Category: Austin (Page 193 of 318)

Female Entrepreneurs Connect and Learn at Women@Austin

October 12, 2014 / / 3 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Bzd3VsvIIAAS9bx“Leave Your Superwomen Capes at the Door”

That’s Jan Ryan’s only rule for Women@Austin events at Capital Factory. The meetings provide a receptive environment for female entrepreneurs to connect and learn from each other while enjoying wine and hors d’oeuvres.

“Authenticity is what makes the magic for women,” Ryan said. “And being able to talk to each other with our guards down is when we learn.”

And since the group launched last February, Women@Austin has become extremely popular. The events have filled up within days of being announced and always have a waitlist.

For Austin Startup Week, the event filled up within five days with 140 women and a few men registered and a waitlist of 78 people, Ryan said.

The group also focuses on educating women-led startups about finding funding. Babson College recently released a study showing that women entrepreneurs have made considerable progress since 1999 in getting venture capital, but a wide gender gap still exists.

The study found “the amount of early-stage investment in companies with a woman on the executive team has tripled to 15 percent from 5 percent in the last 15 years.” Yet despite that progress, “85 percent of all venture capital-funded businesses have no women on the executive team.” And just 2.7 percent of venture capital funded companies had a woman CEO.

Bzdxmp9IUAAdUEjThe event also featured a special “Elevate” award given to Jimmy Treybig, founder of Tandem Computers and a venture capitalist in Austin since 1996. He’s been a big supporter of many female-founded companies in Austin and serves on many boards, Ryan said.

In a brief talk, Treybig advised entrepreneurs looking to raise money to study the VC firms and angels before approaching them. Entrepreneurs need to find out if the VC firm invest in their field, how much they invest, whether they invest in new entrepreneurs with little experience and whether they invest in Austin and does the VC have money, Treybig said.

Seventeen VCs turned down Treybig when he started Tandem.

Women entrepreneurs also need to research whether the VC firm has female partners, Treybig said.

“Or do they have a man that has worked with women all of their life, like me, and realize how special, how smart, how motivated and how much contribution women can make and that’s never a question,” Treybig said. “If there isn’t either a women or that type of man, then I wouldn’t spend time…or I would put it way down the list.”

“The main point is there are two types of VCs,” Treybig said. “One type is VCs that have run companies. Others are financial VCs. They might not have worked with a lot of women.”

For Naturally Curly, now known as TextureMedia, Treybig found Golden Seeds of New York to invest in the women-run company. Now Mike Maples Jr.’s VC Firm Floodgate Ventures, which invests in Austin startups, has a woman as a partner, Treybig said.

Lastly, women entrepreneurs must be able to show investors how they will get their money back and make a profit on the investment, Treybig said.

Ingrid Vanderveldt, former Entrepreneur in Residence at Dell, also spoke briefly about Belle Capital Austin, a venture fund she’s heading up locally that invests in women-run tech companies.

The event concluded with a 30-minute panel discussion on lessons learned from women run firms. The panelists included Jeanette Hill, founder of Spot on Sciences, founded in 2010, Crista Bailey, CEO of TextureMedia, founded in 1998, and Zeynep Young, founder of Double Line Partners, founded in 2009.

Ryan asked the panelists to talk about some of their failures and lessons learned from their ventures.

Hill advised new entrepreneurs to make sure that they have a good product and market fit. The product doesn’t sell itself, she said. It’s important to know how to market and sell it.

Bailey told new entrepreneurs to raise as much as money as they can to give their idea some gas.

Young advised new entrepreneurs not to give big titles to early employees. Reserve those titles for when the company grows and becomes successful so that those titles will be there to hire on the talent to grow the company, she said.

FBombs, The Startup Week Panel on Failure

October 10, 2014 / / 3 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Chris J. Snook, 9WSearch’s Susan Strausberg, Denver area Entrepreneur Gabriella Krista Morgan, co-founder of P2BInvestor and Denver Management Consultant Allen W. Duck, photo by Susan Lahey

Chris J. Snook, 9WSearch’s Susan Strausberg, Denver area Entrepreneur Gabriella Krista Morgan, co-founder of P2BInvestor and Denver Management Consultant Allen W. Duck, photo by Susan Lahey

In a panel dedicated to failure in starting up a business, the audience seemed to be most focused on one thing—the risks inherent in picking a co-founder.

Panelists shared stories about enormous, botched business deals thanks to people they trusted, horrible lawsuits, embezzlement, and then the more common scenarios of just having to work through a challenging decision with a co-founder…or greet an ex-co-founder amicably when you run into him or her.

Fort Collins, Colorado, entrepreneur, investor and speaker Chris J. Snook moderated the panel that included 9WSearch’s Susan Strausberg, Denver area management consultant Allen W. Duck and Denver entrepreneur Gabriella Krista Morgan, co-founder of P2BInvestor.

The Ugly Breakups

Snook told about a publishing company he started with a co-founder who, one night, sent Snook a drunken email, saying he wanted out of the business. When the co-founder had a change of heart, Snook welcomed him back. Several months later Snook was served with a lawsuit, filed by his co-founder, alleging numerous breaches and illegalities.

Snook felt suddenly under siege. “We had 42 authors,” he said, “I had no idea if any of them were in on it, no idea if he was setting up shop. He didn’t really ask for anything,” but Snook bought his way out of the suit with roughly a quarter of a million dollars. “I was blown away, and it was shocking and hurtful, and it happens.”

Others told of business deals that went awry. Duck told a story about buying a financial planning company and keeping the seller on for the last three years before retirement.

“Within six months it was pretty clear things weren’t going according to plan,” he said. He flew up to the company—which was in Connecticut—and the seller told him he wanted to leave. Next thing he knew, he learned that the seller had been embezzling from the company and had started another company where he was re-signing all his original clients. Ducks company won a judgment against the man but it took three years to bring to trial. The day of the trial, Duck was meeting with the lawyer who was looking over papers and suddenly went white. It turned out the seller had declared bankruptcy.

“For us, it was a pointed battle. We needed to win this,” Duck said. But the company almost went broke doing it. “The judiciary works very well,” he said. “But it works really slowly, and you can go out of money quickly in pursuit of vengeance. You have to be very astute.”

When she ran Edgar Online, Strausberg said, MarketWatch offered the buy the company. Everybody was in favor of the deal and Strausberg empowered her CFO and president to handle it. Meanwhile, as she had amicable phone chats over a bottle of wine with Larry Kramer, founder of MarketWatch, her underlings were unraveling the deal without her knowledge. It died over the terms of the president’s contract. That wasn’t a co-founder issue though. Strausberg’s co-founder has always been her husband, Marc Strausberg.

Even when there’s no malintent, co-founders sometimes have to part ways over differences in vision.

One advantage to having her father as her co-founder, Morgan said, creates a level of trust and also a bond that has to be preserved. So it causes them to work through issues more carefully than they might if they were less connected.

But if things do go wrong, Duck said, “You will never get chastised for holding the moral high ground.” Disparaging previous founders only reflects badly on you.

The Biggest Mistake

Unfortunately, the entrepreneurs said, you rarely see a mistake as it’s happening. It’s only in retrospect. Morgan wishes she had spent less time raising funding and more effort getting to revenue. Duck had taken a subsidiary of a Finnish company from near bankruptcy to such financial success that it was supporting the parent company, by changing the culture and marketing tactics to those that would appeal more to Americans. One day parent company executives called and told him they needed $1 million to pay down debt. Duck believed the returns would be better if they kept the money in the company. When he told them so, they hung up on him.

Several days later, he said, there were six Finns in his office. “Finns don’t leave Finland,” he joked. “Ever. No one wants to see them and they don’t leave.”

Duck was let go and eighteen months later, the company was closed.

“It had become so personal for me…” he said. “If I could take that decision back, if I had humbly sent them the million dollars, that company would still be in Colorado. That haunts me. It was nothing more than ego that precluded me from making the different choice. Thirty five people lost their jobs, and they didn’t need to.”

Ultimately though, he said “The biggest fuckup for any business is to procrastinate. Everybody has seen the S curve of a company’s life cycle. If you procrastinate you limit the creativity of the organization to a point where it stagnates, boils back to inactivity…making a bad decision and then having to change course is better than not making a decision.”

Austin Startup Week’s Werewolves Vs. Villagers

October 10, 2014 / / 1 Comment

Wolf Howling at MoonlightBY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Mercury Fund director Aziz Gilani says he uses it in board meetings because the premise isn’t who’s right, but who is most persuasive. Ali Syed of Justworks said it helps with pitch competitions. But mostly the 30 or so people who convened to play Werewolf at Techstars Wednesday night had no objective but to bullshit each other, catch each other in lies, and have fun.

Werewolf is the parlor game of choice in the tech world, and while games can last only about a half hour, players can go all night.

IMG_7243 2At the onset, each player gets a card and is either a werewolf, a villager, a seer, a priest…that’s the basic premise. There are variations. Werewolves kill. Villagers die and lynch suspected werewolves. Seers can identify werewolves, and priests can save people from death. The last two, considered “special characters” have some immunity because the villagers want to protect them. Anyone, including werewolves, can claim to be a special character. In fact, lying is encouraged.

Only the werewolves and the game director, in this case a commanding Brian Fryer of Evosure, knows who the werewolves are. At “night” everyone closes his eyes and makes noise—in this game a tribal drumming on the table—and Fryer cries “Werewolves wake up!” The werewolves, by mutual silent consent, pick a villager to “kill.” Fryer orders the werewolves back to sleep. “Seer wake up! Who do you want to see?” The seer silently accuses someone of being a werewolf and Fryer signals whether he is correct. “Priest wake up! Who do you want to priest?” The priest can choose to protect himself or another. When it’s time for the villagers to wake up, the newly dead villager must leave the game and the rest make accusations about who the werewolves are. If they spot them, the werewolf is killed, unless he can convince the villagers that he is not, in fact, a werewolf. Villagers are often wrongly accused.

IMG_7197 2In the first round, three Techstars villagers died and Gilani was accused of being the werewolf and given a chance to speak in his defense. Considering Mercury Fund paid for the game, one would have thought that would have counted, but no.

“I say it’s Andy (Aguiluz, expansion management consultant for Techstars.) Three Techstars people have died and nobody’s more anti-Techstars than she is!” he argued.
Aguiluz was, in fact, one of the most proactive werewolves. But the vote was taken and Gilani was killed.

IMG_7192 2“Okay, if you want to kill Van Helsing, go ahead,” he said, leaving the table.
Later, Jason Seats was accused of being the werewolf. “I am priest,” Seats pronounced with conviction. “And I am very good at this game. I am impenetrable at night.”

Yet the villagers voted to kill him.

“Wow,” someone said. “Not so impenetrable.”

IMG_7230 2Other arguments included “I can’t grow enough facial hair to be a werewolf.”
The game broke into screaming accusations and counter accusations at times and occasional statements of “These villagers are stupid.”

The first time he played, Nick Spiller of the UT Freshman Founders Program said, he was the seer. Seers are a special target for werewolves because they can identify them. Spiller announced his seer status in the first round and was too humiliated to come back and play for awhile. It was a rookie move.

“It was a kneejerk reaction,” he said in his defense. “I was in possession of this information and I shared it. But in this game, you have to prove yourself.”

ParLevel Systems Receives $2 Million in Funding

October 9, 2014 / / 7 Comments

images-1ParLevel Systems, based at Geekdom in San Antonio, has raised a little more than $2 million of $2.5 million in funding it’s seeking, according to filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company, which was founded in 2012 by Walter Teele and Luis Pablo-Gonzalez, seeks to make vending machines smarter by hooking them up to the Internet and monitoring them remotely. Nine investors have participated in its funding so far. The company is still seeking an additional $416,319.

ParLevel is dealing in a marketplace known as the Internet of Things, which envisions a future in which all kinds of everyday objects from refrigerators to cars are hooked up to the Internet and interact with other devices.

ParLevel was one of 12 startups that participated in the TechStar Cloud accelerator program in 2013. The company received $18,000 in seed funding and an optional $100,000 in a debt note. It also received $25,000 as one of the first recipients of the Geekdom Fund.

The following video was produced by Key Ideas for Geekdom and its “Geek of the Week” series on Geekdom members.

Meet the Geek – Parlevel from Key Ideas on Vimeo.

Full disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

The City of Austin and ATC Form a New Partnership

October 9, 2014 / / 1 Comment

imgres-7There’s a new tech partnership in town.

It’s the Austin Technology Partnership, an alliance between the City of Austin and the Austin Technology Council.

The new partnership seeks to study and strengthen the city’s technology industry with a major focus on the emerging life sciences industry.

The partnership has an annual budget of $775,000 with the city contributing $294,500 and the rest of the money coming from the private sector. It will also create 3.5 full time positions, said Grover Bynum with ATC, which currently has four full time employees and a staff of interns from the digital MBA program at St. Edwards University and the University of Texas at Austin. The new jobs will support data collection on tech talent, available capital for investments in the tech industry, the number of companies and jobs in the life sciences industry and ways to further develop the market, he said.

Austin’s tech industry has an annual regional economic impact of $21.5 billion and supports 26 percent of the area’s jobs.

“Austin’s at a tipping point,” Austin City Council Member and ATP sponsor Mike Martinez said in a news release. “It’s time to leverage today’s strengths to ensure that the next generation of Austinites have the same, or greater, opportunities as many of us do today. The Austin Technology Partnership will lay the groundwork for training local talent for stable, high-paying jobs while supporting the City’s efforts to implement effective economic policies, streamline public investment, and save tax payer dollars.”

The Austin Technology Partnership will connect tech job creators to educators and workers, increase access to later stage capital, support the life sciences industry, and research ways to support market growth.

“Industry and City leaders spent the better part of two years developing a strategic set of shared priorities,” ATC President and CEO Julie Huls said in a statement.

“Austin is the only tech market in the U.S. to galvanize industry support to partner with a municipality to grow a stronger regional economy. We’re certain this new path will lead us to more efficient and more effective investment of regional resources to support our innovation-based economy. This partnership will allow ATC to serve our members and our market at a level unparalleled in the U.S.”

The Austin Technology Council represents more than 1,200 technology executives and 250 companies.

20X2 During Austin Startup Week: What Were They Thinking?

October 9, 2014 / / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

20X2 - "What were you thinking?" event at Austin Startup Week, Photo by Susan Lahey

20X2 – “What were you thinking?” event at Austin Startup Week, Photo by Susan Lahey

There were artists and musicians, comedians and luminaries of the Austin tech scene including Bob Metcalfe—representing gravitas in his suit and tie—Hugh Forrest, Bijoy Goswami, and entrepreneurs Eric Bandholz and Josh Kerr as well as Valerie Cason, ATC’s director of sales and marketing.

They were charged with getting up in front of a crowd in the dark bar to answer the question: “What Were You Thinking?”

But instead of 20 origin stories, as might have been expected, they told stories about wandering into a gay biker bar, stories about comedian Katie Pengra biting her grandmother’s fake breast, comedian Ralph Hardesty’s take on gay life in Alabama and a showering rain of f-bombs.

20X2 is an event launched at SXSW in 2001 that brings together people of all creative stripes and asks them one question. In this case: “What were you thinking?”

Participants have two minutes to answer the question. Founded by Kevin Newsum with Jeff Rider and Mark Couvillian, it landed at Elysium bar for Austin Startup Week.

Steve Basile, publican of B.D. Rileys, told the story of working for Tivoli as a “tech guy,” then quitting when IBM bought it, joining a startup that had five business plans in a year, then leaving it all to return to New York when his father got sick. A friend who had started an Irish pub asked him to help with marketing and paid him in Guinness.

“I’m thinking that if you move in the direction of something you truly love, you don’t have to think about anything else.”

Goswami gave a litany of what a lot of other great thinkers were thinking, from Galileo to Jobs, including the conversation in which Steve Wozniak warned that Apple Records was the name of the Beatles’ label and Jobs retorted that it didn’t matter because “We’ll never be in music.”

Valerie Cason, ATC’s director of sales and marketing, photo by Susan Lahey

Valerie Cason, ATC’s director of sales and marketing, photo by Susan Lahey

Cason told the story of her startup ZeneScene, being invited to join the SXSW Startup Bus and falling in love with the Austin tech scene, and staying in love with the Austin tech scene through the demise of her company.

Writer Erin Passons shared what many people are thinking—Mopac or I-35? Though, she said, “Mopac is a hinderance,” she said, “On Mopac, if you’re in a fender bender, you don’t have to worry about getting murdered” because the other car will likely be driven by a soccer mom or Matthew McConaughey. Whereas I-35 is “a cesspool of disaster and disgustingness.” It’s pavements are made up of missing person’s bones, heroine needles, and the skeleton of the Lindbergh baby.

Josh Kerr at 20X2, photo by Andy Aguiluz

Josh Kerr at 20X2, photo by Andy Aguiluz

Kerr, Written founder, was thinking that if he launched his company, Zosh, at DEMO and beat the crap out of a fax machine on stage to demonstrate that the app replaced the fax machine, he would make the crowd go wild and win the biggest prize. He was not doing the math that would have prepared him for the fact that the youth baseball bat he bought lacked the mass to smash a fax machine. He expected pieces to go flying. The bat bounced off the machine. So he picked up the fax machine and smashed it on the ground. Parts went flying, the crowd went wild, and he won the biggest prize.

Bandholz, founder of Beardbrand, said he was thinking about the money “which makes you do wicked, evil things, awful things, you can buy anything you want and save more money than most people make in a year.” The bearded entrepreneur explained how he’d bent his whole life to the founding of the company, showing a picture of himself, clean-shaving, vaguely resembling Opie Taylor, and saying “When I worked for a bank, I looked like this.”

Singer, songwriter Mike Wiebe got the whole crowd singing choruses of: “What was I thinking? Must have been stoned. Rushing into shit like this is was why I’m going die alone….”

Hugh Forrest, was not thinking in January 2000, when a stranger sent him an email proposing an SXSW event in which 20 people would speak for two minutes, that this would become a huge event. He was not thinking it would travel to Chicago and London and hundreds of tech celebrities would get involved and it would cover questions ranging from “Where am I?” to “What’s the big idea?” But since that has happened for 20X2, he said, he’s thinking that “The community has the best ideas for cool SXSW content and maybe this is one more opportunity to demonstrate the power of the community.”

Bob Metcalfe was thinking, after a gin and tonic, while he watched f-bombs falling and body parts and various sexual references punctuating most presentations: “The next two minutes are dedicated to the idea that you f’ing care what I was thinking.”

He reviewed the landmarks that happened the year he invented the Ethernet—the opening of the World Trade Center, Nixon’s confession to covering up Watergate, the invention of gene splicing and the Bic lighter and cell phones. “Today,” he said, with wifi “There are a billion new ports of Ethernet and I get less than a dollar for each one….

Then he told the story of the club to which he is a member, the club of people who invented things that plug into computers, like the USB, HDMI and so on. This club meets regularly but then the inventor of the USB died. The other club members served as pallbearers and lowered the coffin into the grave.

“Then,” Metcalfe said, “we lifted it up again, turned it 180 degrees….”

Winners of the SXSW Eco Startup Showcase Announced

October 8, 2014 / / 2 Comments

-Awards-Teaser-300x169_0SXSW Eco announced five winners of its third Startup Showcase during a ceremony at the Austin Convention Center Tuesday night.

Open Water Foundation of Fort Collins, CO., won for Social Impact for a non-profit and Drinkwell of Boston won for Social Impact for profit.

PAX Pure of San Rafeal, Calif. and Picasolar of Fayetteville, AR, tied for the win in the Greentech category.

Lagoon of Cincinnati, OH., won in the Cleanweb category.

SXSW Eco’s 2014 Startup Central programming was produced in conjunction with Austin Energy and the Austin Technology Incubator, part of the IC2 Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Startup Showcase featured 32 companies. Each one gave a four minute pitch, followed by four minutes of questions and answers with a panel of judges. The judges included representatives from Target, Shell Technology Ventures, the Whole Planet Foundation, New Enterprise Associates and Sprint.

Silicon Hills News’ Latest Magazine on Tech Startups Taking Off

October 7, 2014 / / 2 Comments

Farewell Atlantis
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Rockets launching are a symbol of Texas’ rich history in the space industry.

Although innovation has become a buzzword in many circles it still rings true in Texas and the neighboring states of Louisiana and Mississippi, which all have NASA facilities.

Space exploration is at that heart of innovation.

First, the nation raced to put astronauts on the Moon. Mission accomplished. Next, NASA built Skylab and then took 10 years and 30 missions to complete the International Space Station. In September, NASA announced a $6.2 billion contact with private companies SpaceX, a startup, and Boeing to shuttle astronauts to the ISS.

And now NASA has sets its sights on taking humans to Mars.

Talk about big ideas. Texas has ideas as big as the state. And that’s evident when you look at the tech startups coming out of Central Texas. They aim to tackle big problems and deliver clever solutions.

The ecosystem of investors, law firms, accountants, public relations firms, accelerators and incubators, banks, universities, government departments, chambers and support agencies all help to make this a strong region for technology and innovation. But it’s the people who make things happen. And in this issue, you’ll meet one of them, Jacqueline Hughes, creator of the Austin Startup Week. And we’ll introduce you to even more people who make up the great tech scene in our next issue.

For now, enjoy these stories of entrepreneurs creating something from nothing and pushing the envelope of innovation.

Without a doubt, the tech industry is white-hot and taking off in Austin and San Antonio. The sky is the limit.

At SXSW Eco: Creating Jet Biofuel from Saltwater Tolerant Plants

October 7, 2014 / / 2 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News

imgres-4Saltwater makes up 97 percent of the world’s water and 20 percent of earth’s land mass is arid or desert regions.

Combine the two and create a new kind of biofuel that will be sustainable and cut carbon emissions, said Alejandro Rios Galvan, director the Sustainable Bioenergy Research Consortium at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi.

The institute is focusing on cultivating halophytes, desert plants that can be irrigated with seawater and used as biofuel feedstock to create jet fuel.

In particular, it’s growing Salicornia, a green succulent that produces seeds containing 30 percent oil, which can be refined and used as an alternative to jet fuel, Galvan said.

“We’re going to produce biomass for alternative energy in a sustainable way,” Galvan said. “We’re not feeding into the food versus fuel debate.”

IMG_4028Galvan spoke with Julie Felgar, Boeing Commercial Airlines’ managing director of environment strategy, in an afternoon keynote address at South by Southwest Eco, which kicked off Monday at the Austin Convention Center. SXSW Eco is produced in conjunction with Austin Energy and the Austin Technology Incubator. It runs through Wednesday.

Felgar and Rios discussed the development of sustainable jet fuel and the effort to reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent in coming decades.

“Aviation is expanding around the globe,” Felgar said.

In 1993, 73 percent of all air traffic came from North America and Europe. That has fallen to 50 percent in 2013. And that’s because Asia is booming.

Airlines will need nearly 36,000 new airplanes valued at $5.2 trillion in the coming decades, Felgar said.

Today, about 19,000 airplanes fly globally, but that fleet will almost double within 20 years, Felgar said.

“It comes with some potentially troubling environmental impact if we don’t act now,” she said.

Salicornia, photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

Salicornia, photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

The airline industry contributes 2 percent globally to the world’s carbon emissions, Felgar said. That will grow to 3 percent by 2030, she said. It will not grow more because Boeing and other aircraft makers are creating lighter and more efficient airplanes and they are increasingly focusing on using biofuels to power their aircraft, Felgar said.

By 2020, the aviation industry wants to be carbon neutral and by 2050, it seeks to reduce emissions by 50 percent, Felgar said.

Boeing wants to expand biofuel supply to 1 percent of jet fuel demand by 2015, Felgar said.

“The problem is supply,” she said. “The refining capacity is very small right now.”

And it’s expensive. It used to cost $30 a gallon for jet biofuel and that’s dropped substantially, but it’s still expensive, she said.

Today, many feedstocks will provide biofuel including oils and biomass, plant sugars and other sources like algae and municipal solid waste.

The move to jet biofuel has to be a global movement, Felgar said.

“We can’t just do this in the U.S.,” she said.

That’s where the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in the United Arab Emirates comes in. It’s launching a pilot project to cultivate and produce biofuel from Salicornia, Galvan said. And if that test is successful, it will look at commercialization.

Austin Startup Week Kicks Off

October 6, 2014 / / 1 Comment

imgres-3It’s that time of year again to celebrate Austin innovation, entrepreneurs and tech companies.

Austin Startup Week, which began three years ago – the same week as Silicon Hills News, is bigger and better than ever before. And this week features lots of fun and free events. If you haven’t registered already, sign up now so you don’t miss out.

Today’s highlights include Vintage Startup T-shirts – which has already got the Twittersphere buzzing with t-shirts from Ben Dyer, sporting a Peachtree Software Tee, Bob Metcalfe in a classic 3Com Tee and Joshua Baer in Dash and Other Inbox T-shirts. And Fred Schmidt with his Origin Systems T-shirt from 1981. The company, founded by Richard Garriott that started Austin’s gaming industry.

The big events for today include:

SXSW Eco Demos in Brushy Park, across for the Austin Convention Center, which is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. SXSW Eco, a conference focused on green tech and more, also kicks off today at the convention center.

Looking for a job? Look no further than the Built In Austin Startup Career Fair from 3 p.m. until 6 p.m. at The Mohawk, 912 Red River.

And don’t forget the opening party: the ATC Battle of the Tech Bands which runs from 6 p.m. until 10 p.m. at The Mohawk. Read more about the event in Susan Lahey’s story.

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