Source: fortune.com --- Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Richard Wolpert is not your average Silicon Valley startup CEO. For starters, he's in Los Angeles, not the Bay Area. He's 54 and a veteran of Apple , Disney , and Real Networks. He's been an operator and an investor. Once upon a time he invested in the first company Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was an involved in, a now-forgotten file-sharing outfit named Scour. Wolpert's latest venture, HelloTech, has an abundance of pluck. It has raised $18 million in venture capital, has just 35 headquarters employees (plus a call-center crew in the Phillippines) and a business model that combines the cleverness of Uber with the fills-a-real-need utility of innovations like how-to videos on Alphabet’s googl YouTube or what-did-we-do-before-it-existed Google Maps. HelloTech, says Wolpert, epitomizes a category I hadn't know of before: DIFM, or do it for me, the polar opposite of DIY, or do it yourself. The new wave of Internet-connected devices like smart speakers, video doorbells, digital locks and so on are tougher than they look to install. And even if they're a snap, integrating them with similar gadgets is a challenge. Enter HelloTech, which matches jobs with qualified technicians at fixed prices. Though the company operates as a consumer service, its early key sponsors are device and service providers who make the HelloTech technicians available to their customers. Samsung pays the way for certain customers; Ring Video Doorbell subsidizes in ...
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