Category: Austin (Page 235 of 318)

Brett Hurt and Jeff Harbach have joined forces to found Hurt+Harbach, a seed-stage venture capital firm in Austin.
Hurt, co-founder of Bazaarvoice and formerly with Austin Ventures, and Harbach, former executive director of the Central Texas Angel Network, plan to invest primarily in Austin companies.
“I discovered that I really enjoy being a VC. Helping entrepreneurs is the next phase of my career, and this is a natural evolution for me,” Hurt wrote in a blog post announcing the new venture. “Co-founding a new venture capital firm is the ideal way to express my passion for building extraordinary companies.”
Hurt has also invested in several Austin startups as an angel investor. In the last 10 months, he has met with “around 300 entrepreneurs.”
And he saw a need for more seed-stage investment firms.
Harbach, a serial entrepreneur and a Kauffman fellow, also saw the need.
“During my time with CTAN I saw first hand the need for more early stage capital in Austin,” Harbach wrote in a blog post. “With the blessing of the CTAN Board of Directors, I started to devote some time to researching how to get more early stage capital flowing in Austin. Those efforts culminated in Hurt+Harbach.”
The new firm held a meetup last week at Lola Savannah in West Lake Hills.

The Austin Technology Incubator’s summer-long Student Entrepreneur Acceleration & Launch, known as ATI SEAL, culminates next Thursday with a Decision Day event.
The event, on Sept. 5th, kicks off at 6:30 p.m. and runs until 8:30 p.m. at the Blanton Museum at 200 E. MLK Blvd. It features nine student-run companies showcasing their startups.
The public is invited. Please register for the free event here.
During the ATI SEAL Program, the startups decide whether to continue to pursue their startup ideas or to kill them. This is the sixth class to go through the program. To date, more than 30 companies and more than 100 students have participated in SEAL.
Among the success stories is Ordoro, a member of the 2010 SEAL class, which has since raised nearly $2 million in funding and works with Amazon, BigCommerce, eBay and others.

The 2013 ATI SEAL class includes:

AdBm Technologies: Developing high-performance, low-cost, and easy to deploy noise abatement technologies for marine environments.

OnSite Control: Providing portable wildlife access control solutions with a focus on the oil & gas industry.

Beyonic: Aggregating mobile payment networks to allow businesses to connect in emerging markets.

Clay.io: A platform for HTML5 games-helping developers distribute and improve their games with high-level social features, and helping consumers discover great cross-platform games.

Favor: Anything you want delivered in Austin

Guava: The fitness coach for the personal finances of the American worker.

nCarbon: Commercializing the novel material graphene to focus on the development of the next generation super capacitors.

Intelligent Menu: Offering consumers an intelligent way to dine, while also allowing restaurants to understand and connect with their customers to make data-driven decisions.

LifeM: Making highly flexible pressure sensors for cardiovascular
applications to revolutionize the catheter pressure sensing industry.

E.J. Lawless, who formerly worked as senior director of online marketing at indeed.com, has launched a vertical search engine called FurnitureNear.Me focused on helping consumers find furniture near their houses to save people time from going to store to store and searching on multiple Internet sites. The site is currently available for consumers to search in Austin, San Antonio and Houston.
The industry is large and highly fragmented and Lawless saw an opportunity to bring some order to the chaos with his startup. Lawless recently answered some questions, via email, about FurnitureNear.Me.

Q. Can you explain your product in the simplest language possible?

A. FurnitureNear.Me provides one site to search all the available products and store locations of top furniture retailers near you. Eventually it will include not just top retail chains but every furniture store.
Instead of driving store-to-store, shoppers can go to FurnitureNear.Me to see what stores have styles and prices they’d like, and then plan where to shop–saving time and frustration.

Q. What’s your secret sauce? What differentiates you from the competition?

A. FurnitureNear.Me focuses on having the most complete index of furniture items from retailers both big and small. It will also focus solely on furniture in order to have the best furniture search results.

Q. Who are your competitors?

A. There are a limited number of competitors. Google Product Shopping Engine has a small number of furniture retailers because furniture stores have to pay to be part of the index. There are a few other price comparison engines with limited selection as well.

Q. Are you Bootstrapped, or do you have Venture Capital or Angel Investment?

A. Bootstrapped

Q. Who makes up your team?

A. Currently, I’m the only founder, though I’ve been able to reach out to people I know for help on a variety of areas.

Q. Who are your customers?

A. People looking for furniture, whether that’s consumers looking to buy a new piece for their home or professionals like interior decorators searching for unique finds.

Q. What is your business model?

A. Right now the focus is on just building the product, but there are a few business model options for a vertical search engine like FurnitureNear.Me.

Q. What is the biggest win you’ve had to date?

A. I’ve taken a fairly lean approach to this idea working on validating key pieces in small steps. Each validated step, from whether it was possible to do the idea or if users would like it, has been a meaningful win.

Q. What are the most helpful Austin startup resources that you’ve used?

A. The network of people I’ve met over the past few years working at various startups in Austin.

Q. What are the advantages of being in Austin for launching your startup?
A. Austin is great for FurnitureNear.Me because of the local talent with experience in vertical search engines.

Q. What are your plans for the future?

A. Continue to focus on building and improving the product; specifically, including more furniture retailers in the search and improving the quality of results.

Q. Anything else you would like to add or say that I haven’t asked you about?

A. Furniture is a great market for disruption right now. It’s a large market at approximately $60 billion in sales in the U.S.; ecommerce is the fastest growing segment of the furniture businesses; and there have been new entrants recently, like One King’s Lane, that have gained significant traction.
The basic shopping process has been the same for decades, though. People get a catalog in the mail or see an ad and then drive to the store, and hope for the best. If they don’t see what they like, they drive to the next store, and so on.
FurnitureNear.Me is trying to make the buying process simpler and faster by providing one site to search across all of the furniture inventory in an area to let shoppers know what stores they like and where to go.

Makexyz is a global online marketplace that connects people who want to get a product made with a 3D printer to people who have them in their neighborhoods. Nathan Tone, the company’s co-founder, spent some time Thursday morning chatting with Silicon Hills News about the startup, which launched in January and has quickly grown both locally, nationally and internationally.

Q. What is makexyz?

A. It’s a 3D printing marketplace that links people who need something made with 3D printers in their neighborhoods.

Q. Who are your customers?

A. Our customers are consumers making things like iPhone cases and toy robots, businesses prototyping their next products. And people with 3D printed products, like a watchband, that are producing hundreds of units through makexyz.

Q. Who is on your team?

A. My co-founder, Chad Masso, and I met working at indeed.com. He comes from an engineering background. I come from the product side. Our team of four is rounded out by two other awesome developers.

Q. Why are you guys the ones to do this startup?

A. We’re here because we like making things ourselves, and makexyz is a really great opportunity to help other people make stuff at a significant scale. That perspective, in combination with our history of building great products, has proven successful so far.

Q. What challenges do you face bringing your startup into the marketplace?

A. It’s still a very new technology for a lot of people, so the education challenge is significant — helping people understand what’s possible with the technology. We’re lucky because we have a network of over 1,000 3D printers in 45 different countries who know their subject matter and who are more than willing to share their knowledge with customers.

Q. How do your acquire customers?

A. To date growth has been completely organic and referral driven. On the printer side, the community has proven very tight-knit, where printers who have made money and met interesting makers through makexyz are more than happy to tell their friends about makexyz. On the customer side, if you use makexyz, you end up with a really interesting and unique object, which your friends and family will ask: “where did you get that?” Through makexyz.

Q. What is the business model?

A. We add a charge on top of every order. Think: airbnb for 3D printers.

Q. How are people using makexyz?

A. Once you have a distributed network of 3D printers, there are some really interesting applications that you can build on top of it. For example, with printers in 45 different countries, makexyz makes it possible to produce and deliver a product to a customer anywhere in the world in less than one day.

Q. Are you bootstrapped or do you have angel or VC financing?

A. We’re bootstrapped. We’re not actively looking for funding, but if the right opportunity came along we’d consider it.

Q. What Austin resources have you found most helpful?

A. Austin’s community of very successful revenue-oriented entrepreneurs who are happy to help out in any way they can. That has been a huge help for us along the way. It’s a great town to start a company in.

Q. What has been your biggest win so far?

A. Starting out, our original goal was to start in Austin only. But as soon as we launched, printers were signing up all over the U.S. And we were receiving emails every day saying “I’d love to list my printer, but I’m not in the U.S.” So we opened everything up internationally. So we’ve been international pretty much from day one. It wasn’t a pivot as much as a fast-forward for us. When we said: this makes just as much sense globally as locally.

Q. What is your long-term vision?

A. Our goal is to help people make things. And in service of that goal, we’re willing to take the business in any direction that makes sense. In terms of long term vision, through makexyz’s global network, you will be able to produce and deliver any product to a customer anywhere in the world, for free and in less than one day. That’s a big enough mission for now.

Another California company has put stakes down in Austin.
Auction.com, based in Irvine, Calif. with 1,000 employees, announced Wednesday plans to open an Austin office on Sept. 3 and hire up to 40 people.
The office will focus on customer relations and business development. It will located in 7,000 square feet at the Stone Lake Office Park at 4030 West Braker Lane.
Downs Deering, senior vice president of VIP operations and Michael Dean, vice president of residential sales, will lead the Austin office.
The company has already hired several sales and business development executives.
“Building and scaling a high-quality sales and business development team is a key driver to our continued success as a business,” John Hood, executive vice president of C2C Inside Sales for Auction.com, said in a news release. “Austin was our first choice as a location since it offers an excellent talent pool of professionals from leading technology companies who have the experience to help us better serve our customers, and enhance the current teams in our Irvine headquarters.”
Auction.com is an online platform that lets people sell and buy real estate.
“We are pleased to welcome Auction.com to the Austin region, the company will be a wonderful asset to our growing technology community,” Gary Farmer, Chairman of Opportunity Austin; a five-county economic development initiative of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce said in a news release. “Auction.com’s expansion to Austin is further evidence of Central Texas’s attractiveness to companies who have chosen our city because of the access to talented workforce, entrepreneurial spirit and high quality of life.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Austin Women in Technology hosted a lively conversation at Chez Zee Tuesday night about the future of tech jobs in Austin.
The panel discussion featured Whurley, founder of Chaotic Moon Studios, Austin City CIO Stephen Elkins, Melissa Richter, IT Executive with General Motors and Diane Kenyon, Senior VP of IT at Harden Healthcare. The session was moderated by Nathan Green, VP of SureScore. The consensus: Other than advanced technical skills, the most important skills are being able to write and communicate, to get along with a team and to innovate.
Most of the panel agreed that the pace of change in tech makes it impossible to find Lego-style matches for jobs. No matter how cutting edge the school is, it can’t keep up pace with technology, so by the time students graduate, they’re already behind. And tech people may have skills that were all the rage when they took a job several years ago, but the job description they once filled no longer exists, or the skills are obsolete.
“It’s impossible to prepare core content that’s updated enough,” said Whurley of universities. “When I worked at Apple all we had to do was develop for iOS. And every year there are 3,500-to-5,000 APIs that next year are useless….” By contrast, he said, people he hires from artistic backgrounds, who are closet coders, do really well.
By contrast, Kenyon said the people she hires who have college degrees can: “Write a memo, write a business letter, communicate with my customers…. There’s no longer the ‘nerd’ section at any shop that says ‘You don’t have to be able to talk to people in a language they can understand. I’m looking for people who have skills and an understanding that their skills are transferable to my needs and if there’s something you don’t know how to do and understand that you need growing and training on communication and you understand boundaries, these people I can train.”
And, Whurley said, people have to be able to work in teams. That doesn’t mean they won’t fight, if they’re passionate about what they’re doing. But “it’s like with your spouse, it’s what you do after a fight that’s important…. We need the right person, in the right job, in the context of the team we’ve built. We’ve got to be 100 percent on all three of those.”
There are, however, some specific skill sets IT employers need. For example, a knowledge of big data and 3D printing. Those are key, said Richter, for moving GM forward with its idea that the car will be the new cellphone: a mode of transportation and data center all in one that consumers will engage in a whole new way. 3D printing, she said, will “take the humans out of what we’ve all been doing for the last 30 years and free us up to innovate.”
Austin has one of four GM Innovation Centers to bring the company’s tech development in-house.
Elkins joked that the skill set he needs is whatever’s on today’s “vacancy report.” But generally, he wants to hire people who understand the tech side and the business side and can communicate between that space. He also said that data security issues would be a crucial growth area in the future as data continues to grow.
Kenyon also mentioned data, asking if she could post a job for a “dataholic, because that’s what I really need.” As a healthcare company, she said, her biggest challenge will be moving her company through the phases of Obamacare. And that will take a lot of innovation. “I can’t sit in my fifth floor penthouse across the street and decide ‘This is how workflow should be for the nurse.’ We have to maximize the information at their fingertips and minimize the feeling of doing data entry.”
It boils down, she said, to “Can you do the job? Will you do the job? And can we put up with each other?”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Julie Huls, president and CEO of the Austin Technology Council, said Monday night that now, while Austin’s considered a bastion of “cool” and tech is growing, now is the time to address local tech needs going forward. To that end, ATC has spent the last few years collecting data and “organizing” the Austin tech world. Going forward, they’ll use that information to identify key needs in the tech community and try to address them.
“Getting tech organized has been crazy difficult,” Huls said. “It’s not in an entrepreneur’s makeup to be a joiner. It took awhile to understand how to get everyone pointed in the same direction. How to get everyone engaged. The way we finally figured out to do it was to ask ‘Don’t you guys want to be involved in making investment decisions about how money is going to be allocated to resources…?’ It’s time for us to articulate a new vision.”
While much of Huls’ talk, at Startup Grind Austin at Capital Factory, referenced vague “high level conversations” ATC was having with “C-Suite Executives,” she did give some concrete insights as to the direction ATC will be pushing in coming years.

9,000 jobs by 2027

One of the biggest needs, locally, is for people with high-level technical skills. In the next 10 years, she said, tech-related jobs are projected to increase by 9,000. Most executives would prefer a “grow your own” approach, recruiting people out of the University of Texas and other area universities and tech programs. But, for one thing, there aren’t enough highly skilled people coming out of those programs to meet the demand, Huls said. So recruiting from other regions will be crucial. Secondly, she said, many Austin graduates are being recruited by companies on the coasts and they jump on the chance for an adventure and a higher paycheck. The good news is, many of them return to Austin after a few years.
ATC, she said, was started by some heavy hitters like Pike Powers and Laura Kilcrease. But there “hasn’t been a very clear roadmap for growth and success. My concern is that if we don’t articulate that and create that map ourselves, we lose our competitive edge.”
“My hope is that Austin can do a better job of branding Austin tech,” Huls said. “We’re about 20 years out of date. There are lots of people who still believe that Austin is still about (semiconductor) chips and we kind of haven’t been all about that for quite some time. Our Austin tech brand is not current.”
In fact, Austin’s tech is very diverse, a reality that has to be communicated to the world. She also weighed in on other issues people identify as problems in Austin’s tech growth.
“I’ve reversed my position on the need for capital,” Huls said. At this point, she said, organizations like CTAN and investors from both within and without Austin are providing ample capital. Capital’s not a big issue. Scaleability has been an issue, in terms of entrepreneurs building great small companies and then selling them rather than growing them to be strong elements of the local economy. But, Huls said, Austin is at a tipping point with that, as evidenced by IPO activity in the last year or two.
“We have some awesome executives who stay here after they make it big…mentoring informally or formally. What I hear from investors is that Austin entrepreneurs need help with some of the fundamentals like business development skills and pitch skills.”

Getting the Word Out About Austin Tech

To that end, she said, ATC is actively seeking executives, investors and tech leaders who want to help foster growth in the community, whether that’s volunteering on a think tank or visiting a school to inspire kids toward STEM education.
“We’re not doing enough,” Huls said. “We’ve been on the top of every list for the past five or ten years but that’s not going to last forever. We’re taking for granted the amazing array of assets we have here…we have real assets that are marketable and make us truly competitive. We’re not doing enough to get that information out there nationally.”
Huls, who studied marketing and communications, became president and CEO of ATC in 2009, chosen for her ability to build a bridge between what was happening in the tech world and the rest of Austin.
Next month’s Startup Grind on September 23 will feature Erine Gray, CEO of Aunt Bertha. Organizer Andi Gillentine said the group has features thought leaders and investors over recent months but will head into the fall with a series of entrepreneurial CEOs and founders.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At the Pike Powers Lab Tuesday morning, Nest Labs, based in Palo Alto, announced it has selected SPOT BPO to expand its technical support and customer service in Austin.
SPOT is locating its customer service center in a 27,000 square foot building at 6800 Burleson Road in the Bergstrom Technology Center.
The center will house about 140 customer service employees initially. The company plans to hire 125 of those agents immediately.
SPOT is going to provide the technical and customer support for Nest Labs thermostat known as the Nest Learning Thermostat.
Nest Labs has 300 employees in California. Austin is one of the top markets for Nest’s thermostat. Texas, overall, is the largest market for its smart thermostats, which save energy and adjust appliances in the home according to the consumer’s needs, said Mark Wilhelm, the company’s director of customer support.
Nest currently has two employees in Austin, Wilhelm said. He said by the end of the year, the call center could have as many as 150 employees with 80 percent of them being employed by SPOT and another 20 percent being employed by Nest. The jobs pay between $10 to $20 an hour, Wilhelm said.
Nest looked at ten other cities before selecting Austin as the site for its center, Wilhelm said.
Nest Labs has participated in the Pecan Street Project, a research and development organization focused on clean energy products and services.
“As Nest prepared to bring its signature product to market, Pecan Street conducted research utilizing the Nest Learning Thermostat to measure the effectiveness of set and forget smart thermostats, with Austin households at the Mueller Development,” according to the Chamber.
The new center can hold up to 250 employees, said Alton Martin, CEO of SPOT Consulting. He plans to contract with other technology companies doing work in the smart appliances area to hire additional employees, he said.
The Austin Chamber of Commerce and the Pike Powers Lab, a non-profit smart grid research lab, worked with Nest to bring the jobs to Austin, said Lew Little, its chairman.
Nest Lab’s expansion in Austin is the latest of a string of companies to move to Austin from California, Little said. In the past year, 15 companies have expanded or relocated here including Visa, Apple, Dropbox, Resignation Media and HID Global.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Utz Baldwin knew that one day regular people would be able to control their home electronics with their smart phones—regular people meaning not James Bond or the very wealthy. Having spent decades designing and installing connected home systems for rich people, he waited until the technology and consumer usage hit the tipping point…then he founded Ube.
Ube, which is part of Techstars inaugural class, makes an app that controls smart dimmers in your home using an open source API. With the installation of the Ube dimmers—that cost about $79 each—you can turn your lights on from your smart phone before you get home or while on vacation (as long as you’re someplace with an Internet connection.) Or you can remember you left the bedroom light on while you’re watching a movie in the living room and turn it off without going upstairs. Ube dimmers have sub metering technology to let homeowners know how much energy their lights are using. It relies on several gestures: a slide to raise or lower the light in a room; a pinch to turn everything off at once.

A 007 Home, Without His Expense Account

And unlike other connected home technologies, Ube gets along great with other devices. You can use your home router; you don’t have to buy a special one. And down the road, Ube will be able to control hundreds of other IP systems from its one app.
The app will also rely heavily on analytics to “learn” its owners’ living habits.
“Because we’re using server side software and algorithms we can begin to capture and learn how you interact with the technology around you…” Baldwin said. “People typically like their lights set a particular way. As you interact with the lights and other electrical products around you, our system can learn your behaviors rather than responding to a predetermined block of code. Also if you’re going on vacation, our system could remember what you did in weeks before and simulate that. Instead of a light coming on at 6 and going off at 10, we could make it look like somebody went from the bedroom to the kitchen.”
Brad Kayton, a serial entrepreneur in home electronics, advisor and investor took on the role of advisor with Ube mostly because of the team, but also because the idea was unique in the industry.
“The more functionality that you have the better,” Kayton said. “Some folks out there are trying to create more of a closed system. That never wins in technology…. Ube’s plan is that other systems will be allowed to integrate with our system. We can bundle with other systems. The founders are very good at creating partnerships…going out and convincing other companies they should integrate with us. That’s the winning strategy.”

Playing a Hunch

Baldwin had his own top 100 systems integrating company, AD systems, and worked as CEO of CEDIA, an International Trade Association for the residential electronic systems contracting industry. So he had long industry knowledge. He also, he said, “always had difficulty working with others. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Leo, I’m strong willed, opinionated.”
For awhile CEDIA felt like running his own show, but then the politics set in. He’d conceived the idea of Ube a decade before, but when he left CEDIA in 2011, he took time off to ponder his next move.
Founding Ube, he said, was “a culmination of life experiences, connections you make, tracking industries you’re familiar with. I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to see a good idea. The writing’s on the wall. The information’s in front of you. It’s just a matter of acting on it.”
He knew the connected home industry was moving toward a networked world but the infrastructure wasn’t there. He’d watched other companies try and fail similar projects and waited until the number of smart phone users reached a critical mass.
In the first quarter of 2012, he called his co-founder Glen Burchers who had worked with him at AD systems. The first words out of Burchers’ mouth were:
“I hope you’re calling me with a startup idea because I’m sick of my job.”
“You have to have the fortitude to act on your hunch. You also want to prove your assumptions quickly. We launched our product and came above water as quickly as possible. You want to introduce a technology like ours without spending millions and millions to do it…. We were bringing together sub metering, capacitative touch, Wi-Fi, a lot of cool tech rolled into one device.”
They built a slide deck and gave themselves a 60-day investigative period visiting mentors, CEOs of other companies they knew, investors, “just to get their opinion…should we do this or should we go get jobs?”
The answer was, Go for it. So they bootstrapped, and raised $200,000 in friends and family seed money, and built prototypes.
“They didn’t look pretty but they worked. We got them back from the manufacturers in China and were sitting at Glen’s dining room table with all these light bulbs and wires. We had the app going and they were talking to each other. That was exciting.”
In October, Ube launched at DEMO. Unfortunately they nearly failed to show the product because their wireless access registered as an “alien” wireless network to the building’s IT system which blocked their app’s connection. They were up until 2 a.m. the night before getting it squared away. But it all worked out in the end and they won the People’s Choice Award which gave them a million in free advertising from IDG in magazines like Computerworld and CIO.
“It was a bit surreal standing on stage at the end of the event holding a million dollar check. I thought that was a very pivotal point for us.”

The Startup Rollercoaster

In April 2013, Ube launched a Kickstarter campaign. In the first two days, the money poured in. Then for the next five, the campaign essentially stopped. Hit the doldrums. Then, three days before the campaign, Kickstarter pulled the campaign because of an objection they had to the reward Ube was offering, though they’d initially approved the reward. Ube had to email all their backers and ask them to send their support to a new campaign.
“Twenty four hours later we were back live. We’d gotten 250 emails from our backers.” The backers had pulled out of the first campaign and Ube wound up bringing in nearly $308,000, more than their initial goal.
One of those backers, Steven Jennings, is eagerly awaiting the release of his Ube dimmers for a home he’s redoing in the Barton Springs area. He met with Utz and got a look at the prototypes.
“One of the things that’s annoying is when you’re comfortable on a couch, getting ready to watch a movie and my wife and I kind of play ‘It’s your turn’ to turn off the lights,” said Jennings. “Ube is iPhone or Android compatible and you need one device that will do it all. The idea of multiple gestures is great.”
“Ube is also very intuitive, very consumer friendly,” Jennings said. “It’s not tough for the non-programmer-thinking mind…down the line they’ll be controlling other stuff as well. The light switch is their shtick to get you in. It’s a good shtick to start with.”
Ube has a profile on the popular crowd funding site Fundable.com, where accredited investors can learn more about the company. They anticipate raising a Series A venture capital investment round late this year. They need to hire additional staff and accelerate their engineering. So far they have about $430,000 in pre-orders.
Being accepted into Techstars was another huge validation point, Baldwin said. And only a week into it, he’d learned a ton. But then it’s been 18 months of intense learning about the VC community, the differences between Silicon Valley VCs and Texas VCs, valuation, convertible notes, the manufacturing process….
“It’s a little like being bi-polar,” Baldwin said, riding the ups and downs and not getting a paycheck. He’s learned 16 different ways to cook lentils.
“But I wouldn’t trade it. I’d go another 18 months without pay just for the ride.”