Category: Austin (Page 255 of 318)

With the University of Texas cheerleaders kicking things off, student entrepreneurs pitched nine companies at Longhorn Startup Lab Demo Day Thursday night.
It’s the fourth time Longhorn Startup Lab, formerly known as 1 Semester Startup, has held a Demo Day.
And it was the highest graded crop of companies yet, said Josh Baer, one of three class instructors.
The entrepreneurs had fully developed ideas, solid business plans and some already had customers, advertisers and sponsors. They gave polished pitches in front of an audience of several hundred students, investors, mentors and others at the Lady Bird Johnson Auditorium.
“To be honest, I’m kind of jealous of the Longhorn startup camp group, because when I was in my undergrad they were just starting to figure out entrepreneurship,” said Keith Casey, who has served as an official mentor to the program for two semesters.
He did a startup his sophomore year of college but he didn’t have mentors or any of the resources these teams have available to them, he said.
“The fact these students can get plugged in, starting realistically their freshman year, I’m so jealous,” he said.
The Longhorn Startup Lab companies span the entire spectrum of experience from startups that have been through the program before and have a solid foundation to one company that just shifted focus in the last week, Casey said.
Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT, Baer and Ben Dyer, entrepreneur in residence at UT, lead the semester long class in which students work on launching a company.
“Every class is different,” said Dyer.
And it’s difficult to compare one semester’s class to the next one, he said. But he thinks that maybe there will be a Michael Dell that spins out of the class in the future.
Many of the companies like Clay.io, Servuss, CrowdRX, TeamPi and Suit of Clubs took last semester’s course. Members of the startups are allowed to take the course twice to further develop their ideas. Often, they pivot or change the course of their company during the semester.
Justin Crites with CrowdRX, said his company took the class twice because his team wanted to get as many free resources for their company for as long as he could.
“Our product takes a long time to develop because it’s in the health industry,” Crites said. CrowdRX’s technology crunches big data sets and provides doctors with information on how best to treat stroke patients.
The other teams pitching included BluSense, Future Business Networks, OverLotus and Burpy.
David Stanwick, CEO of Future Business Networks, a gaming portal with 39 games, said the company had 1.4 million visitors in January with 29.9 million ad impressions and generated $4,500 in monthly revenue.
During the last three months, Future Business Networks had seen a 62 percent increase in revenue, Stanwick said.
Forrest Dukes leads the BluSense team, which is developing a wristband with built in sensors to allow people to network with others at conferences.
Clay.io, a platform for HTML 5 game developers, had 2,500 users at the start of the semester and 100 games in its marketplace. It now has 7,500 users and 300 games, said Radhika Sakalkale, who runs the site along with Austin Hallock and Robert Leung.
Servuss, which makes a learning platform that competes with Blackboard and WebCT, has customers in the Leander Independent School District, testing its technology.
Burpy, with a slogan of “Order it. Get it. Burp it” wants to deliver groceries to your doorstep. It launched 31 days ago and has had 70 orders with five returning customers. Its average order was $21.22.
Its competitors in the space are Peapod, AmazonFresh, eBayNow, and WalMart To Go.
The idea was tired by Kozmo.com, UrbanFetch and Webvan during the dot com boom and all failed.
Those failed dot com had their own inventory. Burpy gets its groceries from local retailers and eventually plans to crowdsource deliver of the groceries.
Burpy thinks the timing is right and it’s able to execute on the idea efficiently and effectively.
TeamPi is a marketplace for automated stock trading algorithms.
Suit of Clubs, formerly Beehive from last semester, has already landed Microsoft, Google and Amazon as corporate sponsors.
The last company to pitch was OverLotus, which connects customers to restaurants, focuses on generating new business for restaurants and on customer retention.
Many of the students said they planned to continue their ventures after the class.
The University of Texas is developing new resources and partnerships to allow that to happen.
Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency formed a year ago to foster student entrepreneurship, said Grant Heimer, incoming director of the agency. Its main focus is to get a space on campus for students to interact with each other, he said.
“We want to enhance the entrepreneurial spirit on campus,” he said.

In just 13 days, the Austin Technology Council and some of the biggest names in the central Texas technolog industry will gather for the third annual CEO Summit at the ACL Live at Moody Theater. The event takes place May 8th and features talks and panels with some of the movers and shakers in the local tech scene.
The event is designed to tackle some of the region’s problems like the ability to retain technology talent. The conference will also put an emphasis on polling attendees to find solutions to the problems.
Mike Maples Jr. will give the keynote address on the “Future of Technology: Going Big from the Start.”
Maples, a long time Austin executive at Tivoli and Motive, is now a Bay Area Venture Capitalist.
Another long time technology proponent locally, Tom Meredith will give the closing address at the Summit with a talk focused on “The Promise of Austin.” Meredith, a long time executive at Dell and other technology companies, currently serves as general partner and co-founder of Meritage Capital, servers on numerous boards and is focused on community and philanthropic efforts.
A panel on “Building Tech Success with a Long View,” will feature John Arrow, Brett Hurt, Mark McClain and Bob Metcalfe.
Another panel features Joshua Baer, John Thornton and Bill Wood discussing “Creating a Vibran Capital Market for our Region.”
“Our region and state are at a critical juncture in relation to other markets,” Julie Huls, ATC President, said in a statement. “ATC is looking forward to supporting this unparalleled gathering of technology leadership in an important discussion on the challenges that face our industry, develop a greater understanding of our shared landscape, and introduce some strategic solutions.”
The CEO Summit also features a Startup Showdown fast pitch opportunity with the Central Texas Angel Network. Six companies will be chosen to present to a panel of judges who will select a winner. Companies seeking either series A or series B funding may submit an application to be considered for the panel by Friday, May 3rd.
To register for the 2013 CEO Summit, available to members of ATC, please visit its site. The cost to attend is $499. Temporary memberships to ATC are available to those outside the Austin area.

RISE Week Austin is just around the corner.
The conference, which was named a “Must Attend 2013 Conference for Entrepreneurs” by Forbes takes place May 13-17.
This week is the deadline to apply for the RISE startup competitions and awards. RISE has tripled its cash prizes to $3,000 and will have some in-kind prizes from its sponsors And RISE doesn’t have any application fees so all four events are free for startups to apply.
RISE offers opportunities for startups and entrepreneurs of all sectors and levels, as well as nonprofits.
The deadline to apply is this Sunday, April 28.

Fast Pitch Competition A fast pitch competition for startups with $3,000 in cash to the winner plus in-kind prizes from sponsors.

Social Good Fast Pitch Competition A fast pitch competition for nonprofit and social good programs. The winner receives $3,000 plus super in-kind prizes from RISE’s sponsors.

Funding Forum A chance to pitch your startup to a room full of angel and venture capital investors. Also, those investors will select a top startup to receive a special prize.

Royito’s “Don’t Do Mild” Award “Is your product or service outside-the-box? Does your company have a purpose aside from making money? Do you have a strategy for success?” according to RISE. “Tell us why you “Don’t Do Mild,” and YOU could win the Royito’s Award of $5,000 and in-kind prizes at the RISE Closing Bash from entrepreneur extraordinaire Roy Spence!”

RISE, a nonprofit program, also needs volunteers.
RISE Week Austin is a phenomenal time to network with startups and business leaders. You’ll get to attend the conference, listen to great speakers, and earn wristbands to the Closing Bash!

Email RISE TODAY with your name, phone number, and daytime and/or evening availability for the week of May 13-17.

BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Austin is entering entrepreneurial stage 3.0, where local startups will not only emerge, succeed and be acquired by bigger companies, but where they’ll be able to grow to serious scale, said Laura Kilcrease, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at The University of Texas McCombs School of Business
Earlier, Kilcrease said, Austin had limited entrepreneurial experience. There were people who had built lifestyle businesses but few whose businesses scaled to the enterprise level. Nor were there enough serial entrepreneurs.
“Now,” she said, “We have entrepreneurs who have built businesses once, twice, five times. There’s such knowledge and learning now about what to do and what not to do they can take the talent to the next level.”
That includes entrepreneurs like Kilcrease herself, people in their 50s and older who have “failed at retirement who are moving here and they’re vibrant and active and want to help those entrepreneurs who are starting out. Growing a business from one to three people is one thing…but when you get to growing a business from 50 to 300 that’s a whole different way of managing. We have the managers here now and the talent to make that possible.”
In fact, Kilcrease later called out an audience member from Dell who asked what contribution that company could make toward Austin 3.0. A company like Dell, she said, that has successfully scaled and is now reinventing itself could be a great resource of guidance and mentorship to help other local companies do the same.
Kilcrease was interviewed Tuesday night by John Sibley Butler, director of the Kelleher Center at the final event of Entrepreneurship Live, a series she created for interviewing serial entrepreneurs about their experiences.
Kilcrease is a 25-year veteran of the Austin entrepreneurial scene and watched the city evolve from one that relied on state government, the University and peripherally the oil and gas industry, into a hub for startups. In 1992 she became executive director of the University of Texas IC2 Institute’s Center for Commercialization and Enterprise. She co-developed and launched the Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), one of the country’s first technology incubators, and served as ATI’s founding executive director. Kilcrease also launched The Capital Network, one of the largest “business angel” investor networks in the United States with more than $150 million in completed transactions
Kilcrease talked about the evolution of the startup ecosystem and where it is headed, largely from a funding standpoint.
“Early stage companies were funded in an ecosystem…where you could give a venture capitalist a 12-page powerpoint presentation on your idea and get $5-or-$10-million,” she said. “Now you couldn’t present a running company and get $5-or-$10 million.”
Venture capitalists have become more risk averse because it’s harder to take companies public and IPOs give investors a far greater return on investment. Enter the angels investors of whom the Central Texas Angel Network is the fourth most active in the country. In recent years, she said, roughly $29 billion has been invested by VCs in startups annually, with about 3,000 companies receiving that funding. Angels, meanwhile, have invested $20 billion in 50,000 to 60,000 companies. More angels have become investors in networks and clubs as well. But now, crowd funding seems to be encroaching on the kinds of deals the angels traditionally made, since new Securities and Exchange rules will require crowd funding investors to be SEC approved.
At the same time, more companies are beginning as lean startups requiring relatively little investment.
“There are a lot more tools today than there used to be,” she said. “Lean startup, three day startup, accelerators. There are a myriad of different ways to enter the discourse about entrepreneurship and how to get going…. What I’ve seen is that people start not with assumption that they’re going to try to make a traditional business as in, do you have an IP, what is the market…there’s not a 30-page business plan. They’re driven by new business models.”
As a judge at SXSW Interactive, for example, she always asks “How are you going to make money?” and the response is frequently “I don’t know. We’ll just get the technology out there and see what happens.”
One of Kilcrease’s passions is to make entrepreneurship accessible for more people. Twenty years ago, she said, most entrepreneurs were 35-to-45 years old with some experience under their belts. Now most people think of entrepreneurs as the Mark Zuckerbergs, fresh out college without the responsibilities many middle-aged people carry. But now people over 50 are becoming entrepreneurs at a rapid rate.
Moreover, as an immigrant herself from England, Kilcrease would like to see barriers removed for immigrants who, she pointed out, already had to overcome barriers to leave their home countries and adapt to U.S. culture.
One audience member asked whether this evolving ecosystem Kilcrease described in Austin would be choked by the rapidly growing population and all the problems that brings. Kilcrease, however, said that the focus could not just be on Austin but on all of Central Texas. That’s the real ecosystem. And while Austin was no longer a small city where most of the key players could sit down in one room and work things out, it could still evolve positively.
For example, rather than business incubators and accelerators fighting over a particular business, they could all just support one another’s successes.
“We complain about traffic and complain about other things but we’re still ranked as one of three top growth areas…. With anything good, there are things you need to tweak.
We need to solve the problems and make sure that everyone’s involved. And be thankful we’re doing well in a great place.”

By Ian Panchèvre
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The legal industry is facing disruption.
Outsourcing legal services abroad is becoming increasingly common. Online companies such as Legalzoom and WireLawyer are making documents more accessible to casual legal consumers. And in the midst of all the change, a San Antonio law firm is blazing its own trail in true startup fashion.
González & Mosier is an up-and-coming law firm that offices out of Geekdom, in San Antonio. G&M was founded by Luis González, Roberto Rondero de Mosier, and Nathan Roach.
Collectively, the trio represents a diverse legal background. Roach – a Trinity and St. Mary’s law graduate – considers his expertise to be litigation and technology. González – a product of Stanford and UT law – is a man of immigration and domestic and international business law. Whereas Mosier – also a Stanford and St. Mary’s graduate – fancies sports, entertainment, and general business. All three consider intellectual property an area of expertise.
While working as a litigation consultant, Roach developed the opinion that attorney’s at most law firms operate in silos. This was a problem that the partners wanted to solve when forming G&M.
As the first and only law firm to have an office at Geekdom, they sought to develop an integrated approach towards business law that is well-suited to the legal needs of technology startups.
Startups are different than traditional businesses in a number of ways. Accordingly, they face unique challenges and legal considerations.
For example, a common challenge with startups is funding. After all, startups that aren’t fully funded can still have costly, legal needs.
“Coming from the perspective of an entrepreneur, we know budgets can be very constrained and that funding is oftentimes an issue,” explains González. “So we tell our clients, ‘we want to build a long term relationship with you, we want to grow with you.’”
In that spirit, G&M has been operating a client-centric billing model, something they refer to as value-based billing.
Roach elaborates on the issue: “With firms that do billable hours, the bill is measured by the convenience of the attorney, not the value that is provided to the client.”
In contrast, G&M meets with its clients to talk about their needs and the value an attorney can deliver. A number or a structure is then established that quantifies the monetary value of their services, as opposed to setting an hourly rate and then running the clock.
“If it doesn’t match up on a billable hour basis, that’s okay because the client will find that we delivered value for them,” concludes Roach.
Another novel characteristic of G&M’s integrated approach is the firm’s position on business consulting.
Once upon a time, attorneys were commonly identified as “Attorneys and Counselors.” The implication being that advising on general business matters was part of a lawyer’s purview.
“The ‘counselors’ part doesn’t get as much attention these days,” observes Roach. “But a lot of times that’s the more important part of the relationship… Sometimes a problem doesn’t require a legal solution.”
An additional trait of the firm’s integrated approach is an atypical understanding of technology, which relieves G&M’s clients from the educational process they often encounter with traditional law firms.
“Here, someone comes in and has a question on whether or not they are violating their terms of services because of a particular way they are attacking an API,” says Roach. “And we can talk about it without having to say, ‘okay, let me go back and look up what an API is.’”
Scheduling is another challenge. Given that startup entrepreneurs are notorious for erratic work schedules, G&M often meets with clients at odd hours and on off days. “Saturday and Sunday meetings are common,” notes González.
While these entrepreneurial attorneys are busy with a peculiar work schedule, they maintain that their efforts are in support of a greater cause.
“Geekdom’s community mission is very important to us,” says Roach.
To that extent, G&M has offered pro bono legal clinics for the Geekdom community. “We’re in a unique position to help these companies succeed,” continues Roach. “If we have a legal relationship, that’s great. But a lot of it is simply education for the community.”
Roach goes on to describe the legal “circle of life” that he gets to experience with clients. “Most companies start off with a legal need when they form,” Roach notes. As they mature, “their legal needs change.” And eventually, “they either need to sell or wind down.”
At Geekdom, companies in the beginning of their lifecycle are in abundance. But as these startups grow into sustainable businesses, the need will arise for a legal team that can work with companies “no matter where they are in their corporate life.”
While G&M works to fill that role for its clients – which include some of the most recognizable companies at Geekdom – the founders also give thought to the lifecycle of their own business.
“Five years from now, expect us to expand our presence in Austin, New York, and California,” predicts Roach.
González continues: “We want to become the premier firm for business law and intellectual property. I know that’s a lofty goal. But the most important thing is making sure that our clients are able to say that they have something special with us.”
It appears that they are on the right track.
Parlevel Systems – a Techstars Cloud startup that is connecting vending machines to the web – is a G&M client. Walter Teele, the CTO of Parlevel, comments on “the human side” as a compelling strength of G&M.
“Not only are they professionally good, but they are really cool people. They really like to get involved with you and give you close attention.”
Roach attributes the strong relationships that G&M has with its clients as a primary driver behind the firm’s growth.
“Even in the first year of the company’s life, our growth has wildly exceeded our expectations. The response has been fantastic. We have not had to do much in the way of marketing… all our business is referral driven, with one client telling another client, it’s been great.”
All things considered, G&M certainly departs from the library-with-wood-paneled-walls ethos embodied by traditional law firms.
“Each of us like being disruptive,” says Roach with a bit of a grin. “It’s fun to be hacking the law.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com

Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud program was featured recently on We Are Austin Tech.
Seats, cofounder of Slicehost, a cloud hosting company, has helped countless entrepreneurs through the TechStars Cloud program. He is also an active angel investor.
In 2008, Rackspace acquired Slicehost. Seats moved from St. Louis to San Antonio. For two years, he served as vice president for software development at Rackspace, managing its cloud computing business.
Late in 2011, Seats agreed to become the managing director of the new TechStars Cloud program. Its first class graduated 11 companies last year and 12 companies this year. The program just wrapped up with TechStars Demo Day last Thursday.
And Tuesday, Seats will be the first interview for the inaugural Startup Grind San Antonio program, an affiliate with Startup Grind in Mountain View, Calif. The event at Geekdom begins at 6 p.m. Tuesday evening with pizza and beer, sponsored by Vid Luther, founder of ZippyKid. The interview will start at 7 p.m. If you haven’t gotten your ticket to this hot event, please do so soon and join us Tuesday night at Geekdom.
Also next Monday, Andi Gillentine, cofounder of Whit.li and director of Startup Grind Austin, will interview Mellie Price, a serial entrepreneur who most recently founded and sold Front Gate Tickets. Be sure to get your ticket to that event at Capital Factory in Austin.

IBM Austin is having a day-long Mentor Day on May 8th at its IBM Innovation Center in Austin.
The company is inviting startups from Austin and San Antonio to apply to participate in the program. Mentor Days are part of the IBM Global Entrepreneur program. The deadline to apply is Monday, April 22nd.
IBM is looking for startups addressing the world’s problem in energy, water, traffic, transportation, healthcare, telecommunications and other societal issues. To apply, a startup must be less than five years old and it must be privately held.
There’s also a public portion of the event featuring the startups pitching and a networking reception afterwards.
IBM is seeking to identify, support, mentor and promote early stage technology entrepreneurs and it plans to offer other mentorship events this year.
“The first part of the day’s proceedings will bring the small group of selected startups together to briefly introduce their companies with quick pitches, and then they will be matched up with our coaches for mentoring sessions,” according to IBM. “The second part of the day will be open to the public and each startup will have six minutes to share how their businesses make our planet smarter.”
Two companies will be selected by mentors and the audience to move on to the interview stage of IBM’s regional SmartCamp event in North America in the Fall.

ZeroVM is creating the world’s first cloud hypervisor, which is a piece of software that creates and runs virtual machines.
The team from Israel has created an open source platform for cloud computing that is fast and efficient. The open source program runs on Openstack, the operating system for the cloud, which Rackspace created along with NASA.
The ZeroVM Team has spent the past week in Portland, Oregon at the Openstack Summit meeting with customers. They arrived back in San Antonio just in time to pitch ZeroVM at the TechStars Cloud Demo Day on Thursday.
Camuel Gilyadov, one of the team’s founders, presented the company. Its slide showing “5 Geeks with Russian accents,” got a big laugh.

Silicon Hills News Founder Laura Lorek recently interviewed ZeroVM about is product and plans to change the world.