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.”
Category: Austin (Page 278 of 318)
Nick Longo, director of Geekdom, and Graham Weston, co-founder of Rackspace and Geekdom, at TechStars for a Day.
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
TechStars Cloud alumni panel at TechStars for a Day, photo courtesy of Geekdom
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.
Austin’s combination of educational institutions and IT professionals convinced General Motors Cos. to open an innovation center here and hire 500 workers, said Timothy Cox, its executive director for enterprise solutions.
“We’re looking for the best and brightest to help us,” Cox said Friday morning during a phone interview.
Cox will deliver the keynote speech at Innotech Austin, a technology conference at the convention center next Thursday. He plans to tell the GM transformation story.
“What we are doing and how we are doing it and specific steps we’re taking,” Cox said.
A big part of that transformation will take place at GM’s new innovation center in Austin. Cox has been at the new center, which opened in a former Dell building at 717 E. Parmer Lane, interviewing job candidates.
“It’s been good so far,” he said. “We have some good people on the ground with us. We’re hiring people on a project basis.”
GM wants to hire software developers, project managers, database experts, business analysts and other information technology professionals.
“As we go through this transformation of the company we are bringing back in house core IT skills,” Cox said.
Software applications that the company once outsourced to others will now be done inside the company to increase productivity and efficiency, Cox said.
Workers in Austin will create operating systems and software applications for GM’s Information Technology Group. They’ll create a broad range of tools for internal use for GM. They will not be working on in-car engineering design systems, he said. That group is based in Michigan.
“To run a company like GM there’s a lot of large sophisticated business processes to automate,” Cox said.
In 1984, GM acquired Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems, known as EDS, for $2.55 billion to modernize and automate the carmaker and to expand into the IT industry. But the integration of the two companies never worked and GM ended up spinning off EDS as an independent company in 1996.
“Because of the speed of the market and competition we found that we can move faster if we have direct control of those resources,” Cox said. “It’s all about innovating more quickly so we can get a leg up in the marketplace and be more competitive.”
Once the largest car and truck maker in the U.S. with more than 48 percent market share, GM’s market share has shrunk to around 18 percent of the market in 2012, according to a recent article in Forbes. GM’s partners make vehicles in 30 countries. Its brands include Chevrolet, Cadillac, Buick, GMC and Isuzu. Cox drives a Cadillac ATS, a luxury sedan that is
GM’s all-new Cadillac ATS (Photo by Sam Sharpe for Cadillac)
While Austin is not known as an automotive center, that’s not important, Cox said.
“There are broad array of capabilities required to run automotive company,” he said. “While Austin may not be an automotive center it’s very much an information technology center. Its breadth of technical skills in this area is a real asset.”
GM plans to build four innovation centers around the country. It announced Austin as the first center and a few weeks ago it announced the second one will be located in Michigan. The other two sites have not been announced yet.
GM has also announced it plans to hire 3,000 people from its business partner, Hewlett-Packard. But Cox said he doesn’t anticipate that many of those people will be in the Austin area. Most of the employees in the local innovation center will come from Austin, he said.
“We’re very pleased to be here,” Cox said. “It’s a wonderful city. Great people. We look forward to a long and productive relationship here.”
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Stacy Zoern, CEO of Community Cars, Inc., runs a car manufacturing business out of Pflugerville.
But that’s not the most remarkable part. Zoern, who uses a wheelchair to get around, wanted to find a car that would provide independence to wheelchair users.
Online, she found the Kenguru, an electric smart car. Only problem was the company ran out of money and shut down operations. So she raised $1.4 million and partnered with the company and they moved the defunct car operations from Hungary to Texas and began manufacturing the bright yellow smart cars in 2010.
That innovative and entrepreneurial spirit earned Zoern’s Community Cars Inc. a spot on the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce’s A-List, which recognized this week 28 innovative technology startups.
Zoern’s is the only car company to make the list.
The list is meant to shine a spotlight on some of the region’s most innovative technology startups that are seeking funding. To compile the list, the chamber’s tech partnership sought input from investors.
“Austin is rich with innovative startups that are primed for growth and simply need exposure and, most importantly, capital, to transform potential into reality,” Susan Davenport, senior vice president of Global Technology Strategies for the Austin Chamber, said in a news release.
Silicon Hills News has done profiles of several companies on the list including InfoChimps, BlackLocus, Calxeda, MapMyFitness, MassRelevance and Gazzang.
This slideshare contains screen grabs of the homepages of the 28 companies that made the Austin Chamber’s list for 2012.
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.
Rackspace’s headquarters, which they call “The Castle,” photo courtesy of Rackspace
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.
At the end of the SparkED program at Geekdom on Sunday, the kids presented their projects to their parents.
“My name is Ryan and I’m a Web designer,” said a member of the website team.
He then told the packed room of proud parents about how his team used design elements like typography, layout, hierarchy and wire framing to create an attractive website.
The Jackson Inc. website is live on the Wix.com platform. It illustrates how much work the kids did in two days. Forty kids from Jackson Middle School in San Antonio spent Saturday and Sunday learning to create a robot, a game and a website and build a business. They wrote all the content and took all the pictures on the website of the four teams that made up the SparkED program. Those teams included the website design group, entrepreneurship team, robotics group and the game programmers.
In the SparkED program, seventh and eighth grade students from select middle schools throughout the San Antonio area learn about technology and entrepreneurship in a weekend.
“These kids learned how to make a website in a day,” said Louis Pacilli, director of education at Geekdom and the head of the SparkED program. “Imagine what they could do in a week or a month.”
Mistique Chavez, 12, seventh grade, learned to build and program robots.
“It’s fun,” she said. “It’s cool.”
Mentors singled Chavez out for a special award for going above and beyond expectations to help her team. She received a Geekdom T-shirt.
Omar Khalid, 13, a seventh grader, also worked on the robotics team. His team built a Lego Mindstorm robot called “The Zombie Catcha” and programmed it to pick up a zombie doll. The kids created a scenario in which zombies attacked downtown San Antonio and they marketed their robot to the military, families and businesses as a way to protect themselves from the invading zombies.
“I like technology,” Khalid said. “I like anything that has to do with technology.”
After the program, Khalid said he would try to keep up with robotics by joining a school club and trying to make one at home.
During the presentations at the end of the program, the robotics team gave a live demonstration of their robot in action to their parents.
Throughout the weekend, the kids learned how to collaborate and work together in small teams, Pacilli said.
The kids also learned new words to express themselves, he said.
At the end of the presentation, the kids said in unison “We are the entrepreneurs of the future.” The parents applauded.
“It’s incredible what these kids have accomplished in a weekend,” Pacilli said. “These kids have been sparked to consider business.”
Each child received a gold trophy and recognition for completing the program. One member of every group also received a T-shirt for being exceptional.
Brian Hurley, principal of Jackson Middle School, watched proudly as the kids gave their presentation. He wanted his school to participate in the SparkED program because he wanted to get the kids involved in the creative side of technology and show them what education can provide them for their future, he said.
“I was very impressed, especially with the vocabulary, teamwork and that they had an actual product,” Hurley said. “I just think this is a great program. It’s a very innovative program. I know the kids were very excited about this weekend.”
Tony and Tanya Ballez’s son, Diego, was also recognized for being a team leader on the website design team. He received a Geekdom T-shirt.
“We thought it was wonderful,” Tony Ballez said. “We didn’t know what to expect when we came here. We’re very excited to see what he accomplished.”
Before this weekend all Cameron Lindner, 12, could say is my life’s over because he couldn’t participate in sports following two concussions, said Tammy Lindner, his mother.
“He loves video games,” she said. “He learned to build one and that’s better than football.”
The program filled a big void in Cameron’s life at the right time, she said.
“He’s smart,” she said. “I think this program is awesome. He’s going to be back for summer camp.”
SparkED will host weeklong summer camps during June, July and August for the kids. The camps will focus on teaching the kids how to build mobile phone games.
Michael Rice, a software developer with Rackspace, served as mentor to the programming group on Sunday. He’s a self-taught programmer who dropped out of school in ninth grade and later earned his GED and took some college computer science classes. But mainly he learned programming through participating in a Linux user group forum and reading. And he got his job at Rackspace after writing a lot of free open source code.
His advice to learn programming is to “focus and read and if you don’t understand something go ask.”
“A good programmer loves puzzles and likes to take things apart and put them back together,” Rice said.
He volunteered to mentor the kids because “I really like helping other people learn this stuff.”
Joseph Borrego, 16, a junior at Alamo Heights High School, volunteered to mentor the robotics group.
“They are really self directed,” Borrego said. “They really enjoyed the program and I enjoyed working with them.”
Jakyb De La Rosa, 14, eighth grader, also received recognition and a Geekdom T-shirt for helping out the entrepreneurship team.
“It was pretty fun,” he said. “I thought it was going to be boring.”
His parents, Manual and Valeria De La Rosa were thrilled with his accomplishments at SparkED.
“The vision these guys have for the next 10 to 15 years in the tech field is exhilarating,” Manual De La Rosa said. “They want to take the U.S. and the state of Texas to the next level. We want our kids to have great paying jobs in the technology field. We’re losing ground as a nation to other countries. This kind of program can help us keep those jobs in the United States.”
Dean Pacilli, 17, a freshman at St. Mary’s University majoring in international relations and computer science and son of Louis Pacilli, volunteered to mentor the website group.
“Just getting the kids involved in technology is so important,” he said. “Our future is going to be all about technology.”
“Because we’re advancing at such an exponentially fast rate we have to keep up,” he said. “Because they are learning about this technology at 12, they’ll be really advanced when they’re my age.”
The kids loved being able to create their own website, he said. They liked having that power, he said. He’s already volunteering for the next SparkED group.
“I totally love the program,” he said. “I can’t wait to see the new batch of kids.”
Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News