Category: Austin (Page 255 of 318)

Providing further validation that Texas has a red hot tech market, Xconomy has launched its eighth bureau in the Lone Star State.
Xconomy, based in Cambridge, MA., covers innovation hubs in Boston, Boulder/Denver, Detroit, New York, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.
“Texans pride themselves on being independent, adventurous, and hard-charging: the same characteristics that make for great innovators,” according to Xconomy’s news release.
Angela Shah, a former reporter with the Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman, is the editor of Xconomy Texas. She’s based in Houston. But it’s Xconomy’s first bureau named after a state instead of a city.
“Texas is unique in that the people who live there identify more with the state as a whole than an individual city,” Bob Buderi, Xconomy CEO and Editor in Chief said in a news statement. “In keeping with this spirit, we felt that it made more sense to have a statewide bureau, rather than a city-based model, especially as we build our presence.”
“Texas has long been a robust part of the U.S. economy with contributions in energy, life sciences and technology,” Shah said in a news statement. “I’m looking forward to now being able to share with Xconomy’s readers the stories of Texas’ personalities and their innovations coming out of its startups, universities and research centers.”
To support the Texas bureau, Xconomy has partnered with BioHouston, BioMed San Antonio, Capital Royalty, Cooley LLP, Rice University, Texas Medical Center, University of Houston, and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.

Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, is known to say “the world’s problems will not be solved by another website.”
The co-inventor of Ethernet, which celebrates its 40th anniversary on May 22, and founder of 3Com, should know.
Metcalfe falls into the category of entrepreneur known as an innovator. He created an innovation driven entreprise that changed the world.
He’s even got his own law: Metcalfe’s Law.
To illustrate the difference between innovators and the other startups, the Kauffman Foundation has just released a report, “A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs: Understanding Differences in the Types of Entrepreneurship in the Economy,” detailing how “not all startup companies are created equal.”
Both “innovation-driven entreprises” and “traditional small and medium sized entreprises” can create valuable products, services and jobs, but it’s the big innovators that take on global problems and “can potentially create hundreds or even thousands of high skill jobs if they succeed.”
So the question begs does the high tech region of Austin and San Antonio have enough innovation driven entreprises? And if not, why not?
Certainly, the region has produced quite a few: Dell, National Instruments and Rackspace among others.
“People who use entrepreneurship as a ‘catch-all’ phase to capture a single economic activity make an important mistake,” Bill Aulet, managing director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and coauthor of the paper, said in a statement. “Each type faces different hiring challenges, funding needs, growth potential, risk levels and other needs that support organizations must understand to successfully help these companies.”
The Kauffman report details how innovation driven startups are often focused on global markets and are often founded by highly educated individuals with diverse skills and they require external investors. Whereas small and medium startups focus on local or regional markets and they require little outside investment.

By Ian Panchèvre
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

3 Day Startup was a success!
“How so?” you ask.
Well, one of my takeaways from 3DS was an emphasis on using key metrics. In that spirit, I’ve developed a metric that I call the Active Sleep Debt Ratio (ASDR), which is the ratio of the number of hours you’ve slept over the past day.
For example, if over the past 24 hours you’ve enjoyed a healthy 8 hours of sleep, you would have an ASDR of 0.33. The highest ASDR is 1.0, which is only possible after a period of extreme sleep deprivation or medical hardship.
Well, in this case, the day after 3DS, I posted an ASDR of 0.71 with 17 hours of sleep. When it was all said and done, I was very tired.

But please, don’t interpret my ASDR as a complaint. Rather, I see it as a source of pride. All the late nights and early mornings were definitely worth it. Some awesome things happened during those 5-hour-energy-induced bursts of alertness.
For one, I grew as an entrepreneur. Little things, like a worthy book or an interesting concept, frequently came up during conversation. More mechanical things, like research and pitch techniques, were absorbed from both mentors and other participants.
But the opportunity to immediately apply those new insights to a particular task was the best part of the educational experience.
“The experiential learning is really great to see in action,” noted Josh Schechter, an organizer of the event.
Cristal Glangchai, also an event organizer and the director of Trinity’s entrepreneurship program, built on that sentiment during her remarks Sunday evening. Glangchai pointed out that while chemists and biologist have laboratories, artists have studios, and engineers have machine shops, entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have a defined destination for developing their skills.
“3DS is essentially an applied environment for entrepreneurship,” stated Glangchai.
What are some of the things that happen when you compress the entrepreneurial experience into a single weekend? Nerf gun battles and sprints to the kitchen for food were only part of it.
“Pivots,” declared Cole Wollak, a 3DS mentor. “We saw multiple pivots throughout the weekend. Which is good, it indicates that teams are learning.”
Yes, if there is one constant in entrepreneurship, it is that there are no constants. Change is an ever-present force that should be embraced rather than resisted.
To that extent, it was interesting to see how the various projects and teams morphed over the weekend. The company my team worked on, grantsfor.me, changed quite a bit, quite often.
Our journey started with general observations from Wesley Zernial, a grant expert who works with non-profit organizations. Through him, we learned that the system was broken. Market research, brainstorming sessions, and friendly debates caused our team to explore a number of possible solutions: a marketplace to connect grant writers and applicants; an online educational resource center; a common platform for grant providers and grant seekers…
Ultimately, grantsfor.me would improve the grant experience by matching grant seekers with the best possible grant opportunities for them, and by making it easy to electronically file grant applications online. “Match.com meets TurboTax,” we were fond of saying.
Before I knew it, Sunday evening came around. While the Spurs were steamrolling over the Lakers to complete their playoff sweep, I was part of a large crowd that attended the final pitches.
On Friday, 15 concepts were presented. By Saturday evening, the list of concepts had narrowed down to 9. And on Sunday, 5 startups, including grantsfor.me, pitched to a panel of judges, investors, and supporters of San Antonio’s entrepreneurial community.
Dean’s List helps reduce dishonesty and risk during the hiring process by supplementing the traditional resume with a more nuanced work history.
Deal Frenzy seeks to gamify the deal hunting and mobile couponing experience.
Maker Cubes is getting in on the exciting additive manufacturing revolution with its own version of 3D printing.
And finally, one of the more memorable quotes of the weekend – “Think about Kickstarter and American Apparel having a baby and ‘BOOM!’” – came courtesy of Martel Mathews when he was describing 10,000 Threads, a marketplace for fashion designers.
“I thought they all performed admirably,” said Sheridan Chambers, a member of the 3DS judging panel and a Principal at the Denim Group. “The groups were all great. They did an amazing amount of work in a very short period of time.”
After the pitches concluded and the audience had dispersed, an awards ceremony and after party had the entire 3DS body in an upbeat mood.
Throughout the process, “the groups really came together,” shared Mariah Villarreal, a participant.
Glangchai concurred: “The chemistry of the groups was amazing, everyone took feedback really well.”
But perhaps, what had everyone most excited, wasn’t reflective joy over a weekend well-spent, but rather, growing excitement for the future of our community.
“I am thrilled for San Antonio, that it has the brain power and entrepreneurial minds that we were able to see in action,” beamed Cynthia Schluter, an audience member at the final pitches.
Thanks to 3DS, forty local entrepreneurs are now better equipped to pursue their dreams and start new ventures.

A year ago, TechRanch expanded its reach into Chile.
It struck up a partnership with startups in South America to foster that region’s entrepreneurial base.
Now, TechRanch, a coworking space and incubator in Austin, has expanded even further this time into Asia with a partnership in the city-state island of Singapore.
TechRanch and Get2Volume announced their partnership today “to incubate and grow technology companies in Austin, Texas and Singapore,” according to a news release.
Get2volume, funded by Singapore’s National Research Foundation, invests in, mentors and helps grow innovative microelectronics-centric companies.
TechRanch and G2V plan to collaborate to help each venture launch startups in their respective countries.
“Technology companies are global from day one,” Mike Holt, Get2Volume CEO, said in a news release. “Working together with TechRanch, we bring our companies global growth and execution capabilities”.
“This partnership provides portfolio companies with access to capital, connections and complementary capability. We look forward to working together to nurture and empower the next generation of technology entrepreneurs and enable their success” Sandeep Kumar, General Partner Business Development, TechRanch, said in a news release.

By Andrew Moore
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Two years ago, UT journalism professor Robert Quigley had an idea – put together University of Texas students from both the journalism and computer science schools with the goal of producing commercially viable mobile apps in a single semester.
Recently, Quigley posted the following on Facebook:
“This class was just a blurry idea a year ago. Today, one of my student groups – Glos Guide for Journalists – got an app in the Apple App Store. Amazing work for a team of undergrads to pull this off in one semester.”
The Mobile News App Design class held their first ever Demo Day at the Belo Center for New Media at the University of Texas Austin campus on Saturday. The class produced five apps — all of which will be available in the Apple App Store at some point. Students will be able to keep the revenue. Judges from several different news organizations provided feedback and advice to the student developers and gave them awards.
The Glos Guide for Journalists iPhone app won Best Overall App. It is essentially a quick reference guide for the AP stylebook – the official grammar, punctuation, and practices guide of the U.S. news industry. The app breaks down rules into categories for easy navigation, and allows users to bookmark and print out rules in a PDF format.
The students who created the Glos Guide consulted different journalism professionals throughout its development. As a result, they compiled a resource of tips and advice given by each professional. Users can search these journalism tips by author. Several UT journalism professors contributed advice, including Robert Quigley and Kate Dawson.
The app does not include the complete AP stylebook – that would have caused a copyright issue – but it does include basic hard-to-find rules such as when to capitalize directions such as “north”. It is available in the Apple App Store for 99 cents.

One of the reasons for the Glos Guide’s success was the simplicity of the product, as the team was careful to avoid a problem known as “feature creep”.
“Some of the more successful apps are the apps that are just simpler in nature,” said Event Judge Chris Visit of Frank+Victor design. “Apps that are resources tend to be the most successful because they have a finite universe of content. You’re not aggregating data or dealing with user submissions.”
The most news-related app of the bunch was Nerv, a newsfeed app that piggybacks on Twitter. Nerv aggregates credible twitter news handles for major cities, and makes them easily searchable. The app’s goal is to help users find out what is going on quickly and easily.
“The big difference is that it’s credible,” said UT computer science senior Jonathan Long. “It is definitely easier to use and the information is more readily available.”
Currently the app only covers Austin, Boston, San Francisco and Portland; but the team is looking at adding more cities. Nerv is available in the App Store for free. Long hopes that local businesses in these cities will want to work with their app to provide better information and perhaps some revenue.
The one iPad app of the bunch was PicBook – a scrapbooking app integrated with Facebook. PicBook works with the picture tags in Facebook to let users pull the photos they have in common with one or multiple friends. Once the pictures load, the iPad app will automatically resize them to fit in a digital scrapbook were users can easily move and rotate the photos. Users can also add text, colorful backgrounds, and other touches to their digital scrapbook.
Implementing a good graphic design was a major challenge for all the teams, and PicBook’s biggest development issue was keeping the layout clean and simple enough for anyone to use the PicBook interface.
“It was hard to decide how to set up the pages so that they were really intuitive to use and also looked aesthetically pleasing,” said journalism graduate student Jeana Bertoldi. “For the journalism students it was hard to make the design, and then for them (Computer Science students) it was hard to implement the design.”
PicBook will have a freemium business model where the core app is free and users can purchase additional features. The PicBook team is now putting the finishing touches on the app and will submit it to the App Store next month. They will eventually incorporate a website where users can upload and compare their PicBooks. Users will also be able to post the PicBooks to their Facebook pages.
An app with a more narrow news approach was Prix-Party – which focused on Formula One racing news. Designed to keep people keep connected to Formula One events, the app keeps track of the location, time, and cost of the events around Austin with a simple list view. The Prix-Party team worked closely with Kevin Olsen at The Austin Grand Prix to bring the app to market. Additionally, their app collects Formula One tweets so users know what the racing community is talking about.
The Prix-Party team experienced the pressures of a real world app development cycle first hand, giving them valuable experience in working with team dynamics.
“At first our team was getting along great, and then as the pressure began to build we started to have this stormy phase where we were getting irritated with each other,” said journalism senior Caleb Ingles. “It got to the point where we had no choice but to figure out a way to work together.”
“You have to learn a lot about project management,” said computer science major Angela Deng. “If you don’t manage things right you’re going to hold up your entire team and just waste time.”
The Prix-Party app will be submitted to the App Store a few weeks from now. The students have already created an iPhone style commercial for the app.

Last but not least is Pxljam. This app is designed to give the “360 concert experience” by allowing all the users who attend a concert to easily upload the photos to a consolidated gallery accessible with the Pxljam app. After a fan takes a concert picture, they add the name of the band and the location before uploading the image. Pxljam will then collect all these images and sort them.
The Pxljam team realizes that their app’s success depends on how many users upload content, so they have focused a lot of development time on promoting their app through social media in order to create a pre-release fan base.
One of the biggest challenges the Pxljam team faced was settling on a layout design and style for the product that really represented who they are.
“We went through so many phases of what Pxljam was,” said journalism graduate student Carlos Morales. “The hardest part was coming to a point where we could say ‘ok, this is what it is.’”
Pxljam has already been submitted to the App Store as a free download, and will notify fans on their Pxljam Facebook page when the app is live. They hope to work with Austin music venues to begin creating revenue.

The Mobil News App Design course was the first class of its kind at the journalism school of the University of Texas in Austin.
The class was composed of 13 computer science students and 13 journalism students. Senior Lecturer Robert Quigley led the class from a journalism perspective. Austin tech entrepreneur Joshua McClure mentored the class on the app development and computer science side. Students in both disciplines had to quickly learn basic skills in iOS coding language “Objective C”, as well as Photoshop skills, app layout principles, and the basic principles of media and journalism.
“The idea was to bridge the two disciplines and try to make journalists who can apply to geek jobs and know that they’re going to get it because they have the experience of having built an app,” said journalism professor Robert Quigley. “And also to give the computer science students more of a well rounded communications perspective.”
Quigley originally pitched the idea for the class to Journalism School Director Glenn Frankel and Associate Director Wanda Cash more than a year ago. After this class’s success, the Journalism School will continue to pursue app design courses.
Quigley will help create an Intro to Mobile Programming for Journalists course this fall, which will be taught by freelance iPhone developer Jeff Linwood who helped teach coding in this inaugural class. The class has been posted and is already full. Professor Quigley is more than impressed with the students in his first app design class, and can’t wait to teach the next Mobile News App Design class In spring of 2014.
“I’m unbelievably proud of my students. They worked so hard. They were so creative. They had so much fun. They learned so much. I can’t put it into words how exciting this is for me,” said Quigley. “This was a really special class.”

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.”