Mass Relevance held an open house and gave tours of its new downtown office at 800 Brazos St. in Austin.
The company took a 12,000 square foot space and transformed it into a cool high-tech office.
Sam Decker, CEO of Mass Relevance, shared this video on Twitter. It shows the company’s open design for its offices and its kitchen and lounge space with video game consoles and ping pong table.
Mass Relevance has created a social media platform that allows content publishers to create new revenue streams around curated and integrated experiences on TV, the Web, mobile and large screen displays. Its clients include NBC Sports, NFL Football, Cisco, Samsung, and Pepsi and media companies like CNN, Boston Global, New York Times and Washington Post. Sports teams using the platform include the New York Giants, San Francisco Giants and the Boston Celtics.
Back in August, Technology Reporter Lori Hawkins of the Austin American Statesman wrote this story on Mass Relevance’s move downtown. Apparently, it’s part of a trend of high-tech startups moving downtown.
Category: Austin (Page 274 of 318)
By EHREN FOSS
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
What’s the whole story?
The purpose of the rest of this post isn’t to tell the whole story of HelpAttack! We hope, however, to pass along the most valuable wisdom we have accrued.
Sarah Vela came up with the idea that became HelpAttack! during Austin’s “Movember” fundraiser of 2009. Austin’s team had a lot of social media people on it, and Sarah’s feed became noisy with fundraising asks. Why can’t we just give each time we Tweet about other stuff?
Sarah knew David and David knew Ehren and we all got together to talk about the idea, at that point called “Change4Change.” In April of 2010 we paid some lawyers and became a Delaware C Corp. We developed an early version late that spring and early summer, and launched our “Beta” on August 23rd.
The core of the idea – giving each time you send a Tweet, no matter what the Tweet is about – soon grew into a broader concept: Micro donations driven by all kinds of online activity: Facebook posts, blog posts, comments, photo and video uploads, petition signatures, and so on.
Individual Supporters
At first, we focused on building an app that individuals could use to support a cause of their choice. Our goal was to become a place where people could express their good natures online, like a Change.org, Care2, or Jumo but focused on social media. We created “coins” which were like Foursquare badges – rewards for making different kinds of pledges.
A cursory look around the internet reveals a graveyard of companies who tried to build their own social networks and own user bases from scratch. At this point we were also seeing signs that while people want to be good and believe they are good, they usually need more of a push to actually do something good. Sharing a photo (think Instagram) doesn’t cost anything. Donating does, and the psychology of people while they are giving is very complex.
Nonprofits
Our next major release, in early February of 2011, included a Facebook integration (for a second pledge type), and a dashboard for nonprofits to log in, access donor data, and monitor their fundraising efforts.
Shortly afterward, American Red Cross and Best Friends Animal Society gave it a go. To date, they were the most successful nonprofits on our platform.
Restructuring
In May of 2011, Sarah and David left the company but stayed on as valuable and active advisers. In August of that year, Vanessa Swesnik joined to kick butt at business development.
Celebrity Ambassadors
Celebrities have large online audiences. The larger the celebrity, the more people after them to post a link or give a shoutout. On the other hand, many celebrities have strong ambassador relationships with nonprofits, and the PR/talent management industry is well versed in the concept.
We learned a few things. One, IMDB Pro, LinkedIn, and a little creative Googling makes it easy to get the right phone number with about 15 minutes of work. Two, these people are professionals.
Remember the Miley Cyrus campaign we blogged about? We called the nonprofit, and learned that the chairman of their board of directors is also the chairman of the Screen Actor’s Guild. Furthermore, while it was now obvious how they were able to get nearly 100 celebrities onboard, they explained that the participating marquee celebrities would not allow the fundraising totals to be shown, as that could be construed as a stand-in for popularity. Celebrities don’t want to appear less popular in any context.
In another case, we reached a PR firm who was interested, but asked that we reconfigure our platform to allow people to give when their client sent out a specific type of Tweet. For example, every time Liza Minelli tweets a photo of herself, her fans would give $1.
We weren’t able to totally win over the staff of any celebrities. We got close a few times.
Cause Marketers
Like celebs, companies have specific goals and hangups when it comes to social media and supporting nonprofits. Retail firms are tough: they want you to buy their stuff, so they are unlikely to push a campaign where the first priority is direct donations to the nonprofit. Other industries have other challenges: regulatory compliance, privacy concerns, and so on.
In the cases where we were able to make a serious pitch for a cause marketing campaign, it was sunk by too many cooks in the kitchen! Having a national nonprofit, and a national brand, and both of their teams of lawyers, together with a PR firm and us… didn’t make much progress.
Nonprofits Again
Ok, so if celebrity ambassadors and cause marketers… back to nonprofits! We spent the rest of our run attempting to convince nonprofits to run social media fundraising campaigns. We used IRS and other data to identify those who would be likely to have a large online community already. We had some success with PETA, Heifer International, World Food Programme, UNICEF USA, and a few others. Several smaller nonprofits surprised us and ran very successful campaigns (for their size).
Still, the amount of effort required to do the convincing, help craft messaging, talk through the results, convince them to continue the campaign, and so on far outweighed the 4% of donations we were getting back. We did a couple custom apps or consulting engagements for organizations to fund a snazzy redesign in the summer of 2012. Success did not follow.
Vanessa, Holly and I were worn out and tired of not having a sustainable business. We talked with David and Sarah and decided to call it quits in early September of this year.
Other Topics
Legally Transacting Tax Deductible Donations
We didn’t know anything about this topic when we started. It took a long time, and a lot of networking and effort, to find a few people who actually knew the rules.
If you are transacting tax deductible donations on behalf of a nonprofit, there are generally two approaches.
One, you can register as a professional solicitor in each state that requires it. This costs around $10,000 in legal fees, more if you have someone do it for you. The professional solicitor structure was created for people who reel in big fish at galas (and get paid for it) and also for some telemarketers who participate – directly or indirectly – in fundraising.
Two, you can set up a donor advised fund. A donor puts money in the fund, and then the fund is required to distribute the money to nonprofits in accordance with the donors wishes. This is most common with trusts or other structures where the donor doesn’t want to deal with as many of the details, but has a lot of money.
Both of those routes were annoying and expensive from a legal perspective, so we looked for a partner who would transact the funds for us and we found Network for Good. At the time, they were the only such entity in the US, and they were also expensive.
We didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out that nobody really knows how the laws apply to third party online fundraisers like HelpAttack! No case has been brought forward far enough in the internet age. Attorneys General are paying attention, and keeping their eye on various parties, but they aren’t aggressively pursuing startups like ours.
So, did we have to pay all the extra money? Probably not. We’re not advocating that anyone skirt the rules. The point is that knowledge is incredibly potent. If we knew we could get the Excel files of every single nonprofit in the US, for free, from an IRS webpage, that would have helped (you can). If FirstGiving had entered the market sooner, that would have helped too. We could have gotten through our first 18 months spending $10k less and generating more revenue than we did.
Our Competitors
There still aren’t very many companies out there doing similar things. Rt2Give (TwitPay) gave up at least a year ago. Snoball continues (thanks to some nice fundraising rounds in lieu of actual growth) and their model is the closest to HelpAttack! Pledge4Good, Rainmaker App, Charity Swear Jar, Pledgie… there are always a spectrum of new companies and new models out there. Kickstarter-style sites, and team fundraising sites, meanwhile, have done very well in the past few years. So…
Does Social Media Fundraising Work?
This is the $100B question. If you’re reading this you probably already know that Americans donate around $300B per year, but that amount has been flat for the last decade. Online giving has been growing hand-over-fist, but still represents only around 10-15% of the total. Meanwhile, direct mail and fundraising from other channels have likely declined by the same margin. If nonprofits are going to grow overall, and gain more resources to fight the world’s ills, online fundraising has to grow faster. Social networks and social media seem like the most obvious place for that to occur.
Some entrepreneurs confide privately that “nonprofits don’t know what they are doing.” In some cases, with regards to online fundraising, that is absolutely true. There are some organizations out there that will be a lot smaller in 10 years for this reason.
But that’s cynical. What’s really going on is that nonprofits don’t seem to have TIME for anything new. Small nonprofits are stretched extremely thin. Even if the executive director “gets” the internet and social media, how much time can they spend? Can they afford any of the tools that help save time? Can they afford ads to help boost their community growth? Medium and large nonprofits suffer from other maladies: The most common is that the communications team may do a fabulous job managing the website, blog, and social media, but the fundraising department is in another silo. The communications team is driven by engagement: likes, comments, stories, interactions, and community growth. We observed that this environment does not make it easy to create, establish, and sustain a recurring fundraising program within an online community. That’s a whole new ball of wax and although large nonprofits have more resources and staff, they still don’t have enough bandwidth.
Another factor is that after a few years of record growth and constant buzz, financial realities have hit Facebook and other networks, and many nonprofits are disillusioned at their inability to efficiently reach the communities they worked so hard to build.
I still believe social media fundraising absolutely can work. For most who try, it doesn’t, because:
The numbers don’t work out: Not enough people see or spread enough posts to generate enough clicks for the conversion rate to favor viral growth. You either need to start with a very large audience or sacrifice the fundraising potency of a message for viral potency. The solution to this problem is to nurture partners with larger communities and to craft a set of messaging that will spread AND get clicked on.
They only try once. Almost never will a single Facebook post bring in a significant amount of money (natural disasters perhaps the notable exception)
Social media and fundraising practices at most nonprofits are not integrated. Sometimes these teams don’t even talk.
Perhaps we would have been successful if we executed our plans better, or perhaps we would have been successful with different plans, or the same plans in a different order. Who knows. A few people said we were more of a feature than a business, and that may have been true.
What do you think? Good luck to all those working to crack this very tough nut!
About Ehren Foss: “Co-Founder and CEO: has a decade of diverse technical experience with web programming, database administration, and many of the open source tools that help make the web an amazing place to work. He is the founder of Prelude Interactive, a web development firm. Before that he worked at Alchemy Systems an Austin, TX company specializing in professional development and training systems. Ehren is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Editor’s note: This post first was first attributed incorrectly to David J. Neff, co-founder of HelpAttack. It appeared on HelpAttack!’s website and is reprinted here with Neff’s permission. The Austin-based startup shut down in October.
By PAUL O’BRIEN
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Having spent a couple years now in Austin, and the previous 12 in Silicon Valley, a frequent topic of discussion over drinks or dinner is the question of how entrepreneurship works. Not “Startups” per se, at least not in the context that we think of them when reading about all the innovation on TechCrunch; rather, mere entrepreneurship and the fact that people are wired to work for themselves.
It’s really an intriguing topic when you consider entrepreneurship where you live. As a country, we’re excited by the hype machine that fuels entrepreneurship in California but generally speaking, the economy there is NOT entrepreneurial. It’s simply too expensive. Other than the funded ventures served by the exceptional amount of capital available to the brilliant innovators there, people generally don’t work for themselves, at least not compared to the ambitious entrepreneurs of a place like Austin; who I’d bet, are not unlike the individuals creating opportunity in your city.
There are countless comparisons of one city to another; one economy to another. People love to posit and debate what makes one community thrive while another fails or why a city churns out billion dollar ventures while another rarely crosses that threshold. My thoughts here are along the same lines but I’ve come to a conclusion of late that I think is unique and worth considering.
If we distill down all of the variables driving an economy, we can conclude that there are only two types of entrepreneurial markets in the U.S.: High Cost vs. Low Cost.
The High Cost Startup Economy
High cost markets are flush with experience, new talent, and ideas BUT require greater investment in business simply to get started. As a result, the “ideas” which receive investment are already fleshed out by experience, ambition, collaboration, and a network of peer professionals BECAUSE no one can afford to start a business without being so capable and taking an idea to market worth investment. This gives such markets (think San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York) a tremendous advantage and the opportunity to go for big risks; you see this in the billion dollar valuations of Silicon Valley, the dominance of the entertainment industry through LA, and the center of commerce in New York.
Of course, I’m generalizing.
The Low Cost Startup Economy
Lost cost markets are also flush with experience, talent, and ideas but it takes virtually nothing to get started. Consider the expensive cities on the coast vs. middle America – It costs $185 per hour to get a Ruby on Rails developer in San Francisco. What requires $750k in capital investment there takes only $250k elsewhere. As a result, a few things happen:
Startups from those big cities get a lot of attention; much of it for no reason other than how big they seem. After all, a $750k investment is newsworthy! Isn’t it? No one bats an eye at the same exact startup in another city raising only $250k. What a pittance!
PR = traction
The flaw in that happening is that PR = traction; for good ideas and bad. Capital buys time and resources and in our increasingly outsourced economy, even though it costs more to hire talent in those expensive cities, $750k applied to some overseas developers goes a LONG way further than $250k. Time = opportunity.
Time = opportunity
Entrepreneurs in middle America try to replicate from the coasts… let’s do it like they did… without appreciating everything that goes into making those economies work – A great idea, some money, and we’re set! The problem is that other factors are easily overlooked: experience, ambition, collaboration, and a network of peer professionals, PLUS the PR impact of being in those high costs markets. Inexpensive markets can’t replicate what happens in those expensive cities so why are we trying? Rather, learn from their examples as what works there, in those market dynamics, won’t work the same way elsewhere.
What’s an idea worth?
Are “ideas” new? Are ideas worth anything? How does your city feel about big ideas? Expensive cities seem to fully embrace the perspective that there is no new idea and that it’s about execution. After all, ideas in high cost markets really aren’t even ideas by the time we hear about them, they’ve been vetted, tested, and in development by experienced individuals. They work that way because of that first, and the next, considerations but important to evaluate is that in that, no one is testing an idea; everyone, all the investment, development, advisors, investors, and entrepreneurs, are focused on executing, scaling, and growing. What’s happening where you live? Are people validating ideas or scaling businesses?
Perhaps most important, in low cost markets, entrepreneurs with ideas can easily, and therefore all to often, try to go it alone. If not alone, with few others, from the sense of independence that smaller towns and middle America seems to encourage. Silicon Valley, for example, isn’t an entrepreneurial environment – it’s a startup environment. There is a BIG difference. Entrepreneurs have a bit of the lone wolf in them whereas startups are never sole proprietorships. Entrepreneurs can’t and shouldn’t do it all themselves. There is NO reason to Learn and Discover (my 3rd point) how to scale when the rest of the country already knows so much about your industry, marketing channels, segments, etc. High cost markets put more emphasis on Agile principles for the very reason that they must leverage one another because it’s too expensive to do anything but get the dang thing out and get some proof – and then iterate, iterate, iterate. The high cost of a market forces people to appreciate that time and resources are valuable and though expensive, I don’t have the time to discover something with which I’m unfamiliar – I’m going to focus on what I know well and collaborate with others who can contribute what I need.
So ask yourself and please share with me, how much of this rings true about where you live. Don’t consider the access to talent, experience, education, or even capital that drives your economy; simply consider the cost of doing business where you live. How much of that cost determines how your economy works and drives how entrepreneurship might excel with your support.
The mere cost of markets creates different cultures and expectations and rather than learning from one another we try to emulate things. Expensive markets try to attract and retain the talent from inexpensive markets while inexpensive markets try to replicate how expensive markets work. It’s a failed approach which in and of itself needs innovation if we’re to foster entrepreneurship in the United States.
About the author: Paul O’Brien “has held many formal roles, from VP of Marketing for Zvents and Outright, to managing interactive marketing for HP and designing online advertising for Yahoo! He is most proud of having been featured in the Michael Miller book, Online Marketing Heroes, as one of the 25 leading online marketers as well as appearing in Internet Retailer, KGO Radio, Webmaster Radio, and DM News.”
Editor’s Note: This post originally appeared on Paul O’Brien’s SEOBrien website. It is reprinted here with his permission.
One Source Networks, a managed voice, data and cloud services provider, has struck an agreement to buy OuterNet, a cloud managed solutions provider, based in Austin.
The San Antonio-based company did not provide the details of the sale but reported it’s expected to close in the next month.
The deal also includes OuterNet’s 10,000 square foot data center in Austin. One Source Networks has data centers in Greensboro, N.C., Dallas, Chicago and Los Angeles.
“We are very excited about what this acquisition will mean for our customers, and the OSN and OuterNet team members,” Ernest Cunningham, CEO, One Source Networks, said in a news statement. “OSN and OuterNet have worked together for the past three years to deliver managed network services to our enterprise clients. The OuterNet team has a deep level of technical expertise and talent which will be a valuable asset for our customers, and their hands-on, customized approach to enterprise networking meshes perfectly with OSN’s. The combined capabilities will allow us to deliver even greater value and innovation to enterprises.”
The San Antonio Business Journal reports that OuterNet, founded in 1994, has 22 employees while One Source Networks has 45 employees.
Josh Huck, CEO of HeyRide
The company, founded in 2012, draws its inspiration from “the success of collaborative consumption companies such as Airbnb and car2 go.”
Heyride has established an alternative marketplace to cabs in Austin. It’s a place where people can give and receive rides via their smartphones.
Last week, the Austin Chronicle published a cover story on HeyRide. Shortly after that the City of Austin issued a statement reporting the city had sent HeyRide a cease and desist order on Oct. 31.
The City reports that HeyRide “very closely resembles that of a taxi franchise and that any operation dispatching drivers to potential passengers ondemand requires a City Council approved Franchise Agreement, and that all drivers are required to successfully satisfy criminal background and driving history checks as set forth by the Austin City Code.”
The Austin American-Statesmen originally reported that the City had shut HeyRide down. But Josh Huck, its CEO, reported on the Austin Startups Facebook group that HeyRide is still operating.
Q. How did you come up with the idea for Heyride?
A. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get a ride during SXSW, and I wondered why I couldn’t just ask someone for a lift. I decided that it was pretty ridiculous that people weren’t able to connect in this way, as I’d been traveling around the world using services like Couchsurfing and Airbnb for years. So I decided to build it myself.
Q. How does it work?
A. You fire up Heyride, say where you are and where you want to go and a driver makes a bid on your ride. You choose who you want to ride with and they take you where you want to go. You pay electronically with your phone and the credit card you have on file.
Q. How many people are signed up for the HeyRide service currently?
A. We’ve currently signed up almost 1000 users.
Q. How many do you anticipate will use the service?
A. We’d like to take Heyride national, so we think the sky’s the limit. After Austin, we’ll be exploring new markets and spreading the word.
Q. How does HeyRide make money?
A. If you give a Heyride, you take 80% and Heyride takes 20% as a service fee.
Q. Why has the City of Austin taken action against HeyRide to shut the service down?
A. Actually, they haven’t taken any action yet. A cease and desist doesn’t mean Heyride is going anywhere. We don’t feel that the City of Austin actually understands our business model; specifically, the difference between a taxi cab company and people using a platform that enables peer-to-peer ride-sharing. Because of that, they’re standing beside old-school regulations that haven’t caught up to innovations in the marketplace. We’re confident that once we open a dialogue, we’ll be able to work together for a common goal: making Austin a better place where it’s easy to get a ride when you need one.
Q. How do you plan to deal with that?
A. We’re going to begin a dialogue with the city, mobilize our customers to raise their voices on our behalf, basically get people behind the idea of ride-sharing and take our case to people who can help us change any necessary regulations to accommodate this type of innovation.
Q. Who are your competitors?
A. There are a few similar services of note out on the West Coast, Lyft and Sidecar. But we’ve taken a different path with Heyride, creating a better user experience with more choice for the user and safety and privacy features that go above and beyond.
Q. Who makes up the HeyRide team?
A. You can find this on our About Us page at heyride.com.
Q. Is HeyRide bootstrapped? Do you plan to seek Angel of Venture Capital Investment?
A. Heyride received its Series A funding from Silverton Partners, a local venture capital group.
Q. Where is HeyRide located?
A. We’re nestled in the East Side of Austin at 1306 E 7th St.
Q. What kind of car do you drive?
A. I’m the proud owner of a silver 2005 Pontiac Vibe. It’s kind of a mutt, being half-Toyota, but I love it anyway. It gets 40 miles to a gallon, has leather bucket seats, a sunroof, an iPod adapter and a sunroof. Gonna be some rocking Heyrides in the ol’ P-Vibe!
Q. What’s your favorite local startup resource?
A. Digging on the Austin Startup Facebook Group – great place to interact in real-time with people in this community. Also, our investor Kip McClanahan’s awesome blog www.ReOverthinking.com is chock full of great resources for people who want insight into VC.
Q. Anything else you would like to make a point of that I haven’t asked you about?
A. I love running a business in Austin.
The news couldn’t be better for Austin these days with its highly 
skilled high-tech workforce attracting new Fortune 500 companies.
First, General Motors announced plans to establish a research center in Austin, which will employ 500 workers.
Now Visa U.S.A. plans to build a new global IT center and create 794 new jobs in Austin, according to this news release from Gov. Rick Perry.
Last week, Gov. Perry announced Visa’s plans and pledged $7.9 million in incentives to the credit card company through the Texas Enterprise Fund.
“The city of Austin has proposed an economic development grant of $1.6 million if the company meets its investment and employment targets,” according to this story in the Austin American Statesman.
“Texas is competing nationally and internationally for jobs and we want companies who are looking to expand or relocate to consider the Lone Star State first and all we have to offer. Visa’s decision to build a new global IT center in Austin is a great fit with our skilled workforce and Central Texas’ reputation as a hub for high tech companies,” Gov. Perry said in a news statement.
Visa, based in San Francisco with 8,500 employees worldwide, is one of the world’s largest processors of credit card and debit payments. The company posted revenue of $10.42 billion on net income of $2.14 billion in 2011.
“Visa is continually looking for opportunities to add world-class talent to our organization,” Will Valentine, a Visa spokesperson, said in a news release. “Austin offers a vibrant technology community and business-friendly climate, and we are working closely with local officials to finalize an agreement.”
Mellie Price, photo courtesy of We Are Austin Tech
“One person told me early on that the truth is right there you just have to listen to it,” Price said in the interview. “Listen to your customers. They are giving you real feedback. Be willing to hear it. If they are giving you the feedback that what you have doesn’t matter to them be willing to stop.”
Price talks about her authenticity in her relationships and how that aides her in her entrepreneurial endeavors. She founded Front Gate Tickets and web development firm Monsterbit, both of which have been acquired.
Every Tuesday, We Are Austin Tech releases a new video spotlighting someone in the community who has contributed to the city’s vibrant technology scene.
Interact ATX wants to attract the best and brightest young startup minds to join them at South by Southwest Interactive next year.
The group, started by Maran Nelson, a senior majoring in psychology and advertising at the University of Texas, seeks to bring about 100 young entrepreneurs from all over the country to Austin this spring.
“Essentially the premise is we’re getting sponsorships to make SXSW accessible to the brightest young minds in startups today,” Nelson said.
Interact ATX just launched its website seeking applications and has already received dozens just by word of mouth advertising, Nelson said. One of the applicants includes a fellow in Peter Thiel’s 20 under 20 fellowship program. Thiel, a co-founder of Paypal, launched the program in 2011 to give some of the brightest kids under 20 a $100,000 grant and the opportunity to work on a project instead of going to college.
Nelson wants to do the same for young entrepreneurs who want to go to SXSW but cannot afford to do so on their own. She has also set up special meetings and networking opportunities for the group while they are here. And she is arranging for free housing (a couch or spare bed in someone’s home) for them during their stay.
Nelson expects to receive 500 or more applications. She’s working with 30 schools around the country and reaching out to the people on their campuses involved in entrepreneurial activities. But she’s not restricting the applicants to just college students. She wants anyone who is under 30 and has a great idea to apply.
Nelson has always had an entrepreneurial inclination. She worked with CampusCred, a Y Combinator Startup which shut down recently.
“SXSW has a ton to offer to startups,” Nelson said. “I’m really excited about being able to give people a leg up and provide them with resources they don’t have.”
Jeff Harbach, executive director of the Central Texas Angel Network
And although its investors hail from far flung places, the angel network concentrates its investments locally.
“We consider Central Texas to be Austin and San Antonio,” said Jeff Harbach, executive director of CTAN.
Last year, CTAN invested $5.7 million in 22 companies and so far this year, the organization has invested $5 million in 18 companies.
In three years, CTAN investors have put more than $15 million into regional startup companies.
The Halo Report, compiled by the Angel Resource Institute recently named CTAN as one of the most active angel networks in the country. And even though CTAN does a lot of technology deals, it’s not solely focused on that industry.
“We’re industry agnostic,” Harbach said.
CTAN invests in a wide variety of companies and industries including consumer products, information technology, software, mobile and more.
“We tend to look at just about everything,” he said. “But someone looking to build a bowling alley in Buda we’re probably not the right place for them.”
Since its founding in 2006, CTAN has invested in more than 50 companies.
CTAN has five funding cycles a year. The application deadlines for each one are listed on its website. The organization also holds “office hours” at a local coffee shop ten times a year. It’s a chance for entrepreneurs to get feedback on their ventures from angel investors. Entrepreneurs have to apply in advance to participate.
“I always tell entrepreneurs to go to the office hours,” Harbach said. “It’s a good opportunity for entrepreneurs to get in front of investors. In our community, as great as it is, there aren’t a lot of meetups where you can go and talk directly to investors and get feedback.”
CTAN investors generally take an equity stake in the company they back. Some angels to debt deals. The investments range from $200,000 to $2 million.
This summer, a group of high school students got together for the first ever High School Startup at Anderson High School in Austin.
The four teams created four companies and four products. Two of the teams have now launched Kickstarter campaigns to market and sell their goods.
The first, Switchbox has raised $2,297 of its $15,000 goal with 49 backers and 30 days to go. The second team created the GiraffeStand, an iPad bed mount.
So far, the GiraffeStand Kickstarter campaign has raised $1,025 of its $4,000 goal from 20 backers with 22 days to go.
The GiraffeStand sprung out of frustration from Tina Bao, a graduate of TAMS in Denton, whose arms got tired when she tried to use her iPad in bed. That problem served as the catalyst for the GiraffeStand team to create a solution.
In addition to Bao, the other team members included Advaith Anand, a junior in the LASA magnet program at Lyndon B. Johnson High School, Scott Davidson of Round Rock High School and Jack Thoene of Anderson High School.