Category: Austin (Page 208 of 318)

Mahana Helps Restaurants Roll Out the Red Carpet

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagonas, co-founders of Mahana

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagdonas, co-founders of Mahana

At a restaurant like Swift’s Attic, when someone is an especially good customer—perhaps because they come in a lot, host big parties or drink expensive Bourbon– you don’t reward them with a punch card good for a free muffin. You might send out a complimentary appetizer, said co-owner CK Chin, and you want to make sure it doesn’t show up on the bill. You might slash their wait time. You might give them the table they prefer. But with 60 percent turnover in the restaurant industry, there’s a good chance that if the owner’s not around, the hostess won’t have a clue whether the guy who walked in is a big spending regular or transient who eats nothing but salad and bread sticks. That’s part of the idea behind Mahana.

If a restaurant uses Mahana, and its customers download the app, the restaurant picks up a beacon that signals the customer is near and has a chance to invite him in for a special pairing of his favorite food and drink. If the customer walks in, Mahana lets the host know and gives information the restaurant has gleaned about the customer, meaning the host can welcome the diner by name, offer a favorite table or suggest a special based on previous purchases. Mahana also clues the customer about wait times for a table before the customer ever walks in. Mahana members can share what items they liked on the menu and especially loyal customers can expect perks, like a bump up the waiting list or an appetizer on the house.

In Praise of Market Validation

Mahana Co-founder Richard Bagdonas previously founded SpeedMenu, an ordering and payment app for the restaurant industry…and it taught him something.

SpeedMenu and other companies, he said, “saw a problem they were experiencing and went to solve it,” Bagdonas said. “But they didn’t ask restaurants whether their problem was shared by the restaurant. They thought ‘I’m having this issue, other people must be having this issue, if I solve it, people are going to love it.’

With the founding of Mahana with serial entrepreneur Bryan Menell, Bagdonas began with market validation, asking restaurants about their pain points.

“Not once did they say paying by credit cards was a problem,” he said. “They don’t need you to order a beer or food on your phone, they have someone there to take your order. Just because that person might be busy doesn’t mean they want to replace that person with something else…. Their biggest problem is there’s a chair over there and nobody is sitting in it and nobody is buying food. If they don’t sell the food, it has to get thrown out. They have the food. They have the staff and they have the chair that’s worth maybe $40,000 a year.”

Restaurants needed butts in seats. They needed people coming in, and people coming back, because the cost of acquiring a new customer is just as daunting for restaurants as for other businesses. They needed to be able to identify their best customers and to communicate with them in a way that doesn’t burn them out.

Stuart Thomajan, co-founder of Swift’s Attic and a partner in other popular restaurants such as Uchi and Delish, said that Mahana helps restaurants give valued customers that red carpet treatment, even if it’s the hostesses first day.

“People will go through histrionics to show the hostess they’ve been there before. They’ll say ‘Is Stuart here?’ or ‘Do you have that table in the corner?’” Thomajan said. “They’re trying to let the hostess know ‘Hey, I’ve been here before….’ When you’re serving 2,000 people a week you don’t always have the opportunity to know everybody. We want complete consistency in service. We want to make them feel special. I hoped somebody would develop this tool. Manaha gives us the opportunity to show customers the respect they deserve.”

As a former bartender, Chin said, he cultivated the ability to remember customers’ drinks. He uses that same skill to identify restaurant customers and reward them. Mahana adds “a superhero level of memory to my management.” Nor do customers seem to feel it’s “creepy” that the restaurant is keeping tabs on them. If the restaurant was doing it without getting their opt in. he said, it might be different. But customers treat this as a rewards program.

One of Mahana’s more valuable features, Thomajan said, is that it lets him send emails selectively to customers who would be interested in special events or new menu items at the restaurant without barraging customers with mail constantly. He doesn’t want to send customers emails about specials they wouldn’t be interested in–like sending an email about a steak dinner to a vegetarian or news of a Bourbon special to an alcoholic. “The next time they get an email from Swift’s Attic they won’t open it,” he said. Being able to build relationships with customers, he said “is huge to me.”

Thomajan though is less excited about the feature that lets customers know how long the wait is before they even come to the restaurant. At Swift’s Attic, it can be two hours.

“I’m not loving the idea that a two hour wait will be published to the world,” Thomajan said.

From Southern California to Austin

Before starting Mahana, Bagdonas and Menell founded Subtle Data, a platform for point of sale API developers. But as Subtle Data, they said, they’re “plumbers” setting up the infrastructure. They liked the idea of creating something customer-facing. As business partners, they complement each other. Bagdonas, Menell said, “won’t let me code” because Menell’s IT skills are more dated. But as Bagdonas talked, Menell pulled some documents off a fax machine, pushed them in front of Bagdonas and Bagdonas signed them without dropping a word or skipping a beat. He trusts Menell to be the business guy and “create a structure for the technology” so Bagdonas can keep his focus on software.

“I call him my work wife,” Menell joked.

Both came from Southern California. But they didn’t meet until they got to Austin. Menell was a senior tech consultant for Andersen Consulting working with clients like Apple and with Anderson Windows. After two years, he started his own consulting company Exact Consulting Systems Inc., (Exact stood for Ex-Anderson Consulting). It was the mid-1990s. Computers were still new and companies were beginning to adopt customer relationship management systems. Exact began to implement CRM systems for some of the largest call centers in the world, such as Gateway 2000. The company grew fast to $22 million in revenues. And then he sold it, in 1996 to BSG in Austin and that’s what brought him to town.

Bagdonas grew up in Southern California and had been writing software since he was a kid. In high school, his teacher offered to teach a semester of Pascal. The students loved it so much, they wound up studying it for four years and writing programs that, Bagdonas has no doubt the teacher was selling to industry. At the age of 14, Bagdonas and some friends got interested in voice recognition. They worked tirelessly on creating a voice recognition program but eventually the project failed. For one thing, they had no money. For another, the technology just wasn’t there. Later he realized voice recognition is still one of the hardest things for a computer. Too many words sound the same, even when spoken in a neutral accent. Add a regional accent and the opportunity for mistakes grows exponentially.

But Bagdonas had caught the entrepreneurial “bug.”

“I realized, oh my God, you don’t have to aspire to go work at IBM. You can aspire to be IBM. That’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I’m very much the scientist but through business I get the opportunity to be creative.”

At 16, he launched a mobile mechanic business, going to people’s cars and fixing them wherever they had broken down. He wore fake glasses in an effort to look older. The business lasted five years and he employed three mechanics. His next venture was to learn to be a commercial pilot. His father, who died when he was 12, had been a pilot and Bagdonas was working his way through his licenses when he got in a horrible motorcycle accident. He needed 11 grafts, some with artificial skin. The damage was such that he was unable to pass the FAA’s health screen for pilots.

He became assistant vice president and director of emerging technologies for Prosoft, a company that trained aerospace engineers to program. While there, he authored four books on data communications, telecommunications, the convergence of voice, video and data and data for sales people. Prosoft moved Bagdonas to Austin. Around 2000, Menell incubated one of Bagdonas’ companies and Bagdonas built some support software for one of Menell’s customers. Menell was an advisor with SpeedMenu and later left the Dachis Group to be CEO of Subtle Data.

Right now, they said, Mahana is going to work to “crush” the Austin market, though there are restaurants in Washington D.C. and New York waiting to get on the list. Thomajan said the founders are very responsive to every suggestion he makes as a customer. He and Chin will also be including Mahana in their new restaurant, Wu Chow.

Now, Mahana’s wrapping up its seed round of financing and getting ready to expand. SXSW, they said, “was very good to us.” The company won, among other things, the Silicon Hills News/Austin Technology Incubator and Central Texas Angel Network pitch competition, which entitles them to a series of stories about their entrepreneurial journey. So, SHN will be revisiting Mahana as they work on financing and expand their services.

Boxer Aims to Simplify Email Management

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By JAIME NETZER
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Boxer’s motto is, “Email isn’t broken, it’s just unfair.”

It’s about an overload problem, says Boxer CEO and co-founder, Andrew Eye. “People are all frustrated by overload, and they tend to pick a scapegoat,” he says. “Email is a convenient scapegoat, people say it’s old, it’s broken, it needs to be replaced.” But, he says, it’s not actually broken. By and large, the emails that we get are those we want—or wanted at some point—to receive. Spam isn’t nearly the problem today that it was years ago. (“Google helped us solve that problem,” Eye adds.) But mobile email still comes in one continuous, linear stream. And that, Boxer says, is unfair.

The answer is a kind of email triage: With Boxer, a mobile email management app, users can utilize gestures to swipe their inbox clean. “The thing people want to do the most with email is delete it. It’s important to people to be able to as quickly as they can make a decision, take an action. In a lot of cases that decision is just, ‘is this important to me or not?’”

With Boxer, users can delete email, but they can also acknowledge receipt of email. As its website says: “That’s right, we added a Like button to email.”

Boxer, founded in 2012, previously known as TaskBox, has created an email application that lets people manage their email accounts. Its application supports Exchange, Google’s Gmail and Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, Apple’s iCloud, AOL mail and Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail. Its app is available for free download through Apple’s iTunes app store.

The company, based in Austin, raised $3 million in venture funding last year. Boxer also acquired Enhanced Email to boost its Android development in February of this year and it now has 15 full time employees, according to TechCrunch.

Randolph Bias, professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on tech usability, agrees that mobile email is the challenge to meet at this point in time: “Mobile email management is difficult for the same reason that so many tasks are hard to translate to the small device—we users have experience with the functionality on our laptops or tablets, and thus “mental models” of how the process should work and expectations about what functions will be provided, and it is hard to squeeze all that onto the small screen,” Bias explains. “Or, more to the point, [it’s] hard to decide which functionality to keep up close to the surface and which to bury, several keystrokes or gestures away.”

For his part, Bias was mostly impressed with Boxer’s functionality, but would offer up one change, to the Like function. “They should’ve used some other term, like “received,” that better expresses the user’s intent,” Bias says. “Plus, if I get an email that says “Aunt Edna died,” I don’t want to “like” it.”

But other customers have been thrilled with Boxer, which also offers integrated to dos and combined inboxes. “Boxer makes dealing with mobile email fast and easy, and it has completely replaced the default mail app on my iPhone,” says Michael Trafton, a Boxer user and Austin-based start-up entrepreneur. “I love being able to delete or archive my emails with a simple swipe of my finger.”

“Like most business owners, I’m drowning in email—I receive hundreds of messages a day,” Trafton adds. “Boxer makes it easy for me keep on top of my email. I can process my inbox with one hand—a simple swipe will delete or archive a message, or I can dash off a quick reply using message templates—no typing necessary. If an email needs further action, I add it to my ToDo list and it’s waiting for me when I get back to the office.”

That kind of control is exactly what Eye has in mind. “The mobile inbox is such a huge opportunity to make people’s lives better, to make them feel more in control, to make them feel like they’re accountable, like they responsive,” Eye says. “The inbox has never been associated with these types of words, but it’s really this wonderful source, if I want to know all the things I’m supposed to be looking at and thinking about.”

Wonderful, that is, as long as you have an app to help with you the decoding. To learn more about Boxer, visit www.getboxer.com.

ihiji’s Invision Cuts Down on IT House Calls

April 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Stuart Rench, founder of ihiji, photo by Leslie Anne Jones

Stuart, founder of ihiji

Remote diagnostic tools have been available to big companies with complex computer networks for many years, but the options for your average residential IT support provider were limited. It’s a waste of time and expense for the IT guy when he has to go to a house just to reboot the printer. Stuart Rench knows this from experience, and his ihiji invision – a little black box that plugs into a wall socket and lets specialists monitor what’s going on with the network remotely – is now saving many IT guys many trips.

Rench started his first company in Florida in 2005. There, he installed home automation systems for high net worth individuals – homes with $500,000 in-home theater systems and dimmable lighting controllable by touchscreen interface. On occasion, a client would come in on his private jet late on a Friday night after months away, something wouldn’t be working and Rench or one of his partners would have to go figure it out.

For several years, they tinkered with a prototype that could monitor networks remotely and eliminate needless in-person visits. In March 2010, Rench and his team packed up their computers and servers and relocated to Austin to work on ihiji full-time, but it took awhile for business to pick up.

“We were ahead of what the market needed,” Rench said. In the four years since moving to Austin, the team grew to eight members, but shrank down again for a period during slow sales. Today, it’s back up to nine full-time members, including three sales people. In those four years, the Internet of Things grew, home networks became more complex, and so too did the need for monitoring and support. “Now we’re the go-to company.”

The ihiji invision – which allows IT service providers to remotely see all the devices on a network and diagnose and maintain those connected devices – is now in 46 states and 25 countries and sales are strong. Some of ihiji’s clients are big national brands, but many are small businesses, one- or two-man shops for whom the ihiji invision helps conserve time and resources. Rench says their customers come from both ends of the geographic spectrum: He has a lot of clients who are city dwellers and remote monitoring saves them from having to waste time in traffic to visit clients in person; and he also has rural customers who need to cover a lot of ground – one client in Montana services homes within a 500-mile radius. Another customer based in New Zealand works exclusively on IT systems for mega yachts, ihiji’s service and monitoring solution is especially useful to him since his clients’ boats go all over the world. Earlier on, ihiji’s customers were mainly IT providers servicing residences, but Rench says now they have more clients who service commercial networks too.

Ihiji’s team works out of an office at Austin Technology Incubator, where they’ve been since arriving in Texas. Today, Rench says their focus is on making sure their upcoming products are ones people really want, not just what they think they might want, and to that end they’re paying close attention to feedback. So far Rench says, “We haven’t built anything where weren’t pushed in that direction.” Now the company is looking to grow its product line and expand the platform’s capabilities.

It used to be that IT service and system integration were seen as two separate jobs. Drawing on his industry experience, Rench equates them to a ven diagram with an ever-increasing area of shared space. “If I project forward, there will be very little difference between the two,” he says.

The home automation industry is in a growth phase, and the pace is expected to pick up with the proliferation of devices like Nest, the Wi-Fi-enabled smart thermostat, whose parent company Google bought in January for $3.2 billion.

“Only three percent of American homes currently have home automation systems, but we are only starting to approach the point at which such systems can really save people money and make their lives easier,” said Howdy Pierce, co-founder of engineering consultancy Cardinal Peak. “In the next five years we expect penetration of the Internet of Things to grow exponentially.”

With more devices on their networks, homeowners will likely need more help maintaining it all, and in turn the IT industry’s need for remote monitoring systems will grow, which will be good for ihiji. Things are already looking up, Rench says, “We’re on track to double revenues over the next year.”

Coworking Options for Yogis, Dog-Lovers and Everybody Else

April 3, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photo licensed from iStock

Picking a co-working space is like a cross between choosing a place to work and finding your favorite hangout. What’s important to you? Ergonomic chairs? Community? The vibe? The snacks? Or, as one Yelper explained, the fact that they “play the same tunes I have on my iPod?”
And considering that the people around you might become your friends, clients, business partners and tribe what do you want them to be like? Older professionals? Hackers? Hipsters? Artists? Do you want to bring your dog? Do you want to share a coffee machine with investors? Do you want a yoga class in the same space?
Austin has a great array of coworking places that offer all of the above and more. We’ve compiled a directory of some of the area’s hottest co-working spaces for you to find your spot.

Capital Factory

In many ways, Capital Factory is the hub of all things startup. On the 16th floor of the Omni building, this is where you can rub elbows with many of the area’s most promising new companies, and the investors and successful entrepreneurs who mentor them. You get access to giant pillows and snacks like candy, chips, fruit, and the occasional pizza. Co-workers don’t get all the designer ergonomic office systems. They share long tables in a common room. But they are at hand for many cool events and meetups that happen in Capital Factory space.
Membership Fee: $150 for 15 hours a month; $350 for unlimited access
Address: 701 Brazos St., 16th Floor, Austin
Website: capitalfactory.com/work/coworking

Conjunctured

Conjunctured is a funky work space in an old house on the East Side. Started by a couple of geeks, Conjectured prides itself on the community its co-workers have created. Members not only work at the space during the day but also have happy hours, volleyball games, board games at one another’s homes and go tubing and group skydiving. Conjunctured plays music from its members’ iPods but also has a quiet room for people who need minimal distractions. And it’s dog friendly—if you call first.
Membership fee: $25 to $275 a month
Address: 1309 E. Seventh St., Austin
Website: conjunctured.com

Center61

Center61 in East Austin, is where you might want to be if the focus of your work is social good. Like, if what gets you up in morning is the environment or global justice or racial harmony and you’re looking for likeminded people to collaborate with, this would be the place to work.
Modern, airy and quiet, Center 61 is scientists, artists, business owners, technologists and more.
Membership fee: $10 to $200 a month
Address: 2921 E. 17th St. #4, Austin
Website: center61.com

GoLab Austin

In an old building on groovy East Sixth, the GoLab is a combination art gallery and coworking space. Founder Steve Golab offers lunch and learns and encourages the software and social platform developers to birth new ideas through collaboration and community.
Membership fee: $250 to $350 a month
Address: 621 E. Sixth St., Austin
Website: golabaustin.com

Link Coworking

Link Coworking is one of the best known and longest-lasting co-working spots in Austin. With a funky, modern space with ergonomic Turnstone furniture, Link has private, dedicated spaces as well as open working spaces. If offers a place for experts to come and give free consulting to members and the community and it holds and myriad events for networking and for fun.
Membership fee: $200 to $500 a month
Address: 2700 W. Anderson Lane, #205, Austin
Website: linkcoworking.com

Opportunity Space

Started by startup veteran Erica Douglass, Opportunity Space is specially designed for startups, rather than freelancers or solopreneurs. Operating out of a charming old house on Caesar Chavez, on the East Side Opportunity Space offers each startup a dedicated desk and, if they want, a dedicated room. And it has one thing few co-working spaces offer…a shower!
Membership fee: $500 a month for a dedicated desk
Address: 2125 E. Cesar Chavez St., Austin
Website: opportunityspace.com

Perch Coworking

Perch coworking in East Austin offers ergonomic chairs, mail delivery and a community of what it calls “self-contained business people.” Perch has clean, modern space and focuses hard on the business aspect of getting work done and meeting with likeminded people who might also be good business contacts.
Membership fee: $175 a month; drop-ins are $25 a day
Address: 2235 E. Sixth St., Austin
Website: perchcoworking.com

Posh Coworking

Posh is the first Austin co-working space specifically for women. Elegant, if a little girlie, Posh not only provides co-working spaces but quiet meeting areas—named Elizabeth, Audrey and Marilyn–for members to meet with clients. Members rave about the warm feel, the writing lab, and the help of the owner, Blossom.
Membership fee: $125 to $400 a month
Address: 3027 N. Lamar Blvd., Suite 202, Austin
Website: poshcoworking.com

Soma Vida

So what if your requirements go way beyond ergonomic chairs and snacks? Soma Vida is a wellness community described by several Yelpers as “Nirvana.” It’s a yoga collective, a wellness center, a veritable Vallhalla of work life balance in an old house in East Austin. And best of all, it’s way less expensive than most co-working spaces. And memberships come with free yoga classes and entrance to networking events. Namaste.
Membership fee: $25 to $65 a month
Address: 1210 Rosewood Ave., Austin
Website: somavida.net

Tech Ranch Austin

Tech Ranch is another major startup hub in Austin, north of downtown. It’s an incubator that helps businesses from seed to scale. In a quiet office park off 183, Tech Ranch offers a range from general co-working in a modern setting to a dedicated desk, chair and locking cabinet space. Another great place to rub elbows with entrepreneurs and investors who are making new things happen.
Membership fee: $150 to $300 a month
Address: 9111 Old Jollyville Road, Suite 100, Austin
Website: techranchaustin.com

Vuka

The owners of Vuka envisioned the space as a co-working place, event venue and all around community gathering space. A giant, open warehouse with incredible tree light fixtures and funky furniture, Vuka is the perfect place for people who want to combine art with work. The venue has almost no parking, however, and some members report that all that combining of art, work and community can be a little distracting.
Membership fee: $150 to $300 a month; drop-ins are $15 a day ($5 on Fridays)
Address: 411 W. Monroe St., Austin
Website: vukaaustin.com

San Antonio Coworking Space

Geekdom

Geekdom is the place for San Antonio coworking. The local startup hub, Geekdom is steps away from the Riverwalk and offers month to month membership as well as dedicated desks and office spaces. Because it’s the hub of entrepreneurship, it’s also the place to encounter the up and coming companies and the investors and mentors who are helping them. The coworking space is moving into the historic Rand building downtown in late March and will have a specially designed space featuring showers, bike racks, kitchen, postboxes, phone booths and a special events center.
Membership fee: $50 to $200
112 East Pecan, 10th & 11th Floors
San Antonio, Texas 78205
Website: http://geekdom.com/san-antonio

Austin-based Social Media Powerhouses Mass Relevance and Spredfast Merge

April 2, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Spredfast has merged with Mass Relevance to create one of the largest independent social marketing companies, and will operate going forward as Spredfast.

Mass Relevance has created social media management platforms for more than 350 major brands including Pepsi, Campbell’s, GE, Target, Walgreens and Microsoft.

Spredfast also provides its customers with a social media platform to manage all of social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, and other popular blogging services. Its clients include AT&T, Warner Brothers, Whole Foods Market, AARP, AGAIN Interactive, HomeAway, and Ogilvy.

Together, the companies have more than 600 customers and they work with all five major broadcast networks and operate in 84 countries. The companies process more than 650 million pieces of social content every day.

“Keeping up with the speed of social is a lofty challenge for marketers and media today. Consumers continue to raise the bar for how they want to engage with brands. Amidst a sea of social chatter, brands must find the right moments to interact with their audience, and move faster than ever to deliver their stories,” Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast said in a news release “The combination of Spredfast and Mass Relevance give brands an unparalleled ability to stay on top of market trends, and be smarter about how to engage customers in social experiences that build lasting relationships.”

Social media has become a crucial component of how companies interact with customers and conduct business.

“We built Mass Relevance to connect relevant conversations from social networks and fuse them into a customer’s brand story. Three years later, we are honored to align with our neighbors, another Austin-based company, to complete the circle of bringing audience participation into every aspect of marketing,” Sam Decker, CEO and Co-Founder of Mass Relevance, said in a news release. “The combination of Spredfast and Mass Relevance opens up new possibilities for our customers to do more with social content in real-time.”

Mass Relevance, founded in 2009, has raised $5.5 million and Spredfast, founded in 2008, has raised $64.1 million to date, according to CrunchBase.

“Spredfast and Mass Relevance together provide an unmatched, comprehensive product solution necessary for any marketer to succeed in today’s always on and ever-changing social environment,” said Mike Dodd, Partner at Austin Ventures and founding investor in both companies.” These two companies and their highly effective leadership teams have been a critical part of the Austin technology landscape and their continued growth as one entity will be a defining factor in this community.”

The combined company will continue to be led by current Spredfast’s CEO Favaron. Decker will join the Board of Directors and serve as Executive Advisor to the new company. Spredfast has 350 employees and offices in Austin, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London and Sydney.

Austin’s New Chief Innovation Officer

April 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Kerry O’Connor, Austin’s new Chief Innovation Officer, defines innovation as “any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome.” Her job as innovation officer, she said, is “bringing smart people together to feel around in the dark.”

O’Connor spoke at a party to welcome her thrown by Google and Capital Factory Monday night. She has held several positions in Washington D.C. as well as several global consulates. She worked in Ghana and Morocco in various capacities for the U.S. Department of State, and was hired as “innovation catalyst” for the department in 2012. She also served as logistics coordinator for the Pittsburgh G20 Summit in 2009.

Her road to innovation was marked by global history, she said, such as the falling of the Berlin wall and 9/11 when the rules that had marked the parameters of U.S. relations with other countries all changed and innovation was inevitable. O’Connor has a bachelor’s in international affairs with a concentration on European studies and minors in economics, French and music. She has a master’s in international affairs from George Washington University. Her starting salary will be $130,000 annually.

A rock climber and improv player, O’Conner said she wanted to begin “a very grounded conversation. Buzzwords make me break into hives,” she said. “I want to figure out how to collaborate on the nitty gritty.”

A fan of alliteration, O’Connor said, she wants to focus on “What is, what if, what wows and what works.” In the next 90 days, she said, she plans to come out with a business model that will be Austin’s model.

Austin, she said, has claimed a creative freedom for itself and everybody wants a part of it. No one who learned she was coming to Austin was nonchalant about it. “Keep Austin weird, “ O’Connor said, “is money.” At the same time, she said, “Constraints are kind of cool. Constraints give you something to play with…they give us texture.”

She would like to see entrepreneurs talking to intrapreneurs about risk, about creating business models and figuring out how to inject that into ongoing operations. She wants to keep the ethnography of the city while drawing people closer together. She wants to support the strong community vibe behind the Keep it Local movement that seems stronger in Austin than in D.C. where so much of the population is transient.

She wasn’t, she said, prepared to speculate much on ideas yet, until she’s gotten a better sense of the city’s soul.

Several of the city’s top innovators, including Bob Metcalfe and Hugh Forrest attended the event, as did several startups.

Chasing Tales: Invodo Harnesses the Power of Story to Drive Sales for Clients

March 31, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

BY STACY ALEXANDER EVANS
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The Lefsetz Letter is no Slashdot or Ars Technica. Yet the blog’s founder, Bob Lefsetz—a modern day philosopher of sorts, who proselytizes on everything from popular music to aging—has some compelling thoughts with surprising relevance for the tech world and business. “If you can tell a story,” proclaims Lefsetz, “the world is yours.”

Enter: Invodo, an Austin startup whose slogan is “We make video work for commerce.” Simply put, the company claims that the storytelling possibilities inherent in video, make it an indispensable tool for closing sales online.

Invodo CEO Craig Wax says he agrees with Lefsetz’ assertion, and takes it a step further. “Every great business has a story behind it,” says Wax, “Consumers choose which brands to trust based on stories. It’s hard to tell stories online with just text and pictures, though. That’s why video is such a powerfully disruptive force on the Web. In just a few seconds a video can communicate a brand story far more powerfully than a written paragraph, and that is driving every major brand to find new ways to tell stories with online video.”

Not surprisingly, like so many other startup leaders who work in the Texas state capital, Wax says Austin is the perfect place for a company that relies on creative capital because of its unusually large talent pool. “This city has producers, directors, on-camera talent, and others who have worked on everything from feature films to industrial videos,” enthuses the CEO.

The fact is, last year the Hollywood Reporter ranked the film school at the University of Texas at Austin tenth in nation, and first among schools not located in the New York or Los Angeles areas. Indeed, garnering a reputation throughout the country as the U.S. film community’s “third coast,” Austin is full of hopefuls striving for recognition as the next Sofia Coppola or Matthew McConaughey. Naturally, these artists often take second jobs in the interim. Invodo is all too happy to reap the harvest.

Actor Lara Shah has done it all: from playing the role of an aspiring entrepreneur in the independent feature film Funemployment to sexing it up in a music video for the Riverboat Gamblers. This past December she appeared in an Invodo production for Dell. “They were super-professional. It was a really efficient shoot,” says Shah emphatically. “There wasn’t the whole hurry up and wait thing,” she says gratefully, referring to shoots that can drag on for 12 or 14 hours, much of it spent waiting around for technical fine-tuning. “It was a positive experience. It was one of those well-run ships.”

Regarding client services, Wax acknowledges that client needs are diverse and may range from driving increased sales conversions from their product pages to promoting new product launches or reducing support costs. “Our first priority is always to understand the business goals, so we can build the content and technology strategy to accomplish those goals,” says Wax, “deploying the technology in a way that delivers the biggest impact.”

One happy customer is Eric Mahlstadt, Director of eCommerce at Golfsmith in Austin. He says a genuine concern for helping customers become better golfers is key to the company’s success. With that in mind, bringing the intimate retail customer service they’re known for to an online platform was one of the team’s primary goals when they considered the integration of video on the Golfsmith website.

“We teamed up with Invodo, and it’s been a really great partnership,” says Mahlstadt, “because not only do they bring a player which we can customize to the look and feel of our site…but they also help us produce the video from the ground up with the messages that we want to tell about our products…”

So it goes, in business as in art. “After nourishment, shelter and companionship,” says novelist Philip Pullman, “stories are the thing we need most in the world.”

Rocket to the Moon: The Stratospheric Ascent of Mass Relevance

March 29, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By STACY ALEXANDER EVANS
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photos by Stacy Alexander Evans

One look around the offices at Mass Relevance in downtown Austin, and it’s clear this is where the cool kids come to work.

Surrounded by colorful lockers embellished with skater-style stickers and loft-like exposed vent ducts, the employees here—like new hire Courtney White who recently moved to Austin from San Diego—gush about company perks such as an on-site chef who provides lunch every day for its team of hardworking buzz-generators.

Mass Relevance is what you might call a purveyor of brand congruity. These days, effective advertising via social media is all about one vision, one voice. Mass Relevance helps make that happen for its clients via razor sharp strategizing. Its client list is impressive, featuring some of the biggest names in the glamour industries of sports and entertainment, among them ESPN, Fox Sports and NBC’s The Voice.

Cofounder Brian Dainton, along with Eric Falcao and Sam Decker, joined forces in 2010 to build what Dainton calls a “company that would transform the industry.” Starting out initially as TweetRiver, Dainton and his team had a vision that soon became more expansive. “When we saw the tremendous opportunity to help brand and media companies bring social content into digital screens,” says Dainton, now serving as the company’s VP of Engineering, “we knew we had a much larger opportunity on our hands than just the TweetRiver product.”

Dainton says bringing Decker on board was key to their success. Known as the trailblazer behind Bazaarvoice, Decker had the expertise they needed in building strong, innovative, marketing technology companies. “Our hope was to weave social content across any and every digital screen,” he says, “starting with TV, and expanding now to jumbotrons, digital billboards, websites, mobile and tablets.”

In business, as in mating, comedy, and so many other risk-taking endeavors—it’s often all about the timing. Mass Relevance was founded in 2010, a banner year for the marriage of advertising to social media. That April in New York, the Interactive Advertising Bureau held a Social Media Marketplace to sold-out crowds. Linda Cronin, executive for soft drink giant Coca-Cola, was the keynote speaker.

At this meeting, Cronin presented five ingredients for social media success:
1) Add value
2) Be transparent
3) Be consistent
4) Be receptive to change
5) Surprise and delight your consumers.
This advice almost seems simplistic by today’s standards. Mass Relevance had dreams of convergence that must have been merely a glimmer in Cronin’s eyes four years ago.

Mike Dodd is a partner at Austin Ventures, the much-lauded venture capital firm that provided support to Mass Relevance in its early days. He says the backing was a no-brainer. “We invested in Mass Relevance because we saw the trifecta of success I look for in startups – strong product that companies need, tremendous opportunity in the market, and an executive team with the experience, skills, and vision to successfully lead the company.” The feeling is apparently mutual, as Dainton remarks, “We have tremendous respect for the entire Austin Ventures team, and how they’ve helped accelerate Austin’s tech startup industry.”

Dodd goes on to say that his firm is impressed by what Mass Relevance has accomplished to date, citing its partnership with social media giant, Twitter. “They were Twitter’s first certified partner licensed to re-syndicate content for display,” beams Dodd, “and are currently the only company with access to both Twitter’s firehose and Facebook’s Keyword Insights API.”

Considering the fact they also partner with Instagram, Vine, Google+, Youtube and Klout—it’s no surprise Mass Relevance works with 25 percent of Interbrand’s 2013 World’s Best Brands. Clearly, they are one of Austin’s crown jewels. Dodd is proud to report that they “continue to sign new clients and develop new social experiences that are changing the way brands and media companies interact with consumers.” It seems likely that someday soon we can say we remember them when…

Mass Relevance headquarters in downtown Austin.

How to Tap into Austin’s Investor Landscape

March 27, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin skyline at golden suntrise reflected in Ladybird Lake, photo licensed from iPhoto

According to the PWC Money Tree, Texas was the sixth highest investment region in the country in 2013. With $1.3 billion invested it was a small player compared to Silicon Valley’s $12 billion in investments. A fact that continues to gall Austin’s startup community. The good news for startups is that, in a lot of ways, Austin is still a small town which means it’s easier to meet investors here than in it is in many markets. Angels and venture capitalists attend pitch competitions, Startup Week events, SXSW and even crazy things like Startup Olympics. But even in Austin, walking up to an investor and launching into your pitch is considered a major faux pas.
We’ve seen founders walk up to investors who are three bourbons into a networking event and launch into a pitch. We’ve seen founders joining conversations and scattering participants like roaches by putting on their “sales” voices. We’ve seen founders looking at investors they just met like guys who have been at sea for a year meeting the first woman on shore. No.
Most investors want an introduction from someone they trust before they hear your pitch. In addition, while one investor admitted: “We want to find startups pretty much when they roll out of bed in the morning, before they’ve made too many mistakes” they don’t want to waste time with startups who have no business model, no idea how much it costs to acquire a customer, no revenue model, no sales strategy, no idea of their valuation, no measure of their competition and so forth.
So we’ve included a list of some of the leading area investors. Some of the kinds of companies they invest in, and rules they have about approaching them.

Central Texas Angel Network
Central Texas Angel Network is one of the top five most active angel investment groups in the U.S. CTAN angels come from numerous industry backgrounds and invest in companies from tech startups to consumer packaged goods. Many of them work with startups at the local incubators as mentors as well as investors.
CTAN has more than 130 members who are commonly spotted at pitch events put on by the University of Texas, Capital Factory, Incubation Station, Techstars and other startup institutions, usually looking for early stage companies to make seed investments. In 2012, the angel group invested $8 million in 25 companies. CTAN has quarterly “office meetings” to informally meet and pitch to investors to get feedback on their pitches. The group also has five annual funding cycles. Startups apply at the group’s website, and those that are accepted have the opportunity to pitch and get feedback from investors. An average investment for a single investor is about $25,000.

Austin Ventures
Austin Ventures is the largest firm in Austin with a $3.9 billion fund. Austin Ventures invests in both early stage and middle market companies AV Investors have been quoted as preferring to meet startups interested in pitching them through an introduced from someone they trust. Early stage investments range from Our investments typically range in size from $500,000 proof-of-concept projects and seed financings to $40 million venture growth rounds. $25 million to $100 million. Austin Ventures is a very hands-on investor. Among its portfolio companies are Bazaarvoice, RetailMeNot, Spiceworks and Spredfast.

LiveOak Venture Partners
A relatively new venture firm, LiveOak Venture Partners has expressed that it’s more open to early stage companies than some other investors. Partner Krishna Srinivasan said he doesn’t require an introduction and is interested in talking to a number of seed stage startups. Live Oak recently announced a $100 million fund for early stage companies. Its minimum investment is usually $250,000.

Silverton Partners
Silverton Partners is an Austin based company that mostly invests in tech companies. Though it has invested in several Capital Factory companies already, the company recently announced a partnership with Capital Factory whereby every Capital Factory accelerator startup with an initial $50,000 from two angel investors would receive another $25,000 from Silverton. This is on top of a $50,000 match from Capital Factory.
Generally, Silverton’s initial investments range between $200,000 and $2 million.

Triton Ventures
Laura Kilcrease, one of the managing partners of Triton Ventures, helped found Austin Technology Incubator and formerly served as Entrepreneur in Residence for the University of Texas Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship. She can frequently be seen at University of Texas pitch events and mentors many startups.
Triton focuses on spinout companies, including technology licensing spinouts, tech commercialization and early stage companies. Average initial investments range from $500,000 to $4 million. Triton also supports companies in its portfolio with additional investment and often introduces its portfolio companies to other investors.

Mercury Fund
Mercury invests in lean, early stage startups with small scientific teams and software based businesses. Initially the fund invests between $50,000 to $1.5 million and usually invests between $4 million and $6 million over the life of the company.

Wait, How Are Millennials Sparking Change Again?

March 26, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The topic was supposed to be How Millennials are Sparking Change, but while the panels addressed the challenges of entrepreneurship, the dearth of STEM in the education system, the growing Hispanic population and the Austin startup culture, little was said about how millennials are sparking change until the end.

In that final panel, sponsored by National Journal and the Atlantic, Techstars managing director Jason Seats, pointed out that with the “cushy existence” of the middle class and above, millennials graduate ready to reach for the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy. “They’re looking for fulfillment right out of the gate,” which means they’re trying to do things that will be meaningful and benefit society. That’s changing the culture.”

Isaac Barchas, head of the Austin Technology Incubator said there is a higher percentage of millennials than other generation groups viewing entrepreneurship as a career path, though he said he doesn’t know what direction that entrepreneurship will take.

And Rep. Trey Martinez of San Antonio said he hoped that the entrepreneurial spirit of millennials would help reinvent government in “the confluence of the tech world meets the business world to fix the inefficiencies in government.”

Finally, Margo Dover, executive director of Skillpoint Alliance said the millennials she works with not only offer great innovation and wonderful ideas, but they level the playing field. “They don’t care about your gender, your sexual orientation or your color they want to be the best. The best leaders and the best innovators and the best business people…I am learning from them,” she said. What older people (women in particular) were taught was impolite, such as speaking out boldly and taking leadership positions, they do joyfully.

Why Millennials Are Entrepreneurs

The first panel, Millennial Entrepreneurship Panel Discussion included Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at UT, Rudy Rodriguez, managing partner of Team Venti, Grant Helmer, student and director of Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency, Jae Kim, founder of Chi’Lantro BBQ, Ali Mavrakis, CFO of Basedrive. Ron Browstein, editorial director of Atlantic Media moderated.

Brownstein asked how the panelists had decided to take the plunge into entrepreneurship. Kim said he had always been an entrepreneur because “I was never very good at school.” He started companies when he was 21 and 25 that failed. But Chi’Lantro, he said, “seems to be doing pretty well.” Rodriguez, who grew up on South Padre Island, said his father always taught him to “swim toward opportunity.” He had taken a corporate job, he said, and was always bored and tired, and began to wonder “is this all there is?”

Metcalfe said he had “gone to school for 23 years in a row and loved it” but when he went to Silicon Valley he met Steve Jobs, David Packard, William Hewlett, and decided “If they can do it, so can I.”

Metcalfe said his biggest challenge was learning to sell.

Mavrakis said the toughest part was taking responsibility. “The buck has to stop with me. You’re going to get a lot of advice. Figure it out and do something with it.”

For Kim the most difficult part was capital. He’d maxed out his credit cards early on and the card companies were calling and asking “What’s wrong? Do you have a family emergency? Can you pay your bills?”

All the panelists agreed that if you want to start an Internet based company or a tech company it’s a lot easier and less expensive now. There’s a global audience. They also agreed with a poll Brownstein cited that said the most important factors for entrepreneurial success are persistence, people skills and knowledge of business.

“We all talk about how lucky Mark Zuckerberg was,” Metcalfe said. “When you look at what the days were like, it’s about getting through the unlucky days and exploiting the luck when it was good.”

The two pieces of advice all panelists agreed on for budding entrepreneurs are: Listen to customers, mentors, advisors and start something.

It’s About Connection

The next panel, How to Start, Sustain and Succeed as a Millennial Entrepreneur, included Seats, Barchas, Dover, Martinez and Michelle Skelding, senior vice president of global technology strategies for the Austin Chamber of Commerce.

All agreed that a big part of success in the Austin startup ecosystem is about what Barchas called “touching atoms.” It is key that the city has an ecosystem where entrepreneurs interact. For one thing, said Skelding, it creates collaboration, what Seats called “cross pollination of ideas across verticals. One of the benefits of that, he said is that institutional knowledge comes from interaction with an organization or ecosystem and providing situations where people can interact and learn from one another greatly reduces the time and cost of imparting institutional knowledge. Bringing people up to speed.

Most agreed that the present educational system marginalizes women, minorities and people in lower socioeconomic brackets, especially in the STEM fields. Dover, whose organization gives high school students an opportunity to get hands on in area companies and offer innovative solutions to the problem those companies face, said she never had a formal education. But she had a mentor by the name of George Kozmetzky, who said if she would meet him once a month for breakfast at 6 a.m., he would help her. And she did.

One audience member asked how someone would find out about the Austin ecosystem and Seats said it was a lot like navigating UT campus. “I got this complicated set of directions and got on campus and said ‘Where is the student activity center?’ When I got lost again, I asked someone else. You just start walking.”

After the panels, Brownstein said that, of Austin and Los Angeles, Austin was far more community oriented. The idea of starting a business in Austin is much more a process of joining a community than simply “doing your own thing.”