifies issues, strategies and tactics to help employees reduce noise and increase focus;
The human-centric CEO communicates frequently and articulates expectations with humility and confidence to avoid uncertainty, prevent anxiety and achieve alignment;
The human-centric CEO recognizes he has a range of communication mediums at his disposal and selects the most appropriate one based on the magnitude of the situation;
The human-centric CEO believes in the power of company rituals such as one-on-ones, exec team meetings, all-hands, stand-ups, retrospectives and off-sites;
The human-centric CEO expresses empathy, appreciation and gratitude for the work performed by existing, outgoing and former employees;
The human-centric CEO listens intensely and empathetically with her full self — ears, eyes and intuition;
The human-centric CEO takes out time for self-care because she understands she cannot serve others and be highly effective unless she is mentally and physically healthy.

There’s no way to mince words. COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on the startup community. The inevitable is unfortunately occurring every day — many startups will never come back from this. As eternal optimists, however, we see opportunity in this crisis for the broader industry: the rise of the human-centric CEO. Now is the time for us to propagate community, resourcefulness and generosity. It’s the time to be ever thoughtful about employees, colleagues, stakeholders and fellow founder/CEOs in need. Individual startups may not survive this crisis, but it is our hope that an everlasting mentality does.

By no means is this list exhaustive, but it captures the behaviors and attributes from the top leaders we are working with. We believe CEOs should strive to become human-centric. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we believe it will lead to healthier organizations and better results over time.

All product creators can learn something from Jackbox Games’ user experiences

Published May 4, 2020

Jason Shen
Contributor

Jason Shen is a three-time startup founder and the CEO of Midgame, a gaming technology company backed by Techstars and Betaworks.

How do these games work?

There are more than 20 unique games across Jackbox Party Packs 1-6, too many to explain — but here are three of the most popular:

Fibbage: A twist on the traditional trivia game, players are asked to invent an answer to a question of obscure knowledge (e.g. “a Swedish man who works as a dishwasher receives disability benefits due to his unusual addiction to ____.”) Then all the invented answers are mixed in with the truth and players must select the real answer while avoiding fakes. You earn points for guessing correctly and for tricking other players (the answer is “heavy metal”).

Why COVID-19 could delay Interswitch, Africa’s next big IPO

Published May 4, 2020

The economic effects of COVID-19 could delay Africa’s next big IPO — that of Nigerian fintech unicorn Interswitch.

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time the Lagos-based payments company’s plans for going public were postponed; the tech world has been anticipating Interswitch’s stock market debut since 2016.

For the continent’s innovation ecosystem, there’s a lot riding on the digital finance company’s IPO. After e-commerce venture Jumia, it would become only the second listing of a VC-backed African tech company on a major exchange. And Interswitch’s stock market debut — when it occurs — could bring more investor attention and less controversy to the region’s startup scene.

What is Interswitch?

TechCrunch reached out to Interswitch on the window for listing, but the company declined to comment. The tech firm’s path from startup to IPO aspirant traces back to the vision of founder Mitchell Elegbe, a Nigerian electrical engineering graduate whose entire career has pretty much been Interswitch.

Africa’s tech scene is still fairly young, but it does have a timeline with several definitive points. An early one would be the success of mobile money in East Africa, with the launch of Safaricom’s M-Pesa in 2007. Another is the notable wave of VC-backed startups and founders that launched around 2010.

Interswitch CEO Mitchell Elegbe (Photo Credits: Interswitch)

With Interswtich, Elegbe pre-dated both by a number of years, founding his fintech company back in 2002 to connect Nigeria’s largely disconnected banking system. The firm became a pioneer of the infrastructure to digitize Nigeria’s economy.

Interswitch created the first electronic switch whereby Nigerian financial institutions could communicate and thereby operate ATMs and point of sales operations. The company now provides much of the rails for Nigeria’s online banking system.

NWU researchers develop a throat-worn wearable that could offer early warnings for COVID-19 patients

Published May 4, 2020

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is resulting in big shifts across industries, but the development of more long-term solutions that address a future in which what we need to do is mitigate the impact of the new coronavirus seems like a worthwhile place to invest time and effort. Projects like a new one from Northwestern University researchers working with the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab in Chicago that resulted in a wearable to potentially provide early warnings to COVID-19 patients are a prime example of that kind of work.

The wearable is designed to be worn on the throat, and it’s already in use by around 25 individuals, who are providing early data about its effectiveness via at-home and in-clinic monitoring. The hardware involved monitors coughs and respiratory activity, and then feeds that into a set of algorithms developed by the research team that can identify what might be early symptoms of COVID-19, and potential signs that the infection is progressing in a dangerous way that could require more advanced care.

The gadget is designed to be worn around the clock, and provides a continuous data stream. This has the advantage of providing insight as it becomes available, instantly, instead of relying on regular check-ins, or waiting for when symptoms are clearly bad enough that someone needs additional help, at which point it’s usually past the stage of early intervention. The wearable essentially looks like a thin bandage the size of a postage stamp, and it can monitor not only cough sounds and frequency, but also chest movements, heart rate, body temperature and respiratory rate.

It’s tuned specifically to what health experts have generally tagged as the most common early symptoms of COVID-19, which include fever, coughing and problem breathing. The “suprasternal notch,” which is the technical name for the site on the throat where the wearable rests, is “where airflow occurs near the surface of the skin” through the respiratory pathways of the body, according to Northwestern researcher John A. Rogers who led the device’s development team.

This hardware can potentially be useful in a number of ways: First, it’s a valuable tool for front-line healthcare workers, offering them what will hopefully be an early warning sign of any oncoming illness, so they can avoid infecting their colleagues and get the treatment they need as efficiently as possible. Second, it could be used by those already diagnosed with COVID-19, to potentially provide valuable insight into the course of the infection, and when it might be getting worse. Third, it could eventually also be used to tell scientists working on therapies what is working, how and how well, with live information from test subjects both in-clinic and at home.

The device is also relatively easy to produce, with the team saying they can do so at a rate of around hundreds per week, without even needing to lean very heavily on outside suppliers. That’s a considerable advantage for any hardware that might need to be leveraged in volume to address the crisis. Plus, people can wear it almost unnoticed, and it’s very easy to use both for clinicians and patients.

There are other projects in the works to see how devices that monitor biometrics, including the Oura ring, and the Kinsa thermometer, can help contain the epidemic. The researchers behind this wearable have spun up an engineering company called Sonica to manage their device’s development, and will now be working with various agencies (including through funding by BARDA) to deploy it in more places, and see about potentially productizing the wearable for wide-scale use.