2015-2016 Key Club Application: Fill & Download for Free

From 2016 IPO Prospects: Nutanix Files for IPO on the One Million by One Million blog:According to Gartner, the Infrastructure as a Service market is expected to grow 38.4% in 2016 to reach $22.4 billion. Billion Dollar Unicorn club member and hyperconverged storage provider Nutanix has recently filed to go public with plans to raise $200 million.Nutanix’s OfferingsSan Jose-based Nutanix was founded in 2009 by Dheeraj Pandey, Ajeet Singh, and Mohit Aron – all technology experts who had built scalable systems such as Google File System and Oracle Exadata. In October 2011, they started selling the initial version of the Nutanix Operating System, which pioneered hyperconverged infrastructure by providing block storage for virtualized environments on VMware. According to an IDC report, Nutanix is the market leader in the hyperconverged infrastructure industry with 52% share of the revenue.Nutanix’s offerings include two key suites. The Nutanix Prism is a comprehensive management solution designed to simplify datacenter storage and virtualization operations, and the Nutanix Acropolis is a turnkey infrastructure platform that converges compute, storage, and virtualization resources to run any application, at any scale.Their platform is primarily sold through channel partners, including distributors and resellers, and delivered directly to end-customers. They have a base of approximately 2,100 end-customers, including 226 Global 2000 enterprises such as Best Buy, Kellogg, Nasdaq, Nintendo, and Nordstrom. They have about 1,368 employees. Distributors Carahsoft Technology and Promark Technology accounted for 23% and 15%, respectively of its revenue in 2015.Nutanix’s FinancialsTotal revenue was $30.5 million, $127.1 million, and $241.4 million for fiscal 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 316% and 90%, respectively. Net loss was $44.7 million, $84.0 million and $126.1 million for fiscal 2013, 2014, and 2015, respectively.Sales and marketing expenses accounted for 72% and 67% of total revenue in 2014 and 2015, respectively. Net cash used in operating activities was $29.1 million, $45.7 million, and $25.7 million for fiscal 2013, 2014 and 2015, respectively. In the first quarter ending October 31, 2015 net loss was $38.5 million on revenue of $87.7 million and ccumulated deficit was $312 million.Nutanix competes in a rapidly evolving market with traditional storage vendors EMC, NetApp, and Hitachi; traditional IT systems vendors HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Dell, Hitachi, and IBM; and hyperconverged infrastructure and software-defined storage vendors like VMware.In its IPO filing, Nutanix also alludes to the risks associated with Dell’s recent mammoth $67 billion acquisition of EMC and its 80% holding in VMware.“Dell is not just a competitor but also is an OEM partner of ours and the combined company may also be more likely to promote and sell its own solutions over our products. EMC also holds the majority of the outstanding voting power in VMware, Inc. and if the acquisition is completed, Dell will control VMware, and could combine the Dell, EMC and VMware product portfolios into unified offerings optimized for their platforms.”Nutanix recently entered into an OEM partnership with Lenovo.They are venture funded with investments of $312.2 million from investors Fidelity Investments, Riverwood Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Greenspring Associates, Khosla Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Wellington Management, and Blumberg Capital. Their last round of funding was held in August 2014 when they raised $140 million at a valuation of over $2 billion. An earlier round of funding in January 2014 had valued them at $950 million.Kurt Marko on Forbes says that“Given ongoing consolidation in the server and storage business, it’s conceivable that Nutanix never makes it to IPO. Using a price-to-sales ratio of 8-10, Nutanix could fetch upwards of $3 billion in an acquisition; high, but feasible for a company like Cisco or Oracle looking for a competitive edge over Dell-EMC-VMware.”It is quite possible, given the state of the industry.

Donald Trump launched himself into politics by leading the racist, lying Birther Movement: hollering and lying about President Obama’s birth certificate and other papers. Republicans were fine with it. In fact, they started taking Trump seriously in politics because of it!Trump launched his campaign for president by calling Mexicans rapists, drug runners and murderers. Republicans were fine with it. In fact, they flocked to him because of it!Trump attacked his Republican opponents with crude, schoolyard nicknames, and taunts during debates, and with lines like “look at that face.” Republicans loved it!Party leaders were troubled. But once they saw the groundswell of enthusiasm for him, they got on board. Trump said he couldn’t get a fair trial in his Trump University scam because the judge was “a Mexican.” Paul Ryan, aghast, called that a textbook example of racism. Then, Ryan got the memo. He back-pedaled. He was fine with it.During the 2016 campaign, Trump kept calling for a “Muslim Ban”— a “total ban” on Muslims entering the US! He insisted Muslims all knew who in their communities would commit acts of violence and didn’t hand them over: “I think Islam hates us.” He said we needed a “Muslim Ban” because “There’s something going on with them. We need to figure out what’s going on.” He lied about vetted Syrian refugees (we were only proposing to let in a trickle of them, mostly women and little kids, after two years of background checks) and said we knew nothing about them, and read the poem about “The Snake.” Republicans ate it up. He was their boy! They were so proud he kept his campaign promise about the Muslim Ban. They were pouty it was repeatedly declared unconstitutional (bigoted, anti-American piece of garbage that it is) and pleased when, finally, the “watered down” version was blessed by the Supreme Court.Donald Trump, several times during the 2016 election, encouraged his supporters to kill his opponent, Hillary Clinton, saying things like maybe the NRA types would “do something” about Hillary, and suggesting that her security guards should lay their guns down, and then we’ll “see what happens.” Republicans were fine with it. They thought assassination threats were great! They were good with how often Trump calls women pigs and dogs, and with him screaming hate at reporters at his rallies like “Little Katy Tur,” and with him encouraging people at his hate rallies to assault non-violent protesters as they were escorted out.Donald Trump was the favored candidate of Vladimir Putin, ex spy head of an enemy foreign power, during the campaign. Putin said as much. The Obama administration announced that the DNC emails leaked just before the Democratic Convention which sent the Bernie people howling were hacked by the Russians. Republicans were fine with it. They don’t care about our national security, or national sovereignty, or the integrity of our elections. When Trump hollered his “Russia, if you’re listening …” invitation, Republicans thought it was hilarious! They were good with having a foreign spook’s puppet in our White House.Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders saw secret data on Russia’s meddling — and evidence of direct collusion/cooperation/conspiring between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. President Obama asked them to issue a joint statement with him, condemning the Russians for what they were doing to our election. Well, Mitch McConnell had showed how little he loved America when Obama took office, amid two bungled Republican wars of choice and a Republican Recession, and in that time of national emergency McConnell told Republican Senators that their “number one priority” was to make sure Obama did not get a second term. McConnell showed his contempt for our Constitution when Obama nominated centrist, universally admired Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court after Justice Scalia died, and McConnell refused to allow the Senate to perform its advise and consent role. McConnell the Traitor came through again during the 2016 election. He said: not only would GOP leaders not stand with the President for our electoral integrity, if Obama released the intelligence about Russia, Republicans would yell that it was false: an attempt by Obama to put his thumb on the scales of the election and help Hillary win. As usual, other GOP leaders went along with McConnell’s anti-American treachery.Trump sneered at Senator John McCain during the election for having been a captured, tortured POW in a war Trump avoided serving in with a lie about bone spurs. Trump said of our POWs: “I like the people who don’t get caught.” Republicans were fine with it.Trump sneered at a Muslim Gold Star family during the election. There are indications that data coming from Russia stopped for a few days; the Russians figured his campaign couldn’t survive something that crass. But Republicans were fine with it, and the chatter from Moscow resumed.Trump did an imitation of a disabled journalist who does not have total control of his arm movements. Republicans were fine with it. Some pretended to believe Trump wasn’t mocking the reporter — he just moves his arms a lot! Others didn’t bother pretending to believe this.The Access Hollywood tape dropped, with Trump bragging about how when he sees beautiful he just has to kiss it, and they’ll let you get away with it when you’re a celebrity, you can walk up to them, grab them by the pussy, anything! Republicans held their breath to see if this would be a problem for them; did they still have any conscience or decency? They didn’t! Mike Pence pressured Trump to issue a sincere apology. When Trump wouldn’t, Pence lied and pretended Trump had, and Pence said he was so moved by it.The tape fit the narrative of who Trump has always been: statements he made on the Howard Stern Show about how, when he owns a beauty pageant, he walks into the area where contestants are changing, naked and semi-naked, to “inspect” them. During the campaign, there were nineteen women who confirmed Trump had done things he brags about, to them: kissed them on the lips upon meeting them, groped them, pushed them up against the wall and assaulted them, grabbed them by the pussy in a club, etc. Six women said he’d come into the changing area when they were in beauty pageants. Five were teen contestants — the youngest was 15. The tape also correlated with Ivana Trump’s 1990s claim during her divorce from Trump that he violently raped her. (In 2015, Michael Cohen yelled about it at a reporter that “you can’t rape your spouse!”) A number of the women had reported/filed charges about sexual assault years before Trump entered politics. Republicans were fine with all of it.Credible news reports during the campaign, mostly in newspapers, not on TV, talked about the Trump Model Management scam, where teen models from around the world were coached to lie to Immigration and say they were coming to the US for contacts and interviews, not to work, and then they were warehoused in one apartment by Trump and gouged for rent; Trump pocketed their illegal earnings as models. Details came out about the Trump University scam; the man who ran it for Trump said it was set up to prey upon the elderly and uneducated and steal their life savings. It wasn’t a university. Trump said he hand-picked the staff, but he never met them or hired them; they were hired off of Craigslist, and many had never sold real estate. The scam took $20,000 or $30,000 from some people. Republicans were fine with it.Republicans were fine with Trump bribing the Attorney General of Florida, Pam Bondi, with money from his slush fund/personal charity not to investigate his Trump University scam. They were fine with Trump using money from his fake charity to buy jumbo portraits of himself. They continued to holler about the Clinton Foundation — a real charity which releases its tax returns and has helped millions of people around the world.Republicans knew during the 2016 campaign that Trump has reneged on hundreds of contracts; he hires someone to build him a building, or lay down flooring, or put in mirrors — and then, after the small business works months or years, he doesn’t pay them. Or, he pays them thirty cents on the dollar, and sneers: sue me! There were many articles about how Donald’s bigoted father Fred C. Trump and Donald Trump had a racist housing policy during the 1970s, lying to black applicants and saying there were no apartments to show and marking their applications with a “C” for colored. The Federal government took the Trumps to courts for this bigotry, repeatedly. In the face of a torrent of fact-checked, carefully sourced, credible stories about all of Trump’s crimes, Republicans learned to shout: “Fake News!” They pretend, like Trump, not to know the difference between real journalism — and click-bait sites, and FOX, and the Enquirer, and stuff in their social media feed that Russian cyber-trolls and bots put there. They have left the fact-based universe far behind.Republicans were fine with Trump bellowing that if he didn’t win, that meant the election was rigged. They were fine with the chants of “Lock her up!” and Trump telling Hillary during a debate that if he won, “You’d be in jail.” They were good with the US being reduced to a banana republic where the winner in an election threatens and then jails the loser as a matter of course, no evidence needed.Trump came into office and almost immediately fired the head of the FBI, James Comey because of “the Russia thing,” as Trump said publicly. He said it on the news, and in a private meeting with Russians in the Oval Office. Republicans were fine with it.Trump received multiple warnings that his National Security Adviser Mike Flynn was compromised — he had lied and Russians and others could blackmail him because they could expose his lies, so he should not be allowed to see sensitive data. Trump kept Flynn on for two weeks after Sally Yates told him this. He fired Sally Yates. Republicans were fine with it.From early on in Trump’s presidency, there were reports that Jared Kushner lied repeatedly — hundreds of times — on his security clearance forms. He did not disclose many, many meetings with foreign nationals that might pose security concerns. He kept re-filing his forms. Republicans were fine with Kushner continuing to see sensitive intelligence he could then blab or sell to enemy states.Republicans in Congress gave up their Constitutional oversight role; they would not properly investigate what Russia did to the 2016 elections. They would not investigate Trump’s obstruction of the FBI investigation. They would not investigate how he was violating the emoluments clause with his hotel in Washington that foreign diplomats stay at to curry favor with the administration, and other “perks” and bribes Trump gets. They would not investigate his multiple lies about President Obama, Hillary Clinton and others. They would not investigate the way American Navy SEALS were killed in Yemen, and how that raid and news of it were handled. They would not investigate how/why Trump handed top-level intelligence from Israel to the Russians in the Oval Office — so that the Israelis and others will think twice in the future about giving us tips that could help keep Americans alive. They would not investigate the security clearance of Kushner and others. They would not demand that Trump release his taxes. They would not work with Democratic colleagues to look at ties between Trump and Russia; Devin Nunes performed his contemptible theatrical pranks, and lied and said he’d recused himself or “stepped back” when he hadn’t — and the Republican base was fine with all of the GOP clowning and posturing and dodging of their oversight role.Trump said there were “good people on both sides” in Charlottesville, and Republicans were fine with it. He attacked the media and individual reporters — his buddy David Pecker at the National Enquirer had goons harass the teen daughters of reporter Mika Brzezinski over the phone, while Trump was tweeting nasty things about their mom (another of his weird woman-with-a-bleeding-face rants) — and Republicans were fine with it. Trump re-tweeted an image of a train plowing CNN, right after the terrorist in Charlottesville killed Heather Heyer with a car and wounded seventeen. Trump re-tweeted himself body-slamming CNN. When the loony in the Trump-mobile in Florida was sending pipe bombs to Democratic leaders and media — Trump kept demonizing those same people and media. Trump praised the unstable thug Congressman from Montana who body-slammed a low-key, polite reporter and lied about it. Trump re-enacted the body-slam at one of his hate fests, around the time of the Tree of Life synagogue massacre. Republicans are fine with it.Republicans continue to bleat “no collusion” and to call Mueller’s investigation a “witch hunt” after substantial evidence was gathered that has led to so many indictments and guilty pleas and several convictions — after Manafort and Gates and Papadopoulos and Stone and Pinedo, and after all those Russian nationals and entities got served. Republicans know Don Jr got an email inviting him to collude, and he wrote back “I love it!” and took the meeting in Trump Tower with Jared and Manafort. They know that Don Jr lied about it several times and his father helped him concoct a lying letter, and they both lied about doing that … Republicans don’t mind at all. Fake News! Witch Hunt! No Collusion! Sad!Republicans saw how Trump behaved toward Putin in Helsinki. They saw him do that belly crawl. They saw him believe a dictator/spy chief of an enemy foreign power over our own intelligence — people who risk their lives every day gathering data — and his own, hand-picked Director of National Intelligence and heads of the FBI and CIA and foreign policy advisers. Republicans pretend that all those people must be part of the “Deep State.” They don’t mind it when Trump talks to Putin for hours at a time and only the Russians know what gets said. They know that Putin, in addition to surveilling our voter rolls, also surveils our power grid and economic system and nuclear power plants … and they just don’t care. Putin helps Republicans win, and that’s what matters to them.Republicans are fine with the news that Trump violated campaign finance laws to have Michael Cohen pay off porn star Stormy Daniels and centerfold Karen McDougal during 2016, and then Trump reimbursed Cohen, and lied about it all again and again … They were just furious at Cohen when he stopped lying for Trump and talked about deals they’d done which Cohen could provide proof of. They are fine with Trump being “Individual One”: an un-indicted co-conspirator in Cohen’s crimes.Republicans were fine with Trump nominating Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court because Kavanaugh was likely to give Trump a pass on crimes while in office. When Dr. Blasey Ford and others stepped forward, Republican leaders made a great show of respect toward her, and hid behind a woman questioning her. Republicans clutched at their pearls and murmured about a presumption of innocence (in a job interview?) and due process and traumatizing a person and that person’s family. But Republicans were fine with Trump coaching Kavanaugh at the White House to throw a tantrum at Senate Democrats, and with Trump lying when he said there would be an unlimited one-week FBI investigation, and they were fine with Trump publicly lying about Dr. Blasey Ford (who may well be a survivor of sexual assault, like so many women and girls who say they were attacked by Donald Trump), and mocking her testimony. Republicans were also fine with Trump and their party leadership backing Roy Moore: a man with many accusers, banned from a mall because of the way he hit on teenagers. Republicans these days are fine with sexual predators in general.Republicans are fine with how Trump mocked and ultimately fired his Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself after he was caught lying to the Senate about his contacts with the Russians during the 2016 campaign. They are fine with Trump destroying every fire wall in government, such as the one between the DOJ and the White House, and with Trump choosing an acting Attorney General and then a new Attorney General because they auditioned for him, in effect, saying publicly he could never be held accountable for his crimes. They are fine with Trump breaking laws left and right, lying and undermining our Constitution with impunity.And so, in the unlikely event that Trump is, in the end, somehow held accountable for his crimes, and if he is indicted before 2020 — of course they won’t mind. The Republican base will yell “Fake News!” They’ll say the courts are fixed against Trump, and the Deep State is out to get him. The party leaders will say the same. You can turn off your conscience, again and again — and eventually, it will switch off permanently.The Republican Party has at times been honorable, even heroic. There have been times when they were the major US party that opposed slavery, and racism, and Jim Crow. There have been times when Republican leaders like Teddy Roosevelt stood up against corruption and graft in government — on the state and national level. There have been times when Republican leaders did things like build our national highway system (Eisenhower) and found the Environmental Protection Agency (Nixon) and go after bigots in housing like Donald Trump and his father (Nixon again) and champion democracy, at least in name (Ronald Reagan). But Republicans have left the fact-based universe far behind. They no longer believe in science, or in data collected by all our intelligence services and NASA and our armed forces. They no longer believe in the Constitution, or in honor, or in integrity, or in treating all human beings with basic decency, or in the First Amendment, or in the principle that no one, including the president, is above the law, or in free and fair elections, or in democracy even as an ideal, or in patriotism toward America and the importance of our sovereignty and security. They are happy for us to become a puppet state. They are happy for us to be a gangster state. They are happy for us to be a thug state, with our leader advocating for bigotry, chaos and violence. They are happy to have us devolve into the brutality of the schoolboys in William Golding’s novel The Lord of the Flies.Here’s my song, from right after the 2016 elections, about what appeals to the Republican base:And here’s my song about the Republican Party leaders:This is who they have revealed themselves to be thus far. I don’t expect them to change.

From Death by Overfunding: Powa Technologies on the One Million by One Million blog:There is no other company that illustrates the roller-coaster ride of a Unicorn as graphically as the United Kingdom’s Powa Technologies. Powa had helped put London on the Unicorn map by becoming one of the few multi-billion dollar ventures. Then with not as much as a whimper, it transformed into a Unicorpse with investors still struggling to understand what went wrong.Powa Technologies’ OfferingsFounded in 2007 by serial entrepreneur Dan Wagner, Powa was formed to deliver a seamless experience across all purchase channels, keeping in mind the constantly moving consumer. As part of its vision, Powa offered three key solutions – PowaWeb, PowaPOS, and PowaTag. PowaWeb was a cloud-based platform that powered e-commerce on a retailer’s website and provided it with access to a secure payment gateway. PowaPOS was a mobile and tablet-based point-of-sales (POS) solution that could integrate all POS peripherals and software applications in one design. But its biggest offering was PowaTag, a mobile application that claimed to be able to enhance a retailer’s digital strategy.PowaTag boasted of features that could allow print ads, radio ads, and web-ads to become points of sales for the retailer. As part of the strategy, it offered a QR code, a PowaTag Code that could be scanned, a Touch button on an online portal that could be clicked, a URL that could be embedded in social media to allow shoppers to go directly to checkout, and an audio watermark that could be used to convert a live or recorded broadcast to a sale by directing the app to take the shopper to a series of screens to make the purchase. In a nutshell, it was aimed at converting every POS into a sale.While PowaTag had big ambitions, it failed on execution. The solution was rumored to be rife with bugs and ultimately did not attract as many retailers as the company boasted. By the start of 2016, Powa claimed that it had signed up with over 1,200 retailers globally for the PowaTag app. But more recent findings have revealed that those documents were just letters of intent and not formal contracts to allow the companies to work together.Powa Technologies’ FinancialsPowa earned revenues by charging the merchants a transaction fee ranging from 40 cents or 10 basis points per transaction, whichever was higher. It did not disclose financials, but according to market reports, at its peak, the company was delivering annual revenues of mere £4.9 million (~$5.9 million). The revenues are rather low because the company claimed it was in a pre-revenue stage.Powa had been venture funded with $225 million in investment from Wellington Management and Bay Bond Partners. Its last funding round was held in November 2014 when it raised $80 million from Wellington Management at a valuation of $2.7 billion. The round had put Powa in the Unicorn club as it was valued at a rather modest $400 million during funding in 2013. By the end of its last financing round, Powa was looking to list in 2016.Powa Technologies’ FallBut 2016 unfolded in a very different kind of exit for Powa. Powa began the year on a very positive note after its big win in China. It had announced at the end of 2015 that it had partnered with UnionPay Network Payments that could help bring PowaTag to China’s 1.3 billion consumers. David Wagner said that the deal had “trumped Apple Pay” and others looking to enter the country. But that was not really the case. Apple Pay did enter China soon enough and UnionPay denied any relationship with Powa since the agreement was with an intermediary and not directly with UnionPay.By the beginning of 2016, Powa was in trouble with cash. Many believe that the China deal was being used to drum up financing. It had run out of cash, was in severe debt, and was doing all it could – right or wrong – to get investors interested. It was not having any luck raising funds despite firms like Goldman Sachs making internal presentations valuing it at $16 billion-$18 billion in September 2015 and on a clear path to be worth $50 billion with revenues of $5.5 billion by 2018. In 2016, its biggest investor Wellington Management had called in the loans and Powa was forced into liquidation. By February of 2016, Deloitte was appointed as liquidator to handle the offloading of assets.At the time of liquidation, Powa had under a quarter million dollars in cash, a debt of $16.4 million, and payroll for 311 employees to worry about. Within a month, the assets were sold off and employees were either laid off or their contracts bought over by new owners. PowaTag was bought by a consortium led by entrepreneur Ben White and PowaWeb was bought by UK-based digital business group Greenlight Digital for undisclosed sums to end the stellar story of the Unicorn called Powa.Powa’s crashing failure is attributed to a failed product and unchecked spending fuelled by overfunding from investors. Wagner was known to throw lavish parties at posh Mayfair addresses and the company was operating out of prime rental offices at the top of the Heron Tower in London. In 2015, it recorded a loss of £31.5 million (~$38.4 million) with the bulk of it being incurred due to salaries and rentals.Despite the growing concerns, investors continued to fund its losses. They poured millions into Wagner’s claims that Powa could become a bigger company than Facebook or Google. They got carried away by their own greed forgetting that due diligence is also partly the responsibility of an investor.