#w multiple layers for friction reasons

[strawberri-syrup]

very amused by my father calling me to check in and me being like. im good im good im good ANYWAY I HAVE A SURGERY QUESTION

[cafeleningrad]

morally gray character... apart from many younger target demographic spheres watering the complication of recognizing the right choice and struggle along the way, if not following the ethical way to the the right decision, from a conflicted Boromir to Han Solo, guy who's a bit rude but charming rogue with a heart of gold who's just a bit too cool to state out right that he's there fore the right reasons....

once out of a simple didactic territory, every more fleshed out character will get entwined with the complications of morality, either with own principles, expectations of others, choice, lack of information or maturity, social expectation, being down on luck or also shaking up the reader's preconception if things they consider "right" are actually "right". Yes sure, in a "will you save the world form the big Spaghetti monster scenario", choices are easy. Either the world end or not. Once it gets beyond such simplified conflicts, simple "X good, Y bad" morality itself might not be the biggest friction of a plot anymore if the story wants to be honest about all the variety of human experiences. Such can't be reduced by two labels. Maybe some people are in life situations in which choices aren't easy, at some point losses have to be dealt with, and life isn't a zero sum game of karma points.

Even take a simple sitcom like the Office. None is a particular scummy person but even in a very dramatized way very close to people you would find in the office. Nice girl who's so insecure she gets engaged to a not so great guy and breaks off the engagement way too late to out without appearing like a coward or with a bit of little spine but for her it's step for growth. Or a narcissistic boss who crosses way too many boundaries to appear or liked but does by time make the right calls to protect his employees. Or the usually nice and harmless costumer service employee who talks way too much much about sopas and celebrities - she means no harm, she will help you no questions asked, but it can be annoying. In the end they aren't bad people but they're not always great either. The measurement isn't morality here but how to best deal with different personalities. I think the show was this successful because it hit close to reality in the experience that some coworkers are all living their own little lives, and they aren't well meaning yet not always easy to compromise with out own life style.

Going into more deeper territory in literature you won't often have grand heroes who go after a big bad one, and all conflict is ended. Even though many copycats of Tolkien's retraced the outlines of Middle Earth - legendary swords, three main species (elves, dwarves, humans) living in conflict but fighting against one Dark Lord, and like a central intelligence, all evil dies immediately with him - Tolkien himself might have had one big bad but the harm Sauron caused lives on after him. The Shire is damaged, Theoden fell into depression with or without Sauron's help, Grima just aided the process, and the relationship within Denethor's family is complicated by favouritism before the Ring surfaces as source of conflict. Even with a central bad guy, Tolkien did not overlook how pre-affected characters can be entering a central situation, and how certain events aren't easy to deal with.

Or even without big impacts, I think good romances are the most honest when it comes to complicated relationships. Recently I read Miss Smilla's fine sense for Snow. The central bad guys enact Danish colonialsm in Greenland for their own purposes. The story is told from the central perspective of protagonist Smilla Jaspersen. Although a deeply layered protagonist hiding their vulnerability under multiple defensive layers, like sarcasm, trying to do everything alone, resourcefulness, she does also sabotage herself for deeper connections, treating people who wish to help and support her coldly. The judgement if the reader likes her is left to each reader themselves but without her character being marked by trauma of being uprooted, colonial pressure, not so healthy coping mechanisms, and a certain comfort in misery, the motives of inability of communication, ice, snow, and the quiet but kind relationship to the murder victim would not work at all. In fact, if Smilla wasn't oen to dissect everything around her, even human connections, her scientific conclusions driving the plot wouldn't be believable. Maybe an even quieter, calm story would the movie Past Lives. It's a simple romance that two characters held affection for each other but they never get together. It's a simple story. One character is more invested in the other, than the other character in them but that's a situation without much blame. That's how it is, it hurts, sometimes do find each other in situations which are not as simple as expected. The potential for a deeper romance hangs in the air, perhaps it would be terrible if she left her husband but that moral dilemma never arises. The story isn't about adultery and the reasons behind it but letting desires and visions go.

All in all, the way that current fiction discussions are held overlook the potential to tell stories which aren't didactic. Yeah, of courses stories can have a stance on dark themes of adultery, abuse, breaking free of bad sitautions etc. . But already at step 1 people are arguing if such topics should even exist in fiction. In my opinion, if stories pass step 1 and directly tap into the complications of certain issues, the story can create be cathartic about confronting maybe not the greatest points in life but also understanding for people who don't do well, if not the chance to do better. Or simply telling about stories which don't want to tell me that "thing X is bad actually". Even strories for adults tend to treat their target demographic as if they were 5 years old.

[katelynn-a-fan]

Why We Do What We Do (2)

First | Next

“Wow! Look at that!” “Woah!” “So cool!” A chorus of voices shouted.

Logan looked up from where he was into the night sky and caught a ‘shooting star’ streaking across the sky. He was mildly surprised that he had enough time to see it by the time whoever had seen it and exclaimed and he had looked up. He allowed a small grunt to pass through his lips.

Logan disliked calling them ‘shooting stars’, because they were merely bits of rock and ice that had been shucked off a comet or were tiny bits of rock and dust from impacts of planets or asteriods far away that just happened to enter the Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason they looked like ‘stars’ at all was because they were burning up in the atmosphere from the very high temperature molecules of the mesosphere being pushed together, causing a massive amount of friction to very rapidly wear away at whatever rock/meteor was entering the atmosphere. 

Logan always found the Mesosphere fascinating though. Temperature wise it was the coldest layer, but yet each individual particle contains so much energy. It was very distinct from the Thermosphere above, in that it’s the last layer to contain a significant amount of ozone or even just air for that matter. This ozone was the reason for it to deviate so far into being colder than the troposphere of daily life, because the Thermosphere was the hottest layer of the atmosphere and that sits above the Mesosphere.

Logan coughed a little to clear his throat before continuing.

“Great job on spotting that Cal! Remind me when we go inside and you’ll get a piece of candy.” Logan projected while still gazing up to where the meteor had been.

“Score!” came Cal’s familiar voice to his right a few telescopes down.

Logan inwardly and sarcastically rolled his eyes, but he would never be so unprofessional to disrespect a student like that, much less his students.

College kids and their excitement for free food.

Logan dropped his gaze down from the sky and returned to what he was doing, helping one of his students navigate the controls of her telescope. 

“When it comes to a telescope, even the tiniest movement can sweep over what you are looking for, so always double check the coordinates you have inputed into it, okay?” 

The student, Grace, only kept her gaze on the telescope with an expression of a confusion that he probably had once shared the first time he had used telescope.

Logan waited for the student to say something, before adjusting his glasses and standing up from the stool he had been using when he was looking in the telescope when he got no response. 

He patted Grace’s shoulder. “You’ll get the hang of it. You have the coordinates on your sheet, just use the paddle to input them and look through the eyepiece right here. And if you can’t find what you’re looking for, put the telescope on the lowest speed and move around until you find that signature faint green blob of the nebula.”  Logan affirmed as he pointed his finger to the small eyepiece he had been observing through and then picking up the paddle from it’s place and then returned it back.

“If you still can’t find it, call me or one of my TA’s over to help. The universe is a big place, don’t sweat it if you can’t find what you’re looking for.” Logan smiled a small smile to punctuate his statement.

It could’ve been the very dim red lamps they used for lighting their workspace, but Logan thought he saw Grace blush as she mumbled a small “Thank you” before turning to the telescope and retrieving the paddle to do her work for the class.

Logan strolled over to where his 2 TA’s were standing, chatting about whatever.

“Hey Ramie, Mike! How are they all doing?” Logan’s voice was enough to stop their conversation, but Logan doubted any of his students who could vaguely hear what they were saying were perturbed.

Ramie spoke first. “Good! Theo is getting along nicely with the focus and Alex found the first nebula using the manual controls and the coordinate sheet instead of letting the computer do it.”

“Nice! It seems Cal has some competition for best Astronomy student of the class. But... you didn’t hear that from me.” Logan lowered his voice and placed his hand like he was trying not to let Cal hear to punctuate his statement.

Alex is a lot like me, wanting to prove he knows how to do things without anyone’s help. I just hope he doesn’t get too far ahead of himself. God knows I was too smart for my own good when I was his age.

“Ha ha! Sure, sure. All good here too. I love that tonight will be so easy! They’re all such good kids. Honestly I think this semester’s going to be a breeze.” Mike interjected with a laugh as Raime went over to a student raising their hand.

Logan’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. It was not professional to check his phone while he was teaching, and he was sure it was a notification from one of the puzzle games he had to entertain himself with on his phone.

“Well, when you’re doing midnight labs, you only get the students who actually want to be here. Not many would want to have a class that ends at barely before midnight. And anyone who came here more for the party scene than to further their education would weed themselves out the moment they saw when Astronomy labs would be.” Logan articulated as he watched Ramie converse with the student about whatever problem they had. Instinctively and unconsciously, Logan lightly patted the pocket of his pants that contained his phone.

“True that.” Mike replied while also observing Ramie help the student.

They sat in silence for a moment or two before Logan’s pocket buzzed again, but Logan ignored it as before. Logan knew it was probably the secondary alert for when a notification stays unopened, he would clear it away later. Mike’s eyes flitted to Logan’s pocket for a second before seeming to think better of something, quickly returning to look at Ramie. Logan caught the glance, but decided to ignore it. 

Mike could have whatever assumption he had, really, Logan couldn’t care less about stuff like that, as long as his assumptions didn’t hinder him in his duty as a TA. 

After Ramie came back, Logan and the TA’s devised a game of Name that Constellation. Everyone would take turns scanning the sky, and when they found each constellation they would name it and any interesting fact about the myth. And if they couldn’t find a constellation or remember the myth to go with it fast enough, that person would be the next to help a student with their telescope.

Luckily, Logan was an astronomy teacher for a reason, and his TAs were grossly  outplayed. Ramie was the first to fall and looked subtly peeved as she then waited for the inevitable hand raise. Mike, luckily for Raime, fell next as his eyes searched the sky for a familiar pattern only to be met by a indistinguishable field of dots. 

Now, both of the TAs were waiting for Logan to falter. 1, 2, 3, 4 rounds and Logan always kept managing to spot countless constellations that they had apparently looked over multiple times with the ease of an adult reading a book for small children learning to read. And even the myths were explained in great detail, not just the basic premise of their myths, the full stories with their exposition, rising action, climax, and resolution. 

Granted, this was the first outside lab of the year, but Ramie and Mike shared the same assumption: that they knew their teacher.

But with this development, both Ramie and Mike shared a look that they both knew meant We have a lot to learn apparently. 

Not only about astronomy, but their teacher as well.

Now Logan did not see their shared glances as he was scanning the sky for his next target, but was broken out of his focusing when his phone went off again.

Logan’s heart sank.

It was a call this time.

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to take this call.” Logan excused himself while keeping a mask of indifference with a small dash of embarrassment mixed in.

Logan’s pace remained measured as he descended the small flight of stairs near him, but once he was out of sight, his quickened his pace significantly as he reached the door back into the main classroom.

There was only was one person this could be calling and he knew that they would only call if it was truly important/urgent.

Logan’s heartbeat quickened as he opened the door to the empty classroom. He had pulled the phone from his pocket at some point in his trek, but didn’t want to answer too soon as to be unable to hear the call. Without looking at the lock screen, Logan pressed the call button to accept the call.

He brought the phone to his ear. 

Before Logan could say anything Patton’s voice flooded into Logan’s ear. Patton only got through one sentence before his cries took over his words where they essentially became a part of his crying as the call dropped with Logan’s shitty cell reception.

That one sentence made Logan drop his phone with trembling hands as he burst into tears himself, making Logan sway before sinking into the nearest chair. However, Logan did not have the luxury to cry outright, only letting silent tears leak from his eyes as he took in what Patton meant.

Logan picked his phone back up and saw 10 missed texts from Patton, and kicked himself for not even considering to at least glance at his phone before Patton was resorted to calling him to get his proper attention.

Logan stopped short in his emotional mire, struck by a wave of realization, his jaw setting into a stern and determined expression. Logan knew what he had to do.

Logan swiftly composed himself, wiping away the stray tears from his eyes, as he returned back to his TAs, beckoning them over to where he was at the top of the stairs.

“I have to go. Can you hold down the metaphorical fort with just the 2 of you for the rest of class?” Logan’s mask of indifference was back, hoping that neither the TAs or the students near him could tell he had been crying moments before.

Ramie and Mike now shared a glance Logan caught at full force this time. “We’ll fine, like you said, most of the kids in this class are here because they know what they’re doing.” Mike replied with a hint of something more gentle than Logan had ever seen on Mike’s face and for that he was grateful.

The silence hung between them as a silent message was implied from what they didn’t say. We know you well enough to know that whatever this is is serious. We’ll cover for you. Go.

Logan nodded as he turned and briskly maneuvered down the steps, gathering what little paper material he required for teaching his midnight astronomy class and in short order found himself cranking his car into reverse and driving towards his destination, knowing exactly where he needed to go.

The problem was, in other circumstances, he would enjoy going to his destination.

But the sentence Patton uttered on the phone changed everything. Logan knew those 7 words would haunt him for years to come. 7 words to turn Logan’s world on it’s head.

“They found him, but it’s really bad.”

Taglist:

@ironwoman359 @lefaystrent @delimeful 

[tech-battery]

The Corsair H150i Elite Capellix AIO Cooler Review: Go Big Or Go Home

Corsair is one of the oldest and most reputable PC component manufacturers in the PC market. The company’s origins lie with memory-related products but, nearly two decades ago, the company slowly began diversifying into other segments of the market. While their initial attempts were reluctant, releasing but a couple of products each time, most of these attempts were highly successful and drove the company to grow massively into the entrepreneurial (and recently IPOed) giant that they are today.

These days, one of Corsair’s most successful product segments is that of all-in-one (AIO) liquid coolers – an ironic outcome considering that liquid coolers were the company’s first unsuccessful diversification attempt back in 2003. Corsair did not give up on liquid cooling though and several years later, when simple and maintenance-free AIO cooler designs appeared, Corsair successfully launched their own AIO coolers. Today, AIO coolers are one of Corsair’s most popular group of products, with the company retailing over a dozen different models at this point of time.

In this review we're taking a look at our first cooler from Corsair's new Elite Capellix series of AIO coolers, the H150i Elite Capellix. Like previous H150 AIO coolers, this is a 360mm (3x120mm) cooler, the largest that Corsair makes and ostensibly offering the best cooling performance thanks to its hefty radiator size. For cases that can fit the sizable cooler, the H150 series typically addresses both end of the performance spectrum, offering modest cooling at very low fan speeds (and thus noise levels), or top-tier cooling at more normal fan speeds.

For their new Elite Capellix generation of coolers, Corsair has given their product lineup another layer of polish. Along with incorporating the latest and greatest from Corsair in terms of MagLev fans and pump heads, Corsair has focused on making the Elite Capellix series “Smart” AIO coolers, adding an advanced Commander CORE module into the bundle. A combination fan and RGB lighting controller, the Commander CORE greatly enhances the programming flexibility of the cooler’s performance and lighting features, allowing it to control fans and lighting throughout an entire system.

Packaging & Bundle

We received the new H150i Elite Capellix in a long cardboard box, hinting the size of the cooler. Corsair is currently shipping most of their products in artistically similar black/yellow themed packaging and this cooler is no exception. A colorful picture of the H150i covers the relatively simple front of the packaging. Inside the box we found the cooler and its parts well protected by custom cardboard inserts.

As expected, Corsair includes all of the necessary mounting hardware into the box. The H150i Elite Capellix supports most of the current consumer CPU sockets, including sTR4/sTRX4 for AMD Threadripper CPUs, the mounting hardware for which are also included in the bundle. Corsair also includes an alternative main block cover for aesthetic purposes.

Corsair supplies a Commander CORE module alongside with the H150i Elite Capellix, which essentially is a version of the iCUE Commander Pro RGB controller that the company retails as a stand-alone product, simply tailored to control the RGB lighting of the liquid cooler instead. Nevertheless, it sports six fan power and RGB LED connectors, allowing users to install up to three additional compatible fans, enabling either push-pull configurations or the control of system fans.

The included three ML120 fans feature cutting edge magnetic levitation engines, with their specifications suggesting extraordinary longevity. Unlike all classic designs, these engines magnetically repel the fan’s rotor, greatly reducing friction. Lower friction should lead to significantly superior overall performance and longevity, as well as lower energy consumption, which explains the low current requirement for the rated speed of 2400 RPM. The fans have frosted blades and a black frame, with eight RGB LEDs each.

The Corsair H150i Elite Capellix Liquid Cooler

At first sight, Corsair’s latest liquid cooler looks deceptively simple. Its massive proportions certainly are inspiring but the simplistic appearance does not hint at how advanced this cooler is. At a high level, the design is based on the standard AIO configuration of a single radiator, two hoses, and a single block that combines the copper CPU contact plate with a mini liquid pump. Corsair went with thick-walled FEP (Fluorinated Ethylene Propylene) tubing with nylon sleeve braiding instead of the usual stiff corrugated tubing, which is more flexible and aesthetically superior.

The massive 400 mm long radiator requires a case designed to hold three 120 mm fans in the row, yet also with enough clearance to fit the extra mass of the radiator itself. It is 27 mm thick, requiring a clearance of 55 mm with the fans installed in order to fit inside a system. Size aside, the radiator is the typical dual-pass cross-flow design with tiny fins soldered on thin oblong tubes, as the vast majority of AIO cooler radiators are. Due to its thickness, the radiator’s airflow resistance is low and clearly designed to perform with very little air pressure.

The main block assembly of the H150i Elite Capellix initially appears unrefined – however, the octagonal body hides a record number of thirty-three fully programmable RGB LEDs and the top plate is removable, providing extra flexibility to users. Corsair includes two top plates in the bundle, one darker and one brighter, but the relatively simple shape of the top cover allows for very easy customization if someone has access to a 3D printer or CNC. The block is powered via the Commander CORE module and has a 3-pin motherboard connector that serves only as a tachometer for speed/health monitoring.

The octagonal copper contact plate is attached to the base of the block with eight screws. Although it is not machined to a perfect mirror finish, it is very smooth and perfectly flat, which is what matters for good thermal performance. Thermal material is pre-applied to it.

Once everything is properly connected and powered, the H150i Elite Capellix becomes a canvas full of colors. The LEDs are controlled by the Commander CORE interface and lighting effects are programmable via Corsair's iCUE software. It is the presence of the Commander CORE module that makes the new H150i Elite Capellix so much more flexible than previous versions of the cooler – when combined with the now highly advanced iCUE software, the number of programming options are endless.

For example, users can stick with basic lighting effects that are purely aesthetic or program practical indicative lighting effects and/or reactions, such as temperature-dependent colors, alarms, and more. Additionally, the Commander CORE module paired with the iCUE software offers a complete synergy between all compatible Corsair devices, allowing inter-device manipulation and commands. For example, users could very well turn the Function row of a compatible keyboard into a lighting bar that indicates the RPM % of the cooler’s fans or change the cooler’s lighting colors based on which mouse profile is currently active.

Testing Methodology

Although the testing of a cooler appears to be a simple task, that could not be much further from the truth. Proper thermal testing cannot be performed with a cooler mounted on a single chip, for multiple reasons. Some of these reasons include the instability of the thermal load and the inability to fully control and or monitor it, as well as the inaccuracy of the chip-integrated sensors. It is also impossible to compare results taken on different chips, let alone entirely different systems, which is a great problem when testing computer coolers, as the hardware changes every several months. Finally, testing a cooler on a typical system prevents the tester from assessing the most vital characteristic of a cooler, its absolute thermal resistance.

The absolute thermal resistance defines the absolute performance of a heatsink by indicating the temperature rise per unit of power, in our case in degrees Celsius per Watt (°C/W). In layman's terms, if the thermal resistance of a heatsink is known, the user can assess the highest possible temperature rise of a chip over ambient by simply multiplying the maximum thermal design power (TDP) rating of the chip with it. Extracting the absolute thermal resistance of a cooler however is no simple task, as the load has to be perfectly even, steady and variable, as the thermal resistance also varies depending on the magnitude of the thermal load. Therefore, even if it would be possible to assess the thermal resistance of a cooler while it is mounted on a working chip, it would not suffice, as a large change of the thermal load can yield much different results.

Appropriate thermal testing requires the creation of a proper testing station and the use of laboratory-grade equipment. Therefore, we created a thermal testing platform with a fully controllable thermal energy source that may be used to test any kind of cooler, regardless of its design and or compatibility. The thermal cartridge inside the core of our testing station can have its power adjusted between 60 W and 340 W, in 2 W increments (and it never throttles). Furthermore, monitoring and logging of the testing process via software minimizes the possibility of human errors during testing. A multifunction data acquisition module (DAQ) is responsible for the automatic or the manual control of the testing equipment, the acquisition of the ambient and the in-core temperatures via PT100 sensors, the logging of the test results and the mathematical extraction of performance figures.

Finally, as noise measurements are a bit tricky, their measurement is being performed manually. Fans can have significant variations in speed from their rated values, thus their actual speed during the thermal testing is being recorded via a laser tachometer. The fans (and pumps, when applicable) are being powered via an adjustable, fanless desktop DC power supply and noise measurements are being taken 1 meter away from the cooler, in a straight line ahead from its fan engine. At this point we should also note that the Decibel scale is logarithmic, which means that roughly every 3 dB(A) the sound pressure doubles. Therefore, the difference of sound pressure between 30 dB(A) and 60 dB(A) is not "twice as much" but nearly a thousand times greater. The table below should help you cross-reference our test results with real-life situations.

The noise floor of our recording equipment is 30.2-30.4 dB(A), which represents a medium-sized room without any active noise sources. All of our acoustic testing takes place during night hours, minimizing the possibility of external disruptions.

Testing Results, Maximum Fan Speed

As always, we'll start things off by testing things at full speed/performance. Our maximum speed testing is performed with both the fans and the pump powered via a 12V DC source. This input voltage should have the pump and fans matching the speed ratings of the manufacturer. According to Corsair’s specifications, the MagLev fans included with the H150i Elite Capellix should have a rotational speed of 2400 RPM. Our tachometer indicated that the fans were rotating at an average speed of 2370 RPM, very close to their rated specifications.

The Corsair H150i Elite Capellix seems to be getting the best thermal performance out of every similarly sized AIO cooler that we have tested to this date, outperforming NZXT’s X73 by a whisker. The performance seems to be fairly stable across most of the load range, offering predictable performance regarding of the load, with the exception of very low loads where the temperature difference is far too small for appropriate heat transfer between the mediums.

The average thermal resistance of 0.0704 °C/W is impressive but users need to keep in mind that this performance comes with the fans rotating at their maximum speed. With the powerful fans of the H150i Elite Capellix, this results to a sound pressure level of 43 dB(A), a relatively high figure for a CPU cooler.

Testing Results, Low Fan Speed

Using a PWM voltage regulator, we reduced the speed of the fans manually down to half their rated speed. At this setting, the 120 mm MagLev fans of the H150i Elite Capellix rotate at 1220 RPM. Since the pump’s speed cannot be controlled directly, we had the Commander CORE module attached to a PC and set the pump to operate in its “Quiet” mode while testing.

When it comes to thermal resistance, Corsair’s latest AIO cooler initially seems to be slightly outperforming all of the 360 mm coolers that we have tested to this date. The average thermal resistance of 0.0808 °C/W is almost identical to the figures we received from the recently released NZXT X73, with Corsair’s MagLev fans giving the H150i Elite Capellix a small advantage in terms of acoustics.

But if one looks at just the thermal performance charts, other implementations with significantly slower fans, including Corsair’s older H150i Pro RGB, initially seem to be performing slightly worse. A closer look reveals that the better thermal performance is due to the quick fans of the H150i Elite Capellix, resulting to significantly higher noise levels. Setting the fans to operate even slower is likely to neutralize any thermal performance advantage that the cooler has.

Thermal Resistance VS Sound Pressure Level

During our thermal resistance vs. sound pressure level test, we maintain a steady 100W thermal load and assess the overall performance of the coolers by taking multiple temperature and sound pressure level readings within the operating range of the stock cooling fans. The result is a graph that depicts the absolute thermal resistance of the cooler in comparison to the noise generated. For both the sound pressure level and absolute thermal resistance readings, lower figures are better.

This graph reveals interesting information regarding the overall performance of the H150i Elite Capellix. Although it does manage to get the best thermal performance out of every other similarly sized cooler, it can be seen that the older H150i Pro RGB actually outperforms it when taking the acoustics into account. This is because of the fast 2400 RPM fans that Corsair includes with the H150i Elite Capellix and our two-point testing methodology. Theoretically, the H150i Elite Capellix would perform identically or nearly identically with the H150i Pro RGB if both coolers were to share the same fans. It is also proof that the long and thin 360 mm radiator benefits very little from higher airflow, as its heat transfer surface is far too large to allow for significant temperature differences even if the airflow is low.

Conclusion

All-in-one CPU coolers first hit the market in force over a decade ago, which since then has allowed for more than enough time for developers to optimize their thermal performance, leaving little room for additional raw performance advancements. Nowadays, with many manufacturers retailing AIO cooler solutions, the market is pretty much saturated, a common outcome in the world of PC parts. Because of this, Corsair is always striving to maintain a competitive advantage by designing products with unique features, which is what made the release of the H150i Elite Capellix an anticipated move.

Where the H150i Elite Capellix has the lead over most of the competition is in terms of quality. Corsair ensured that their top AIO cooler is very well made, with excellent materials and a solid overall build quality. They also supply top-tier and fairly expensive MagLev cooling fans with the cooler, something that is often overlooked despite the fans being one of the most important parts of an AIO cooler.

The prime marketing feature of the H150i Elite Capellix is the included Commander CORE module and its compatibility with Corsair’s iCUE ecosystem. This opens up practically limitless user-programmable options, both aesthetic and practical. Except from the versatility that the iCUE software affords to the H150i Elite Capellix itself, it also enables greater control over other system fans and lights, allowing for system-wide lighting programming and sensory input. For example, it is easy to change the lighting of the cooler depending on which gaming profile is selected or for all compatible devices to share exactly the same lighting effect. The disadvantage of this feature is simple and obvious – this kind of total synergy only works with iCUE compatible devices, meaning that not even all of Corsair’s products are compatible with this feature.

However when it comes to performance, the H150i Elite Capellix barely any better than the H150i Pro RGB that the company released two years ago. We suspected as much from before we tested the cooler, as it is obvious that both coolers share the same radiator and tubing. The H150i Elite Capellix technically leads our thermal performance charts but the very powerful 2400 RPM fans are primarily responsible for this, which actually damage the cooler’s noise-to-performance ratio. Running the fans of the H150i Elite Capellix at the same speed as the fans of the H150i Pro RGB yields virtually the same performance, with but a tiny advantage for the H150i Elite Capellix – an advantage so small that can easily be a statistical error. Regardless, the quick fans provided with the H150i Elite Capellix offer greater versatility, as they can be programmed to stay quiet but also can be made loud if, for whatever reason, the user needs them to be.

Although the H150i Elite Capellix does not have a distinct performance advantage over the previous generation of cooler, its MSRP of $189 actually is reasonable and competitive. Despite the included Commander CORE, iCUE compatibility, and other minor upgrades, it's the same MSRP as the older H150i Pro RGB, making for a pleasant surprise as it means Corsair hasn't raised priced. In fact, it's generally priced close to – or even lower than – most of its direct competition. So from a performance standpoint, although Corsair hasn't managed to really move the needle on performance or pricing for their new cooler, the latest H150i is (still) just as competitive as the previous version.

Ultimately, this means that although we can't recommend the H150i Elite Capellix as an upgrade over a previous-generation cooler, Corsair continues to deliver a solid AIO cooler as far as new builds are concerned. The small quality of life improvements that come with newest H150i will help ensure that Corsair keep its advantage with unique features, all the while offering a better value to users that are considering a large AIO cooler today.

[jeremyau]

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care

HomeHero hangs up its cape, pivoting new direction.

In September, 2016 my family held funeral proceedings in Los Angeles to say goodbye to my grandmother, Flavor Bell Booker, who was only a few weeks away from her 99th birthday. Until that time, she was our first and longest-standing client, dating back to 2013 when HomeHero was nothing more than a paper checklist of screening requirements for the mixed bag of caregivers my dad would find on Craigslist. But today, in what seems like the most bizarre strokes of fate, it brings me great sadness to announce that Flavor will also be one of our last clients at HomeHero.

Almost exactly one year ago, HomeHero lost its core identity when we were effectively forced to terminate our working relationships with 95% of our 1099 caregivers and required to adopt an inferior employment business model. In the process, HomeHero also lost a majority of its competitive differentiators in price, speed and scalability that allowed us to be so disruptive in 2014 and 2015, and it had nothing to do with competition.

HomeHero, for the better half of the last year, has been caught in one of the toughest dilemmas a startup can be in: to A) keep building an “evolutionary business”, or B) hit the reset button and use the remaining capital to take a swing at building the “revolutionary business”.

While this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, today we are announcing that HomeHero has decided to cease all operations and remove itself entirely from the industry of home care to focus on a new healthcare venture. This article should help people understand the forces that led us to this decision.

Early Days

When we started HomeHero in 2013 our vision was very ambitious — to build the fastest, most affordable way to find quality in-home care, and disrupt the $30 billion home care market. For many years I watched with shock and sadness the struggles my father went through finding reliable caregivers for my grandmother in Seattle. So I decided to dedicate my life to fixing one of the biggest (and hardest) problems facing our generation today. For me, HomeHero has always been very personal.

Coming into HomeHero, my cofounder (Mike Townsend) and I had a taste of success and failure in startups. Mike founded a web-based point-of-sale company called ZingCheckout in 2012 that I joined and left before it was acquired by BigCommerce ahead of their IPO. After that, we started a mobile ordering and payments company together called Flowtab, where we made it a lot further on $100k than I ever thought possible in San Francisco. But we knew healthcare would be a lot harder than anything we did before.

Science Incubation

In May 2013, Mike and I packed everything we owned into a small sedan and we moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica for an opportunity to work with Mike Jones at Science, one of the top incubators in Los Angeles. We had the vision to tackle a big problem in the home care industry and Jones was crazy enough to do it with us. As you may know, home care is a large and fragmented industry with over 25,000 franchises nationwide. We saw agencies as being grossly inefficient, as evidenced by caregivers only taking home 40% of the hourly rates paid by families.

It felt inevitable that a company would introduce a disruptive technology model to improve access to affordable home care. We even published an article “10 reasons a marketplace for senior care is inevitable”, citing other factors such as highly-recurring needs, high number of unhappy caregivers and lack of trust and quality.

Marketplace Model

We launched with a workforce of vetted independent contractor (1099) caregivers, who we endearingly referred to as “Heroes”. We created a more user-friendly client intake flow, equipped with beautiful online profiles. Our marketplace grew quickly due to our lower prices and our ability to match caregivers with clients so quickly.

We protected the marketplace by offering the support of a care management team, the personalization of profiles with photos and video interviews, a robust algorithm to control matching and dispatching, lengthy reviews from past clients, and a rating system to ensure quality. We were bringing transparency to a market that was notorious for lack thereof.

Scaling Friction

By the Summer of 2015, we had onboarded over 1,200 Heroes, provided care to a few hundred clients and we expanded to Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco (and the entire Bay Area). In June 2015, we raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

HomeHero had distinct advantages of geographic coverage.

One distinct advantage of HomeHero was our ability to expand to different geographies quickly, whereas most agencies could only keep a 10–15% buffer on supply above their expected billable hours. Still, while our new markets showed early signs of growth via online acquisition, we found ourselves competing with local home care agencies who were staffing experienced teams of field marketers whose primary purpose was to grow leads and coordinate discharges of patients from acute care facilities — such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior centers and outpatient facilities. They were willing to drive across town to meet a family, bring them coffee and pastries, conduct a free home safety inspection and a two-hour consultation.

We were very reluctant to add the additional headcount, but we realized the best way to win the highest net worth clients (spending over $3k per month) was not to build faster and fancier technology, but to engage in the hand-holding and spend long hours with the family. Friction builds trust.

The 1099 independent contractor model, below, is very attractive as it removes excess cost and restrictions for employers. We were charging clients 30–40% less than industry average, and we were paying caregivers 25% higher than industry average. Both sides were winning. Our first million dollars in revenue in Los Angeles came mostly through SEO, SEM and light marketing efforts from part-time brand ambassadors.

Regulatory Challenges

On Oct 15th 2015, the entire home care industry got rocked. The Department of Labor upheld a federal ruling stating that over 2 million home care workers would qualify for the Fair Labor Standards Act —essentially requiring all home care workers to be treated as W-2 employees and receive overtime benefits. This was viewed as a huge win by the controversial and outspoken labor union SEIU, as well as the “Fight for $15” crowd in California.

This ruling would immediately and sharply increase home care prices — especially for live-in rates — and eventually cause hundreds of domestic referral home care agencies to shut down.

The biggest implication of the ruling was that the DOL removed the caregiver overtime exemption for all home care workers — mandating that all caregivers must be paid overtime. While the intentions were likely positive, the result was immediately negative for every party involved.

In a survey we conducted internally, the cost for live-in/24-hour care doubled from $250 to $550 per day average in Los Angeles, pushing the price above a skilled nursing facility on a per day basis.

Families were forced to reduce caregiver hours or fire their agency completely (and go under the table).

Hundreds of thousands of caregivers who were unable or unwilling to be employed as W-2 workers were either removed from their families or let go by their domestic referral agency.

Seniors struggled with “continuity of care” issues as agencies started rotating multiple caregivers in and out of houses throughout the day to avoid overtime costs. This had an especially negative impact on Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

The additional rotations in shifts increased gas, parking and transportation costs and added a layer of complexity to scheduling.

Caregivers saw their working hours and income reduced, seniors weren’t able to get the 24/7 care they needed, and home care agencies saw a significant a decline in revenue from live-ins.

By the end of 2016, the nation’s largest 1099 home care agency, Griswold Home Care, closed down most of its California locations.

I’ve heard this ruling described by industry veterans as the “death of the live-in care”, a classic example of regulation having huge unforeseen consequences on the same people it’s intended to protect.

Shift to Enterprise

This court ruling put a huge target on our backs, especially with prominent agencies like Griswold Home Care closing all California operations. We also acknowledged the growing threat of class action lawsuits (similar to what Handy faced). The independent contractor model was under attack and we felt intense pressure to change.

From any angle, the W-2 model is not very attractive. The switch to W-2 would increase our caregiver onboarding costs by 10X. The additional costs of payroll taxes, overtime, paid sick leave, minimum wage regulations, benefits and health insurance, unemployment tax, workers comp insurance, and potential for lawsuits in a highly litigious industry put us in heavy handcuffs. We would also be forced to implement a 4-hour minimum and raise our prices by 32% — much closer to industry average.

This was the same model we had been publicly shaming for almost three years, but we really didn’t have any other choice. According to Federal law, these caregivers had to be employed by someone.

The only way the W-2 model is profitable is at a price point of $25–30 per hour (industry average).

Making the model even less attractive, in mid-March 2016, California legislators moved toward an agreement with labor unions to gradually increase the statewide minimum wage until it reached $15 in 2022, meaning our prices would have to increase $1 per year over the same period. If our goal was to make home care more affordable to families, we were headed in the wrong direction.

The silver lining was that moving to a W2 model would finally give us the opportunity to contract with enterprise health systems — who were mostly blocked from working with us due to the 1099 contractor relationship.

In spite of the added costs, in March 2016 we launched our enterprise initiative and declared that we were moving our Heroes from 1099 to W-2 and becoming a HIPAA-compliant, state licensed home care agency.

We hired a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Patient Safety Advocate and named a HIPAA Security Officer. We hired an ex-Cambia healthcare investor as VP of Strategy, Kiel Dowlin, to help navigate the transition and assemble an impressive advisory board (including ex-hospital CEO and “healthcare futurist” Josh Luke). We partnered with one of the world’s leading experts in readmission prevention, Andrey Ostrovsky, MD (who later went on to become the Chief Medical Officer of Medicaid) and started building our own predictive insights algorithm to help predict and prevent adverse events in the home.

We now had the ability to manage and train our Heroes, although practically this didn’t change much. More importantly, we could now get paid directly from hospitals and other risk-bearing entities.

For anyone outside of healthcare, a major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce readmissions and the overall costs of post-acute care. One way of doing that was to change the way hospitals got paid by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Instead of paying them on a volume basis (fee-for-service), CMS is now paying them based on the quality of care they deliver to patients (fee-for-value).

This created enormous opportunities for companies like HomeHero to partner with hospitals and help them find more cost-effective options for post-acute care and reduce their reliance on skilled nursing facilities and medical home health. We doubled down on the belief that the big winner in this space would be the one who could win the largest contracts with hospitals and health systems.

Hospital Education

In April 2016, we joined the Cedars-Sinai Healthcare Accelerator (in partnership with Techstars) to learn from the top minds in healthcare about the operations and inner-workings of a world-renowned hospital. Cedars-Sinai, the largest non-profit academic medical center in the western United States, helped us launch the Safe Transition Home program to provide safe transitions out of the hospital and they worked with us to build evidence-based home care products for health systems.

Thanks to its adoption of the HomeHero iOS app, Cedars-Sinai became the nation’s first hospital system to successfully integrate with Apple’s CareKit platform and extend their healthcare system into the home.

One thing we learned about enterprise was that our growth would be somewhat limited due to the lack of financial incentive for certain health systems across the country to pay for non-medical home care, especially if they are only at-risk for a few thousand patients.

We also faced challenges in the mandated screening requirements for our caregivers — such as measles, mumps, rubella, TB, Live Scan fingerprinting, state registration fees, state mandated training and drug screening.

Nevertheless, the education and mentorship we gained from the accelerator program proved to be invaluable. We met with hundreds of executives at large health systems and payors and we were able to successfully define larger pilot opportunities.

We made incredible progress in a very short period of time, and in October 2016 we were chosen to lead a ~$1 million pilot opportunity with a large health system in Southeastern Michigan.

This was an exciting opportunity, but we had one important decision to make… and perhaps, the biggest decision of our lives.

Pilots ≠ Contracts

One danger working with large health systems on pilots is being dragged out in the middle of an ocean and abandoned.

The seemingly logical thing to do after winning a pilot of this size is to ramp up spend, start hiring in the new city and design technology sprints to support the new contract. However, it became evident that this particular health system, like many others we were talking to, had a genuine desire to conduct pilots to prove the actuarial value of home care, but there was no long term financial incentive to pay for home care in the same capacity.

It became evident that most of our pilots were being constructed solely for case studies and had slim chances of turning into sustainable contracts. We were still going to be reliant on private pay for the foreseeable future. This gentle realization was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So in Q1 2017, with significant capital left in the bank, we made the difficult and heart-wrenching decision to shut down all home care operations, transition our clients to local home care agencies and start executing on an entirely new business venture.

Simply put, despite serving thousands of patients since 2013, we do not believe a technology-enabled W-2 home care agency is our most attractive business opportunity going forward. Rather than continuing to push the boulder up the hill and risk a spectacular failure, we will attempt to leverage our talented team, unique experience and technology IP to build a more sustainable healthcare business outside of home care.

In Retrospect

Looking back, our three learnings were as follows:

1. We underestimated the timing, effects and intensity of state and federal regulatory changes in home care.

The only thing worse than losing a fight is being told you can’t even compete anymore. And there’s nothing more painful as a CEO than losing vision for your company, especially if you’ve been holding onto that vision for years.

2. We overestimated the ability for health systems and insurance companies to pay for non-medical home care.

We knew we were in for an uphill battle when we shifted our focus to enterprise contacts. The “what ifs” of this decision will likely haunt me for the rest of my life. Was there a way to avoid the W-2 agency model and pass along employment responsibilities to families and still ensure they comply with all state and federal laws? Could we have kept the 1099 model? Will the Republicans’ repeal and replace of Obamacare somehow result in more money being allocated for post-acute care? Most of these questions we will never know for sure.

3. We underestimated the ability for home care agencies to adopt new technology.

A majority of the 20,000 home care agencies are financially efficient, software enabled and have entrenched relationships within their local communities. While file cabinets are still popular, they are not sitting in the stone ages with technology.

Venture-Backed Home Care

From an outsider’s perspective, home care is a big and attractive market. As evidence, investors poured almost $200 million into various home care companies in the last 16 months. However, this is also an industry built on relationships at a hyper-local level, which isn’t exactly the M.O. of startups. And since 2013, the industry moved from lightly regulated to heavily regulated, making the economics challenging (if not untenable) for any company with huge growth expectations.

Source: Aging in Place Technology Watch (2017)

To break away with enough escape velocity in home care, a company needs to effectively leverage technology to deliver a faster and better experience at a drastically lower price. Currently, none of the venture-backed home care companies have been able to do that. Not one is price-disruptive.

In a recent interview with Home Health Care News, the CEO of one of the largest US home care franchises, Senior Helpers, chimed in on the state of “disruption” in the industry right now:

“In the last couple years you’ve seen Honor, Hometeam and HomeHero.

I’ve talked to all of them. I think everyone was worried that was going to be a big tech disruption that would change how home care is done. But I’ve seen they’ve all had to change their model. They’re now directly employing the caregivers. They’re still using tech to communicate with clients, but a lot of us were doing that already.

Now that Honor is converting itself to an employer model, they’re just like us. Maybe they’re using tech a little better than we are, and they might have some bells and whistles, but we feel confident that client acquisition is not an issue for us. We have great referral sources.

In this industry, you’re dealing with people on a community level, where 80% of your clients come from referrals and the rest from advertising or the internet. I think Honor’s a good company, I like the people managing it, but I look at them like I look at HomeInstead, Maxim or Bayada, just another competitor. I think Honor will do well over time, but they’re going to be just like us.”

As you can see, the incumbents are singing a different tune than taxi companies were in 2013 — three years after Uber‘s launch.

We spent the last three years keeping up with technology vendors like ClearCare in areas like scheduling, timesheet tracking, billing, reporting, analytics and readmission prevention. But what really set us apart was our price, massive geographic coverage of caregivers across 10,000 square miles, our 10-second matching speeds, caregiver video interviews, evidence-based predictive analytics, and most of all, our 1099 model. For obvious reasons, this was far more disruptive to the incumbents — we were offering the same quality caregivers for less than half the price.

It’s sad to say, but today only the very wealthy can afford home care prices of $25 per hour, which typically comes out to over $4,000 a month. Because home care is extremely fragmented, it’s the agencies who can establish long-lasting relationships and deliver highly-personalized experiences who ultimately win. It’s not a technology problem.

The Future of Home Care

Today, I would estimate 60% of transactions in the home care industry occur under the table, as caregivers are sourced through Craigslist, Care.com or within families and social networks. Home care agencies are left fighting for the top 40% of the market which can only be won by leveraging personal relationships and high-touch interactions — including field marketers, home safety auditors and care coordinators—all things that do not scale well for technology companies.

Because of this economic reality, it is our belief that the W-2 home care industry will remain hyper local and fragmented for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that home care is a bad industry to go into if you are looking for a rewarding lifestyle business, but don’t expect any massive scale beyond a few zip codes.

This announcement is by no means intended to be a death sentence to other venture-backed home care companies. I have the utmost respect for the founders of the other home care startups, and I definitely would’t bet against any of them. But Mike and I deeply believe families across the country need better access to affordable home care, and with increasing regulation and thriving B2B technology vendors, it would be irresponsible for us to continue down this path with unlikely probability of liquidation. We mustn’t assume big fundraising rounds are synonymous with market success, this is certainly not the case in home care.

What’s Next

It breaks our hearts to leave home care, as we still believe there needs to be better and significantly cheaper option for families to find quality home care. Unfortunately, we don’t see a path for HomeHero or any other current company to achieve that goal.

The good news is we are pulling out early enough, with significant cash remaining, so we can find a new path forward and continue our same mission of promoting health and wellness in the home.

We will share more details about our new strategy and venture within the coming months, but our goal is still to positively improve the lives of millions of patients.

The hardest part of this announcement is saying goodbye to not only our compassionate caregivers, but all the team members who I recruited and hand-picked. Many of them I convinced to leave their jobs, move across the country, and take time away from their families to fight this difficult battle with me and Mike. For over three years, they were our trusted team of soldiers who would bleed terracotta and follow us into a fireblaze in order to make HomeHero a success.

We will forever be thankful for your loyalty and sacrifices.

To all our family, friends, Heroes, patients, clients, partners, employees, investors and advisors who helped make HomeHero what it was over the past three years, we extend the most sincere gratitude. We are so proud of you and the progress we made together. Deep in my heart I know the world is a better place because HomeHero existed.

Get in touch: @kaleazy.

[jeremyau]

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care – Kyle Hill – Medium

https://medium.com/@kaleazy/theres-no-magic-in-venture-backed-home-care-8f5389528279

There’s No Magic in Venture-Backed Home Care

HomeHero hangs up its cape, pivoting new direction.

In September, 2016 my family held funeral proceedings in Los Angeles to say goodbye to my grandmother, Flavor Bell Booker, who was only a few weeks away from her 99th birthday. Until that time, she was our first and longest-standing client, dating back to 2013 when HomeHero was nothing more than a paper checklist of screening requirements for the mixed bag of caregivers my dad would find on Craigslist. But today, in what seems like the most bizarre strokes of fate, it brings me great sadness to announce that Flavor will also be one of our last clients at HomeHero.

Almost exactly one year ago, HomeHero lost its core identity when we were effectively forced to terminate our working relationships with 95% of our 1099 caregivers and required to adopt an inferior employment business model. In the process, HomeHero also lost a majority of its competitive differentiators in price, speed and scalability that allowed us to be so disruptive in 2014 and 2015, and it had nothing to do with competition.

HomeHero, for the better half of the last year, has been caught in one of the toughest dilemmas a startup can be in: to A) keep building an “evolutionary business”, or B) hit the reset button and use the remaining capital to take a swing at building the “revolutionary business”.

While this may come as a surprise to a lot of people, today we are announcing that HomeHero has decided to cease all operations and remove itself entirely from the industry of home care to focus on a new healthcare venture. This article should help people understand the forces that led us to this decision.

Early Days

When we started HomeHero in 2013 our vision was very ambitious — to build the fastest, most affordable way to find quality in-home care, and disrupt the $30 billion home care market. For many years I watched with shock and sadness the struggles my father went through finding reliable caregivers for my grandmother in Seattle. So I decided to dedicate my life to fixing one of the biggest (and hardest) problems facing our generation today. For me, HomeHero has always been very personal.

Coming into HomeHero, my cofounder (Mike Townsend) and I had a taste of success and failure in startups. Mike founded a web-based point-of-sale company called ZingCheckout in 2012 that I joined and left before it was acquired by BigCommerce ahead of their IPO. After that, we started a mobile ordering and payments company together called Flowtab, where we made it a lot further on $100k than I ever thought possible in San Francisco. But we knew healthcare would be a lot harder than anything we did before.

Science Incubation

In May 2013, Mike and I packed everything we owned into a small sedan and we moved from San Francisco to Santa Monica for an opportunity to work with Mike Jones at Science, one of the top incubators in Los Angeles. We had the vision to tackle a big problem in the home care industry and Jones was crazy enough to do it with us. As you may know, home care is a large and fragmented industry with over 25,000 franchises nationwide. We saw agencies as being grossly inefficient, as evidenced by caregivers only taking home 40% of the hourly rates paid by families.

It felt inevitable that a company would introduce a disruptive technology model to improve access to affordable home care. We even published an article “10 reasons a marketplace for senior care is inevitable”, citing other factors such as highly-recurring needs, high number of unhappy caregivers and lack of trust and quality.

Marketplace Model

We launched with a workforce of vetted independent contractor (1099) caregivers, who we endearingly referred to as “Heroes”. We created a more user-friendly client intake flow, equipped with beautiful online profiles. Our marketplace grew quickly due to our lower prices and our ability to match caregivers with clients so quickly.

We protected the marketplace by offering the support of a care management team, the personalization of profiles with photos and video interviews, a robust algorithm to control matching and dispatching, lengthy reviews from past clients, and a rating system to ensure quality. We were bringing transparency to a market that was notorious for lack thereof.

Scaling Friction

By the Summer of 2015, we had onboarded over 1,200 Heroes, provided care to a few hundred clients and we expanded to Orange County, San Diego and San Francisco (and the entire Bay Area). In June 2015, we raised a $20 million Series A, bringing total funding to $23 million.

HomeHero had distinct advantages of geographic coverage.

One distinct advantage of HomeHero was our ability to expand to different geographies quickly, whereas most agencies could only keep a 10–15% buffer on supply above their expected billable hours. Still, while our new markets showed early signs of growth via online acquisition, we found ourselves competing with local home care agencies who were staffing experienced teams of field marketers whose primary purpose was to grow leads and coordinate discharges of patients from acute care facilities — such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, senior centers and outpatient facilities. They were willing to drive across town to meet a family, bring them coffee and pastries, conduct a free home safety inspection and a two-hour consultation.

We were very reluctant to add the additional headcount, but we realized the best way to win the highest net worth clients (spending over $3k per month) was not to build faster and fancier technology, but to engage in the hand-holding and spend long hours with the family. Friction builds trust.

The 1099 independent contractor model, below, is very attractive as it removes excess cost and restrictions for employers. We were charging clients 30–40% less than industry average, and we were paying caregivers 25% higher than industry average. Both sides were winning. Our first million dollars in revenue in Los Angeles came mostly through SEO, SEM and light marketing efforts from part-time brand ambassadors.

Regulatory Challenges

On Oct 15th 2015, the entire home care industry got rocked. The Department of Labor upheld a federal ruling stating that over 2 million home care workers would qualify for the Fair Labor Standards Act —essentially requiring all home care workers to be treated as W-2 employees and receive overtime benefits. This was viewed as a huge win by the controversial and outspoken labor union SEIU, as well as the “Fight for $15” crowd in California.

This ruling would immediately and sharply increase home care prices — especially for live-in rates — and eventually cause hundreds of domestic referral home care agencies to shut down.

The biggest implication of the ruling was that the DOL removed the caregiver overtime exemption for all home care workers — mandating that all caregivers must be paid overtime. While the intentions were likely positive, the result was immediately negative for every party involved.

In a survey we conducted internally, the cost for live-in/24-hour care doubled from $250 to $550 per day average in Los Angeles, pushing the price above a skilled nursing facility on a per day basis.

Families were forced to reduce caregiver hours or fire their agency completely (and go under the table).

Hundreds of thousands of caregivers who were unable or unwilling to be employed as W-2 workers were either removed from their families or let go by their domestic referral agency.

Seniors struggled with “continuity of care” issues as agencies started rotating multiple caregivers in and out of houses throughout the day to avoid overtime costs. This had an especially negative impact on Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.

The additional rotations in shifts increased gas, parking and transportation costs and added a layer of complexity to scheduling.

Caregivers saw their working hours and income reduced, seniors weren’t able to get the 24/7 care they needed, and home care agencies saw a significant a decline in revenue from live-ins.

By the end of 2016, the nation’s largest 1099 home care agency, Griswold Home Care, closed down most of its California locations.

I’ve heard this ruling described by industry veterans as the “death of the live-in care”, a classic example of regulation having huge unforeseen consequences on the same people it’s intended to protect.

Shift to Enterprise

This court ruling put a huge target on our backs, especially with prominent agencies like Griswold Home Care closing all California operations. We also acknowledged the growing threat of class action lawsuits (similar to what Handy faced). The independent contractor model was under attack and we felt intense pressure to change.

From any angle, the W-2 model is not very attractive. The switch to W-2 would increase our caregiver onboarding costs by 10X. The additional costs of payroll taxes, overtime, paid sick leave, minimum wage regulations, benefits and health insurance, unemployment tax, workers comp insurance, and potential for lawsuits in a highly litigious industry put us in heavy handcuffs. We would also be forced to implement a 4-hour minimum and raise our prices by 32% — much closer to industry average.

This was the same model we had been publicly shaming for almost three years, but we really didn’t have any other choice. According to Federal law, these caregivers had to be employed by someone.

The only way the W-2 model is profitable is at a price point of $25–30 per hour (industry average).

Making the model even less attractive, in mid-March 2016, California legislators moved toward an agreement with labor unions to gradually increase the statewide minimum wage until it reached $15 in 2022, meaning our prices would have to increase $1 per year over the same period. If our goal was to make home care more affordable to families, we were headed in the wrong direction.

The silver lining was that moving to a W2 model would finally give us the opportunity to contract with enterprise health systems — who were mostly blocked from working with us due to the 1099 contractor relationship.

In spite of the added costs, in March 2016 we launched our enterprise initiative and declared that we were moving our Heroes from 1099 to W-2 and becoming a HIPAA-compliant, state licensed home care agency.

We hired a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Patient Safety Advocate and named a HIPAA Security Officer. We hired an ex-Cambia healthcare investor as VP of Strategy, Kiel Dowlin, to help navigate the transition and assemble an impressive advisory board (including ex-hospital CEO and “healthcare futurist” Josh Luke). We partnered with one of the world’s leading experts in readmission prevention, Andrey Ostrovsky, MD (who later went on to become the Chief Medical Officer of Medicaid) and started building our own predictive insights algorithm to help predict and prevent adverse events in the home.

We now had the ability to manage and train our Heroes, although practically this didn’t change much. More importantly, we could now get paid directly from hospitals and other risk-bearing entities.

For anyone outside of healthcare, a major goal of the Affordable Care Act was to reduce readmissions and the overall costs of post-acute care. One way of doing that was to change the way hospitals got paid by Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Instead of paying them on a volume basis (fee-for-service), CMS is now paying them based on the quality of care they deliver to patients (fee-for-value).

This created enormous opportunities for companies like HomeHero to partner with hospitals and help them find more cost-effective options for post-acute care and reduce their reliance on skilled nursing facilities and medical home health. We doubled down on the belief that the big winner in this space would be the one who could win the largest contracts with hospitals and health systems.

Hospital Education

In April 2016, we joined the Cedars-Sinai Healthcare Accelerator (in partnership with Techstars) to learn from the top minds in healthcare about the operations and inner-workings of a world-renowned hospital. Cedars-Sinai, the largest non-profit academic medical center in the western United States, helped us launch the Safe Transition Home program to provide safe transitions out of the hospital and they worked with us to build evidence-based home care products for health systems.

Thanks to its adoption of the HomeHero iOS app, Cedars-Sinai became the nation’s first hospital system to successfully integrate with Apple’s CareKit platform and extend their healthcare system into the home.

One thing we learned about enterprise was that our growth would be somewhat limited due to the lack of financial incentive for certain health systems across the country to pay for non-medical home care, especially if they are only at-risk for a few thousand patients.

We also faced challenges in the mandated screening requirements for our caregivers — such as measles, mumps, rubella, TB, Live Scan fingerprinting, state registration fees, state mandated training and drug screening.

Nevertheless, the education and mentorship we gained from the accelerator program proved to be invaluable. We met with hundreds of executives at large health systems and payors and we were able to successfully define larger pilot opportunities.

We made incredible progress in a very short period of time, and in October 2016 we were chosen to lead a ~$1 million pilot opportunity with a large health system in Southeastern Michigan.

This was an exciting opportunity, but we had one important decision to make… and perhaps, the biggest decision of our lives.

Pilots ≠ Contracts

One danger working with large health systems on pilots is being dragged out in the middle of an ocean and abandoned.

The seemingly logical thing to do after winning a pilot of this size is to ramp up spend, start hiring in the new city and design technology sprints to support the new contract. However, it became evident that this particular health system, like many others we were talking to, had a genuine desire to conduct pilots to prove the actuarial value of home care, but there was no long term financial incentive to pay for home care in the same capacity.

It became evident that most of our pilots were being constructed solely for case studies and had slim chances of turning into sustainable contracts. We were still going to be reliant on private pay for the foreseeable future. This gentle realization was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So in Q1 2017, with significant capital left in the bank, we made the difficult and heart-wrenching decision to shut down all home care operations, transition our clients to local home care agencies and start executing on an entirely new business venture.

Simply put, despite serving thousands of patients since 2013, we do not believe a technology-enabled W-2 home care agency is our most attractive business opportunity going forward. Rather than continuing to push the boulder up the hill and risk a spectacular failure, we will attempt to leverage our talented team, unique experience and technology IP to build a more sustainable healthcare business outside of home care.

In Retrospect

Looking back, our three learnings were as follows:

1. We underestimated the timing, effects and intensity of state and federal regulatory changes in home care.

The only thing worse than losing a fight is being told you can’t even compete anymore. And there’s nothing more painful as a CEO than losing vision for your company, especially if you’ve been holding onto that vision for years.

2. We overestimated the ability for health systems and insurance companies to pay for non-medical home care.

We knew we were in for an uphill battle when we shifted our focus to enterprise contacts. The “what ifs” of this decision will likely haunt me for the rest of my life. Was there a way to avoid the W-2 agency model and pass along employment responsibilities to families and still ensure they comply with all state and federal laws? Could we have kept the 1099 model? Will the Republicans’ repeal and replace of Obamacare somehow result in more money being allocated for post-acute care? Most of these questions we will never know for sure.

3. We underestimated the ability for home care agencies to adopt new technology.

A majority of the 20,000 home care agencies are financially efficient, software enabled and have entrenched relationships within their local communities. While file cabinets are still popular, they are not sitting in the stone ages with technology.

Venture-Backed Home Care

From an outsider’s perspective, home care is a big and attractive market. As evidence, investors poured almost $200 million into various home care companies in the last 16 months. However, this is also an industry built on relationships at a hyper-local level, which isn’t exactly the M.O. of startups. And since 2013, the industry moved from lightly regulated to heavily regulated, making the economics challenging (if not untenable) for any company with huge growth expectations.

Source: Aging in Place Technology Watch (2017)

To break away with enough escape velocity in home care, a company needs to effectively leverage technology to deliver a faster and better experience at a drastically lower price. Currently, none of the venture-backed home care companies have been able to do that. Not one is price-disruptive.

In a recent interview with Home Health Care News, the CEO of one of the largest US home care franchises, Senior Helpers, chimed in on the state of “disruption” in the industry right now:

“In the last couple years you’ve seen Honor, Hometeam and HomeHero.

I’ve talked to all of them. I think everyone was worried that was going to be a big tech disruption that would change how home care is done. But I’ve seen they’ve all had to change their model. They’re now directly employing the caregivers. They’re still using tech to communicate with clients, but a lot of us were doing that already.

Now that Honor is converting itself to an employer model, they’re just like us. Maybe they’re using tech a little better than we are, and they might have some bells and whistles, but we feel confident that client acquisition is not an issue for us. We have great referral sources.

In this industry, you’re dealing with people on a community level, where 80% of your clients come from referrals and the rest from advertising or the internet. I think Honor’s a good company, I like the people managing it, but I look at them like I look at HomeInstead, Maxim or Bayada, just another competitor. I think Honor will do well over time, but they’re going to be just like us.”

As you can see, the incumbents are singing a different tune than taxi companies were in 2013 — three years after Uber‘s launch.

We spent the last three years keeping up with technology vendors like ClearCare in areas like scheduling, timesheet tracking, billing, reporting, analytics and readmission prevention. But what really set us apart was our price, massive geographic coverage of caregivers across 10,000 square miles, our 10-second matching speeds, caregiver video interviews, evidence-based predictive analytics, and most of all, our 1099 model. For obvious reasons, this was far more disruptive to the incumbents — we were offering the same quality caregivers for less than half the price.

It’s sad to say, but today only the very wealthy can afford home care prices of $25 per hour, which typically comes out to over $4,000 a month. Because home care is extremely fragmented, it’s the agencies who can establish long-lasting relationships and deliver highly-personalized experiences who ultimately win. It’s not a technology problem.

The Future of Home Care

Today, I would estimate 60% of transactions in the home care industry occur under the table, as caregivers are sourced through Craigslist, Care.com or within families and social networks. Home care agencies are left fighting for the top 40% of the market which can only be won by leveraging personal relationships and high-touch interactions — including field marketers, home safety auditors and care coordinators—all things that do not scale well for technology companies.

Because of this economic reality, it is our belief that the W-2 home care industry will remain hyper local and fragmented for the foreseeable future. This does not mean that home care is a bad industry to go into if you are looking for a rewarding lifestyle business, but don’t expect any massive scale beyond a few zip codes.

This announcement is by no means intended to be a death sentence to other venture-backed home care companies. I have the utmost respect for the founders of the other home care startups, and I definitely would’t bet against any of them. But Mike and I deeply believe families across the country need better access to affordable home care, and with increasing regulation and thriving B2B technology vendors, it would be irresponsible for us to continue down this path with unlikely probability of liquidation. We mustn’t assume big fundraising rounds are synonymous with market success, this is certainly not the case in home care.

What’s Next

It breaks our hearts to leave home care, as we still believe there needs to be better and significantly cheaper option for families to find quality home care. Unfortunately, we don’t see a path for HomeHero or any other current company to achieve that goal.

The good news is we are pulling out early enough, with significant cash remaining, so we can find a new path forward and continue our same mission of promoting health and wellness in the home.

We will share more details about our new strategy and venture within the coming months, but our goal is still to positively improve the lives of millions of patients.

The hardest part of this announcement is saying goodbye to not only our compassionate caregivers, but all the team members who I recruited and hand-picked. Many of them I convinced to leave their jobs, move across the country, and take time away from their families to fight this difficult battle with me and Mike. For over three years, they were our trusted team of soldiers who would bleed terracotta and follow us into a fireblaze in order to make HomeHero a success.

We will forever be thankful for your loyalty and sacrifices.

To all our family, friends, Heroes, patients, clients, partners, employees, investors and advisors who helped make HomeHero what it was over the past three years, we extend the most sincere gratitude. We are so proud of you and the progress we made together. Deep in my heart I know the world is a better place because HomeHero existed.

Get in touch: @kaleazy.