Ripcord & Alex Fielding

Alex Fielding & Steve Wozniak: Partners in Several Ventures

Fielding worked for Exodus for a while, but eventually, he wanted more. That was when he decided he wanted to found a company of his own. He co-founded his first company, Wheels of Zeus (WoZ), in 2001 with Steve Wozniak, with whom he had worked during his time at Apple. The commonly known abbreviation WoZ was clever because it not only stood for Wheels of Zeus but also was a reference to Steve Wozniak's last name. WoZ made wireless hardware which allowed owners to keep track of the location of enabled objects.

The primary piece of hardware was a smart tag with an embedded GPS that could be affixed to any number of personal property items, including luggage, pets' collars, purses, a ring of keys and more. The tag could then be programmed with an "accepted area" radius. This was an area in which the item was expected to be at a given time.

The smart tag was then programmed to alert the owner if the object or animal moved outside of one of the pre-programmed accepted area zones. If an object moved outside of that zone, the GPS would ping its location to the owner so that he or she could then track down his or her pet or object. Its uses for finding pets were obvious. For items, though, it did more than just help someone find his lost keys; this technology could also alert a person to a stolen item quickly, thereby giving him or her a better chance of finding the item before it was lost forever.

Tag detectors and the WoZ service were the other two components to this particular technology. The company was quite popular, and Fielding and Wozniak sold it for a profit to Zontrack in 2006. Fielding held other positions in the interim between the selling of WoZ and the founding of Ripcord.

In 2004, Fielding had become the CEO of Ripcord Networks - not to be confused with his current company, Ripcord - where he worked until the company was sold in 2009. He was a CTO (chief technology officer) at a company called Power Assure and then the VP of Vigilent. He has also worked for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a contract employee. In fact, it was at NASA that the idea for Ripcord began to come to fruition.

Ripcord: Its Creation and Founding

When Alex Fielding began working on the current Ripcord, he told the important people at NASA what it was he was trying to do. They were impressed by the idea and gave him not only an office space in which to work, but also experts in pertinent fields to help him make his dreams a reality. Ripcord was officially founded in 2015 with the help of investors, who were so impressed with Fielding's record that they gave him $9.5 million dollars, and his co-founder Wozniak, who was also an investor.

People often wonder exactly how Alex Fielding came up with the initial idea of Ripcord. The answer to that question is actually a pretty funny story. It all began with a bet with a friend.

Shortly before the founding of Ripcord, a friend of Fielding's worked for a tech company which was about to move from the private to the public sector. In addition to filling out the required S-1 form, the friend also had to review all the mounds of paperwork from over the years of the company's operation. The friend called his document retrieval company and paid them to retrieve the boxes from the company's storage trailer.

However, when the retrieval company brought the boxes, many of them were missing because the document provider had lost them. This sent Fielding's friend and the rest of the tech company employees into a mad whirlwind of trying to replace, reconstruct and whatever else they could do to try to retrieve the lost records. It was a massive and time-consuming process that slowed the whole transition down.

Fielding, shocked that this had happened in the first place, insisted that there must be a company out there that could have digitized all these records for his friend's company, which would have prevented this disaster from happening. His friend said there was not. Fielding then bet his friend that he could find such a company.

Alex Fielding lost that bet.

He could not find a company that would digitize his friend's records, so he decided to create one instead. And thus, the idea for Ripcord was born.

Alex Fielding: Today

Today, at the age of 41, Alex Fielding is now the founder, CEO, and a board member for Ripcord. He has a lot of different responsibilities in these roles. His main tasks, though, are focused on the company's leadership and vision. He also makes sure that the company’s ideas, plans and operations are carried out in a timely and efficient manner. Today, Ripcord employs approximately 80 people and is worth upwards of $250 million dollars.

Fielding is pretty quiet when it comes to his personal life, preferring instead for investors and customers to focus on his business savvy and professional accomplishments, of which there are many. In addition to his responsibilities with Ripcord, Fielding is also on the board of directors for ISKME (The Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education).

He is also a board member of the Code Warrior and a board member and a founding member of Singularity University, a B corporation focused on exponential technologies that offers a consultancy service, a business incubator and several executive educational programs. It is located in the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

Furthermore, Fielding is also serving on the board of directors at PharmaCapture, an innovative company that utilizes SMS text messages on behalf of many different drug, lifestyle and other health-related industries to text patients about prescription refills, health updates and other relevant information that helps them manage their diseases, refill their medications and stay healthy.

FAQs: