Deadly Derecho

On Thursday, tragedy struck nearby at the hands of severe weather.  A summer thunderstorm brought straight line winds of 70+ mph to beautiful Table Rock Lake near Branson, Missouri, sinking a duck boat and drowning 17 tourists.  There’s some uproar, indicting everything from duck boat design to onboard safety protocols to weather warning communication.  In the immediate aftermath, the president of the duck boat company declared that the storm came out of nowhere, an excuse that may have worked before the ubiquity of smartphones and weather apps.  The truth is that the convection initiated 9 hours earlier near the Kansas-Nebraska border and a severe thunderstorm warning was issued for Branson over 30 minutes in advance of the accident, as several defensive meteorologists were quick to point out.  The incident was extensively covered by media outlets (though if you read a single article, I recommend this one from the Joplin Globe), so I will focus on my experience watching this storm from nearby Springfield.

Though we’ve been under daily thunderstorm watches throughout this hot and humid weather pattern, my alertness was heightened when I received a text from our Tornado Puncher team in Georgia at 3:45 pm.  The radar showed a discrete supercell about an hour’s drive north near Osceola with a 3 inch hail core, followed by a fast-moving line along the cool frontal boundary.  The hail core veered and weakened, but the gust front continued to strengthen as it plowed into Springfield, gobbling up the remnants of smaller storms.  Two hours later, around 5:45 pm, the storm arrived as a dramatic gale: the trees bent to the ground and a flying flotsam of cardboard boxes and styrofoam  packing whooshed by my window.  Naturally, I went outside to investigate, as did the neighbors.  The wind was impressive, easily 50-60 mph where I was standing (Springfield airport recorded multiple gusts over 70 mph), wresting dead branches from the old trees on our property.  The sustained strength of the wind picked up an ominous cloud of dust from the construction zone behind the shop, and I snapped a picture of Missouri’s closest equivalent to Arizona’s infamous haboob:

After 15 minutes of strong wind and a few minutes of heavy rain, the storm pressed south and unleashed a similar fury on Branson an hour later.  I can imagine that these same gusts exceeded 70 mph on the open water, solidly within the windspeed range for an EF0 tornado.  So these threats need to be taken seriously, especially for high risk situations like outdoor events, boating, parasailing, etc.  This is a massive challenge for warning communicators, since the information is available to warn people if they pay attention.  Unfortunately, the designation of “severe thunderstorm warning” doesn’t bat an eye in this part of the country, mostly because it means there’s probably not a tornado.  This doesn’t lessen the dangers of hail, lightning strikes, or straight-line winds, of course.  I hope that the future holds a pinpointed, location-based warning system that rather than drawing a warning polygon will instead text you a brief summary of what will happen at your location and when.  Because if one of the duck boat passengers had received a warning memo of “70 MPH WINDS, HEAVY RAIN STARTING AT 7PM” they could likely have diverted the boat to safety.  The technology is available, and I hope for the world that our meteorology community can make it happen.

Founding a company

Our company is official!  Felix Tech, Inc. has registered with the Missouri Secretary of State as a C-corp, and I am formally its Secretary and co-Vice President.  After about 3 years of talking about it, the process of establishing the business was quick and relatively painless, much like establishing a high school club but with actual monetary consequences.  Since this was all new to me coming in, I’ll take you through our startup experience in terms that a business novice like myself would understand:

• The ideas phase: As early as 2015, Russel and I were bouncing ideas about a variety of water purification technologies, discussing shortcomings in current desalination processes and what it would take to push capacitive deionization to large-scale viability. Market research is very important in this phase, since you don’t want to invest a large amount of time and money into ideas that are either fully patented already or have minimal potential for profit.
• Determine the business scope: Naturally, our ideas phase produced too many products and prototypes to reasonably build, so we narrowed our company to focus on 3 projects of varying risk/reward. The team expanded to 5 of us to include 3 other partners with business acumen and valuable industry connections.
• Select the corporation type: your options include forming as a sole proprietor, a limited liability company (LLC, your basic option), S corporation, or C corporation.  While the C-corp designation comes with higher costs and more paperwork, it allows the most flexibility when it comes to investment and growth, a necessity for a firm devoted to rapid prototyping.
• Choose a name: It’s only a couple of words, but (aside from the names of your children) potentially the most important word choice you’ll ever make.  After months of passive brainstorming of unsatisfactory names, we landed on Felix because it balances memorability with deeper significance.  Latin for luck or iron-lithium alloy, you choose: Felix is a name that can grow with us.
• Establish the headquarter location:  While there are tax advantages to incorporating in a state like Delaware, we decided on Missouri, if only because our 3 Missouri residents are eligible to be registered agents for the company.  We simultaneously negotiated a lease for a workshop in Springfield (I co-signed as a guarantor since the company didn’t have its own finances), which can be done after incorporation if you remember to report your change of address at all three levels.
• File the incorporation documents: Our lawyer, Jennifer, prepared several documents for us as required by the State of Missouri.  Articles of incorporation, bylaws, minutes for initial meetings of the shareholders (wherein we elected ourselves to the Board of Directors) and the board (wherein we ratified the bylaws and accepted our State-required positions.  Just like your typical high school club, corporations are required to have a President, VP, Secretary, and Treasurer).
• Receive the corporate kit:  Jennifer ordered a standard kit that enables me, as Secretary, to appropriately keep written records.  Inside the official-looking book/box is a binder to organize incorporation documents, minutes, stock ledgers, and tax forms.  I was more excited about the official seal, which comes in both stamp and golden sticker form as pictured.
• Stock certificates come included with the corporate ledger. It is very important to discuss the par value per share and projected net worth of the company before selling stock, since the number of shares (30,000) is relatively fixed.  While anyone can try to sell shares for any amount, stock certificates need a company seal and signatures from the President and Secretary to be legitimate, a helpful safeguard.  Any transfers between shareholders also need to be recorded in the corporate ledger.
• Non-disclosure agreement: Since we’re a tech firm, Jennifer drafted an NDA ‘with teeth.’  I shuddered when reading the terms, hoping that we don’t have to unleash the full force of the law on any breaches.  Be warned…though anything I discuss on here is public record, which means it’s more on me to be cautious.
• Website and logo are forthcoming.  This summer, hopefully.  Then we’ll have signs in front of the house/shop and actually look like a business.
• Greene County requires a merchant license for all businesses, including services.  This is a yearly one-page form and $25 fee, and I have to do it before we accept orders for products or services.
• Also, I need to apply for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) by submitting Form SS-4 to the IRS pronto.  Or they’ll swoop in and take our assets, so I hear.

I’ll be honest, the paperwork is daunting.  The key will be diligence, both in remembering forms and keeping the minutes.  Please show some appreciation to the secretaries in your life, it’s not an easy task keeping a company organized.  All told, incorporating a company is relatively simple and inexpensive, especially if you can delegate your document preparation to a friendly lawyer and your secretarial work to an overeager individual…

Paperwork aside, I’m excited to start creating!  This summer, I’ll be mainly drafting patent disclosures for our inventions while working part-time, though I am sure I’ll be integrally involved in selling stock to investors and developing our initial prototypes.  I hear startups require more work than you expect, but my part-time arrangement is ideal for now as it buys me some time to bring my tornado-related research to some degree of completion.  Wish us luck, or felix.