B2B leasing of IT materials (like dark kitchens)

Check out https://www.allwhere.co/

hoo boy .. there's a whole slew of waste and risk with remote work itself, let alone startups' assets & techstack.

While the days are long gone of millions of investor dollars being spent on Herman Miller chairs and building massive servers from scratch (hello dotcom boom), the remote work world has brought its own inefficiencies and risks.

I won't go into the operational friction that is faced by a new company, because that's the problem that OpStart is working on.

But here are some of the tech/security inefficiencies and other risk aspects of remote and/or startups:

Laptop & home office expenses - not only are these an issue for startups that close down, these are also an issue for when a remote employee leaves a startup. How do the laptops get returned to the company and prepped for redeployment? Startups don't usually have IT teams to handle this - and you certainly don't want to devote dev resources to any of this. Plus, what are the logistics to get assets back from a remote employee easily, especially if you had to fire them?

Easy answer? let the departing employee keep it all, which has other risks.

Additionally, security access is a bit of a nightmare these days due to the vast numbers of subscription services. Startups have dozens of app subscriptions in use.

While a service like 1Password or LastPass can help with password control, the transferring of access can be a nightmare, riddled with ugly handoffs and risks to mission-critical services. There's no easy way to audit that everything is secure once an employee has separated from service - it requires detailed review of each app, with every service handling its admin and access transfers a different way.

On the subject of security, while Google drive is an easy and low cost way to share files etc, there is no easy way to audit who has access to what without going through the drive file by file.

The whole thing borders on terrifying.

There's also the concern about how to handle:

• existing customer data and its proper handling / disposal
• customer contract winddown (if possible), and
• other wind-down expenses.

Software engineering teams might be able to build in proper access protocols to their webapps with worldclass security and data handling, but with the advent of no-code apps running off of google sheets, I have a hunch many startups have swiss cheese-like customer data security.

And if the customer data is held on a laptop that's retained by a departing employee, what are the risks to the startup? If the company shuts down completely, what are the ethics for how to handle the data?

A few possible solutions, that may/may not fully address all the issues above:

A startup/remote company-centric managed services IT company. It could offer packages that are specifically designed for the needs of a startup (rental laptops, which include security management etc). As the startup grows, the managed services can convert to a more traditional enterprise arrangement, and act as a fractional CIO advisory.

and/or

a service (like the above or another model tbd) that includes VC as pipeline partners - where the VC firms offer some type of asset service that is available alongside their cash investment .. and when /if the startups needs change or the startup folds, the laptops get returned and reused within the VC portfolio company network.

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Source: I was COO of a venture-backed, remote startup, so the issues described are all real examples of the headaches, and I have a background in risk mitigation/controls/process ops. My husband owns a managed services IT company, and I gained a familiarly into how the service might work if that's the solution.

What about renting equipment instead of buying?

This company seems somewhat related: https://www.builtfirst.com/

I am uncertain whether the total addressable market (TAM) is substantial enough to tackle the issue at hand. The cost of starting a digital business still remains low compared to traditional businesses.