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Upthere |
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November 21, 2016 Issue |
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CEOCFO MAGAZINE |
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Upthere Says: “Your Device Is Just For Creation: The Cloud Is For Storing And Sharing” |
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Chief Executive Officer and Director
Upthere:
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – November 21, 2016
CEOCFO: Mr. Bourdon, according to your site, Upthere is the smarter way to store everything you want. Why and how? Mr. Bourdon: It’s the smarter way because we handle storing things in a much more elegant fashion for you. For example, today, when you take a picture with your smartphone, that picture is stored on your phone. However, if you want that picture available to you elsewhere it has to be synced around to all different locations. Upthere doesn’t store things on the device, we store things directly in the cloud so that every device can access that photo as soon as it’s taken. We also make it really easy to find what you’re looking for and then share it privately or publicly.
CEOCFO: What is the technology or what are the features in your technology that allow for an easy and as you said “elegant “solution? Mr. Bourdon: The core of our technology is a new file system that is designed for our increasingly mobile world. A file system is the way that a phone or computer stores and finds your data and makes that data (photos, files, videos) available to the the applications and user interfaces that we interact with. There is a fundamental and important difference in our file system that is unlike what other cloud providers have built.
We don’t “sync” or “back-up” your things. Instead, we write them directly to the cloud. Syncing is an old technology that was built for big, bulky desktop computers. This is incredibly inefficient for the following reasons:
- You end up with many different copies of your stuff floating around on all of your devices; - You have to have a lot of local storage in order to hold on to all of your things.
We think this is a much simpler way for people to interact with their things. They don’t have to worry about running out of space or having to delete photos from their phone when they want to take a picture or a video. Just send it to Upthere and we’ll take care of the rest.
CEOCFO: Are people concerned that it could get lost “up there” or is that not a consideration anymore these days? Do people just assume that items in the cloud will be where they should be? Mr. Bourdon: The idea of the cloud has now been around for a decade or longer for mainstream consumers. We rely on it every day for all kinds of things; for email, messaging, or ordering a pizza. The cloud has made our lives more interesting and made things more accessible. We think that there is a real opportunity to make your experience with your things better.
The cloud also is more secure and reliable than keeping your important content on any one device. What happens if you lose a phone or tablet or if one day it just stops working? We make sure that your content is always available in a fast and easy way.
CEOCFO: Has your method been thought of before? Has it been technologically possible? How did you decide, when others have not, that this was a good way? Mr. Bourdon: The world is changing a lot. If you think about where computing has gone in the last decade, it has made quite a transformation. We now have a world where we have many different devices — phones, tablets, computers, and clouds. Ten or fifteen years ago we all had just one computer.
The technology that’s inside today’s devices is based on that old desktop computer technology. Specifically, the way that data is read and written to the local storage of these devices is the same way that the computer did it 35 or 40 years ago. Very little has changed. You want your photos available from all of your devices and you want to be able to share your photos. The original technology that was designed for computers never envisioned this multi-device, mobile-centric world. Therefore, technologies were developed, like syncing, to try to make all of our devices look the same. By keeping things locally and syncing them you could compensate for the network not being good enough.
Today the network is good enough. We have very fast LTE connections in most places, and Wi-Fi is available at basically every coffee shop, malls, sporting events, and even supermarkets. Thus, when you have fast networks and you have the sheer, raw computing power and unlimited storage the cloud offers, you can rethink the problem again and say, “We don’t need to rely on those old technologies.”
CEOCFO: Would you tell us about Loops? Mr. Bourdon: We think about all the things you keep Upthere as a big bucket of stuff. We want to provide simple ways for you to find and organize this bucket. Loops let you organize things easily. For example, if you have a group of pictures and a PDF, and a Word doc, you can put them into a Loop. If you’re planning a party; you want to have your catering menu and some music for that party, and some pictures as well...you can put all of those things into a Loop.
Since the data doesn’t move around, we don’t need to email or text to share. When I put something into a Loop the other people in the Loop see it instantly.
CEOCFO: Where does Upthere play into with Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Snapchat or any of the various available options? Mr. Bourdon: Upthere is the primary place you keep your things. Therefore, you can take any item in Upthere and share it on social networks like Facebook and Instagram. It works just like you would expect.
CEOCFO: What might people save in Upthere that they do not bother saving now? Is it conducive to more and perhaps different items than people typically think to save? Mr. Bourdon: I think of Upthere as the place you put ALL of the things in your life that are meaningful to you; things that you want to keep safe and you want to get access to. During the course of our lives we create many things. There are things that define the work that we do, whether it is our school work or it is our professional work or it is our families; for those things that are really important, that you want to have access to for a lifetime, that you want to be able to find those things even though you have hundreds of thousands of them. We think of it like that. I don’t know that it is about saving a particular type of file, but I think it is about persisting and maintaining things that are meaningful to you in your life.
CEOCFO:. How will you be using the recent substantial funding? What is the strategy over the next six months to a year? Mr. Bourdon: We’re going to keep building the world’s best personal storage experience. That’s our goal. We’re just beginning. We didn’t just build an “experience here.” We have actually built an entire operating system behind the scenes that runs in the data center. We have to make it fast, make it searchable, make it organizable, and make it sharable; all of those things are significant components and require significant investment and investments that we will to continue to make.
CEOCFO: How are people finding out about Upthere? Mr. Bourdon: We have only been out of beta for a couple of months, so word of mouth has been our best friend. Sharing Loops with friends and family makes onboarding new people easier. We’re also building trust with our customers. The things that are important enough to save using our product are the most important things to us. Features don’t matter, articles don’t matter...at the end of the day it’s making good on the promise we have made to our customers.
CEOCFO: What is your geographic range today? Mr. Bourdon: We’re available in more than 40 countries on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows and the web.
CEOCFO: Eventually, what is the plan? Mr. Bourdon: We want to be available worldwide in local languages.
CEOCFO: What surprised you as you have been developing, growing and actually offering Upthere? Mr. Bourdon: I think what we’ve identified is how poorly customers are being served by existing solutions. And how we don’t treat the cloud as our primary place to keep our things. Right now we treat it as a secondary place. We built Upthere to be your primary storage place. It should be the one place that you keep everything. Your device should be, for the most part, disposable when it comes to storing. Smartphones are wonderful input devices to take pictures, type into, and use the sensors, but all of your stuff should be stored in the cloud.
CEOCFO: What has changed, if anything, in your approach as people have started to use it? What have you learned from your audience? Mr. Bourdon: The things that we learned from our users are specific use cases that they have. It is fascinating to hear people talk about how storage fits into their daily lives, whether it is for their personal use or for professional use and to identify specific workflows that people have. Hearing directly from our users inspires us to think about aspects of our app and service and how we can improve them.
CEOCFO: Would you give us an example? Mr. Bourdon: When you hear that someone really gets the fundamental idea that we propose of having all your things in one place directly in the cloud and how they then are able to use our sharing within a creative workflow. For example, users can take a Photoshop file, open that Photoshop file right out of Upthere, edit it Photoshop and save it back to Upthere. Once saved, their entire team can access it immediately. It’s freeing to not have to worry about it. Those kinds of workflows are really wonderful to hear about and it, again, inspires us to think about new ways that we can serve those folks.
CEOCFO: Why pay attention to Upthere? Why is Upthere an important concept, not just a nice option? Mr. Bourdon: There IS a better way to keep your things safe and sound and we’ve made that product for people. Also, in the grand scheme of computing, I think what we are doing is very meaningful. If you look at computing and how the computing architecture exists in the cloud, our approach is an important part of the future of it.
An explanation of what I mean: A computer has four important functions that make it work: input, output, storage, and compute. Input mechanisms are keyboards, cameras, motion sensors and GPS sensors. These are all things that create data and create input into the computer. Output are screens, printers and those things that allows us to see our content and applications. A computer also has storage, so it has a way to keep what we create. The computational part performs all the tasks applications ask the devices to do, such as video transcoding and search. Our mobile phones are really good at the input part and pretty good at the output part, but they are not good at the storage part and not good at the compute part.
This is a real change that is happening in computing; it is that the cloud is so much better at the storage part, because it has infinitely scalable storage.
Ultimately, the cloud has many more processors than a single device that it can apply to a problem; many more CPUs, so it can solve problems faster and it can also be informed by the solutions that have come before it in a way that your device cannot. Therefore, when you think about the past architecture of computing, it was developed when the input, the output, the storage and the compute were all encapsulated into a single device. Devices will continue to become thinner and lighter. The input and output functions will only get more robust. These devices will gradually rely on the cloud to do all of the storage and the computing. We’ve built the storage and compute aspect of the architecture. That is how we think about it at a really high level and where we believe that Upthere fits in the advancement of computing. |
“We don’t “sync” or “back-up” your things. Instead, we write them directly to the cloud. Syncing is an old technology that was built for big, bulky desktop computers. This is incredibly inefficient for the following reasons:
- You end up with many different copies of your stuff floating around on all of your devices; - You have to have a lot of local storage in order to hold on to all of your things.
We think this is a much simpler way for people to interact with their things. They don’t have to worry about running out of space or having to delete photos from their phone when they want to take a picture or a video. Just send it to Upthere and we’ll take care of the rest.”- Chris Bourdon
Upthere:
Contact: DJ Anderson 415-706-5720
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Chris
Bourdon