Tag: investment

Snapchat and the curse of Big Money

Snapchat shows that too much investment money is not always good for a growing business

Goldman Sachs fesses up to making a huge mistake about Snapchat, telling investors in an analyst note how they over-estimated the company’s potential and ability to execute on advertising opportunities.

There’s much to be said about Wall Street’s role in supporting Silicon Valley’s greater fool model and Business Insider has certainly been across how Goldman Sachs and its fellow bankers have been less than honest in their public dealings over the Snap float.

While the ethics and behaviour of Wall Street bankers and venture capital investors is a worthy topic for discussion, one of the notable things about Snap’s float is that it was too expensive.

The initial IPO valued the company, which at the time was reporting $500 million a year in losses, at $28 billion dollars. It’s not incidental the float incurred $85 million in advisors’ fees to Goldman Sachs and their friends.

A high valuation might be good for the early investors and employers – particularly those who sold in the initial ‘stag’ that saw the stock jump 60% on its first day – but for the company itself, and the later shareholders, it’s a disaster as the business’ management frantically struggles to find revenue streams to justify the market price.

This is the same problem that has crippled Twitter, instead of focusing on long term value to customers, users and shareholders, the company has desperately flailed around looking for quick hits to its revenue numbers.

While Twitter and Snapchat are outliers, the same problem faces smaller businesses which have attracted huge investments. The pressure to justify the money at stake becomes crippling and almost always damages the long term prospects of the company.

Too much investor money is rarely a good thing. As with much in life, quality and not quantity is what really matters for companies looking for capital.

Champagne tastes and short runways

In an age of startup unicorns, it’s not surprising investors are being burned

One of the curious things about the Silicon Valley business model is how fundraising is seen as an end in itself.

Most business proprietors would be philosophical or mildly irritated if they’d had to give up equity or go into debt to fund growth, but in startup land a whack of money is seen as success in itself.

Sadly that money isn’t always well spent as the story of the free spending Guvera streaming service shows.

Over the company’s eight years the founders raised $185 million which ran out last week leaving the 3,000 small investors out of pocket.

That small investors were even involved in such a venture raises eyebrows and suspicions aren’t helped by a funds manager charging huge commissions for their services.

 

Just the use of a middle man like AMMA Private Equity – which happened to be run by one of the co-founders – should have raised concerns however the high commissions should prompted questions from the investors about advisors’ interest in getting them into a high risk venture.

In the current overheated startup space it’s necessary to be skeptical about many of businesses claims and the amounts of money being raised, as big pots of honey attract the flies.

Freelancer and the sugar daddy problem

Attempts to create hands off marketplaces fail as the realities of managing millions of users becomes apparent

Last week Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg announced the social media platform will be hiring three thousand content moderators following a string of shocking incidents on the company’s live streaming service.

Facebook were the most successful of the generation of businesses promising algorithms and the user community – coupled with common sense – would act as gatekeepers.

That was handy for their business models, as the reduced administration costs would mean a much more scalable and profitable business.

Managing users’ sins

Along with Google, AirBnB and Uber, Facebook found that relying on users’ feedback and their own algorithms wasn’t enough to cover the myriad of sins humans commit or one in a million edge cases which occur a thousand times a day when you have a billion daily users.

Even the biggest of the web2.0 companies, Google, found their core business being shaken as the limits of algorithmic advertising were explored and advertisers didn’t like where their brands were appearing.

Most striking was AirBnB who quickly found ignoring aggrieved landlords didn’t work when you’re a billion dollar company. Uber, Facebook and Google have similarly found the “we’re just an agnostic distribution platform” doesn’t fly when you’re boasting millions of users.

Freelancer and the sugar daddies

Which brings us to Freelancer, the labour sites were always problematic in this space as services are rife with ripoffs, misunderstandings and inexperienced operators – on both the seller and buyer side.

Another problem though which seems to be appearing is the advertising of adult services on this site, such as this advert which appears to be either an advert for a sugar daddy or a webcam performer – the mangled English makes it hard to tell.

Bizarrely a Freelancer administrator has removed some of the advert’s content but has left the post itself up.

Clicking on the related links brings up a whole range of strange projects including someone who needs a photoshop expert to insert an individual into sex photographs.

Holding the service harmless

It’s hard to say whether these posts comply with Freelancer’s Terms and Conditions as they are the usual vaguely written screeds seeking to shift all responsibility away from the company which have become the norm with online services.

The reputational risk to Freelancer though is real, as company listed on the Australian Stock Exchange it has public investor base and, given its competitive market, it has to appear respectable to user – becoming a Tindr for adult performers – is probably not where organisation would like to be positioned.

Hitting the profit margin

Ultimately though Freelancer’s problem in this space is the same as most online platform services, the promise of negligible administrative costs is an illusion as managing a large user base brings up legal, regulatory, reputational and even political risks as Facebook is finding.

Like many of the early promises of the internet, the idea of a hands off platform where users do the work while owners sit back and pocket profits has gone. Where there’s people and edge cases, there’s risk and those profits may not be as great as they appear.

Coping with ignorance in a dysfunctional market

Startup investing involves working in ignorance, rather than managing risk says one veteran funds manager

“We discount uncertainty and ignorance too much,” says funds manager Jack Cray.

Cray was giving his From Risk to Uncertainty to Ignorance presentation at Sydney’s North Shore Innovation Network where he went through some of the lessons from a career of managing funds in North America and Australia.

Groupthink is one the great risks Cray sees in the investment community with funds managers tending to recruit from a monoculture drawn from economics and finance degrees. “Diversity amplifies signals,” says Cray.

Compounding the groupthink is the focus on risk, believes Cray. Risk can be managed while the other factors in investment – uncertainty and ignorance – can’t.

Traditional investors, particularly those in the public equity markets, understand risk well. However those established models also mean create process driven risk averse institutions.

In the Uncertainty field, typified by the private equity markets, fixed models don’t work so well as a consequence investors have to be more risk tolerant and patient as they deal with a world where things can’t be assumed.

And then there is the world of ignorance where no-one can quite be certain of what’s going on, which is typical of the tech startup field. In this space, investors have a high risk tolerance and are often muddling through while being buffeted by unexpected factors.

“To succeed in a world of ignorance you have to be honery and less concerned about certainty,” Cray observes with a wry smile.

This explanation makes a lot of sense when looking at why institutional investors struggle with the startup world and why private equity investors – largely a group of financial pirates – are so profitable.

In answer to my question that saying startup investors are operating in a world of ignorance implies that sector really is an insider game, Cray was ambivalent – it can be, but the endorsement of a major VC or highly regarded investor will by its nature be seen as information in a field where everyone is short of data.

Cray also had an interesting perspective on how markets and pundits see change differently, “investors overlook while futurists overcook.”

Speaking to Cray after the event, he had some thoughts about the internet itself, while it’s a great source of information it also creates too much noise. Cutting out that noise is essential for a good investor.

When it comes to investment all of us are dealing with different degrees of ignorance, Jack Cray’s views were an interesting insight into how managing a stock portfolio or picking ventures is more than just understanding risk.

The trouble with crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is a useful tool for some ventures, but it isn’t without its risks

This story originally appeared in Business Spectator in July 2015, with the recent crowdfunding stories I thought it was worth revisiting.

Last week home automation start-up Ninja Blocks announced it was closing down after three years, two successful Kickstarter campaigns and burning through $2.4 million of investor funding. This follows the winding up of smart lighting venture Moore’s Cloud late last year.

Both companies relied heavily on crowd-funding to raise their profile and attract capital for their projects. The two Ninja Blocks campaigns raised a total of $800,000 to fund their two products while Moore’s Cloud fell short of the target they set.

Former Moore’s Cloud CEO Mark Pesce was bitter about the company’s failure to meet its target, telling Technology Spectator last year he would rather eat bullets than go through a Kickstarter campaign again.

Not better, just different

“People say it’s a better way of getting investors, it’s not better it’s just different.” Pesce said in reflecting on a campaign that raised $350,000, only half the amount needed to get the product onto the market. “If you do a crowdfunding campaign you have to be customer-focused from Day One. You have to do a marketing campaign and customer support from the first day, you have to build the customer infrastructure first.”

Ninja Blocks’ former CEO Daniel Freedman agreed that ultimately crowd-funding is not the best place to raise capital for a new start-up, “Kickstarter is a great place to launch a product but I don’t think it’s a great place to launch a company,” Freedman also told Technology Spectator last year.

“I think there’s two different things there,” Freedman said. “Unless you get several million dollars like some of the larger Kickstarters have, you need to get external funding. If you were to price in everything you need to do to get a product worldwide shipping then you’d be selling a two hundred dollar product for six hundred dollars.”

Impeccable qualifications

Ninja Blocks boasted an impeccable pedigree for a start-up, being a 2012 graduate of the high profile Sydney Startmate program that included a $25,000 cash for a 7.5 per cent stake in the business. The company also received a million dollars in seed funding that year from a group of prominent Australian investors that included Atlassian founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes.

The company went on to raise another $800,000 through two Kickstarter campaigns and last year secured a further $700,000 from investors including Singtel’s Innov8, Blackbird Ventures, and the prestigious 500 Startups project to expand into the United States.

Despite the resources and high profile backers, Ninja Blocks still ran out money. Something that didn’t surprise 500 Startups’ founder Dave McClure who responded to the news on Twitter with “not all startups will be unicorns and making things is hard.”

Hardware is hard

Co-founder and director of Australian crowd-funding site Pozible, Rick Chen agrees with McClure’s views, “startups needs to realise building a hardware product is difficult, they need to understand how the hardware developing cycle works, get their hands dirty and do some actual work to make sure things are in control before crowd-funding.”

The complexities of running a hardware start-up were acknowledged by Freedman during his interview with Technology Spectator last year, “there are things you would never have thought about when you ship a product worldwide, things like certifications, recycling programs in Europe and foreign language manuals.”

However, Chen sees crowd-funding as having a role in funding hardware start-up projects, particularly in protecting the founders’ equity in the venture. “Crowdfunding offers a unique way to build and engage with an audience base for hardware companies, it is a fantastic tool if used well. The core value of a crowdfunding campaign versus investment funding is those supporters and early adopters of your product and of course not losing any percentage of the company.”

Crowdfunding lessons learned

For the investors in Moore’s Cloud and Ninja Blocks they may well now be thinking it would have been better to insist on that work being done earlier, however start-ups are a risky business and most will fail, something that Chen points out.

“Crowd-funding is not easy, it combines fundraising, product launching, marketing, PR and other things all in one package, it requires a lot of energy to plan and execute, and the result is unpredictable,” Chen states. “But I don’t think crowd-funding itself adds any extra dimension to the difficulties of creating a start-up, all the process is required with or without a crowd-funding campaign and the result is as always, unpredictable.”

While crowd-funding is still going to be attractive to capital starved entrepreneurs, many start-up founders and their investors will note the lessons of Moore’s Cloud and Ninja Blocks’ failure. Crowd-funding certainly isn’t the simple path to raising funds.

Crowdfunding the energy revolution

As technology changes so to do business and investment rules. The solar energy market is a good example.

“We have no shortage of investors,” says Tom Nockolds of Sydney community solar farm group Pingala in an Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s report on small business power projects.

The ABC’s report focuses on Bakers Maison, a suburban Sydney bakery that raised 400,000 dollars to extend its solar solar electricity system to slash its power bills and promises investors a seven percent return on investment.

Seven percent is very good in these days of low yields so it’s not surprising investors are lining up for projects.

It’s also an indictment on the modern banking system that smaller businesses like Bakers Maison have to issue debt directly to the market rather than getting a loan, which would have been normal a generation ago but today Australian banks would rather lend to property speculators than productive businesses.

This isn’t to say such fund raising is without problems as there is a real risk of fraud which Australia’s prescriptive fund raising laws are designed to avoid, even at the cost of stopping genuine investments.

“We’ve had to duck and weave our way through the regulations to set up this kind of operation,” says Warren Yates of Clear Sky Solar Investments – another volunteer group – about the laws which were developed after the financial scandals of the 1960s mining boom and the 1980s entrepreneur period.

As a consequence, the ABC story points Australia is lagging jurisdictions like Germany, Denmark and Scotland in developing these schemes.

With the banking system having left the field of funding growing businesses and responsibility largely falling on volunteers to provide services, reforms encouraging community crowdfunding need to be developed to provide capital to industry and local initiatives.

That many of the current reforms in this area such as America’s Jobs Act or Australia’s Innovation Agenda focus on a narrow set of industries – specifically the tech startup sector – which means we’re missing most the value in an evolving economy. A bakery, factory or hotel deserves the same investment advantages as the next potential tech unicorn and they could employ just as many people and deliver even more benefits to the broader economy.

New technologies have always demanded new investment and business rules and we’re seeing those pressures developing today, all of us have to demand regulators and politicians pay attention to the changing needs of our economy.

With investors clamouring for new opportunities and businesses wanting capital, it would be a tragedy to miss the possibilities of today’s technological, financial and energy revolutions.

Juicing innovation

The Juicero’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

Every tech boom has its excesses and it’s hard to go past the Juicero as the most egregious of today’s mania.

A number of high profile investors, including Google’s venture capital arm, have poured $120 million dollars into the internet connected device that squeezes juice from pre-prepared pouches of pulped fruit and vegetables.

Bloomberg found the devices don’t a great deal as the juice can be squeezed out of the packs by hand, which is just as well given the microchipped pulp containers can be disabled by the manufacturer.

While the Juicero aims to be the juicer equivalent of the Keurig coffee capsule, the device’s expense, built in obsolescence and unnecessary waste is emblematic of everything  that’s wrong with the current Silicon Valley culture.

The fundamental question of any business idea is ‘what problem does this solve?’ It’s hard to think of anything the Juicero fixes.

Bootstrapping to success

Bootstrapping is the easiest and cheapest form of investment, maybe we should celebrate it more.

One of the downsides of the current tech startup boom is the obsession with investor funding, the race to be a billion dollar ‘unicorn’ like Uber or AirBnB obsesses most of us reporting on this space.

The paradox is while we gleefully report businesses raising hundreds of millions of dollars at ever increasing valuations, we’re also discussing how the cost of entering industries or launching new companies is collapsing, making it easier to launch a venture than every before.

Which leads us to good old fashioned ‘bootstrapping’ – funding a business’ growth out of sales.

A recent story I wrote on Sydney based HR tech company Expr3ss! reminded me of that where owner Carolyne Burns described how she financed her business initially through the sale of her house and has never taken a cent from investors over a decade of profitable operations.

Bootstrapping is the traditional way generations of business owners and entrepreneurs have funded their ventures and it’s only in recent years with the rise of the tech startup that venture capital or private equity has been seen as investment sources for most small businesses.

That rise of VC and PE investors though could be partly due to the banks stepping out of their role of financing small businesses as they’ve focused on financial engineering and funding speculators.

Also driving things in the last decade has been the flood of cheap money that’s washed across the world as governments and central bankers try to stave off deflation.

Many businesses needing money to fund capital investment or expansion have found it’s become harder to go to banks or traditional investors and that partly explains the rise of VC’s, Private Equity and the range of new online lender and crowdfunding platforms.

Venture Capital and investor money though never really comes cheap and having raised funds from investors, a founder or business owner’s job becomes as much about managing investor expectations as running the company.

 

For many business founders, the whole reason for starting their own company was to run their own show. So answering to a bunch of investors defeats the purpose of going on one’s own.

Carolyne Burns’ story is a reminder that the best, and cheapest, form of business financing is profitable sales. It’s something we should remember in an age that celebrates loss making companies dependent upon indulgent investors.

Government cargo cults and community building

Melbourne hopes a culture of government subsidies will build an industry ecosystem, history isn’t on its side.

Following the post on Building Digital Communities a few weeks ago, some friends forwarded me an excellent article from New Zealand tech evangelist Dan Khan on what he learned from from observing the development of Boulder’s tech community.

Khan’s view is values are at the root of building a startup community, an open and distributed network of people bringing their disparate but relevant skills to a region is what builds an industry cluster.

Equally it’s about values being aligned so the community reinforces its own strengths and advantages.

To many, the startup community is not a tangible thing. Instead, it’s an amorphous, ever-changing network of support, knowledge, resources, and relationships which gives those creating ventures, a boost up to the next level when they need it.

It’s simultaneously a safety net that eases founders down when their ideas fail; and a resounding cheerleader and network of scale for those flying high.

The New Zealand experience is informative as Wellington’s tech sector explodes on the back of special effects studio, WETA along with Xero and the vibrant startup community based around initiatives like Enspiral. So much so the city is offering free trips to prospective workers.

Enspiral itself is a good example of grass roots community initiative where a contractor’s collective has grown to 300 strong organisation building connections between Wellington’s creative, tech and businesses groups.

History is on the side of those building grass roots communities as almost every industrial hub has grown out of motivated individuals harnessing a local region’s advantages to dominate a sector.

As Steve Blank’s Secret History of Silicon Valley describes, the rise of today’s venture capital tech sector business model came out of a group of driven individuals leveraging the United States’ massive electronics research spending through the mid Twentieth Century along with a boost from tax changes in the late 1970s.

Silicon Valley’s startup culture owes a lot to government spending and policies but the development of today’s ecosystem took fifty years and many motivated individuals working together.

Which brings us to to the Victorian state government’s funding the establishment of a 500 Startups outpost in Melbourne. This is part of a sustained campaign to subsidise global tech companies’ setting up their regional offices in the city.

As part of that campaign the Victorian state government has promised to spend sixty million Australian dollars on building a startup ecosystem in Melbourne, it’s a classic example of top down planning.

History hasn’t been kind to Victoria in its tech industry subsidies, with the state government spending ten of millions at the beginning of the century to develop region’s gaming industry only to see the sector collapse as a high Australian dollar and soaring costs saw international studios leave and local producers close.

In 1998, then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, triumphantly proclaimed subsidising Netscape’s Australian office would lead to Melbourne becoming a global tech centre. Twenty years later, that game continues.

500 Startups founder Dave McClure hints at how the outpost will be limited, “Partnering with Melbourne and LaunchVic helps us bring a slice of Silicon Valley to Australia through our startup, investor, and corporate programs.”

So there’s a strong sense of deja-vu, dare one say even cargo cult thinking, in the weekend’s announcement.

While bringing a slice of Silicon Valley to Melbourne is nice, it doesn’t build an ecosystem which will take years of patient encouragement of local, motivated individuals. What’s worse, the government intervention threatens to distort the market and stifle the culture of grass roots development Khan identifies as being critical.

The question for Melbourne’s startup community is how much patience does the government have? The nation’s political culture of announceables, which the current state minister is an enthusiastic participant, doesn’t bode well.

For the moment, the priority for the Melbourne startup community is to decide if public sector funding should be a critical part of their ecosystem. If government subsidies for foreign businesses are the answer then ensuring bipartisan and long term political support for strategic initiatives should also be close to the top of the list.

Rethinking startup rules

Much of the current mindset around investing and supporting startups creates barriers to founding new businesses. What can we do better?

What are some of the barriers to increasing diversity in the startup community’s monoculture? Yesterday we had an insight into some of the changes needed at the Women in VC forum held in Sydney.

Samantha Wong, partner at early stage startup accelerator Startmate and Head of operations at Blackbird Ventures, described how Startmate identified some of those barriers among the 51 companies that went through the program and the steps to overcome them.

What Samantha and her team found illustrate how the Silicon Valley model of founding and funding businesses inadvertently creates obstacles for women, older workers, disadvantaged groups and poorer people.

Insisting on Solo Founders

“Previously we had a rule that you couldn’t be a solo-founder. It’s too much work to do it by yourself,” she explained.

There’s good reason for that belief as building any business on your own is hard, regardless of whether it’s a tech startup or a dog walking franchise.

It’s understandable that investors are reluctant to get involved with a ‘one person show’, although a lack of capital is going to make life extraordinarily harder for a sole founder or proprietor.

The myth of the tech co-founder

“You had to have at least one technical co-founder in the team.” Samantha explained, “the reasons for this rule were historical.”

This belief goes back to the origins of the Silicon Valley business model where companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and even Google were founded by ‘two men in a shed’ where one was the marketing or sales whiz and the other delivered the product.

Interestingly many of the recent successes like Facebook, Uber and AirBnB haven’t had that dynamic, probably because the technology industries have matured to a point where developer and product managers are established trades or professions are easily available as well as cloud based tools making technology itself more accessible.

So a ‘tech co-founder’ will almost certainly be useful but isn’t essential to get a business off the ground in today’s tech environment.

Being in attendance

“We had a blanket rule of requiring participants to be in Sydney for the full duration of the program,” says Samantha. “The reason for this we know from experience that ninety percent of the program’s value comes from that sharing which happens between founders, the support and the friendly competitive pressure you get from them. It brings the best out of you.”

Startmate changed its policy so only one of the co-founders needs to be in Sydney. While it doesn’t solve the problem of solo founders with family obligations that don’t want to move, it does make it easier for those with dependents to participate.

Dropping the blanket rules

Over the six years Startmate has been running, they’ve seen a change in the nature of startups joining the program. “When the program started in 2011 we gave a small amount of money to a couple of people to build a product and start attracting customers,” Samantha said.

“By 2016 we were attracting much later companies that already had revenue and the program’s focus became growth and fund raising.”

“So instead of blanket rules we started to ask ‘what does this company need to grow in the next three to six months?’ Do they enough resources right now? Is the product good enough to sell? If you can get good answers to those then it’s worth considering them joining.”

The lessons from Startmate in increasing diversity among their intake are instructive and it indicates the limits of the Silicon Valley model that favours young, middle class men over other groups.

For the tech industry, that focus on one group is a great weakness and means investors are missing a world of opportunities. Ditching existing biases and established wisdom could be a very profitable move from everyone.

Scamming the Jobs Act

JOBS Act equity crowdfunding replaces the ‘fools, family and friends’ that startups relied for seed capital. Hopefully there won’t be too many fools

When the Obama administration approved the US JOBS Act in 2012 it was almost certain the crowdfunding aspects would attract charatans looking to separate gullible investors from their money.

And so it has turned out, with the New York Times reporting how some crowdfunding sites are worried by the poor quality of startups touting for funds on some platforms.

The Times piece follows the story of Ryan Feit, the founder of New York’s Seedinvest who tells how he has rejected substandard proposals only to have seen them embraced by other crowdfunding platforms with often terrible results for investors.

One of the early companies he rejected was shut down by regulators — who labeled it a fraud — after it raised $5 million from investors. And Mr. Feit expects it won’t be the last.

That fraudsters would be attracted to crowdfunding sites is unsurprising and with regulators still working out how to manage investor protection the field is still very much ‘buyer beware.’

High valuations are also an investor warning sign.

Mr. Feit has been particularly worried about companies that have assigned themselves sky-high valuations that will make it hard for investors to ever make their money back. In several cases, companies that he rejected because of their high valuations have shown up on other sites with the same valuations

The unicorn mania of recent years is the cause of this focus on high valuations and is strange for investors as those richly priced stakes are not in their interests or those of employees taking equity in the business. If anything, a ridiculous market valuation should be the biggest warning of all to potential stakeholders.

Ultimately though it may be that crowdfunding equity isn’t about taking a stake in a business but more showing one’s support for a venture suggests, Nick Tommarello, the co-founder of Wefunder.

Mr. Tommarello also noted that many small-time investors so far were viewing their investments more as donations to businesses they like, rather than as investments that will make money.

As JOBS Act equity crowdfunding campaigns are limited to a million dollars each, being the modern equivalent of the ‘friends, families and fools’ may be the future of these capital channels. Hopefully there won’t be too many fools.

The shine goes off the wearable tech market

FitBit and GoPro lose their lustre as smartphones take many of their features

Friday was a bad day for former startup darlings FitBit and GoPro with both companies disappointing investors.

GoPro, whose cameras for a while defined a new wave of adventure videos, announced a loss of $104 million dollars on the back of production issues and further disillusioned stockholders with a forecast of further poor sales in the upcoming holiday season.

Those shareholders have many reasons to be disillusioned with the camera maker’s shares reaching $98 two years ago after floating at $24. Today they are sitting at $11.

FitBit shareholders have suffered similarly, with the fitness band’s shares falling to eight dollars after listing at $20 almost two years ago. Their announcement of further problems on Friday saw the stock price dropping thirty percent on the day.

It may be easy to scorn investors in hindsight, but both companies were emblematic of a new generation of wearable technology and much of their problems today owes as much to them trying to stay ahead of the curve as it does from smartphones developing most of their products’ functionality.

The travails of FitBit and GoPro are typical of a time when new technology is changing business. Some companies  shine brightly then fade while others have a rocky road to success. We’ll have to wait and see if FitBit and GoPro survive.