Category: Austin (Page 277 of 318)

Austin is a bootstrapped kind of technology startup scene, says Joshua Baer, entrepreneur and co-founder of Capital Factory.
He gave an overview of the Austin Startup scene last Friday at Capital Factory, the downtown coworking space and technology incubator.
He says technology entrepreneurs move here not just for the technology industry but for the quality of life.
“Austin is a great place to be poor,” he said.
San Francisco and Silicon Valley are not great places to be poor, he said.
Social capital is also important here. People help each other out, Baer said.
The tide is also rising in Austin. It’s not just one thing. Everyone does better when everyone wins. Multiple successes create a strong entrepreneurial ecosystem, Baer said.
During a talk Monday night at Capital Factory, an audience member asked him what it would take for Austin to become a huge technology center like Silicon Valley.
“I think Austin is kind of number three,” he said. “Silicon Valley and New York are the top two.”
They are followed by Austin, Seattle and Boston, he said.
Silicon Valley is at its peak, he said.
“There’s pretty much an established hierarchy,” he said. “If you know people it can be great.”
But if you don’t, it can be a tough place to break into, Baer said. Austin’s entrepreneurs are much more accessible, he said. They hold office hours and meet with new entrepreneurs in coffee shops around town. They want to help out, he said.
In the video on the Austin Startup Scene, Baer provides some history of the technology industry in Austin with companies like MCC, Dell, Tivoli and Trilogy.
Recently he points to the success of BazaarVoice and Homeaway, which both went public and Indeed.com which was sold to a Japanese company.
He says to keep an eye on WhaleShark Media. He thinks they are the next big Austin Initial Public Offering.

At the age of 10, Joshua Baer won a state award for piano composition.
It was one of his first endeavors at creating something new.
“Piano lessons were somewhat of a torture for me,” he said. “I was forced to go for seven years.”
It wasn’t until he got to compose his own music that he began to enjoy the piano.
Baer recounted that story during Startup Grind, a technology meetup at Capital Factory Monday night. About 50 people attended the event.
That desire to create something from nothing has driven Baer in most of his entrepreneurial endeavors. He has created three companies, invested in dozens more and co-founded Capital Factory, a technology startup incubator and co-working space in downtown Austin.
“If I get to the end of the day and I haven’t made something then I feel like a failure,” he said.
Baer got interested in computers in the 1980s when America Online was big. As a sophomore in high school, he participated in a summer program at Carnegie Mellon University and decided he would study computer science there after graduating.
At Carnegie Mellon, he started his first company from his fraternity house.
“I think I always wanted to run my own business,” Baer said. “My father was an entrepreneur. His father was an entrepreneur.”
Baer strongly believes that “activity causes opportunity.” So he became involved in ListStar, an e-mail service in college.
“I was a poor college kid and I was studying computer science,” Baer said.
Because he had time, he read the manual for the ListStar software and began answering questions in forum groups.
“People started asking me to consult,” Baer said. He charged $20 an hour. Then customers began asking him to host their e-mail servers for $50 a month.
“That was the beginning of my hosting business,” he said.
Over the next two to three years, he kept doing that. He initially ran the business on the school’s Internet network, but soon moved to a house off campus with friends. He took the basement and installed a T-1 Line and filled one half with servers.
“We kind of grew organically from there,” he said. “I was definitely focused on the business more than school.”
But Baer did graduate in 1999 but at first he was reluctant to leave Pittsburgh. His business had $200,000 a year in revenue.
“I could buy beer every weekend,” Baer said. “I thought I was the king of the world. I was thinking this is it. I’ve got the life.”
But one of his friends landed a job at Trilogy in Austin and convinced him to move. The executives at Trilogy told him he could continue to run his business.
At Trilogy, Baer participated in Trilogy University. It was a survivor-like contest inside the company in which 25 teams formed and worked on their ideas throughout the summer and in the end only the five best teams survived. Those teams got funding. Baer created a team that got funding and was later sold for $20 million. His entire team moved to Seattle, but he decided to stay in Austin.
His side business had taken on its own life. He had 25 people working out of his house.
In 2004, Baer bought a building and moved the company there. That’s where he met Jason Cohen, founder of Smart Bear Software. His company was across the street.
A year later, Baer moved his company to the eighth floor of the Omni Building downtown. In 2006, Skylist won an award as one of the best places to work in Austin.
“Winning that award was one of the things I’m most proud of,” Baer said. “I just wanted to build the kind of place I wanted to work at.”
Creating a fun business culture attracted talented employees, he said.
“Most people will chose lower compensation if they like where they work,” he said.
Baer also launched OtherInbox. Unlike his previous businesses, which he bootstrapped, he raised money to launch that company.
“There was this big idea. That didn’t work,” he said. “The big idea was wrong.”
Baer has a strong preference to raise as little money as possible to launch a business.
“Inherently when you’re raising money, you’re getting out ahead of your skis,” he said. “Too many people think raising money is some sign of success. It’s not.”
Baer also co-founded Capital Factory in 2009, fashioned after Trilogy University and Y-Combinator. Capital Factory has had three classes of five companies each. Its biggest success is Sparefoot, Baer said.
Capital Factory now occupies the entire 16th floor and is a year round program and co-working space with 175 people and 80 companies with the goal of reaching 250 people and more than 100 companies.
“It’s something bigger than what it was,” Baer said.
Capital Factory has a small fund that invests in companies based there. It takes a 3 percent equity stake for its investment.
The focus of Capital Factory is companies that can get profitable on $1 million or less, Baer said.
“You shouldn’t need to raise money to prove an idea,” he said.
Baer is also focused on software companies.
“You can create something out of nothing,” he said. “The cost of doing that has dropped to nothing.”

A year ago, Geekdom and the TechStars Cloud launched in San Antonio.
Both programs have had giant ripple effects throughout the technology community since then, said Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace. He worked to create both programs to benefit San Antonio’s startup community.
“TechStars created an entrepreneurial ecosystem for San Antonio,” Weston said during an interview Saturday at TechStars Cloud for a day.
Even though the 11 teams that participated in the 2012 inaugural class didn’t come from San Antonio, they had a positive and lasting effect here, he said.
For one, they helped attract attention to what was already going on, Weston said.
And Geekdom served as the catalyst to bring everything together, he said. Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space on the 10th and 11th floors of the Weston Centre downtown, hosted the TechStars class. But it also hosts daily seminars, put on by its members, on all kinds of tech issues from programming to marketing. Geekdom now has 500 members and dozens of companies based there.
“Geekdom has brought everything together,” Weston said. “A lot of this stuff was going on throughout the city but they needed a place to go to collaborate and exchange ideas. Geekdom filled that void.”
The TechStars Cloud program also helped attract venture capital, public relations, marketing, programming, business development and other expertise to San Antonio.
The 11 teams in the last class have collectively raised more $15 million.
“VCs took notice of what’s possible here,” Weston.
And this year, two strong teams from San Antonio have submitted applications to participate in the TechStars Cloud program. It’s too early to tell whether they will be accepted, but the fact that they exist shows the benefit the program has had here, Weston said.
“What I like about this year is I see more possibilities or B to C rather than just infrastructure and just pipes,” said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, during TechStars for a Day.
Longo said he has his fingers crossed that the San Antonio teams will make the cut for the TechStars Cloud program.
“Today is a very telling day. There are only going to be ten, maybe 11 teams selected,” he said. “I hope we get our San Antonio team or teams with an s.”
The application deadline for TechStars Cloud was Sunday at midnight. Jason Seats, managing director of the program and others will select the 10 to 11 teams that will participate in the program, which kicks off Jan. 14.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

By Michael Girdley
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Perhaps the biggest concern about the Techstars Cloud program is the apparent lack of benefit to San Antonio: Of the 11 startups in the inaugural class, none stayed. However, during the Alumni Panel portion of Saturday’s Techstars Cloud For a Day Event held at Geekdom downtown, the assembled graduates of the program shared a number of serendipitous and direct connections resulting from their three months here. It’s easy to see how these connections are a contributing factor to the future growth of San Antonio’s startup ecosystem.
For example, panel member J.R. Storment of Cloudability shared that he was attending a Rackspace employee’s wedding later that evening — a friendship forged during his time in the Cloud program here.
Engin Akyol, CTO of Distil.it in Arlington, VA at first wondered why the program wasn’t in Austin? But, he said, “Settling in let me see the city more that you don’t see in the onset.” He also landed a girlfriend during his time here which brings him back to town regularly.
It’s these little things that are growing the culture and relations to creative people across the USA to San Antonio.
These connections work both ways. Another episode involved one of the program startups being sued by a former employer. Rackspace employees were able to put the startup in touch with an employment attorney to defend them. This same attorney worked to defend members of program sponsor Softlayer and managed to end the suit very quickly.
In addition, the panelists shared how CTOs of the program companies continue to have regular conferences to discuss technical issues and share advice.
The panel also shared a number of other insights with prospective TechStars Cloud 2013 teams:

– There was a suprising little amount of coding during the three-month program stated Justin Delay, Founder of Tempo-db. The teams spend the vast majority of time in meetings with mentors, potential customers and program staff rather than writing code. That was a big surprise.

– While mentoring is a huge part of the program, the quantity of mentors means that multiple conflicting or contradictory opinions is a real thing. Teams must learn how to distill down the opinions and make their own choices in the face of “Mentor Whiplash.”

– Finally, a huge portion of the success of the program is due to expectations. As a cohort going through the same process at the same time with mentors and leaders who expect a lot, results happen faster than they would naturally.

Disclosure: I am a volunteer mentor for the program.

Spanning Cloud Apps has added Jeff Erramouspe as its chief revenue officer.
Erramouspe will oversee the company’s marketing and sales activities. Previously, he served as president of Manticore Technology, which merged with SalesEngine International. Before that, Erramouspe held leadership and executive positions at StoredIQ, Digby, Vignette and Compaq.
Spanning provides cloud data protection for businesses. The two-year-old Austin-based startup expects revenues to soar 10 times greater than last year’s revenues.
“Spanning Backup, the company’s flagship product, is the top-rated backup solution for Google Apps users and administrators,” according to the company.
“We’re thrilled to welcome Jeff to the team,” Charlie Wood, CEO and founder of Spanning said in a statement. “As we scale the company alongside the growth in Google Apps adoption worldwide, we’re focused on bringing in the best enterprise talent to support our customers as they move their critical productivity and collaboration tools to the cloud.”

AlwaysOn selected Austin-based Phunware as one of its OnHollywood 100 winners.
The list recognizes disruptive technology in the entertainment industry.
AlwaysOn selected Phunware and the other winners based on their innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value and media buzz.
The Austin startup was honored at AlwayOn’s sixth annual OnHollywood event on Oct. 29 and 30th at the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica, Calif.
All of the winners are creating new digital tools for the entertainment industry.
A full list of all the AlwaysOn OnHollywood 100 winners can be found on the AlwaysOn website.
“We are extremely humbled and honored to receive the OnHollywood 100 award on behalf of our employees and shareholders,” Alan Knitowski, Founder and CEO of Phunware said in a news statement. “Not only were we the only company recognized from the great state of Texas, but we were also only one of only eight mobile companies recognized globally as well. We are likely the largest mobile company in the world that most people have not yet heard of, but we expect that this award and recognition will go a long way in changing that in the near future.”
Phunware customers include the NFL, NASCAR, CBS, NBC Universal, ESPN, Univision, Demand Media, Qualcomm, Samsung, HomeAway, McDonald’s, Turner and Discovery among others.
Phunware is a mobile as a service company that provides a platform to brands to engage, manage and make money from mobile users.

San Antonio’s largest technology company, Rackspace got some big-time press with an article in the New York Times.
The reporter chronicled the company’s renovation of the dilapidated Windsor Park Mall into its corporate headquarters.
It is an amazing facelift.
The mall now houses the bulk of Rackspace’s workforce and it’s got all kind of amenities, detailed in the story, like a two-story circular slide, a food court, food truck days, recreation rooms and so much more.
“Our headquarters is a representation of our values as a company,” Weston told the New York Times. “We are ambitious, we are expansive, and we are unorthodox.”
The article mentioned Weston’s business ventures and his wealth but failed to mention his philanthropic efforts through his 80/20 Foundation. Weston is shaking up the educational system and the tech startup community locally. He has invested millions to establish Geekdom in downtown San Antonio and to provide startup funds to technology companies. In addition, he is funding SparkED technology and entrepreneurship weekend programs for middle school kids and summer camp to teach them to build mobile phone apps.
The investments of Weston and other Rackspace founders like Pat Condon and Dirk Elmendorf and former Rackspace executives like Jason Seats are transforming San Antonio into a bustling technology center. To see this transformation first hand visit Geekdom at the Weston Centre downtown. Nick Longo, a technology entrepreneur and former Racker, runs the collaborative coworking space that has already expanded to San Francisco.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

AirStrip Technologies, Inc. has added Todd C. Cozzens as chairman of its board.
And the San Antonio-based company also named Keith B. Pitts to its Board of Directors.
“Todd and Keith both bring a wealth of experience to the table,” , AirStrip CEO Alan Portela said in a news release. “Their knowledge and skill sets will be invaluable as we embark on the next stages of growth and continue to develop new ways of using mobility to connect patients and clinicians across the continuum of care.”
Cozzen specializes in growth stage healthcare companies. He joned Sequoia Capital as an advisor in April. Before that, he served as CEO of Picis, which UnitedHealth Group acquired in 2010. And he previously ran other healthcare startups that were acquired or went public.
Pitts has more than 30 years of healthcare experience. He is currently vice chairman of Vanguard Health Systems.
AirStrip Technologies develops mobile applications for healthcare workers.