Category: Austin (Page 173 of 318)

ESI Group, based in Paris, Thursday announced the acquisition of Austin-based Amoeba Technologies.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Amoeba, a privately held company founded in 2007, makes Presto software which provides cooling simulation and design optimization for electronics such as computers, mobile devices, automotive electronics, medical electronics and data centers. Its customers include Apple, Amazon, Qualcomm, Google, MagicLeap and VSN Mobile.

As a result of the acquisition, Amoeba’s Founders Sanjay Mathur and Prabhu Sathyamurthy, experts in computational fluid dynamics, will join ESI Group, which has 1,000 employees in 40 countries.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Kenny Van Zant, photo by Susan Lahey

Kenny Van Zant, executive with Asana—a web and mobile software application that allows teams to work together without email—spoke Wednesday afternoon at Capital Factory on “Building a Culture of Accountability.”

Asana’s accountability system distributes tasks, measures results and provides clarity. Asana has yearly strategy and vision sessions and periodic committee meetings to make sure it’s producing the right results. The meetings are open to everyone.

Asana doesn’t actually aim for 100 percent success on key results. Seventy percent—a number stolen from Google management—is considered success. In fact, while the AOR system is Asana’s invention, they borrowed many other management approaches from employees who worked at places like Google and Facebook. What works stays; what doesn’t goes.

Missions and Values

Every company should have a mission explaining why the company exists, Van Zant said. But then it should have values like house rules. Some of Asana’s values include “Transparency by default” and “Wisdom over rules.” When the company hired a finance guy he wrote a long list of rules about the company’s finance policies. Van Zant asked him to rewrite it so it would be more fun to read and more in line with “Wisdom over rules.” The document came back considerably shorter, basically explaining how people get reimbursed and encouraging them to “Spend Asana’s money like it’s your own.”

Asana does not believe in micromanaging its employees, Van Zant said. A manager’s job is to ask questions like “How are we organized? How well do we function?” The team, he said, has areas of responsibility and it’s not his job to know all the things they’re doing and be in control but to help them manage their growth and careers and “unblock” them.

“I managed for 20 years before this model, and I found the most stressful thing for a manager is feeling like you had to have your arms wrapped around everything,” Van Zant said. “Their failure is my failure. Their pain is my own pain’s messed up for managers. That’s just not right.”

They practice peer to peer communication. If an employee has a question, needs help or has an issue with the way someone else is functioning, they don’t invoke the bell curve: I talk to my manager, my manager talks to your manager, your manager talks to you, with scheduled meetings and memos all along the way. That’s what Van Zant calls “Work about work” and it takes up a huge amount of time and energy. Instead, people talk to those who have the answer, or the issue, directly.

Their idea is to be “tightly aligned but loosely coupled,” Van Zant said. So everyone is working toward the same goals but doing so independently and only coming together at certain points.

Learning to Trust

The hardest part, he said, is trust. A company mantra is “Everyone has a genius.”

“The root word of genius is every person had a genius…and their skills were different from yours….,” Van Zant said. “My job is to get out of the way and let them offer it. It requires so much trust. You have this temptation where you want to be in their shorts, wondering what they’re doing at every moment of the day…. Ten years ago I would not have been able to do this.”

People are paid according to seniority, performance and other factors, Van Zant said.

“It’s the manager’s job to see people are compensated fairly,” Van Zant said. “The compensation strategy is part of the mentorship and career guidance…we don’t really connect performance with salary. That just breeds a bunch of bizarre neuroses.” If they see someone is over reaching on AORs, they’ll check in with that person as to whether they can hand off a responsibility or whether they need to hire more people. “You get an egolessness when this system is implemented,” he said. “You don’t see examples of people amassing control. It’s more like ‘Do you want this responsibility? I don’t want to step on your toes.’ It becomes very polite.”

Asana has launched a marketing campaign in Austin and is advertising with Silicon Hills News. This is a sponsored post.

Vested Finance, an Austin-based financial technology startup, announced it has closed on $5 million in seed financing led by Sandleigh Ventures.

The Austin-based company plans to use the money to expand its operations by hiring a development team to create and distribute its mobile app. It has offices in Austin, San Francisco and Washington, D.C.

Lorne Abony founded the company earlier this year to target the problem of student debt. The app seeks to allow students to pay for their education without incurring debt by allowing people to invest in a student in exchange for a percentage of that person’s future earnings.

“At $1.3 trillion and growing, we have a student debt crisis with no solutions,” Vested CEO Abony said in a news release . “Vested will allow students to unlock and monetize their greatest asset, which is the present value of their future earning potential by providing them with a perfect market to sell this asset to those willing to provide immediate capital in exchange for a portion of the students future earnings for a finite period of time.”

The Vested app also provides access to a mentoring program.

Epicor Software Corp. announced Monday plans to spinoff of its retail solutions business into a separate privately-held company.

The Austin-based business software company refers to its spinoff company as “SpinCo” until the deal is done. Apax Partners, a private equity investment group, is providing the funding.

Noel Goggin, executive vice president and general manager, will continue to lead the new “SpinCo.” He will report to Joe Cowan, president and CEO of Epicor Software.

“The spinoff of our retail business will ultimately deliver increased value to the customers of both resulting companies,” Cowan said in a news release. “We believe this move will enable both businesses to become more focused, better positioned for growth and capitalize on the unique competitive opportunities faced by each.”

Epicor also announced plans for a debt offering of $2.1 billion. It plans to use the funds to refinance its outstanding $1.3 billion in debt and refinancing $400 million in notes and to fund a dividend distribution to shareholders.

Epicor expects to close the SpinCo deal and the debt offering in June.

V2COM, a Brazilian cleantech company, Monday announced the opening of its Austin office with plans to create 100 new jobs in the next three years.

The company provides hardware, software and other solutions to utility companies to manage their resources and reduce their environmental impact.

“Austin is a spectacular city that, after many visits, we grew very fond of,” Leonardo de Moura Rocha Lima, Chief Technology Officer of V2COM, said in a news release. “We found many advantages that made it a clear choice for us — it’s a highly ranked city in what is considered one of the best states for business, which includes a primary destination for foreign direct investment. Texas also has a very pro-business philosophy with low corporate tax rates and no personal state income tax. Austin is also strategically located, near very important domestic and international air transport hubs, and of course, the weather is great.”

V2Com is working with SkylesBayne to find 3,000 to 5,000 square feet of office space in North Austin near The Domain and J.J. Pickle Research Campus.

“We’re honored that V2COM chose Austin for its first location in the United States,” Charisse Bodisch, Senior Vice President of Economic Development, Austin Chamber of Commerce said in a news release. “Increasing the vitality of the CleanTech sector has long been a mission of Opportunity Austin and we welcome V2COM and their innovative technologies as the newest addition to this growing community.”

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank will serve as the keynote speaker at this year’s Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit.

WP Engine‘s CEO Heather Brunner will conduct an onstage interview with Plank, who is fashioning his footwear, apparel and equipment company into a technology company, according to this article. Under Armour bought Austin-based MapMyFitness in 2013 for $150 million.

Under Armour’s Connected Fitness platform is based in Austin which includes applications such as UA Record, MapMyFitness, Endomondo and MyFitnessPal.

The summit will take place on May 28th at Brazos Hall and is open to Austin Technology Council members. Norton Rose Fulbright is the main sponsor of the all-day event.

In addition to Plank, other speakers include Jeremiah Owyang with Crowd Companies, Adam Marcus of OpenView, Richard Wells of Insight Venture Partners, Jim Armstrong with March Capital Partners, Edward Liu of Morgan Stanley and Hugh Forrest of SXSW.

This year’s event also features a competition among four local startups in the Startup Showdown. Those startups include Loop and Tie, Experiment Engine, vThreat and one more to be announced.

The Austin Technology Council has more than 200 companies as members and represents more than 1,200 technology executives.

Bitfusion, an Austin-based startup, closed on $1.45 million in seed stage funding.

The company also announced it has been selected as a finalist in TechCrunch Disrupt’s 2015 Startup Battlefield.

Bitfusion, which participated in the Techstars Cloud program in San Antonio this year, has created specialized software that brings supercomputing performance to a variety of hardware devices to allow them to run any kind of application. It also has a partnership with Rackspace.

“Many enterprises miss the potential in their infrastructure: There’s always a high level of underused capacity, and our solution is designed specifically to identify existing hardware capabilities, implement optimized software packages for active applications, and achieve greatly enhanced performance,” Subbu Rama, CEO of Bitfusion, said in a statement. “Expensive horizontal scaling doesn’t have to be the default choice. By accelerating the existing hardware and significantly boosting software performance, businesses can fundamentally revise their essential operating practices, cut costs and pursue new market opportunities.”

Bitfusion received its funding from the Data Collective VC, Resonant VC and the Geekdom Fund.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Bob Metcalfe, Professor of Innovation at UT, takes a selfie with Michael Dell, founder of Dell at the Longhorn Startup Demo Day.

Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, interviewed Dell during an hour-long chat attended by a standing room only crowd of about 1,000 people at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium Thursday night.

The event kicked off the Longhorn Startup Lab’s Demo Day, in which 13 student run startups pitched their companies. But first, Dell shared some of his wisdom gleaned from running the company that bears his name for the past 31 years.

Dell is legendary on the UT campus as the 19-year-old freshman that launched his PC startup from his dorm room and grew it into a $50 billion business with more than 100,000 employees and operations in 180 countries. Dell has 18,000 employees in Central Texas.

Bob Metcalfe, UT Professor of Innovation, inventor of Ethernet takes a selfie with Michael Dell. Photo published courtesy of Bob Metcalfe.

More than a year after taking his company private, Dell seems to be enjoying his role as the CEO of what he’s termed “the world’s largest startup.”

“When we went private, we talk a lot about, in the company, unleashing innovation, risk taking and investing in our business,” Dell said.

Dell has hundreds of businesses inside it original business of PC sales, Dell said.

“They are all, in some form or another, startups,” Dell said.

Dell is always starting new businesses, or investing in new business, he said.

“The idea here is that you want to embrace risk,” Dell said. “You want to embrace risk and not be afraid. Big companies, as they grow, they tend to not want to take on risk.”

Since going private, Dell has invested more in research and development, built out new products and services and added sales capacity. And since Dell is the majority shareholder the decision-making is a lot faster.

“The public markets didn’t necessarily have the long term focus that I had as the founder of the company,” Dell said. “Being private has given us the freedom and the flexibility to continue to evolve our business and to focus on longer term outcomes.”

And Dell’s businesses are growing. Dell’s PC business has grown its share in the market the last nine quarters in a row, Dell said. The server and software businesses grew double digits last year. Dell also has some “incredible businesses” in the cyber security and healthcare industries and it’s focused on growing its services business, he said.

Metcalfe quizzed Dell about Dell’s role with startups.

“Startups are important to us,” Dell said.

The company supports and invests in startups, Dell said. It has an Entrepreneur in Residence program. Dell Ventures has several hundred million dollars to invest in new businesses. Dell also has a Founders 50 Club to nurture startup companies. Dell runs the Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network, a global entrepreneur network focused on helping women business owners succeed. And Dell is the first Global Advocate for Entrepreneurship at the United Nations.

In addition to startups, Metcalfe and Dell discussed the Internet of Things, Internet standards, Cyber security, Cloud computing and even Ethernet, which Metcalfe co-founded.

Dell advised students interested in becoming entrepreneurs to try things, don’t worry about getting everything correct, and learn from the experience, Dell said.

Being in the U.S. gives entrepreneurs a competitive advantage, Dell said.

“As I travel around the world, we are really blessed to have a culture in this country that embraces risk and innovation and culturally allows people to try things, recognizing that they don’t all work but that’s a learning experience,” Dell said. “It’s how fast you learn that is the differentiator, as opposed to if you made every decision correctly.”