Rilla - The odyssey begins….

What a fortnight (or so) it has been for Rilla. Just as we published our press release on our vision and funding announcement, we also hit the road for a critical global trip. Imagine the scenario, you are the oldest founder in a group of three extraordinary individuals.? Having secured funding to bring your collective vision to life, you are heading out into the world to test your hypothesis, assess demand, meet investors and learn about how your proposition might be received by real customers.

Two of us, myself and Hal Smith Stevens took on the global mission which involved travel to London, Paris, Amsterdam and Singapore while the third Pul Bandara and our excellent delivery team stayed where they were, crafting our demo software which we will be showing customers in the next few weeks.

Product market fit is often elusive and hard to validate, but at some point your pitch and your product have to make contact with the customer, and this was the time. While we are highly confident in our USP, some highly trained machine learning based P2P network distribution and management algorithms, developed over years, we were also nervous that people would write us off as “tried this before” or “faulty commercially”.??

Not only is it peak excitement for funded founders, but it's also a high risk moment... Is what we have valuable, do we solve a real problem, are we onto something or are we too early or too late?? The room for insecurity and deflation of ego is immense but the thrill of being in the arena is tangible and so, we dived in!

I don’t really love the expression “go big or go home” but the worthy goal is to aim high, change the world and deliver epic value or what’s the point? But you still have choices. Do you start talking to small potential customers for low risk market entry or, if you have the contacts, do you go to the major players and test your concept. Both approaches are valid and carry different risks and we decided to try both. And so with some trepidation we walked into the belly of the beast. Leveraging some long standing relationships we dropped by some old colleagues at Comcast/Sky.?

Revisiting the Sky campus ten years since I last set foot there was quite the experience. As a place to work, Sky (now owned by Comcast) felt like a whole new world with a whole new culture. I had no idea what to expect but I was relieved and made somewhat emotional by what we experienced.?

The welcome from the team was akin to being the prodigal son. These familiar faces made us feel so welcome and listened to our pitch without prejudice. The feedback and honesty was incredible and the self awareness of the team was palpable. We were truly honoured to have the audience that we did. An affirmation that karma does exist and a real privilege to be with these people at the pinnacle of the profession.?

This is the best of the Sky I remember. A company that is ever evolving, constantly striving to avoid becoming the incumbent. Always open to new ideas even when the temptation would be to write off new concepts as tried before or incongruous to their mental model or reality at scale. We left feeling a million dollars thanks to the open and honest feedback and the message we got was, keep going, you are onto something. Quite a moment. Thank you team. ??

Next we visited with a trusted ex colleague at ITV ; once again the discussion was open, explorative and creative. The tone was inquisitive and curious rather than cynical and sceptical. Another sign of quality and a moment of learning and validation for us.?

After meetings with two great humans from VOD Professional and Ostmodern we took a moment to reflect on what we were learning. At this point it was clear that if we can deliver on our promise of high quality high value in live video content distribution, then we are solving a very real problem. It was here that we also really got excited as we know that what we can deliver is a huge leap forward in unlocking customer value in the live sports streaming ecosystem. Better value distribution is just a small part of what we aim to do and so this input was a great inspiration.

We stopped briefly in Paris for a meeting with a founder of a company that has done something similar to us and this was a great confirmation that the basic technology we are exploring can work and that the model is a disruptive challenge to the status quo. If we can improve on this success story and bring accretive value then we are going to have a great adventure.

And now onto IBC, tha annual gathering of the industry in Amsterdam…If Sky was the belly of the beast this was the melting pot of possibilities….

A lot of the fun was from reconnecting with people in the industry and in looking at what the whole broadcast world was doing to innovate and evolve their offerings. Over the course of three days we met with similar players, some potential competitors, old friends, many potential customers and a whole raft of good humans doing cool stuff. Worth saying also that Amsterdam has done a lot to shake off its formerly grubby reputation and that it really feels like a great place to be and to do business in 2024.

Real highlights (aside from the excellent food and service) were the reconnections and hearing what people believe is the future of live and interactive sports and esports experiences. The possibilities are endless and vary from sport to sport but it is clear that any company enabling seamless interaction and transaction can cost effectively bring to life many of the engaging, second screen and integrated experiences that customers want and that create stickiness for content owners and streamers alike.

With a spring in our step we jumped on a train back to London and without even time for a rewarding lunch we were on a plane to Singapore to meet our investors and join the energy of Token 2049, the world’s largest Crypto conference.?

In Singapore we caught up with some of our investors in the shape of Blockchain Founders Fund , Reflexive Capital and Blockchange Ventures . It’s truly lovely (and somewhat refreshing) to have investors who know how to give feedback, critique and encouragement with skill. Feeling supported and enabled while learning is a rare thing and we truly appreciated the guidance we received from these amazing people.?

Our current hypothesis is that the graph we create of users contributing their upstream bandwidth is best accounted for and opened up for value exchange using blockchain based technology. In a world that is frankly doubtful, we are being realists about this. This is a hypothesis we are still exploring and validating, although our experience in the space tells us that in a world looking for valid real world, high adoption use cases that this is one that will support community, interaction and value exchange brilliantly. It can also be done with protocol level integration of what our customers will see as low cost loyalty and rewards programmes for those contributing to the peer to peer network.?

There’s no doubt that the reputation of blockchain technology has taken a hit in the wake of, let’s say rapid wealth creation exploitation means; but it’s also true that the underlying movements of decentralisation and trust-less systems are now finding themselves real market traction and fulfilling numerous use cases as the layers of technology crystallise and stabilise.?

Seeing the level of participation, project contribution and commitment to the legitimate use cases in this space in the form of Token 2049, it is clear to me that this movement is finding its feet and that we are coming out of the trough of disillusionment and into the bullish territory of adoption at scale.?

As disruptive technologists, our job is to show things working with total transparency on underlying risks or cost and letting the market decide if this is preferable to current solutions.?

Ultimately the market chooses the best technology to get the job done for the best value of ownership. While we are definitely open to providing our measures of contribution (watching and upstream sharing of content) into traditional architectures we also see value in showing that multi chain integration and simple means to enable loyalty, rewards, interaction and transaction can definitely unlock the value of Metcalfe’s law of exponential value throughput in a community.?

Those with approaches that embrace experimentation and innovation will be the ones that take the value they create in cost savings and try out new models that turn their customers from passive viewers into contributors, commentators, controllers and even shareholders of content. In turn this will create more collective interaction and a self reinforcing flywheel of value that makes the network more sticky, delightful and equitable in how value flows throughout it. In the world where we can link our protocol directly back into the content (gaming and esport) then the possibilities of community controlled content become endless.

Our immediate mission is to validate that our patented peer to peer technology is superior in every way that counts to our customers and we are actively engaging with organisations who want to trial this capability and who have an eye on the future of online sport experiences.?

Overall, the trip was a resounding success and we are more excited than ever to meet potential customers and show our wares. Never has there been a better time to be in the industry and we are fortunate to have the connections and capability that we do. We will keep you posted on the journey and I hope this gives inspiration to other founders to get out there in the arena and test your ideas. There really is a big world out there and it’s well worth getting amongst it to remind yourself that doing is the best way to learn.

If you want to? know more about Rilla then hit me up. We are super busy but we will always make time for those with the kind of problems we can solve.?

We have a huge amount of appreciation for all of the people we talked to and extra thanks to:

Samantha Renard Steve Griffith Ben Phillips Fraser Stirling Paul Kane Thomas Williams Kauser Kanji , Pierre-Louis Theron Caroline Cardozo Gulliver Smithers Matt McDonald , Dominic Farrell Jose Teixeira Sunny Parikh Azhar H. John Squire , Matthew Immerso Rob Schmults Aly Madhavji Don Lokuge Greg Shaw Keri Little Michael Cutler

So many doors to knock on and so many opportunities to solve a real problem! we will keep you posted on the journey and we cannot wait to start showing what we are building… Onwards and upwards.