Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid (Part 6)

Sramana: So your ultimate strategy is to go to market through third party consultants?

Krishna Kumar: We want to empower consulting companies to run with projects based in our technology. They are not going to buy into our strategy if two things don’t happen. First, we need to have similar customers in the market that they are trying to pursue. Second, we need to have a product that is easy to deploy. We have to ensure both the business value and the customer validation for the Accentures of the world to run with our product.

Sramana: I would like to suggest a third thing that you are going to need to fully attract a professional services consulting firm. You are going to need to understand the use cases. The value to the end customer is key. Right now, you are talking about retail, and yes, there are hypothetical use cases regarding merchandising and placement, but how your product enables those things is still to be determined. You don’t have the proof point and you don’t have the full roadmap lined up. For each of the verticals that you want to play in, you need to create that story for the corresponding consulting firms.

Krishna Kumar: That is a very fair point and I probably did not give you the best example. I chose retail, because that is something people can relate to easily. The other real proof point is in utilities. That is around smart utilities.

Our use case here is in the national power grid in Israel. They have significant problems from many different angles including geopolitical. They are really constricted when it comes to electricity. Their electric grid is practically an island. They cannot piggy back on top of their neighbors to help them out if they have a shortfall. That means there is significant pressure on their grid to go into renewables, specifically wind and solar.

Wind and solar are very clean but they are also unpredictable. Cloud cover can reduce a good chunk of your electric grid. Wind is also very intermittent. Quality is also of extreme consequence to Israel due to the fabs. They cannot sustain variations in electricity due to all of the silicon fabs they have and it would be very easy for them to lose a couple of wafers if they had poor energy.

They have some pretty stringent mandates in quality and economics of their electric grid. We are providing them with a 30 year roadmap. We are like SimCity. We simulate all of the different variables such as customer behavior, economics, operational conditions, and reliability. We factor in different environmental factors, geopolitical conditions such as war and a myriad of other conditions. We then come up with the optimal mix of renewables.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services: Krishna Kumar, CEO of AppOrchid
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