Sheela Marshall and Natalie Merrick founded Tequila Sheela, a tequila company, in 2014.
Sheela’s always had a passion for tequila. When she went to India to visit her mother, she paid $35 for a shot of tequila at a hotel. She didn’t like it and she thought she could create a better tequila. She did research and found out that India consumed a lot of alcohol. That sparked her interest in starting a tequila company to import tequila to India.
Sheela shared the idea with her best friend Natalie and they decided to
launch Tequila Sheela together.
But India turned out to be a much more difficult market than they anticipated.
So, they turned their efforts on marketing their brand in Texas.
“We have a very clean tequila, it’s sourced from a single plant, the blue
agave,” Merrick said.
Tequila Sheela also doesn’t use any pesticides or chemicals on its plants or
in the processing of its Tequila, and it is certified organic, Merrick said.
And in 2016, Tequila Sheela won a double gold medal for its Sheela Reposado
Tequila, and Silver Medals for its Sheela Blanco Tequila and Sheela Anejo
Tequila in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.
That is quite an accomplishment and something Tequila Sheela is proud of,
Marshall said. The organic tequila is made on a small family farm in the state
of Jalisco, Mexico. It took years for Marshall and Merrick to negotiate the
business and launch the brand but since they launched they have found great
success in the Texas market.
And before they named the brand, Tequila Sheela, they did not know Country
Singer Bobby Bare had a Tequila Sheila song about an outlaw in Mexico who dons
a dress to get away from the Federales with the popular refrain “Pour me
another tequila, Sheila.” Sheela hopes
to meet him one day – perhaps at Luckenbach.
The two female founders have faced many challenges in growing the business and increasing brand awareness, but they’ve also had quite a few big wins in the process. Tequila Sheela is available through Total Wine & More, and other retailers as well as bars and restaurants.
One of the biggest challenges is it’s hard to get people to believe that two women own a tequila company, Merrick said. Tune in to the full podcast on Ideas to Invoices to learn more about their entrepreneurial journey.
Schwartzfarb has spent decades working with startups. In his
latest role, he took over the managing director job of Techstars Austin from
Jason Seats in 2015 and he has graduated three classes of startups under his
direction.
Before joining Techstars, Schwartzfarb served as head of
customer development at Joust. Previously, he was vice president of customer
development at BlackLocus, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2012. And he
was co-founder and served as Chief Operating Officer of mySpoonful, which was
acquired in 2011. He also served as an executive with Business.com, which was acquired
by RH Donnelly in 2007. And he spent five years at HotJobs.com.
In this latest edition of the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Schwartzfarb talks about what he sees as the big mistakes entrepreneurs make when it comes to sales, sales strategy, what he looks for in choosing startups to participate in Techstars Austin, some of the breakout Techstar Austin companies and the phenomenal growth of Austin’s startup ecosystem.
One of the biggest sales mistakes entrepreneurs make is “thinking that they have a clear idea of who their customer is, what they are buying and why they are buying it before they really do and just going with gut rather than using data,” Schwartzfarb said.
The next mistake is starting with sales, before doing the
research.
“Starting with sales versus starting with customer
development and customer exploration and thinking that they need to get into
repeatable sales before they have any idea about what can be repeatable in what
they have done,” he said.
Traction is a big focal point when it comes to startups, but
traction can have a lot of different definitions, depending on who you talk to,
Schwartzfarb said.
“But it generally means that the entrepreneur has hit some
kind of repeatability with customers, or they show that they can do that,” he
said.
In his book, Schwartzfarb focuses on customer development
first.
“Up until Series A, startups are still figuring out who
their customer is and what they can learn from them,” he said.
The goal is to get to
that hockey stick effect where sales just take off, but that requires a lot of work
on the entrepreneur’s part in defining and catering to the ideal customer set,
Schwartzfarb said.
“It’s akin to doing consultative sales,” he said. “You go in
with a theory that you are filling a void that exists. You might have a strong
conviction about it. But you’ve got to get customer data to support it.”
Entrepreneur do that by listening to prospective customers
and validating that the problem they believe exists is in fact there and that they
can solve it with their product, he said.
“And that it can be repeatable for a specific customer set,”
he said.
Schwartzfarb is a very strong advocate for the entrepreneur
to be the one facing the customer in the early days and trying to figure out
whether their assumptions are right by validating the data.
He would also like to see founders working on their company without
other distractions, but he realizes that isn’t always possible when some
founders need a job to pay rent.
“A founder that can’t dedicate 100 percent of their time to
the thing they are trying to create is setting up additional roadblocks for
themselves,” he said.
Still, some entrepreneurs can be scrappy at making it all
work with a job and developing their startups. That can show the ability to
make things happen despite difficult circumstances, he said.
Schwartzfarb evaluates thousands of companies each time
Techstars Austin brings on a new class. He ultimately selects ten to
participate in the accelerator program.
To select those startups, Schwartzfarb has a checklist that entrepreneurs
must meet to become a finalist.
First, he needs to be convinced the CEO can build a
meaningful company and attract great talent, Schwartzfarb said.
“I’m not talking about the product or the market yet, it’s
all about the person,” he said.
Next, is the team cohesive and are they the ones that have
the skillset to accomplish what they want to do, he said.
“And lastly, do I believe that there is an interesting market
that has a big opportunity,” Schwartzfarb said. “The product is interesting to
me, but a lot less important. “
That can still leave Schwartzfarb with more startups than he
has space for and so then he focuses on “who are the people we think we are
going to have the most fun working with,” he said.
Techstars Austin has startups from varied industries in its
portfolio including consumer packaged goods.
A couple of years ago, the Techstars program expanded in
Austin with the addition of the Techstars Impact accelerator which Zoe Schlag
heads up. She previously founded and ran
the Unlimited impact accelerator in Austin before joining Techstars.
“What we saw in Techstars was a large percentage of our
companies were impact companies,” Schwartzfarb said. And Techstars data showed
impact companies outperform non-impact companies, he said.
About a third of the Techstars Austin companies are
impact-driven companies, Schwartzfarb said. In addition to Techstars Impact Austin,
Techstars has expanded its impact accelerators to Denver and Atlanta.
It’s not a hard sell to convince companies to locate to
Austin to participate in the Techstars Austin program, Schwartzfarb said.
Austin is increasingly becoming a hotbed of startup activity
and more and more companies are moving here because of the quality of life, lower
cost of doing business and abundance of talent, Schwartzfarb said.
Austin is looked at as one of the best places in the country
to build an early-stage company, Schwartzfarb said.
In the last Techstars class, six companies came from out of
state and three have moved to Austin permanently and two more are in the
process, Schwartzfarb said.
The venture capital availability has improved in Austin, but
it is still lacking in early-stage funding.
Austin has more capital than a few years back, but the city still needs more seed-stage capital, he said. Investors in Austin tend to invest with more of a Series A mindset, he said.
And the top companies to come out of Techstars Austin have
raised their later stage funding outside of Austin, Schwartzfarb said.
For example, ScaleFactor has raised more than $100 million
in the last 14 months. Its investors include Coatue Management, Bessemer
Venture Partners, Canaan, Broadhaven Ventures and Firebrand Ventures.
Other Techstars Austin startups that are expanding quickly include Chowbotics, which has created robots that make food and deliver it to people via vending machines, Storyfit in Austin, Skipper, and SkillPop out of Charlotte, North Carolina, Schwartzfarb said.
Applications close on August 25thfor the next Techstars Austin accelerator. The program kicks off this year on De5c. 2nd so the Techstars companies will be ready to go to South by Southwest and pitch their ventures.
For more about Techstars, the startup ecosystem in Austin and cycling around Austin, tune in to the entire podcast.
Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, holds up a T-Shirt from the Computer History Museum imprinted with his original sketch for Ethernet from a May 22, 1973 memo he wrote
Ethernet’s 46th anniversary is Wednesday, May 22nd
and on this occasion, Silicon Hills News has done a special edition Ideas to
Invoices podcast with Bob Metcalfe, founder of Ethernet.
Metcalfe is also professor of Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin. On Tuesday morning, he spoke to Silicon Hills News on the outdoor deck of Mozart’s Coffee Roasters. An occasional bird can be heard in the background as we chatted under the giant oak trees overlooking Lake Austin.
Metcalfe, who came to Austin in 2010, is also taking a 15-month leave from his position at the University of Texas at Austin starting this summer. During his time off, he plans to work with two Austin startups, which he declined to name.
Metcalfe sketched out the diagram for how Ethernet would work and included it in a memo he typed up on an IBM Selectric Typewriter. (which he thinks might have been made in Austin) He was working at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, known as PARC.
Metcalfe
also formulated Metcalfe’s Law, “which states that the value of a
telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of
connected users of the system.” And that’s been one of the greatest
achievements of the Internet and Ethernet is the ability to connect so many worldwide.
This year, Ethernet celebrates its 46th anniversary, the
Internet celebrates its 50th anniversary, 3Com, the company Metcalfe
went on to found, which is now part of HP, celebrates its 40th
anniversary and the World Wide Web turns 30 years old.
It seemed like the perfect time to chat about Metcalfe’s accomplishments of the past, the killer app of the Internet and some of the ill effects of the Internet and social networks.
For example, Metcalfe quit Twitter in January of this year because the social network continually put him in a bad mood from reading various tweets. It also ate up a lot of his time. He now has reclaimed three and a half hours a day that he used to spend on Twitter, he said. He still does post information to Facebook, and he’s careful not to spend too much time on that platform.
Metcalfe also thinks the current problems the Internet faces will be solved. And there’s so much more he talks about so tune in and listen to the whole podcasat below or on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts.
Barry Mione, President and Co-Founder of SaveDay, courtesy photo
SaveDay wants to make sure everyone can easily and affordably save for retirement.
That’s the mission for Barry Mione, Co-Founder and President of SaveDay, a startup that provides 401K plans to small businesses.
SaveDay, with four employees, is relocating from California to Austin. Mione is currently participating in the Winter 2019 Sputnik ATX program. Sputnik ATX is an early stage tech accelerator that invests $100,000 into each of the startups accepted into its 13-week program. Its Demo Day is next Tuesday when the five startups in the latest cohort including SaveDay will graduate from the program.
“The majority of companies, especially smaller companies, don’t
offer their employees a 401K retirement plan,” Mione said.
During an interview on the Ideas to Invoices podcast, Mione discusses how the company got
started, the growing need to provide 401K retirement plans to individuals who
work for small companies and plans for its future growth. SaveDay has about
2,000 participants currently and manages more than $20 million in assets.
Ayman Abukhater and Mione co-founded SaveDay in 2015. The
company has four employees with plans to grow to ten employees by the end of
the year, Mione said.
Only 14 percent to 15 percent of employees, who work for
companies with less than 100 employees in the U.S., have a 401K retirement
plan, Mione said. About 41 million people in the U.S. who work for small
companies are currently not saving for retirement, he said.
SaveDay is really the ability for an employer to offer any
employee in America a 401K that is free to the employer and lowest in the
industry to an employee and costs $3.50 annually for every $1,000 invested, Mione
said.
Before launching SaveDay, Mione served as vice president at BNY
Mellon and he previously served as senior director of customer service at
E*trade Financial. The startup Mione co-founded, DLJdirect, a division of
Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp. sold to E*trade.
SaveDay is focused on eliminating fees for employers and
minimizing them for employees for 401K retirement plans, Mione said. SaveDay is
a web-based program that is mobile friendly, he said. The size of the companies
enrolled in its program run the gamut from two employees to companies with 125
employees, Mione said.
“I call this a big blue ocean of opportunity,” Mione said.
SaveDay is focused on the 85 percent of small employers who don’t currently
offer retirement plans.
The SaveDay platform lets employees save as little as $5 a week, Mione said. It adds up over time, he said. A 25-year-old who invests just $2 a day will be a millionaire by the time they retire, Mione said.
For more on SaveDay, please listen to the entire podcast below.
In 1996, Sridhar Vembu founded Zoho in Silicon Valley.
Today, the bootstrapped startup is still in its teenage
years even as it finds its stride with the increasing popularity of its suite
of software apps aimed at running everything from a small business to a Fortune
500 company.
The privately-held company does not disclose its revenue,
but it does report that it has seen a compound annual growth rate of 37 percent
during the past five years. And that has led Zoho is profitable and expanding to
even more places.
“In about the first two or three years, we found our footing
in business and we’ve been steadily growing. We decided not to take outside money
like 19 years ago, we just made a one-time decision and we have stuck with it,”
Vembu said. “And we’ve just grown to tell the story.”
Vembu spoke with Ideas to Invoices during Zoho’s annual user conference in Austin, Zoholics. At that event, held at the Palmer Events center downtown, Vembu announced Zoho plans to relocate Zoho’s corporate headquarters from Pleasanton, Calif. to Austin. Zoho has purchased a 375-acre campus at Texas Highway 71 near Kellam Road and Vembu said his vision for the site is to create an Indian village for Zoho’s workers. It might contain houses in addition to a 100,000 square foot building and is going to have about 500 employees.
Vembu doesn’t plan to
exit by taking the company public or selling it. Zoho doesn’t have to answer to
shareholders and can run its business differently. But it’s bootstrapped way of
work used to be the norm, Vembu said.
“Historically this was not unusual,” Vembu. “If you look go
back 100 years to 150 years you look at businesses, most of them were built
this way. What has changed I would argue I haven’t changed as much as the whole
environment has changed.”
Financial bubbles that have been created have forced
short-term thinking in many tech startups looking to exit through initial
public offerings or private equity investments too soon. In the last 20 years,
the U.S. has experienced the Dot Com bubble and the housing bubble and sub-prime
bubble, Vembu said.
“Right now, we are in an everything bubble,” Vembu said. “And
that changes behavior.”
Vembu is inspired by companies in Japan like Toyota, Honda
and Cannon. Japanese companies believe in long term vision and building
centuries old companies. They have the patience and persistence to pursue
long-term projects and that has led to their success, Vembu said.
Zoho makes a suite of 48 software apps to run a business and
packages them in a product called Zoho One, which includes sales,
marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an
array of productivity and collaboration tools.
Zoho still thinks of itself as a startup, Vembu said. It still
has a lot to do and they go after it with its gusto, Vembu said. It also has patience
and it doesn’t grow through mergers and acquisitions and that allows it to
maintain its corporate culture, Vembu said.
Zoho’s competitors outspend the company on marketing but it
keeps growing and acquiring new customers primarily through word of mouth,
Vembu said.
Zoho Corporation has more than 7,000 employees and more than
300 languages are spoken within its workforce. It has 20 offices worldwide with
international headquarters in Chennai, India.
Zoho focuses on building relationships with its employees and
its customers for the long term, Vembu said. Too much of business has become
transactional, he said. It should be based more on relationships and that makes
everyone happier, he said.
Short term thinking in
business is exacting a long-term societal cost, Vembu said. He believes we are
going to see a change in the way businesses act because they’ve reached a peak.
Also, Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. It tracks metrics internally, but it does not share them with others, Vembu said.
For more on Zoho, listen to the entire podcast below.
Most companies wouldn’t let everyone have access to a vault of money, but many companies don’t think about limiting access to data within their organizations
That’s where ALTR comes in. It breaks up data and stores it using blockchain technology, making it inaccessible to an intruder or someone who doesn’t have the key.
ALTR, a data security company, quietly came out of stealth mode last June and announced it had raised $15 million in venture capital.
For four years, a team of engineers worked on the software behind ALTR, said David Sikora, a software industry veteran and former executive chairman at Stratfor, a global research, and intelligence platform. He is a veteran technology executive and the CEO of ALTR.
“Blockchain is a pretty profound new
development, akin to where the Internet was back in the 1994-95 timeframe and
the founding team of ALTR really got a great head start,” Sikora said.
Silicon Hills News recently sat down with Sikora, to talk about ALTR’s cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.
Austin-based ALTR launched its
cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology last year and has
customers in the healthcare industry and financial services. It also has 18
patents that have been issued and several more pending.
Early on, the founding team behind ALTR,
who came from Wall Street options trading, saw how blockchain technology could
be used to differentiate the data security landscape and they started investing
in protecting those innovations, Sikora said. At one point and time, ALTR had
10 percent of all the issued patents in blockchain technology in the country,
he said. A lot of the patents they’ve filed relate to how ALTR is breaking up
and storing data in the blockchain, Sikora said.
ALTR’s platform consists
of an ALTR monitor, ALTR govern and ALTR protect. It integrates into existing
computer networks and supports Microsoft, Oracle and open-source database
platforms. Like a 10,000 piece puzzle, ALTR breaks data into small pieces and
stores it on different servers so if hackers break into a computer system, they
can only access fragments of data.
And recently ALTR partnered with San
Antonio-based Sirius Computer Solutions to provide blockchain-based data
security as a managed service. That partnership helps the company reach even
more businesses, Sikora said.
And
ALTR’s blockchain technology is being used to secure data in the healthcare
field. Recently FRTYL adopted the ALTR platform to protect health records
involved in fertility treatment and IVF.
A lot of hype and focus on Blockchain
cryptocurrency has cooled considerably this year but there are more startups
focused on using blockchain for healthcare, journalism, and verification
purposes. Blockchain technology is becoming more mainstream, Sikora said.
ALTR is also a member of the Austin Blockchain
Collective, which is comprised of more than 120 companies in Austin. But ALTR
doesn’t consider itself to be a blockchain company, Sikora said. It’s a
software cybersecurity company that uses the blockchain to protect data.
For more on ALTR, listen to the entire podcast below.
Wearing a red cowboy hat, jeans, a button-down white shirt, a jade necklace and a necklace of crystals, Adeo Ressi doesn’t look like the typical startup founder.
And he’s not.
Ressi, who has founded and sold two $1 billion companies, now serves as CEO of Founder Institute, which runs an early-stage startup program in 200 cities worldwide, including Austin. He visited Austin during South by Southwest and gave a speech at SXSW on finding your purpose and turning that into a business.
“A startup fails when the founder gives up,” Ressi said. “So, people
always ask is it money, is it the market, or the model, or management. It’s
none of the above. It’s always the drive and passion of the founder. When the
founder is pursuing their purpose wholeheartedly by running the company, that
company can achieve really miraculous things.”
Purpose is driven from the heart, not from the mind, Ressi said.
“Your purpose is something you feel,” he said. “Your heart is driven by
love.”
It’s important for entrepreneurs to get in touch with their feelings and
emotions through guided mediation to feel what their heart is telling them, Ressi
said. Founders can also do it through journaling, he said.
Ressi also spent time at Galvanize with graduates of the Founder Institute Austin program. And he took some time to talk about entrepreneurship on this Ideas to Invoices podcast.
During the podcast, Ressi talks about a whole range of issues. Ressi has done a lot of work with psychometrics and the only thing that alters a person’s personality to create more openness is psychedelic mushrooms, he said. It can help you find your purpose, but journaling is a lot safer and less dramatic method, Ressi said.
Mediation and yoga are also good alternatives, he said.
Working with a coach or adviser can also help a person find their purpose,
Ressi said.
“I think everyone should go on that journey,” he said.
At SXSW this year, a lot of talks focused on authenticity and truth. The rise of vanity metrics has had a counter effect on authenticity in the digital age, Ressi said.
“Obviously you don’t want to post ugly photos on Instagram,” Ressi said.
“But then what happens you get to the point where you start manufacturing
photos that are not real in any way to get followers essentially and build
these vanity metrics.”
There’s almost an instinctual negative reaction that’s happening to
that, he said.
“Where there is a flight to authenticity and vulnerability,” Ressi said.
People just aren’t vulnerable and honest about their feelings, situations, and struggles, Ressi said.
“We have, as humanity, a great deal of trauma that has been passed down for generations,” he said.
Now, there are tools today to heal trauma and it’s important to use them to break inter-generational trauma cycles and build great companies that are good for humanity, Ressi said. He calls that the “neo-enlightenment.”
Fake it till you make it has been a mantra of Silicon Valley for
decades. It comes from entrepreneurs with big ideas showing rigged demos of
their products and creating fantastic revenue charts for where they want their
startups to go. But with the Theranos collapse, that way of doing business has
been called into question. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of Theranos raised $400
million to create a machine that could easily process a small finger-prick sample
of blood and test it for 200 diseases. The only problem was the machine didn’t
work and the company went bust but not before defrauding customers, investors
and employees.
Theranos is an outlier, Ressi said. Everything worked fine up until when Holmes began lying to investors, customers and everyone else, he said. Another recent social media-driven fraud case is Fyre Festival, which raised millions of dollars and promised customers an exotic musical festival in luxury tents on a private island in the Bahamas. Models and social media influencers promoted the festival through paid posts on Instagram, Twitter, and other social media platforms. The music festival turned out to be a huge fraud and didn’t deliver on its promises. Billy McFarland, its founder, is in jail. And Theranos’ Holmes is awaiting a criminal trial.
“As a founder, you run a delicate balance between having that unbridled
optimism and then also having to be genuine and honest,” Ressi said.
The examples of abuse are far less than the examples of success, Ressi
said.
For more on Ressi and his thoughts on traits for a successful entrepreneur and the rise of China and other emerging technology markets, please listen to the whole podcast.
Helping 10 Austin software companies to become billion-dollar companies and another 100 to $100 million in revenue in the next decade is the big hairy audacious goal of the Austin Technology Council.
And Amber Gunst, the CEO who took over the job in January
after serving as interim CEO since last May, is determined to make that happen.
“We are completely and solely focused on the promotion and
support of our member companies,” Gunst said.
Austin is one of the leading technology centers in the
country and it’s going to continue to expand, Gunst said. And the Austin Technology
Council, founded in 1992, is one of the most instrumental organizations for established
companies that are earning at least $1 million per year in revenue, she said.
But it hasn’t always been that way. Austin suffered, like a
lot of tech centers, when the Dot Com bust happened around the turn of the
century in 2000 and 2001. But out of the hard times, Austin’s scrappy bootstrapping
culture was born, Gunst said. She points to companies like Calavista Software,
which was founded in 2001 as a contract software development group. Today, Calavista
is a privately-held full service software development company with clients like
American Express and Nissan.
“That Dot Com bust made a lot of people get scrappy,” Gunst
said. It took time to create these great software companies that around today,
she said.
In this Ideas to Invoices podcast, Gunst discusses the opportunities and challenges Austin’s technology industry faces from rising real estate prices, traffic, talent, funding, diversity and inclusion and more.
Gunst has 20 years of experience in business development and
sales including four years at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. She
previously served as head of sales and membership at ATC. Since her time
working at ATC, she has more than doubled membership and increased retention by
over 18 percent.
Gunst’s advice for South by Southwest is not to over book.
Take time out to make connections with folks from out of town. Gunst
particularly like to visit the Scandinavian House, Canada House and some of the
other international exhibits in town.
ATC’s Gateway South by Southwest Party kicks off tonight at six at the Roosevelt Room and The Eleanor which are known for its 20th century jazz atmosphere and craft cocktails. Last year, ATC’s Gateway Party attracted more than 800 people.
For more on Austin’s growing technology industry, listen to the entire Ideas to Invoices podcast.
In 2014, Chris Shonk co-foundedATX Seed Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm, based in Austin.
ATX Seed Ventures has three partners: Danielle Allen, Brad Bentz and Shonk.
Shonk said they saw the demise of Austin Ventures, the largest local venture capital firm which sunset that year, as an opportunity.
ATX Seed Ventures raised a $18 million fund in 2014, followed by a $32 million fund in 2016. Fund 2 is not fully committed, Shonk said.
“We still have capital to call and powder to invest,” he said.
ATX Seed Ventures plans to announce its third fund this year, Shonk said. It might announce something around South by Southwest, he said. Shonk spoke about the plans during a podcast interview with Ideas to Invoices.
ATX Seed Ventures has already had four exits of its portfolio companies including German car giant Daimler’s moovel brand acquisition of RideScout in 2014, FantasySalesTeam which sold to Microsoft in 2015 and Pledge Music’s acquisition of Set.fm in 2016, and Q2ebanking’s acquisition of Unbill in 2017.
“Millionaires were made,” Shonk said. And some of
those founders are now limited partners in ATX Seed Ventures’ fund, he said.
In its second fund, ATX Seed Ventures has invested in
12 companies and ten of them are founders that have previously run venture-backed
companies, Shonk said.
Some of ATX Seed Ventures other portfolio companies
include LIFT Aircraft, Slingshot Aerospace, SourceDay, RoverPass, GoCo, Olono,
Everfest and Alert Media. It makes investments of between $500,000 to $750,000
initially, but it will make whatever size it takes to lead, Shonk said.
There’s also a talent and experience spillover from startups
that exit in Austin, Shonk said. They bring a depth of executive and junior talent
to Austin that allows for the next generation of companies to go big, he said.
Seed stage deal funding in Austin has fallen for three
consecutive years, according to data from the PricewaterhouseCoopers MoneyTree
Report. But Shonk said that a lot of seed stage funding is now as large as
Series A funding used to be and that there is a focus on writing larger checks.
Seed stage is viewed as the Wild West, Shonk said. ATX
Seed Ventures is running a constructed fund, he said.
“It’s hard to do things small, at scale, that have
magnitude,” he said.
Most people have a shotgun approach to investing at
that stage, Shonk said.
But investing at that stage is really and art and a
science and that’s where ATX Seed Ventures’ expertise comes into play, Shonk
said.
“Seed and A are very fluid words, Shonk said. “The
seed rounds were leading now would have been A rounds back in the day.”
“But what we are seeing is tons of opportunities,”
Shonk said.
If something isn’t a fit for ATX Seed Ventures, he might send the deal to one of the accelerators in town or to angel investors, Shonk said.
For more on ATX Seed Ventures and Shonk’s views on Austin’s developing technology industry, listen to the entire podcast on Apple iTunes, Spotify or below.
Correction: This article has been updated to add all of the partners and to correct the date ATX Seed Ventures raised the second fund it was in 2016. Also, the second fund still has money to invest, Shonk said.
Rolston, who has a more than 25-year career in the design industry, recently sat down with Silicon Hills News’ Ideas to Invoices podcast to talk about the projects his company is working on now and its future as a wholly owned subsidiary of DXC Technology.
Before launching argodesign, Rolston was the chief creative officer of frogdesign. He joined frog in 1994 and co-founded the software design group. He has worked for some of the world’s top brands including Disney, Ford, GE, Microsoft, and AT&T.
Following its sale to DXC Technology argodesign will continue to be based in Austin and it will continue to work with current clients like CognitiveScale and Magic Leap, which has a research and development office in Austin, Rolston said.
Among its high-profile projects, argodesign is working with Magic Leap, which has created augmented reality glasses, to create the buildout of a new computing model based on the concepts of mixed reality and spatial computing. Magic Leap’s technology creates immersive experiences in any room or space, Rolston said.
Argodesign is also working with Austin-based CognitiveScale on artificial intelligence products.
And the company has created concept projects like delivery drones for Whole Foods and transportation pods for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop system, designed to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. Some of the projects will never become a reality, Rolston said.
And recently, argodesign created Stäk, an immersion coffee brewer as its first consumer incubator project debuting on store shelves in early 2019.
For more on argodesign, design thinking and its innovative work in Austin, listen to the podcast.
And the company has created concept projects like delivery drones for Whole Foods and transportation pods for Elon Musk’s Hyperloop system, designed to take people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. Some of the projects will never become a reality, Rolston said.
