Category: Ideas to Invoices Podcast (Page 4 of 10)

Nine Banded Whiskey Co-Founder Sean Foley seized an opportunity to create an Austin-based whiskey.

After noticing a moderately priced, Austin-made whiskey brand didn’t exist, in 2014, he founded the Nine Banded Whiskey company and launched its first bottles of whiskey a few years later.

Today, Nine Banded Whiskey is in 12 states and last year the company inked a deal with the Los Angeles Rams to be the featured whiskey in its stadium.

On this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Foley talks about Nine Banded Whiskey’s history, its secret ingredient – water from a ranch in Mason, Texas and its expansion plans in 2020 and beyond.

The Texas whiskey industry is a very young industry, Foley said. It’s only 15 years old.

In 1995, Tito Beveridge got a license to operate the first still in Texas. He created Tito’s Handmade Vodka. He pioneered the spirits industry in Texas and paved the way for others like Nine Banded Whiskey to follow, Foley said.

Nine Banded Whiskey has improved a lot throughout the years, the bottles have changed, and the recipe has changed along with some of the other processes, Foley said.

One of the secrets to its smooth taste is the limestone-filtered spring water from a ranch in Mason, in the Texas Hill Country. Nine Banded Whiskey is crafted from a unique blend of corn, rye, and malted barley. It is distilled for at least two years in Lawrenceburg, Indiana and blended and bottled in Austin and Dripping Springs. It costs $25 to $35 a bottle and can be found at Spec’s, Twin Liquors, Total Wine and More and other liquor stores.

And the name Nine Banded is after the state’s nine-banded armadillo, the official state mammal of Texas. And it pays homage to old Austin and the Armadillo World Headquarters, a music venue and nightclub that shutdown in 1980 but that once showcased some of Austin’s brightest musicians.

Building a brand takes a lot of intentionality and focus, Foley said.

“It’s better to have 10 people love you than 100 people like you,” he said.

Nine Banded is not in all 50 states. It’s in 12 states and it’s selected the states it has gone into strategically, Foley said. It chose Southern California because it made sense for Nine Banded Whiskey to enter that market.

Nine Banded has done a lot of outreach in the entertainment and sports industries, which Foley has a background in.

The Black Pumas, an Austin band that Nine Banded Whiskey works with was nominated for a Grammy this year in the coveted Best New Artist category along with Billie Eilish, Lizzo, Lil Nas X and others.

And the people involved with HBO’s Ballers Television series featured Nine Banded Whiskey in its show.

“You never known where you’re going to get your pop culture pops,” Foley said. “They help. I do think that though we want to be careful about that stuff.”

It’s not about manufacturing a brand but manufacturing a great product and building a great brand on top of that, Foley said. Nine Banded is being built from Austin with intentionality, learning from mistakes, perseverance and earnest hard work, he said.

Foley draws a lot of inspiration for running his business from his background as a championship swimmer. He grew up as a competitive swimmer in the Milwaukee area and he got offered a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin. He swam for Eddie Reese, the swim coach for UT Austin’s men’s swimming team. Reese has won 15 national champions. Foley was part of three of those championships.

“I am fortunate, very fortunate to be a part of that group of alumni of Texas swimming,” Foley said.

Foley lived in Austin in a time when Austin still had a lot of the characteristics of old Austin. University of Texas athletics and the music scene were two of the biggest things going on at that time, he said.

The day in and day out commitment and long-term investment in what you are working on are lessons he learned from swimming. It’s a step by step and brick by brick process with no instant gratification or payout, that’s what it takes to be a great athlete and a great business person also, he said.

On March 6^th at Central Machine Works in East Austin at 5 p.m. doors open and Nine Banded will officially launch its new Bourbon, Foley said. And it’s rolling out a new marketing campaign featuring custom illustrations by Denton Watts this year with a big focus on female Austin musicians, Foley said.

For more on Nine Banded please listen to the whole podcast.

Editor’s note: Nine Banded was an in-kind sponsor of Silicon Hills News’ 2020 Austin Calendar party.

Silicon Hills News’ podcast Ideas to Invoices entered into its third season in 2019. And here are the Top 10 podcasts for this year, according to our stats on Libsyn, a podcast hosting platform.

Thank you to all our listeners and subscribers. For all of the Ideas to Invoices podcast please visit Ideas to Invoices on iTunes and you can support Silicon Hills News by and the Ideas to Invoices podcast by becoming a patron on our Patreon site.

1. Techstars Austin’s Amos Schwartzfarb Talks Sales Strategy and More on the Ideas to Invoices Podcast
2. Chris Shonk: ATX Seed Ventures Plans to Raise its Third Venture Fund
3. Carey Smith Launches Unorthodox Ventures in Austin to Invest in Startups with Great Products
4. Internet Pioneer Bob Metcalfe Celebrates Ethernet’s 46th Anniversary
5. Barry Mione: SaveDay Seeks to Democratize Access to 401K Retirement Plans
6. Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi Thinks Startups Succeed When Entrepreneurs Find Their Purpose
7. ALTR’s CEO Dave Sikora Says Data is as Valuable as Money and ALTR Uses Blockchain Tech to Secure Data
8. Joyce Durst: Growth Acceleration Partners Says Diversity and Inclusion is Key to its Success as a Custom Software Developer
9. Sridhar Vembu: Zoho’s CEO Discusses its Unique Culture and Plans for its Austin Campus on the Ideas to Invoices Podcast
10. Austin Technology Council’s Amber Gunst is Focused on Growing and Scaling Austin Software Companies

Sana Benefits moved to Austin a year ago from the San Francisco Bay area with a focus on disrupting the insurance industry and providing healthcare coverage for small to medium-sized businesses.

 “We had this idea for how to fix small business health insurance and the barriers to starting it California were really high,”  said Will Young is the Co-Founder and CEO of Austin-based SANA Benefits, a healthcare insurance technology startup.

“But when you looked at which states were most inviting of innovation in insurance, Texas is number one on the list,” Young said. “The regulators here are really excited to welcome new models and new forms of competition.”

“Once we spent some time in Austin, we fell in love, so it was an easy decision,” Young said.

Austin is much more livable than San Francisco these days, he said. Young talks about the challenges the healthcare industry faces and how Sana is working to provide more affordable care to small to medium-sized businesses during this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

Young founded the company with Nathan Hackley in 2017. The two formerly worked together at Justworks, a benefit and payroll company in New York.

Since moving to Austin, SANA Benefits has grown dramatically from less than 10 employees to almost 40. The company also recently closed on $ 3.6 million in seed-stage venture funding. And it moved from a small office at WeWork Barton Springs into much larger headquarters at Manchaca and Slaughter Lane in South Austin. It used the Austin-based startup, Swivel, to find the real estate space to accommodate its growth, Young said.

Sana Benefits is providing an alternative to other big insurance providers like Aetna, Blue Cross, United Health and others. It competes with them by providing insurance that is, on average, 30 percent cheaper, Young said.

“In terms of the value we deliver to people, we save them a lot of money,” Young said. “We also just think about how to serve our members differently. We treat them like human beings. We answer the phone when they call. And if they want to see a doctor that is out of the network. We go and get their doctor into the network. We are running this health plan the way we would want it to be run where it is oriented around serving the needs of members.”

Sana targets companies that have between five and 500 employees that offer health insurance to its employees, Young said. It gets the word out about its product through podcasts, digital ads, billboards, events and by calling small and medium-sized companies, he said.

The healthcare industry needs disruption, Young said. The U.S. is last among the world’s developed nations in providing healthcare to its citizens and it used to be number one. The U.S. has an immense bureaucratic and complex healthcare industry that charges people different rates for service depending on who is paying, Young said.

The cost of care has climbed massively in the last decade, Young said. Companies are raising deductibles for employees to make the plans more affordable, he said. They are shifting the risk to the members, he said.

Meanwhile, the patient providers are losing the human touch, Young said. And hospitals are increasingly suing patients to collect on huge bills.

Sana can’t fix everything but it’s working with its customers to navigate the bureaucratic system and provide the best care for its members, Young said.

For more on SANA and Young’s entrepreneurial experience, listen to the entire podcast. Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site.

Instead of seeking venture capital, Joyce Durst, Co-Founder, and CEO of Growth Acceleration Partners decided to bootstrap the software development company.

Growth Acceleration Partners, known as GAP,  offers analytics, cloud, mobile and QA services. Before co-founding GAP, Durst served as CEO of venture-backed startup Pinion Software, a security software company. At that company, she raised $21 million in venture capital.

“There is such a thing as the wrong money at the wrong time,” Durst said. She made the comments last Thursday during an interview for the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

In 2007, when Durst co-founded the company, GAP decided to focus on its customers and generating revenue rather than fundraising, she said.

“Maybe someday there will be a right time to take money, but so far we haven’t needed it,” she said.

And GAP recently received certification as a Women’s Business Enterprise by the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. That’s an important milestone for the company because it shows the company is walking the talk, Durst said. GAP really believes in diversity and inclusion, she said.

A recent news release said GAP made a point of hiring women and promoting them to leadership positions in GAP.

“The key thing about having women at all roles in the company at all levels, it’s really about diversity of thought,” Durst said. She didn’t set out to have 70 percent of its technical leadership roles filled by women, but they were the best people for those jobs, she said.

“Can we have diversity to get the very best ideas, innovations and thoughts out on the table,” Durst said. That includes diversity in gender, age and multi-cultural, she said.

Durst also tells executives that say they can’t find women to hire, that isn’t true. Companies need to change their hiring and recruiting, and onboarding practices and they will find qualified women to fill technical roles in their companies, she said.

“If you do those things, you will be widely successful in building a diverse team,” Durst said.

GAP chose to put software development offices in Costa Rica and Colombia because they share the company’s values, Durst said. They are innovative places in the same time zone with happy people, great talent, culture and values, she said.

GAP has a wide range of customers across a wide variety of industries including healthcare, fintech, and technology, Durst said. They have built products for Whole Foods, Dell, Solar Winds, Disney, Marvel. GAP reaches new customers primarily through content generation and word of mouth referrals from its clients, Durst said.

GAP has more than $20 million in annual revenue and 300 employees. In the future, the growth is coming from technology and data analysis, Durst said. One of the clients it works with harvests data from cars and GAP helps interpret data to identify traffic patterns to help locate brick and mortar stores, Durst said.

Because GAP is private, it can take a much longer-term view of its business and its goals, Durst said.

For more on GAP and Durst’s entrepreneurial journey, please listen to the rest of the podcast. Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site.

In 2005, Jay Hallberg, founder, and chairman of Spiceworks met with three friends in Austin to create what has become Spiceworks.

They wanted a place where IT professionals could connect and talk about technology. That free platform evolved into a sophisticated social network for IT professionals.

Recently, Ziff Davis acquired Spiceworks. The company just held its annual SpiceWorld convention at the Austin Convention Center with more than 2,500 Spiceworks members, which they dub “Spiceheads” from all over the world. At the event, Hallberg sat down with Ideas to Invoices to talk about the evolution of the company and plans for future growth.

Over the years several companies have inquired about buying Spiceworks, Hallberg said. He took Ziff Davis’ offer to the board and they decided it was the best fit, he said.

Ziff Davis, a division of J2 Global, was a competitor to Spiceworks, Hallberg said. Ziff Davis has a long history of producing great content and that combines well with Spiceworks’ community and products, Hallberg said.

“After a good 14 year run as an independent privately held company, it just felt like it was the right time and right partner to take the next step and write the next chapter in our story,” Hallberg said.

Under Ziff Davis, Spiceworks is going to remain in Austin and Hallberg will continue to run it. The company did lay off 59 people in Austin on August 14th, shortly after announcing the acquisition. Hallberg said he can’t comment on how many employees the company has now in Austin now that it is part of Ziff Davis, but he did say he doesn’t expect any more layoffs locally.

Now that it has joined with Ziff Davis, Spiceworks is more of a global operation with an office in Austin, Hallberg said. It also has offices in Costa Rica, London, and Hyderabad, India, he said.

Twelve years ago, Spiceworks held the first annual SpiceWorld conference at the old Alamo Drafthouse Theater on South Lamar. They rented a movie theater for the day and about 100 people attended the conference. They had lunch in the alleyway. Five vendors attended the event.

“In some ways, it has changed incredibly,” Hallberg said. “In some ways, it has stayed the same.”

Spiceworks quickly outgrew the Alamo Drafthouse, Hallberg said. SpiceWorld has been in the Austin Convention Center for the last five years, he said.

“It’s this two-day celebration of everything that is IT,” he said.

Spiceworks’ community is everything to the business, Hallberg said.

Spiceworks sees millions of IT professionals every month, he said. The community has tens of thousands of people who are highly active in that community. Spiceworks rewards them with badges on a pepper scale with pure capsaicin being the highest honor. It honors those members with awards at the convention every year.

At SpiceWorld 2019, Spiceworks also announced a new product, Account Intelligence, which is powered by artificial intelligence. It lets brands target customers within Spiceworks to market and advertise their products to. Its key features include a prioritized list of businesses currently in the market for a brand’s products and services, information on purchasing intent trends, and competitive insights. The product is currently being beta tested and is expected to be available early next year.

In addition, Spiceworks is using artificial intelligence to mine its data to provide its Spiceworks community members with more insights into market, business, technology and personal insights.

Spiceworks has always been transparent and upfront with its technology community about how it uses data, Hallberg said.

“Any data that is gathered and used has to be for the benefit of the user and not the brand,” Hallberg said.

Spiceworks is also General Data Protection and Regulation complaint. GDPR is a European Union law passed a few years ago to protect citizen’s data and privacy. The law is mandated for tech companies operating in Europe.

SpiceWorld also featured a keynote by Brian Krebs, journalist and Cybersecurity expert. Computer system breaches are the top concern of the Spiceworks community, Hallberg said.

Spiceworks also released its 2020 State of IT study examining technology budget shifts and emerging technology trends in organizations across North America and Europe. The report finds many businesses plan to update old computers to address growing security concerns.

For more, listen to the entire interview with Jay Hallberg. Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site.

Ever wonder what’s going on underwater when you’re fishing?

That’s what piqued Brandon Austin’s interest.  He grew up fishing in Canada and Costa Rica and he always wanted to know what was happening in the water. So, he created a company to find out and became flounder of GoFish Cam.

“Growing up fishing, always like everyone else who has ever held a rod in their hands, I wondered what was going on underwater,” Austin said.

GoFish Cam is a small cylindrical wireless underwater video camera that sits on a fishing line near the lure and works with a mobile app and allows anglers to have a fish-eye view of the water.

“It’s become a great tool that every time you reel in, you have some insight into what’s going on,” Austin said.

Founded in 2015, GoFish Cam raised $750,000, according to CrunchBase. It was part of the Central Texas Angel Network’s portfolio as well as a member of Capital Factory’s accelerator program. Capital Factory also invested in the startup.

In March of 2018, Unorthodox Ventures acquired GoFish Cam and brought the organization inside its offices. That’s when Adam Kahn, sheepshead of operations and a member of Unorthodox Ventures’ The Kitchen, joined GoFish Cam to bring the product to an even larger market.

On this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Austin and Kahn talk about how customers are using the camera and plans for market expansion.

Early on, GoFish Cam effectively used crowdfunding to get its customers engaged early on and to raise money to manufacture the product. The company raised $101,000 from 563 backers during a 2015 Kickstarter project and $120,189 from 631 backers in 2017 from an IndieGoGo campaign.

In addition to anglers, the U.S. Navy Seals began using the GoFish Cam cameras for underwater research, Austin said. Other marine researchers also use the cameras, he said.

“That just shows you a cool part of the entrepreneurial journey, you develop your product for one use case and out of nowhere you find out that you accidentally developed it for something else,” Austin said.

The cameras have captured some amazing underwater footage and GoFish Cam has posted some of them to its YouTube channel on its website.

For more on the company, listen to the entire podcast. Also, please rate and review our Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and support Silicon Hills News by becoming a patron on our Patreon site.