Category: Austin (Page 280 of 318)

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Larry Chiang, investor and teacher at Stanford University, is famous for his after-parties—not in a Hugh Hefner, bad boy kind

of way (no alcohol is served). But because his after-parties help young tech entrepreneurs grasp the importance and the finesse of hosting an event.
“When you throw a party you’re building something and wondering if anyone going to show up,” Chiang said. “You have to put your own name on it. You’re inviting people and you have to promote it. That’s a skill set they don’t teach you inside of engineering business school. Throwing a party is the same as running an election is the same as getting 150 users.”
Which is why his latest party at the end of the Startup Crawl of Austin Startup Week was hosted by the students of a workshop he taught: Engineering 145 Preview. It was a 90-minute version of the class he teaches at Stanford that teaches all the social and sales skills engineering schools don’t teach. Chiang has written a book on that topic “What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School.” The class concluded with students throwing the after-party featuring lemonade and a special Larry Chiang guacamole recipe whipped up by the staff at the Four Seasons. The guac had a couple dozen extra ingredients like roasted garlic and roasted peppers. An iterative guac.
“Lemonade and guacamole are the execution of all the knowledge from the class. Lemonade is a baby business, not a startup. It’s a mini company concept. And guacamole is a recipe, like any other recipe. There are 35 steps to follow, its pattern replicating and pattern iterating.”
After Chiang’s class, attended by half a dozen budding entrepreneurs including some from University of Texas’ One Semester Startup, participants had to secure sponsors for the party.
“There were little hacks on how to execute and be entrepreneur, how to do cold calls” said co-host Johnny Van, a One Semester Startup graduate. Students who sold sponsorships were allowed to keep the proceeds.
Irene Nguyen, a computer science undergrad at UT signed up for the class because she’s drawn to the startup culture, though not sure if she plans to be entrepreneur. “He talked about how to get a legendary signature. It was very inspirational to me.”
About 60 people showed up for the party Thursday night. Much guacamole was consumed.

This weekend, Louis Pacilli will lead a test run of Geekdom’s SparkEd program with 40 at risk Junior High School kids.
The program officially starts next weekend at Geekdom, on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
“It’s completely booked,” Pacilli said.
Kids from North East ISD, San Antonio ISD, Harlandale ISD, New Braunfels ISD and homeschool programs will participate.
“The idea is to spark their interest in math and science through technology,” Pacilli said. “We make learning fun and engaging so students build critical thinking skills. And then we help them make connections across school subjects. We want to help kids create their future and take ownership of the work to come.”
The program involves teaching kids programming, robotics, entrepreneurship and website design. During a weekend, they work in groups of 10 to design and build a Lego Mindstorms robot, create an online game, launch a website and create a business plan to sell the robot. Mentors from the technology and business community volunteer to help and give presentations to the kids. The students listen to six 30 minute presentations.
“SparkEd adopts a blacksmith apprentice approach where kids watch, learn and do,” Pacilli said. “We rely upon our awesome community member experts who practice this method daily at Geekdom. We add an additional layer of company and university student mentors to span the perspective.”
SparkEd leads students through a scaffolding learning process where key concepts and vocabulary unique to website design or entrepreneurship are developed and applied, Pacilli said.
“Through multiple pathways we encourage teenagers to embrace consideration for in demand future careers in science, technology, entrepreneurship, art and math, called STEAM,” he said.
In one weekend, the 7th and 8th graders learn everything they need to know to start a company.
“If we get kids to enter 9th grade more engaged, they are more likely to graduate and hopefully enter careers in technology or business,” Pacilli said. “We know six out of ten jobs in the future are going to be in technology related fields. We want to save children because they are our future. We want to inspire and spark them to purposefully craft their future.”
In addition to the school year programs, SparkEd plans to host week-long summer camps for the same kids so they can make mobile phone apps.
“We’re going to create ways that kids can build businesses,” Pacilli said. “SparkEd is about challenge based learning, solving a problem, finding a customer and making a sale – all the while being innovative.”
“We don’t live in a manufacturing economy where people can go to work at Ford for 40 years,” he said. “We need kids to think innovatively and to become problem solves and work collaboratively.”

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Fourteen early-stage startups pitched to a full house of angel investors at the Capital Factory Thursday for Demo Day, a ticketed event of Austin Startup Week.
When the presentations were through, investors said there were definitely companies they would be looking into and possibly writing checks for.
“I completed my first round of funding before leaving the room,” quipped Bryan Menell, CEO of SubtleData which integrates apps with point of sale data streams. He’s also head of AustinStartups.com and in charge of Austin High Tech Happy Hour. He’d made a dinner date with one investor who showed great interest in his company.
“I’ve seen a lot of those companies before. I’ve been following them,” said Rudy Garza, founder and managing general partner of G51. “Some of them are getting closer. We expect to write a check by the end of this year or early next year.”
Rick Timmins, Chairman of the Central Texas Angel Network said Josh Baer did a good job bringing in companies “that have what we’re looking for, in short, product and customers.”
“These companies have traction in their markets, they’re at very good stages of development,” Timmins said. “They have what we look for which is not how big the market opportunity ‘should be.’ I want you to show me how you’re going to acquire customers one, two and three….I have a company I invested in recently, approximately $750,000 because they had acquired two customers. Their revenue from the two customers was less than $200,000. But what they were selling was disruptive enough to get people to stop what they were already doing and switch.”
Timmins said he would investigate a couple of the companies more deeply and probably write a check because of the event. But he planned to discuss the presentations with his fellow investors first.
“I will share my thoughts and ideas with several folks,” he said. “I’ll make up own mind but I’ll consult with the other investors here. I’m not competitive at all with other angel investors.”
The only investors present were those invited by Capital Factory because they’d recently written checks, according to demo presenter Bart Bohn. Bohn is founder of AuManil which provides analytics for game studios on the most lucrative online and digital game players.
Because of the theme of the event, no startups were seeking more than $1 million. The theme was startups that could reach $1 million in revenue with less than $1 million in funding. As Joshua Baer, founder of the event pointed out, too many companies don’t bother with small funding amounts they have an 80 percent chance of getting because they’re hoping for a giant investments they have 10 percent chance of getting. But if a company can build itself to profitability on smaller investments, sell for $20 million—a tiny amount by Silicon Valley standards–and reap $10 million out of the deal, they still have $10 million. That’s the sweet spot for Austin.
It’s a strategy Silicon Valley could learn from, according to investor Larry Chiang who lives in Palo Alto, teaches tech entrepreneurship at Stanford and loves Austin for its ecosystem of music, entrepreneurship and community.
Garza called it “fishing where the fish are.” Both the numbers of intriguing startups and the numbers of investors are building in Austin, with each piece of the ecosystem spurring growth in the other areas. Austin’s ecosystem, he pointed out, has players at every level. There are companies like his, Capital Factory, Austin Tech Incubator and Tech Ranch that can offer seed money. Then there are the venture capitalists like Austin Ventures and Silverton Partners. Then there are the heavy hitter investors. Austin’s growth in the startup world is building as each of these players gains substance.
Frankly, Garza said, the seed capital is “the funnest part.”
“Everybody’s hair’s on fire. Checks are coming in to the bank…building a company from zero to $5 million is the best part.”
Besides AuManil and SubtleData, Other presenters included Compare Metrics, Engine, Kin Valley, Rockify, Smart Picture Technologies, Stormpulse, Taskbox, Visible Health, Vivogig, Whoosh Traffic, Zing Checkout and One Spot.

Geekdom, the collaborative coworking space in downtown San Antonio, has expanded its kingdom to San Francisco.
And eventually Geekdom hopes to have a global presence with sites in China, South America and other parts of the world and in other cities in the United States, said Nick Longo, its director.
“We’ve got a lot of requests whether it’s different states or different countries,” Longo said. “We’ll go where it makes sense. We’re not in the franchising business.”
The 15,000 square foot downtown San Francisco Geekdom location officially opens in May, Longo said. He spent the last three days in San Francisco at the site. It will feature teleconferencing so members of the San Antonio and San Francisco Geekdom locations can collaborate, he said.
“It’s a live social network,” Longo said.
San Francisco has a real need for office space for its growing technology workforce, Longo said. The site will feature dedicated desks, but only a few dedicated offices, he said. While it’s uncertain whether the site will have a Geekdom Fund, which provides $25,000 investments in startups, investors in the Bay Area will have an active role in the site and its companies, Longo said.
Geekdom members can work out of either San Antonio or San Francisco. And activities at either site will be live streamed for both offices.
“One of the key elements is bringing the workshops and speakers in San Francisco into the San Antonio Geedkom,” Longo said.
Geekdom seeks to become part of the startup ecosystem in San Francisco, Longo said.
“They have a need for space and we have a need for collaboration,” Longo said. “It works out perfectly.”
Geekdom also plans to launch educational programs and weekend bootcamps for kids at the San Francisco site.
“For us, it was the opportunity to be closer to a technology center,” Longo said.
Not even a year old, Geekdom has quickly grown into the technology hub for startups in downtown San Antonio. The site, headed up by Longo, a technology entrepreneur and backed by Rackspace Founders Graham Weston and Pat Condon, has grown quickly. It now has more than 450 members, who pay a monthly fee to either rent an office or work at a desk in the commons area.
Geekdom is also expanding from the 11th floor to the 10th floor of the Weston Centre. The site also hosts the popular TechStars Cloud program, run by Jason Seats, its managing director and cofounder of Slicehost. The program is currently accepting applications with its second program set to kick off in January.
The Geekdom San Francisco site will most likely host some companies from Y Combinator and 500 Startups, Longo said. And Keen.io, a alumni of the first TechStars Cloud class, is based in the San Francisco area too.
The San Antonio Geekdom hosts dozens of technology companies including TrueAbility, Zippykid, Facekey, Cabstr, Embarkly and Grapevine.
Aside from providing office space to digital nomads, Geekdom fosters the technology community by hosting all kinds of meetups and providing nightly classes on everything from programming to marketing and legal seminars. And it doesn’t shut down after dark. The site operates around the clock and has hosted 3 Day Startup Weekends and other events geared at technology and entrepreneurship. Next weekend, the SparkEd program, designed to foster learning in the fields of Science, Technology, Education, Art and Math to at risk junior high school students, starts.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Angel investor Gary Forni Wednesday called Austin Startup Week “Austin’s preeminent event for early-stage startups… I wouldn’t miss it,” he added. Forni, with the Central Texas Angel Network and the Austin Technology Incubator was among roughly 400 people to attend the Startup Bazaar, hosted by Tech Ranch and RISE Austin at The Stage on Sixth Street.
Nineteen companies had demo tables, including Divert-X, wireless monitoring of prescription drug dosage; Springcreek Systems, a Salesforce.com partner which developed a standalone cloud applications to automate and prioritize Customer Relationship Manager data deduplication; Alpha Cares, an online software suite for child care center management; Isthislost, which provides anonymous email and SMS communication between someone who loses something and someone who finds it, and Axelo, a patented 3D motion sensing technology.
Throughout the day, 11 companies also pitched to investors including Needto.com, a site to connect people with work and services that includes a rating service and earnable tags, Whit.li, a provider of social media intelligence for enterprises, Itography, which lets advertisers market products with a mobile scavenger hunt and Engine, which lets users retrieve texts, documents and social content from their Gmail accounts.
Alex Cox-Cuzzi, engagement manager for Tech Ranch who planned the event, said the companies who pitched were all interviewed and auditioned prior to the event and chosen for their readiness to pitch.
“We were looking for the companies that are up and running, they’re out there in the market but haven’t gathered the attention they deserve,” Cox-Cuzzi said. Companies who applied were all early-stage companies so there was a fairly level playing field.
Ben Bazzrea, vice president of business development at Balderdash, which produces mobile apps, websites and design, said the one big problem with the event was that each demo table only had one representative who could actually speak to visitors about the company or produce they represented. If that person was busy, he pointed out, “Other people aren’t going to wait. They just walk away.”
Part of the problem was that, instead of booths, each demo company only had a tiny standing bar table—big enough for a couple of pints, a couple of elbows and a basket of chips. The bazaar theme was chosen to introduce a more casual feel to the event. Frequently, Cox-Cuzzi pointed out, pitch events are formal and stressful. Having it at a bar on 6th Street lightened the atmosphere.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

In yet another panel about why Austin’s the best place for a startup to be, one panelist summed it up nicely: “Austin is still a small pond,” said Tim Kern of Getpromotd. “And if you’re a small fish, you have a better chance of surviving in a small pond than the middle of the ocean.”
The panel on “Why I Moved My Company to Austin” was moderated by Kyle Cox, director of IT/Wireless and development portfolios at Austin Technology Incubator at the University of Texas. Panelists of the Austin Startup week event at City Hall included Evan Baehr, Co-Founder of Outbox who moved to Austin in late 2011 and secured $2.2 million in financing; Adam Lyons, founder of Insurance Zebra; John Kinzell, CEO Xeris Pharmaceuticals which moved from California to the Austin Technology Incubator in 2010, and raised $1.5M and Kern.
Most panelists agreed that Austin’s a good place to achieve modest goals like growing to profitability and either operating at a comfortable level or selling for a reasonable price. A company may be less likely to get discovered as a superstar than it would in Silicon Valley; but it’s also less likely to wind up like one of the thousands of stillbirth companies born in the Valley.
“The vision for exits is actually smaller here and that’s rational because, to take Josh Baer’s model, you can build a company that makes money for under a million,” said Baehr.
Part of the reason for that is the culture in Austin, Kern said. In Silicon Valley one is more likely to hear “’Yeah I know 1,000 people who are doing the same thing you are with a lot more money and you don’t stand a chance’…. In Austin, I really appreciate the wisdom of everybody here and their willingness to share it.”
Lyons said, “I’ve been really motivated by the collaborative culture. People are eager to get out and meet people. Everyone’s trying to make a difference. There’s a culture of encouragement: ‘Everybody should take a chance, everybody should get a chance to fail. Learning is important.’ It’s really hard to create that kind of culture somewhere else.”
Kinzell, whose company operated in the bay area before moving to Austin, cited hard business reasons for moving, including the relative cost per square foot of building a laboratory: $50 more per square foot in Palo Alto, he said.
“We moved it here because it is most of the things California is not,” he said. “There are low levels of unionization, moderate taxes, moderate regulation. It’s a good climate for business.” On the other hand, the company is moving its clinical trials to San Antonio because of Austin’s lack of a medical school.
Baehr felt like Austin could improve on its business climate but was drawn by its lifestyle: Schools, parks, community, arts and cost of living. Although when he and his wife were checking out the town on a day when it was 108 degrees his wife commented: “I must really love you.”
Among the things Austin could improve, he said, was more housing close to town. In the suburbs, where costs are low, the commute is too long. And then, panelists complained about the traffic. And the lack of investors…though more and more are looking from California toward Austin.
Panelists seemed to disagree about whether Austin was a good place or a bad place to try to attract talent. Baehr’s experience was that, for people who don’t know the town “Austin feels like Texas and that’s a little scary.” But others said they had no trouble bringing new talent in, even if the new employees had never been to Austin before.
Before the panelists spoke, Eve Richter, Emerging Technologies Coordinator for the City of Austin and Partner at Napkin Ventures, reiterated some of her top reasons for companies to move to the city from 300 days of sunshine to food carts.
Among the audience was Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin who said he appreciated that the panelists focused on Austin’s strengths of being a place where a startup can bootstrap or grow to profitability on small investment. And where startup founders can be content with small exits versus giant ones.
“I just feel like my whole thing is we need to appreciate Austin for what it is, its niche, and stop trying to compare it to other places.”

Almost a year ago, Calxeda debuted its high-performance low power semiconductor chips to power Hewlett Packard’s servers.
Today, the company announced it has secured $55 million in additional funding with Austin Ventures, Vulcan Capital and its existing investors. To date, the company has raised more than $100 million.
Calxeda plans to use the money on research and development and marketing its products for the ultra-lower power scalable computer industry. It says performance tests show that its chips are ten times more energy efficient than X86-based servers. Calxeda’s chips power servers in giant data centers that require peak efficiency.
“Since it’s based on ARM technology, its chips are similar to the low-power, yet highly capable, processors used in smartphones and tablets,” according to VentureBeat.
“Calxeda is not alone in the market. Applied Micro, Cavium, Marvell, Nvidia, and Samsung are all aggressively pursuing the opportunity to take Intel market share with new low-powered servers,” TechCrunch reports.
Calxeda, founded in 2008, now has more than 100 employees at its headquarters in Austin and its office in Silicon Valley and at subsidiaries in Asia.
“This significant infusion of capital will accelerate the exciting trajectory we’ve been on for the past four years,” Calxeda co-founder and CEO Barry Evans, said in a news release. “Businesses require a more efficient solution for the Web, Cloud, and Big Data. That is what Calxeda is now delivering and this funding will enable us to go bigger and faster.”
For more on Calexeda, read this profile Silicon Hills News did a year ago on the company.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Nearly 200 people showed up for the co-founders meetup at Austin Capital Factory Monday night to kickoff Austin startup week, with almost twice that many coming to the official kickoff party. Among the startups presenting were PredictMyPlace, an app that lets fans predict the outcome of sporting events, Shop Sosho, which helps people find items they’re looking for and Sandbox Ideas which uses facial recognition technology to help people network more effectively.

Jacqueline Hughes, who cofounded the event with Josh Baer last year, said the objective of the event was simply to bring more startups to Austin. The pair did not raise money for the event this year, but did so this year, helping them pay for supplies and enabling them to pay transportation costs for certain startups from out-of-town and out of the country. Dormitory style housing was provided by the Nerd Tribe and Goodybag.
“I went skeet shooting with some people from Australia yesterday,” Hughes said.
Last year, the event included 20 events. This year that has been upped to 30.
This kind of event, Hughes said, where startups are all underone roof, is the vision they have for recruiting more people to the Austin startup scene.
In addition to startups there were investors in the crowd, including Tarzan Sharif of ViralIndiustries who recently moved from the Dallas/Ft. Worth area to Austin. Sharif said he was looking for companies whose context included philanthropy.
“This is the place to find people with the same mindset,” he said, explaining why he chose Austin to relocate.
Among the companies with a philanthropic view were Global Citizen, a tool to help people stay abreast of issues in the world of extreme poverty, and Voxgift, an app that simplifies communication for people in hospitals who struggle to communicate either because of medical treatment or language barriers.
Of course, not all the companies presenting had an altruistic bent. But that was one of the characteristics that separated the “mindset” Sharif referred to, from Silicon Valley.
The rest of the week will include more meetups, a women’s tea and a startup crawl.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The winning entry at an Austin Music Hackathon presented by Twilio Sunday night was a social jukebox app that lets patrons at a bar or club check into a venue using Foursquare and queue up their Pandora playlists into the bar’s sound system. So, you could wind up with Pitbull followed by Bjork followed by Rachmaninoff. Theoretically.
About 25 people attended the hackathon which unofficially kicked off Austin Startup Week. Participants included software developers, designers, musicians, performance artists and more. They started Saturday morning at digital design studio thirteen23, downtown, with coffee and kolaches and had to quit by 9 p.m. Saturday night. Sunday they resumed with demos at 6 p.m.
After playing with various tech toys brought by the sponsors, participants threw around ideas and wound up with teams around the best of them.
The winning team comprised Ansa Copeland and Sara Dubuque, visual/ux designers, Shaun Dubuque, a mobile developer from thirteen23 and Kevin Walorski, a recent Austin transplant from IU in Bloomington, IN.
Another top ranked idea was a table idea from Doug Cook, Executive Director of thirteen23. Below the table was an Arduino board. Cook brought card s with pictures on them of animals—a cow, a duck etc.—that, when dropped on the board cued a corresponding sound on the sound system. He invented it for his three-year-old. When it’s bedtime, he drops a picture of a sunset on the table and the board turns off the lights in the room, turns on a nightlight and cues cricket song on the sound system.
Keith Casey of Twilio was the instigator behind the hackathon.
“I’ve run about a dozen hackathons around software development and SXSW recently hosted an eco one and one on healthcare. But it kind of surprised me we never had one around music,” Casey said.
He loves doing the hackathons because it gives people an opportunity to get creative.
“So many of these people in their day to day jobs have a lot of structure and direction and they don’t get a chance to sort of play,” he said. “Some people find it super exciting and some people are terrified by the prospect.”
The ones who are terrified get plugged in to a team and “super converted by Sunday.”
Twilio was one of the sponsors of the event which was also sponsored by Boulder, Colorado startup Sendgrid; , Rovi of Santa Clara, California and Mashery and SoundCloud from San Francisco.

The second annual Austin Startup Week kicks off on Monday.
The five day event attracts students, professionals and even out of towners from Denver, Spokane, Philadelphia, New York City and even Australia who want to check out Austin’s growing startup community.
Jacqueline Hughes and Joshua Baer organized the first Startup Week last September. It was such a success they are back again this year. They expect more than 2,000 people to participate in this year’s activities, which include coffee meetups, a startup career fair, presentations, parties and a “startup crawl,” showcasing more than a dozen startups in their offices.

“Everyone seems to have their eyes on Austin right now,” Baer, founder of OtherInbox and managing director of Capital Factory, said in a statement.
“If you are interested in checking out or getting plugged into the Austin startup scene, there isn’t a better time to come to Austin than during Austin Startup Week,” Hughes said in a statement.
For a full schedule of events, please visit Austin Startup Week’s website, which lists more than 30 events including a Startup Bazaar and Demo Day.