Category: Ideas to Invoices Podcast (Page 2 of 10)

Uplevyl, an Austin-based tech company that makes an app and digital platform geared to professional women, launched last Tuesday.

Shubhi Bhonsle-Rao, Uplevyl’s founder and CEO, is a former senior executive with Alphabet, Tesco, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Ford Motor Company, among others. She also sits on the board of directors of Open Lending, Center for Global Development, International Center for Research on Women and is an honorary advisory council member of the Federal Reserve San Francisco.

On Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices podcast, Rao said she wanted to build a digital product for women that used technology and data for good.

“I was in Silicon Valley and the technologist in me just came to life,” Rao said. “I was in an ecosystem where it was all about building products and data and the whole startup world.”

At this point in her career, Rao had received her MBA and spent 20 plus years working for large organizations and she wanted to use her skill sets to build something in her adopted city of Austin.

Rao also saw a huge need for uplevyl.

“Because there was something In the back of my mind that was really bothering me and what was really bothering me was being in Silicon Valley and how male-dominated that space is,” Rao said.  “And moreover, how our data is used.”

“For me, being a working mother and having navigated my life through so many different milestones, I really thought about why is it that we don’t really have a lot of digital technology being built by women. And so, in that moment in my life, I thought I could complain about it. But I’m also one of those STEM women who could actually go out and build the product. And so that’s what really inspired me.”

Uplevyl offers ad-free original content including videos, podcasts, columns and topic-driven virtual rooms where members can learn from each other and global industry experts, leaders and mentors. The content is specially tailored based on a member’s needs.

Uplevyl held its launch event Tuesday night at the Hotel Van Zandt in downtown Austin. Attendees included Colette Burnett, president and CEO of Huston Tillotson University and Texas State Representative Sheryl Cole. The event also featured Patricia Greene, former director for the women’s bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, Jill Shackleford, founder and president of the Association of Women and Minority Contractors of Texas, and Sophia “Puff” Story, co-founder of 3 Sided Cube USA.

“It was a really engaging evening, not just because we had lots of wine and food, but because people were genuinely interested in what we are doing,” she said.

On the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Rao talked about how uplevyl is focused on a global audience.

“We need to have the global conversations if we are really going to think about being these global citizens,” Rao said.

When women do well, families do well and societies do well, Rao said. The definition of society must be global in nature, she said.

Rao has also had a much richer life because of her global connections.

Uplevyl also has several men who work with the organization and that is key, Rao said. Uplevyl is about diversity, she said.

“These power allies, whether they are a man or woman are incredibly beneficial and useful to uplevyl,” Rao said.

Uplevyl is also producing high-quality content geared to professional women such as videos, podcasts, and more, Rao said. There is a lot of content already but it is difficult to find and not tailored to the specific needs of women, she said. Uplevyl seeks to fill that void, she said.

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.

REE Automotive recently announced plans to open a North American headquarters and assembly site in Austin with 150 new jobs.

“Austin came out winning this with flying colors,” said Daniel Barel, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder. It chose Austin because of the city’s booming technology industry, its culture of innovation and openness, and the weather here, he said.

“Austin is a hub for electric vehicles, autonomous and advanced technology in mobility,” he said. “It’s very similar to how very recently Israel has grown to be something similar where the auto tech community was created out of almost nothing in the past ten years and is now becoming an interesting center for technology, especially automotive.”

REE Automotive, founded in Tel-Aviv, has seen the industry develop and evolve in Israel, and now it’s seeing it develop in Austin, Barel said on Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices podcast.

REE Automotive has been developing electric vehicle chassis that combine powertrain, steering, suspension, and breaking into a slim platform. Fast Company named REE one of the most innovative companies in 2020.

“What we have done is we’ve created a very unique technology which brings in all of the components that make a care go the suspension, the steering, the braking that control everything you’ve got under the hood of your car or trunk, and we lace it in a very interesting place which is somewhere between the wheel and the chassis.”

That means REE Automotive’s platform is agnostic to dimensional change, battery type, and autonomy controls or human controls. Its REEcorners and EV platforms are intended to power everything from short-range delivery trucks to mid-sized shuttle buses.

“We’re able to do that through a lot of smart thinking and novel ideas,” Barel said.

REE Automotive incorporated a lot of ideas from the aviation industry from drones and flying by wire, Barel said.

“So now you drive by wire,” he said.

In the beginning, everyone kept telling REE Automotive that what they wanted to design couldn’t be done, Barel said. Being outside of Detroit and other major automotive centers helped the company to think differently and try new ideas, he said.

REE Automotive’s customers include Mitsubishi, Hino Motors,  and the medium and heavy-duty trucking arm of Toyota Motor. Toyota has a big plant in San Antonio. It chose the Austin assembly site to be close to its customers, Barel said.

REE Automotive expects to begin mass production of its REECorner technology and platforms in the second half of 2022, Barel said. The company found a building in Austin already under construction that met its needs, he said.

“It is almost as if someone built it for us,” Barel said. The plant will be state of the art and will include automated guided vehicles, robotics, and an undisclosed number of employees for the assembly line, Barel said. REE Automotive has 184 employees worldwide and it expects to add 150 jobs in Austin. It will announce more on its Austin workforce after it hires them, he said.

After merging in July with 10X Capital Venture Acquisition Corp., a special purpose acquisition company, REE Automotive went public on the Nasdaq. REE Automotive currently has a valuation of $1.28 billion. Its revenue estimates call for $19.1 billion by fiscal 2026 and profitability by 2024.

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.

Wursta landed in the top 500 of the Inc5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the country for two years in a row.

This year, Austin-based Wursta was listed as No. 440 on the Inc5000.

Matt Wursta, CEO, founded his eponymous company in 2014 in the basement of his parent’s house in Allentown, Pennsylvania after leaving a lucrative job with Google. He struggled for the first three to four years to land customers and a steady stream of revenue. He worked for competitors like Accenture to make ends meet while finding a foothold in the industry. Wursta recently sat down with Silicon Hills News to talk about his entrepreneurial journey and the growth of his company on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

“I came from an entrepreneurial family, and my parents have always been influential in encouraging me to try new things,” Wursta said.

 “I didn’t have a lot of experience. I didn’t know much about anything, and I decided to give it a shot,” he said.

Wursta had an office in Allentown with 5 employees in a 7,000 square foot space. But Wursta couldn’t find people to hire, he said. So, he moved the company to Atlanta. And in 2019, he moved the company to Austin. Its headquarters are on the Eastside of Austin, and it has 50 employees, doubling in size during the last year.

Wursta has never raised money. The privately held company has grown to $10 million in annual revenue through bootstrapping.

“The one thing that we have done well is to get credit when you don’t need it of any capacity,” he said.

Don’t use it or use it sparingly or very strategically, he said. And pay it right back if you do use it, Wursta said. Building the credit early has been helpful for Wursta, he said. Its first credit line was $3,000, he said.

“Now we have access to capital we otherwise wouldn’t have had if we hadn’t gotten it early,” Wursta said. “It has really helped us through the ups and down and normal business cycles that have happened where we would have had to lean in a little bit.”

Wursta offers as one of its services to enable brand engagement through NFTs or Nonfungible Tokens – which is one of the hottest areas online right now.

“Our goal is to help other companies focus on what they are doing and make the most of the newest, latest, greatest technology,” Wursta said.

NFTs in the blockchain have utility which consumer brands can use to engage with their customers and create new communities, he said.

Wursta is working on its own NFT projects and with some select companies right now, Wursta said.

“The whole digital economy is exploding,” he said. It’s not just NFTs but also in-game and in-app sales of digital goods in digital worlds, he said. What is missing is cross-platform ownership. NFTs allow people to create ownership of those digital goods outside of the platform, he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic also affected Wursta.

At first, the pandemic led to a decline of sales in the first 90 days, Wursta said. But as companies moved operations online, business bounced back as companies recognized the need for online tools like Google’s videoconferencing, he said. Wursta also helped a school to onboard 5,000 teachers from paper to digital, he said.

Wursta also helped his family’s business adapt to the digital world during the pandemic. His parents own and operate Willy Joe’s Restaurant in Allentown, which has been serving hot dogs and cheesesteaks in the area since 1945.

“They were really at the mercy of the local jurisdictional ruling,” Wursta said.

Overnight, Willy Joe’s had to comply with new cleaning protocols, mask mandates and indoor dining closures, he said.

Wursta helped them with their licensing and helped some workers go remote. Willy Joe’s continues to operate and has adapted to the changes, Wursta said.

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.

After selling Honest Dollar, the company he co-founded, to Goldman Sachs, Henry Yoshida recognized another super trend.

He had spent his career in the financial services industry with a particular focus on retirement accounts. Before Honest Dollar, Yoshida, a certified financial planner, had also founded MY Group LLC, a $2.6 billion assets under management retirement plan advisory firm and he had spent 10 years with Merrill Lynch.

Yoshida, a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin who also has an MBA from Cornell University, saw a super trend emerging in people wanting to invest in alternative assets as part of their retirement planning.

So, in 2018, Yoshida co-founded Rocket Dollar, an Austin-based fintech startup that provides self-directed retirement accounts that let people invest in cryptocurrency, real estate, and other investments. His oldest daughter helped name the company, Yoshida said.

“Our company lets people go to different places they previously couldn’t go before just like a rocket can take you further than a plane, a plane can take you further than a car, and a car can take you further than a bike and so forth,” Yoshida said.

Yoshida recently sat down with Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices podcast to talk about the growth of Rocket Dollar.

Rocket Dollar has customers who are investing in NFTs, non-fungible tokens, which is a derivative of the cryptocurrency space, Yoshida said.

“It’s a little bit, to be fair, of a gray area right now,” he said. “Cause technically, you are not allowed to invest IRA dollars into collectibles.”

A physical collectible could be a painting, a baseball card but now there are many platforms that are taking these formally collectible investments and putting them on a platform and chopping them up into pieces of stock, Yoshida said. NFTs are a digital securitized version of art, which makes it eligible to be invested in, he said.

“Very little but we do some of that right now,” Yoshida said.

Some NFTs are selling for millions of dollars. Yoshida is friends with an entrepreneur in Austin who owns several of the Bored Ape NFTs, which have become hot commodities.

“Yuga Labs, the company behind the now-famous Bored Ape Yacht Club line of NFTs, sold its collection of 107 Bore Ape NFTs at an online auction with Sotheby’s for $24.4 million,” according to Blockonomi, a cryptocurrency media site.

Rocket Dollar also recently announced it has closed on a $8 million Series A round of funding and it plans to spend the funds to dramatically scale its company, Yoshida said.

“This new capital is going to allow us to basically make the platform better and get ready to grow by 10 times, by 50 times, and by 100 times in terms of the number of customers, and the assets we have on the platform and so forth,” Yoshida said. “For us, it’s a great time in our business. We have great new institutional investors.”

Previously, Rocket Dollar raised money from a lot of individuals and local angel investment, but its last round was made up of coastal institutional investors, Yoshida said. That money will allow Rocket Dollars to take its assets under management from $400 million to $1 billion to $5 billion and beyond, Yoshida said.

The COVID-19 pandemic also changed the way Rocket Dollar operates. Its downtown office lease came up for renewal in May of 2020 and the company decided to let its employees work virtually from home, Yoshida said. All 20 of its employees are in Austin except for one so the team gets together for meetings and social functions, he said.

“I think that next year, and as we continue to grow, we’re going to continue to be a remote work company but instead of coming in when you want to the office we maintain, it will be a come in when we have reasons to get together for team meetings, spring planning and so forth.”

For more on Rocket Dollar and Yoshida’s entrepreneurial journey, listen to the rest of the podcast below or on Apple, Google, or wherever you get podcast.

Empowering a billion women is Ingrid Vanderveldt’s mission.

She created EBW to reach one billion women across the globe and help them start and scale ventures. EBW does that by developing women entrepreneurs through mentorship, education, and community.

“That is the WHY we exist,” Vanderveldt said during a recent interview for the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

But EBW makes money through its enterprise division which includes a medical distribution company and a data company, Vanderveldt said. In those ventures, EBW seeks to do business with women that come through its ranks, she said.

Vanderveldt is uniquely positioned to make connections. She served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Dell and was the creator and manager of the Dell $100 million credit fund. She was also a member of the 2013 United Nation’s Global Entrepreneurship Council.

Prior to the pandemic, EBW Distributors was creating a one-stop shop for women to get business products and services, Vanderveldt said.

But that changed on March 20, 2020. That day Vanderveldt got a call from her younger brother who was an Emergency Room Doctor in Nashville. For six days he worked in the ER with COVID-19 patients, and he wore the same mask. There was a huge shortage of personal protective equipment for healthcare workers. He asked her to help solve the problem.

Vanderveldt tapped into her network.

“We had relationships across the globe,” Vanderveldt said.

By that Sunday, March 22, EBW had begun sourcing protective gear from around the world. So, the entire company pivoted during the pandemic to build the healthcare distribution business and it has taken off, Vanderveldt said.

EBW sourced masks, medical gowns, and other personal protective equipment from vendors in other countries, she said.

“It was one of those times that gave me the opportunity to look through a lot of things through the beginner’s lens,” Vanderveldt said.

“The supply chain across the globe as everyone now knows was so completely broken,” Vanderveldt. “We had to build it soup to nuts.”

EBW faced so many new operational challenges. To get through it all, Vanderveldt asked a lot of questions. But the fundamentals of doing business are the same no matter what the industry, Vanderveldt said. It’s a lesson she learned from Steve Felice, a former president of Dell.

Those are the lessons she also shares with women entrepreneurs she works with at EBW. The pandemic has disproportionately affected women in the workforce because they are generally the caretakers of the family. An estimated 5.4 million women have lost their jobs during the pandemic.

What the pandemic has done is it has unleashed this mama bear mentality and self-confidence is skyrocketing now, Vanderveldt said. Women are looking to create their own companies and jobs.

“What we are seeing in droves are women starting to step up to the plate in mass with a level of confidence I’ve never seen before,” Vanderveldt said.

It’s the birthing of the SHEconomy, which she defines as Social, Health and Economic impact for women.

It’s the transformation of our economy, Vanderveldt said.

“That to me is one of the most exciting things to ever experience in business,” she said. “Our global economy is going to look very, very different over these next few years”

Still, women face big obstacles to obtain venture capital financing. Only 2.8 percent of VC funding went to women-led startups in 2019 and that dropped to 2.3 percent last year.

Despite the lack of VC funding, women are figuring a way to get their ventures launched and funded, Vanderveldt said.

EBW’s healthcare distribution company grew without any outside capital, Vanderveldt said.

“We’re not waiting on anyone else to give us the OK,” she said. “I’m seeing that with more women.”

Women are figuring out how to finance their businesses on their own. Now investors are coming to EBW, but EBW isn’t looking for funding right now, Vanderveldt said. Investors are recognizing that it is a business imperative to prioritize women, she said.

There is going to be a shift there, Vanderveldt said.

“What the pandemic has taught all of us is that what worked before doesn’t work anymore,” Vanderveldt said. “This pandemic has rocked everyone to their core.”

EBW has a new accelerator to help women scale their ventures. Less than 12 percent of women ever get over the six-figure mark and EBW’s accelerator at EBW2020.com/grow is focused on getting them there, Vanderveldt said.

What matters is who women surround themselves with that gets them there, Vanderveldt said. There is a dealmaker mindset that women must tap into, she said.

“Dealmakers want to work with dealmakers,” Vanderveldt said. “People who are doing big things in the world want to work with other people who are doing big things.”

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.

An experimental Beta City on the outskirts of Austin with transportation tunnels, autonomous vehicles, robots, flying drones, smart buildings, and all the latest technology applications.

That’s the vision of Joe Lonsdale, an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who recently moved 8VC, an investment firm, and The Cicero Institute, a public policy think tank, to Austin. He sees the region developing into an even bigger technology hub.

“It’s a big hub,” Lonsdale said. “I think there’s going to be a lot of really cool suburbs. One of my favorite ideas, which I don’t have time to do right now, but I’d love to work on, is to build a new city somewhere around here, nearby, in the next few years. Buy a bunch of land and dig tunnels connecting it to these places.”

There are all sorts of designs he has sketched up with really cool ideas, Lonsdale said. He made the remarks on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

In the coming years, Central Texas is going to evolve into a major hub and it’s going to have a lot more people and a lot more companies in it, Lonsdale said. The challenge is to keep building, create transportation tunnels and make it easy for people to commute from less expensive areas into Austin, he said.

“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” Lonsdale said.

The Beta City project would rival Neom, the revolutionary $500 billion new city that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is building in the desert bordering the Red Sea. That project is slated to be complete by 2025 and will include drones, robots, artificial rain, holographic teachers, and more, according to plans obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal.

Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Esper, is also on the board of The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk. The Boring Company recently bought a building in Pflugerville, according to the Austin American Statesman. Lonsdale plans to help solve Austin’s transportation problems using technology and tunnels built by The Boring Company.

‘We’re going to dig some tunnels and make sure we fix any kind of traffic problems,” Lonsdale said.

“It’s one of these things that is great for economic inequality as well,” Lonsdale said.

It raises equality and economic access for people if it’s done right, he said. People can live in cheaper areas outside of the city’s core and easily commute to their jobs, he said.

Lonsdale plans to do that project and the Beta City with a little help from his friends, which include Musk, who recently moved to Texas. Musk is staying at the home of one of Lonsdale’s friends. And Lonsdale recently hosted a dinner with Musk and Michael Dell in which they talked about solving big, tough engineering problems with technology.

This year Lonsdale moved his family to Austin and announced that 8VC would relocate its headquarters to Austin. He also wrote an Op-Ed in the WSJ “California, Love It or Leave It” on bad policy decisions that have made the state “unlivable.”

Restrictions on businesses during the COVID-19 Pandemic, in particular, frustrated Lonsdale. His biotech ventures were not able to operate and he wasn’t able to get through to city and state officials to get clearance. Musk also publicly voiced frustrations with restrictions placed on Tesla plants. Last summer, Musk announced he would be building the next Gigafactory to make Tesla trucks in Austin.

Another big investment of Lonsdale’s is in Palantir, a software company that provides intelligence insights to customers. It recently relocated its headquarters out of the Bay area and to Denver, Colorado. Palantir has advanced enterprise software that supports important workflows worldwide, and half of its business is working for government agencies and the military.

The Bay area has become a lot more expensive to do business, Lonsdale said. And it’s become very competitive for getting the best talent, he said. The culture of the best engineers of the Bay area has become somewhat “poisonous,” Lonsdale said. They are not loyal to their employer and some don’t want to work on government and defense contracts, he said.

In the podcast, Lonsdale talks about Wish, the e-commerce app, that just recently went public and that has provided 8VC with its largest return to date – more than 500 times its investment.

“Wish has been a very good investment. There is a very strong team there. And they really proved what you can do in mobile commerce,” Lonsdale said. “The best venture investments are proving something newly possible in the world.”

Wish has become one of the top e-commerce companies in the world, Lonsdale said. The Wish app connects about 100 million consumers in the U.S. and Europe to about 600,000 merchants selling low-priced goods. There are about 100 million possible items you can buy, and they have really learned how to gamify mobile commerce, Lonsdale said.

“They are really good at guessing the items you want to buy,” Lonsdale said. The Wish app also partners with mom and pop businesses to send goods to their store and allowing people to pick them up there. That drives foot traffic to the mom-and-pop stores, Lonsdale said.  

Austin could be the site of the next Wish or Palantir or big breakout technology startup, according to Lonsdale. Already, six of 8VC’s portfolio companies have relocated from Silicon Valley to Austin.

“Austin is seeing a lot of really strong startups,” Lonsdale said.

Among them, Lonsdale’s younger brother, Jon is a co-founder of Austin-based Ender, a property management software startup founded in 2019, which has raised $7 million in funding. Ender moved to Austin about a year ago.

Lonsdale expects the trend to continue. He knows many people who have recently relocated from California to the Austin area, including his dad who had lived in California for 40 years.

Lonsdale thinks Austin is a great place to raise his family. He and his wife, Tayler, have three young daughters. They like the Austin community and its schools and great quality of life. Lonsdale is also a huge patriot who believes in free speech and the right to bear arms. He likes Texas’ ethos of self-reliance and rugged individualism. He recently received his conceal carry permit. He hasn’t bought a ranch yet, but he did buy a cowboy hat and boots and has two forty-foot flagpoles in front of this house flying giant Texas and American flags – something he says his neighbors in California would have objected to. He’s bullish on Texas and Central Texas, in particular, attracting more technology talent, companies, and founders. And the key is to success is to address traffic, homelessness, inequality, and other issues right away with sound policy decisions to prevent problems that have plagued San Francisco in recent years, Lonsdale said.

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.

Active Capital recently announced it has closed on its second fund worth $25 million.

A year ago, the San Antonio-based venture capital firm raised a $21.5 million fund.

Both funds are focused on providing seed-stage capital to business to business software as a service companies, known as B2B SaaS companies located outside of Silicon Valley, said Pat Matthews, Founder, and CEO of Active Capital.

Matthews announced the new fund in a string of tweets.

Pat Matthews on Twitter: “We just finished raising our second fund in the middle of a pandemic. A little more than $25m to continue leading seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies building all over. Proud of our team and thankful for all of our investors and founders.Here is how it went down… / Twitter”

We just finished raising our second fund in the middle of a pandemic. A little more than $25m to continue leading seed rounds for B2B SaaS companies building all over. Proud of our team and thankful for all of our investors and founders.Here is how it went down…

Matthews knows what it’s like to build a company from idea to exit and he discusses his entrepreneurial journey on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

While a college student at Virginia Tech, Matthews co-founded Webmail.us. He helped build Webmail.us into a $10 million business which sold to Rackspace in 2007. Then he spent six-year in executive positions at Rackspace as a Racker. He has invested in dozens of startups as an angel investor before founding Active Capital.

In Austin, Active Capital has invested in Pingboard, Servable, Living Security, CloudSnap, ResturnSafe, VideoPeel, and Prosper Ops. And in San Antonio, Active Capital has invested in FunnelAI and SendSpark, and FloatMe.

In its first fund, Active Capital has invested in more than 40 startups and had three exits, Matthews said. As an angel investor, Matthews has also invested in more than 50 startup companies.

For more, listen to the entire podcast, pasted below, or wherever you get your podcasts – available on Google play store, Apple iTunes, Spotify, PlayerFM, Libsyn, and more.