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Dave Michaels with Tech Ranch Austin promotes the Austin Startup Bazaar during Austin Startup Week.
The day-long event Thursday at Austin City Hall downtwon featured speed-mentoring sessions, pitch sessions, city hall tours, company demonstrations and a marketing talk.
At the Austin Startup Bazaar, Mark Philip, founder of Are You Watching This, talks about his sports startup aimed at fans who don’t want to miss any important plays.
Tim Gasper, co-founder of Keepstream, an alumni of the Capital Factory program, talks about his company’s acquisition by infochimps. Infochimps, an Austin-based data marketplace company with 14 employees, announced the deal at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011. Keepstream is a social media curation tool that gathers content from Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites in one place.
These guys are part of one semester startup at the University of Texas at Austin. The program has more than 100 undergraduate students enrolled. So far, they have formed 22 companies. These guys created a political news site, PurpleSight that aggregates the blue and the red perspective on stories. The idea is to give both sides of an issue to better inform the public. They attended Demo Day 2011 and participated in Austin Startup Crawl during Austin Startup Week.
After the action-packed Capital Factory Demo Day, techies hit the hotspots on the Austin Startup Crawl tour to network, nosh on snacks and drink.
More than 700 people RSVP’ed to the event on Facebook and Plancast, said Josh Baer, one of the Austin Startup Week founders.
Bob Metcalfe talks with entrepreneurs
San Antonio-based Rackspace sponsored the event which included shuttle buses taking people from stop to stop. The event was very well organized and a lot of fun.
One of the largest stops was at Capital Factory’s offices on the eighth floor of the Omni Building downtown. All of the Capital Factory finalists were in attendance to talk about their companies along with some other startups. Bob Metcalfe was there too. People mingled and ate pizza, drank beer and margaritas.
The next stop was Infochimp’s offices. It just bought another Capital Factory alumni, Keepstream. They served up beer from a keg and had a bottle of vodka on ice.
Visitors hanging out at Infochimps offices
Other shuttle bus stops included HomeAway’s offices, UShip, Cloudmasons and more. For the complete list of companies participating in the Austin Startup Crawl visit its Facebook page.
Ariane Fisher, founder of Storymix, presents at Demo Day 2011
Like a hungry mob at an all you can eat buffet, people gorged themselves on entrepreneurship information Wednesday at the third annual Capital Factory Demo Day 2011.
The day-long event at the AT&T Conference Center in downtown Austin kicked off with a keynote speech by Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com and now a professor of electrical engineering and director of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.
Metcalfe offered great advice to the entrepreneurs in the crowd. He said a lot of young entrepreneurs appeared to be “on the verge of dying.” But, instead of pulling all nighters and eating ramen noodles, he told them to get in shape, sleep at least 8 hours and eat healthy meals. The crowd seemed skeptical.
Metcalfe also advised the entrepreneurs to write all the time, give speeches and learn about selling to pitch the company’s products.
“Some entrepreneurs think sales people are lower than whale shit,” Metcalfe said. “Sales people are a different species but they’re carbon-based like you.”
And sales people are essential to the success of a startup, he said.
Metcalfe praised Austin’s entrepreneurial spirit and innovators like Michael Dell of Dell and John Mackey of Whole Foods.
To further foster young entrepreneurs, Metcalfe also launched the one-semester start-up at the University of Texas. Joshua Baer, co-founder of the Capital Factory, is also an instructor.
Following Metcalfe, the five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists pitched their companies in eight-minute presentations with slides. At the end, SwimTopia won the applause meter reading as the audience favorite.
Brian Sharples, co-founder of HomeAway talking entrepreneurship at Demo Day 2011
At noon, Brian Sharples, founder of HomeAway, talked about pursuing his passions and launching his company at the age of 44 after making a lot of other mistakes.
“Surround yourself with as much experience as possible,” Sharples said.
Also, do your homework, Sharples advised. Before he and his co-founder Carl Shepherd started HomeAway, they spent more than six months researching the vacation rental market. They knew very little about the market. They soon discovered Expedia bought VacationSpot in 1999, but the business failed within a year. They found the former CEO of Expedia to find out what went wrong. Turns out Expedia tried to turn the business into a hotel business and get rid of the subscription fee model that customers liked. Owners also liked to interact with renters before leasing their properties. Expedia took away that conversation. HomeAway brought it back.
HomeAway, which recently went public, acquired more than 70 companies to create a business to make it as easy for consumers to find, book and stay in a vacation rental home, as it is to book a hotel.
“If you have a good idea be quiet about it until you’re ready,” Sharples said. For three or four years while HomeAway built its business and acquired competitors, the company didn’t talk to the press, Sharples said.
Sharples told entrepreneurs to be humble, to worry about competitors, to be passionate and to remain flexible. Also, entrepreneurs must have a profit model. The days of starting a business with no clear idea of how to make money, like Twitter, don’t work, he said.
“Never settle, always try to make things better,” Sharples said.
During lunch, investors mingled with entrepreneurs at an actual all you can eat buffet of veggies, chicken, beef, mashed potatoes, salad and desserts.
Silicon Valley Bank, Silverton Partners, AustinVentures, RedHouse Associates, Clearstone Venture Partners, Wildbasin Investments and Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas sponsored the event.
Following lunch, 17 entrepreneurs gave three minutes pitches on their companies. They included Apptive, CopperEgg, The Daily Dot, Forecast, Greenling, Hoot.me, ihiji, Infochimps, Loku, OwnLocal, NightRaft, Ravel, Ricochet Labs, Rockify, Spanning, Stormpulse, VolunteerSpot and WPEngine.
Next, Auren Hoffman, CEO and co-founder of Rapleaf, talked about recruiting and hiring tech talent. He seemed to contrast sharply with Metcalfe’s advice from the morning. Hoffman advised entrepreneurs to work long hours and hire others who work long hours six days a week. He also advised them to return calls and e-mails in a timely fashion.
The day-long Demo Day ended with a call to action. Baer advised everyone to go to the closest bar to talk and then to take the shuttle bus to join the Startup Crawl, a series of stops at various high-tech businesses around town to meet the companies, drink and mingle.
At The Capital Factory’s office, founder Josh Baer gave an overview of Demo Day 2011 during the Startup Crawl.
The third annual Capital Factory Demo Day took place on Wednesday at the AT&T Conference Center in downtown Austin. Five Capital Factory Finalists showed off their companies to investors and others at the day-long sold out event, which was livestreamed. Each of the five companies spent 10 weeks to nurture their ventures.
Emil Hajric, CEO of HelpJuice, gave a demonstration to investors at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011. His company was one the five Capital Factory 2011 Demo Day Finalists. HelpJuice makes an application that makes updating knowledgebases like Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs for companies easy.
Jack McGary, co-founder of SpeakerMix, gave a presentation to investors and others at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011 Wednesday morning. SpeakerMix was one of five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists.
Speakermix is a one-stop shop for finding a speaker for an event. The company’s website is like an online match making service for event planners and speakers.
The market for speakers is $10 billion annually, McGary said. SpeakerMix already has 6,500 speakers on its site and has booked $1 million in speaking engagements, he said.
“We’ve got to work with everyone from Michael Phelps to Glenn Beck,” McGary said.
“There’s a ton of really great speakers that meeting planners are not going to find on Google.”
Kirtus Dixon, co-founder and CEO of GroupCharger was selected as one of the five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists. He pitched his company to investors during Austin Startup Week at the Capital Factory’s sold-out event Demo Day 2011.
Dixon’s company, GroupCharger, seeks to get alumni more actively involved and donating to their Alma Maters through its first web application called AlumniCharger. But that’s not an easy task.
For example, Oklahoma University has an alumni base of roughly 300,000, but only 8 percent give back every year, Dixon said. The university is using GroupCharger’s app to increase engagement with its alumni, Dixon said. The app finds alumni on social networks and then sends event information, invitations and introductions to other area alumni.
“Alumni who stay in touch with their schools after graduation are three times more likely to give back,” Dixon said.
Higher education institutions receive $30 billion in contributions annually and universities spend $2.4 billion on technology to engage alumni, Dixon said. The market is huge with 1.5 million alumni clubs, 55,000 alumni associations and each university spending, on average, $125,000 a year to market to alumni.
GroupCharger launched its beta version in July and it has 20 customers including the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. They pay $500 for the service, Dixon said.
GroupCharger is seeking to raise $200,000 in venture capital and already has $75,000 committed, Dixon said. It needs the money to expand to 40 universities which will be its break even mark to profitability, Dixon said.
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