Alex Fielding's Life Filled with
Purpose and Passion

 

Alex Fielding, Ripcord co-founder, board member and Chief Executive Officer, is in charge of the company’s vision, leadership and execution. 

Fielding's career began as an engineer for Apple and Cisco Systems. He worked on several versions of PowerBook, MacOS, Network Server and the initial iMac team. Fielding worked with Ellen Hancock, former CTO of Apple when he went to Exodus Communications. He also coauthored several applications for patents.


Wheels of Zeus (WoZ)

Alex Fielding and Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, founded Wheels of Zeus together in 2001. It was later sold to Zontrak. Prior to starting Ripcord, Fielding held several prominent positions at various high-profile companies. He served as Vice President of Vigilent, and Chief Technology Officer (Federal) at Power Assure.

Fielding is currently on the board of both the Code Warriors Foundation and The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education (ISKME). Fielding also helped found Singularity University.

Singularity University

The courses offered by Singularity University are designed to supplement a curriculum so there are no degrees offered. Individual universities must be contacted by those students wishing to negotiate degree credit for courses taken through SU. A certificate showing coursework completion and transcript are given when a program is completed.

 

Chapters of Singularity University

The chapters of SU have the responsibility to encourage and invite local innovators to share projects and ideas. Organization of events and support of the challenges for global impact are part of the responsibilities.

Goal of SU

The goal is to build an ecosystem of organizations and innovators that work together to solve the challenges facing humanity. The goal is to find the link between the realities on the ground and innovations in technology. SU partners with several companies and organizations that are geared toward helping to make a difference in the world.

ISKME (Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education)

The mission of ISKME is to improve collaboration, continuous learning and change in the sector of education. It is a non-profit that does research in social science, and develops innovations and facilities based on that research to improve the way that knowledge is shared around the world. Alex has been a member of the board since 2017. The curriculum is standardized around the world with the goal of being transparent and available to everyone, regardless of their location, race, sex or socioeconomic status.

 

Focus of ISKME

Open educational resources are beginning to make an impact at all grade levels from kindergarten to high school and beyond. STEM initiatives are used to foster diversity and inclusion within the technology sector and spur engagement from the community. The nonprofit project offers educators all over the world training on curriculum development.

Orange Fab Mentoring

Mentoring entrepreneurs along with Orange Fab's team allows Fielding to follow on of his passions -- connecting with the next generation. The platform is geared to promoting start-up growth in Silicon Valley. It also connects startups to corporations for strategic partnerships and investment opportunities.

 
 
 

Basics of Orange Fab

Orange Fab is a fellowship program. It provides access to events, global enterprises and office space on demand in 15 countries. Startups based in the United States with an exciting product or passion and a need for new customers, markets or funding can join Orange Fab. To allow startups to gain a competitive advantage, the program is free -- no fees or equity.

CodeWarrior Foundation

Alex Fielding served as CodeWarrior Foundation's director. The organization trains active-duty troops in coding to allow them to find jobs that pay higher wages when they return home. The service is provided to troops at no cost, and all applicants that pass the exam for entry and want to achieve are accepted. 

Donations of time, money and real estate, combined with corporate placement fees, allow for the provision of laptops, a place to study, and cloud storage. This generates value for society while allowing donors to pay it forward, in recognition of the opportunities they’ve been given. The mission includes job placement to help veterans use the skills they have learned through the program.


FIRST

FIRST is a nonprofit with the goal of inspiring interest in technology and science. The organization is based out of St. Ignatius College, where Alex Fielding mentored younger investors, makers and engineers during 2016 and 2017.

 

Ripcord Founded for a Purpose


 

Ripcord turns paper records into data, using robots to scan and classify records at scale. Digitization is more accurate and less expensive this way. There are no additional hours needed, and no additional team members that could be doing other things instead of manually scanning records into a computer system. Access and insight into the records is provided by sophisticated software that is highly customizable to individual customer needs.

 

How Alex Fielding Got Involved with Ripcord

 

A friend called Fielding for advice about a company that was about to go public and was in the midst of a pre-IPO audit. The company had to produce records to ensure that the books reflecting its finances were accurate. Only a third of the boxes of records could be located,  despite a system for managing the records that should have allowed each actual box to be identified. Most of the boxes were in the wrong place or flat-out missing, mislaid by the company paid to keep the files secure.

 

The Cost of Lost Records

 

  • Delaying the initial public offering

  • Hiring a new accounting firm to audit restated financials

  • Having to redo all the previous accounting

Results of a Phone Call

Alex Fielding's friend felt that scanning the records was time consuming, costly and prone to error. The company had already tried scanning records by hand. It took over six hours for each box, and they could not track what did not get scanned into the system. Fielding believed that there had to be a company that provided an automated system to handle the records, but his friend told him he could not find any.

 Alex Fielding decided to do research to track down a company that offered an automated solution. When he couldn’t find one, he launched Ripcord.


 

A Green Mission

The goal of Ripcord is to help make the world paperless. Originally Ripcord Networks, a funding round that netted $9.5 million was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers to turn it into Ripcord. A machine (robot) was created to take care of paper files by the billions. Today’s offices are far from paperless -- in fact, they are using more than at any point in history. But the goal is to end the use of paper in offices, at least when it comes to corporate records.


Robotic Digitization Company

Ripcord is the first project of its kind. Sophisticated software and automation give customers all-inclusive management of records that is both secure and affordable. Founded in 2014, the company was formed with the goal to solve a problem for customers and allow the digitization of paperwork to be done with vision robotics.

 

Alex Fielding’s Ripcord - Solutions & Benefits

  • Compliance enforcement for company and other policies

  • Security improvement

  • Easy to access data

  • Records management is streamlined

Ease of Auditing

There is a lot of paperwork involved with auditing and several organizations must go through an audit to insure they are complying with human resources policies, financial regulations or HIPAA laws. Ripcord's digitization service helps automatically turn mountains of paperwork into searchable digital files, making it much easier to find needed documentation. 


Respond to Auditors

Ripcord makes it easy to find the documents that auditors want. Search for them, group them and send them as digital files. The project has made it possible to use both filtered and keyword searches to find the information quickly.


Compliance Policies and Security Easy to Manage

Retention policies to send notifications before disposition date, or archive records automatically, can be set up. Customers also gain the ability to customize permission of who within the organization can see, download, comment, share and make changes to records. Permissions can be granted based on the person's role in the company. Encryption is used during all phases of data sharing.


Automation Makes It Easier

 

There were experiments with people manually digitizing files in the beginning, and several issues were found with the method. Alex Fielding's staff came up with these issues:

  • Staples were used to secure 90% of the data

  • Only the corners are looked at for staples meaning 8% of staples were not removed from forms

  • High speed scanners are typically designed for uniform content that is fresh from a printer. Staples can cause a rolling scanner to jam damaging the surfaces and making future scans worse

  • Staples leave marks in the scanned items, obscuring data

  • It takes a lot of time to remove staples, unjam machines and take care of numerous scans

  • It can take as many as 8 hours to turn a single box of files into a digital format even without separating/organizing all the files

Project Ease

Alex Fielding and his colleagues came up with an idea to build a system that would improve the ease and accuracy of document scanning. Using vision-guided robots, automated with advanced sensors and optics, solves several problems. The biggest challenge in the beginning was removing 100% of the fasteners. Robotic systems can now handle a variety of thickness and sizes of paper. The machines situate the paper correctly and find all the fasteners in the paper. The pages are separated into logical groupings so that the resulting digital files are in sensible groups, preventing the need to go through thousands of pages to find information.

 

Ripcord Makes it Easy

 

  • Send Ripcord your records. They will be logged and given a barcode to track them all the way through the process of digitization

  • Workcells (robots) organize the records and get them ready to be digitized

  • Every image that is received by Ripcord is digitized in full color and made into a PDF file that can be searched

  • Records are then stored and managed by Ripcord Canopy, the platform for managing records at Ripcord

  • Boolean, filtered and keyword searches can be used to find records

Common Questions about Ripcord

The use of robotic systems to organize data raises several questions for consumers.


 

What happens to the records that are scanned?

Ripcord downloads the records as PDF files onto a hard drive and sends them to the companies when contracts are terminated for any reason. Unless a contract is cancelled, they will automatically renew, and the records will stay in the Canopy software.

Integration with other software services

Docusign, Netsuite, Docusign and other services are integrated with Canopy to make organizing and sorting through data simple and less time-consuming when specific items are needed by companies. Using these with Canopy eliminates data silos. Custom integrations can be created for customers who have a preferred tool for software that Canopy does not currently use.


Are there limits to the sizes of paper?

Ripcord can scan almost any size of paper. Many scans are legal- or letter-sized, but possible sizes range from 24X36 inches to business cards. The service allows companies to focus on passion instead of mundane tasks.