| One startup's Super Bowl Hail Mary |
| | Good morning,
On Sunday, Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes will trot onto the Super Bowl field at Raymond James Stadium wearing the product of an unlikely, bittersweet startup success story.
Mahomes’s helmet is made by Vicis, a Seattle-based company that launched a potentially game-changing new product this week against dramatic odds, with a severely understaffed team, during a pandemic. The Zero2 is Vicis’s first new helmet in more than two years, and it was pushed over the finish line on Tuesday by the small handful of employees who remained through mass layoffs more than a year ago.
Vicis made waves across the football world back in 2017 when its first product, the Zero1, was rated as the safest helmet in the NFL--critical, given what's now known about the connection between football and the brain condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. That’s the model Mahomes will wear on Sunday, as the NFL won’t approve any new helmets for game use until April.
Behind the scenes, Vicis was struggling to turn a profit. By November 2019, the company was pleading with investors for more capital. The funding never came. Co-founder and CEO Dave Marver resigned, and a month later, Vicis' board voted to place the company into receivership in an effort to avoid bankruptcy. Nearly 100 of the company's 110 employees were laid off.
Read our story to learn how the few employees who remained managed to bring a safer, less expensive, and all-around stronger product to market--and what’s next for the company’s future. |
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