Category: Ideas to Invoices Podcast (Page 7 of 10)

Bob Fabbio, founder and CEO of eRelevance, courtesy photo.

In 1995, Tivoli Systems went public and a year later IBM acquired the company for $743 million. Fabbio went on to found electronic document delivery startup Dazel, which Hewlett-Packard bought in 1999 for $180 million.

He later founded White Glove Health, a subscription-based healthcare service that provided health and wellnesses services directly to patients. In that job, Fabbio got the idea for eRelevance Corp., a next-generation customer engagement service for small businesses such as healthcare providers to better connect with their patients outside their practices.

Fabbio founded eRelevance Corp. in 2013. The privately-held company has reported significant revenue increases for the past three years and substantial growth. In 2017, eRelevance increased its Annual Run Rate revenue to $7.5 million, up from $3.6 million in 2016 and it now has more than 1,500 customers

And last year Entrepreneur Magazine named eRelevance as one of the best entrepreneurial companies in America.

To date, eRelevance has raised $13.7 million. Raising venture capital has allowed the company to scale its operations faster, Fabbio said.

eRelevance has 60 employees today and Fabbio’s long-term vision for eRelevance is to create a $1 billion company.

“I gravitate only to ideas, projects, business ideas, startups that have the potential to be a billion-dollar company and this is one of them,” Fabbio said. “I couldn’t be more excited -more passionate about this business than any other I’ve been a part of.”

To hear Fabbio’s advice on launching and scaling startups in Austin, Texas, listen to the latest Ideas to Invoices podcast.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelled the company’s name in the headline. We regret the error.

Scott Willis, founder of Tequila 512, photo by Matt Lankes

He is the president and founder of Tequila 512, Austin’s first tequila brand.

And in this podcast, Willis talks about his entrepreneurial journey, which wasn’t an easy one from quitting his day job and going all in on his tequila venture. He created an award-winning tequila that costs less than $30 a bottle.

But before that, he had to travel to Mexico and learn everything about the tequila industry. In Jalisco, Willis found Luis Trejo, master distiller at La Cofradia. That is still his distillery today.

In 2015, Tequila 512 won Double Gold and Best in Show at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.

Sarah Koch, vice president of social innovation at the Case Foundation, courtesy photo.

Sarah Koch, vice president of social innovation at the Case Foundation, has attended South by Southwest a few times and she noticed a big change and focus on inclusivity and diversity this year.

“Last year it felt like was that first turning point of seeing a lot of attendees who were from diverse communities,” Koch said. “Feeling like there was the beginning of content that spoke to more than just kind of the experience of the privileged white male in Silicon Valley.”

“This year the program coordinators have really hit it out of the ballpark,” Koch said.

Koch spoke about the Case Foundation’s involvement in this year’s SXSW 2018 on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

Before the interview, Koch had participated in a panel at SXSW at the JW Marriott on “Why Black Women are 2018’s Best Investment,” which discussed some of the successes black female entrepreneurs have had. The panel featured Kathryn Finney, founder of The Budget Fashionista and founder and CEO of digitalundivided, Cheryl Contee, CEO and co-founder of Fission Strategy and co-founder of social marketing software Attentive.ly at Blackbaud and Koch.

That wasn’t the only panel on the topic, Koch said. This year, SXSW had additional panels and conversations around black female entrepreneurs and LatinX female entrepreneurs and other diversity and inclusion panels, Koch said. The Case Foundation also co-hosted a brunch panel with the European Union and the United Nations Women focused on female entrepreneurship focused on the realities and opportunities there.

“I’ve really seen both from a content and attendee standpoint that we’re really starting to have a conversation around entrepreneurship that is encompassing and including all of the different types of entrepreneurs who we knew were out there building businesses today.”

During the Why Black Women are 2018’s Best Investment panel, the panelists discussed how less than 1 percent of all venture capital dollars go to black female-led companies.

While Koch is hopeful change will happen and is happening, she’s also realistic that it’s going to take time. People need to focus on how to change systems and creating an awareness around unconscious bias by investors, she said.

More coverage in the media about diverse entrepreneurs will start to affect the conversation people have about entrepreneurship and inspire others, Koch said.

Organizations that surround themselves with diverse people and look for diverse pipelines can overcome their unconscious bias and perform better than homogeneous organizations in the long run, according to Koch.

“Become more educated on who is out there,” Koch said. “There are some real Rockstars that are building companies now.”

Project Diane, a 2016 Report, showed that only 11 black women in the technology industry had raised $1 million or more of venture capital. That stat has more than tripled in the last few years, according to the panel. The full study is coming out in July, Koch said.

The Case Foundation is the family foundation of Steve and Jean Case. Steve Case co-founded America Online. Jean Case is CEO of the Case Foundation and Chairman of the Board of National Geographic. The Case Foundation has been involved in the inclusive entrepreneurship space during its entire 21 years but it is particularly focused on inclusivity and diversity for entrepreneurship through its Faces of Founders campaign, Koch said. The three ingredients entrepreneurs needs are social capital like mentors and accelerators, financial capital and inspiration capital, showcasing stories of diverse entrepreneurs.

Less than 10 percent of venture-backed companies have a woman on their founding team, Koch said. Less than 2 percent have an African American founder and less than .02 percent have an African American female founder, she said.

“So the capital just isn’t flowing in the right direction,” Koch said. “But the opportunity is there. There are more and more studies saying that investing in diverse teams or investing in women make investors more money.”

The Faces of Founders campaign is the key to the Case Foundation’s inspirational capital. The Case Foundation launched the campaign a year ago and it received 750 stories from entrepreneurs who are building businesses. Koch said.

“They were incredible stories entrepreneurs took the time to write out and be heard,” Koch said.

The top five stories ran in a series with Fast Company, but that wasn’t enough so they launched the FacesofFounders.org to feature more stories from entrepreneurs, Koch said.

And it isn’t a zero-sum game.

“There is so much capital that is being brought into this space that can be deployed in a lot of different ways and support a lot of people,” Koch said.

At SXSW, Case Foundation partnered with Tech.co and Kauffman Foundation on the American Cities House. Case set up a Facebook Live studio and brought through 14 different entrepreneurs, ecosystem builders and investors to talk about what they are doing.

“It was a really powerful moment,” Koch said.

For more on the interview, check out the entire podcast interview on Ideas to Invoices on iTunes and please rate and review the podcast.

Gabe WIlcox, co-founder and CEO of MineralSoft.

A native of Arkansas, Gabe Wilcox and his family know firsthand the problem mineral rights owners have in managing their assets.

“It has been a very archaic industry,” said Wilcox, CEO and co-founder of MineralSoft.

In the U.S., individuals can own the rights to any oil and gas that lies beneath the surface of their land and that’s what is called mineral rights, Wilcox said. Before MineralSoft, people made do with a lot of paper and technology tools that weren’t made to manage the assets, he said. When Wilcox couldn’t find a good tool to oversee his family’s assets, he saw an opportunity to build one.

At the time, Wilcox was working in investment finance and spent a summer in San Francisco where he reconnected with John Parker, now the company’s Chief Technology Officer. Together they founded MineralSoft, now based in Austin, which allows mineral rights holders to analyze their portfolios in real time.

Wilcox is featured in this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast discussing how MineralSoft is disrupting an industry.

Initially, to test their idea, Wilcox and Parker printed up business cards for a “company that didn’t yet exist.” And they flew to Houston to attend the annual NAPE Summit, the oil and gas industry’s marketplace for buying, selling and trading prospects and producing properties.

“We got really positive feedback and we learned a lot,” Wilcox said.

Wilcox, who had been studying for an MBA at Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, dropped out to focus on MineralSoft full time. Wilcox and Parker joined the Y Combinator startup program and graduated from that accelerator in 2016.

In February, MineralSoft announced that the company raised $4 million in funding. Investors included Cottonwood Venture Partners, based in Houston. Earlier investors included Bear Capital and Y Combinator.

In addition, MineralSoft recently entered into a joint venture with oil and gas data analytics company Drillinginfo, another Austin-based startup.

“Our products are really complementary,” Wilcox said.

An estimated 12 million private owners in the U.S. own mineral and royalty interests, according to the National Association of Royalty Owners. Those are MineralSoft’s customers as well as endowments, investment funds, trusts and other institutions.

MineralSoft has built a strong team of employees with oil and gas and technology backgrounds. The company has 20 employees currently and plans to double in size within the year, Wilcox said.

“We are changing the way people do things in this industry,” Wilcox said.

“Our challenge is really to go to the market and make them aware we are out there and that is a new and more efficient way to manage the asset.”

MineralSoft acquires its customers through word of mouth and through referrals, Wilcox said. The company will be doing more marketing and public relations outreach this year, he said.

MineralSoft is a cloud-based software company that charges its customers monthly for its service. Today, the company has more than 100 customers on the enterprise-side and its growth has been rapid the last few years, Wilcox said. It launched into the market when oil was at $20 a barrel.

“When oil is in the 20s you better have a value proposition, or no one is going to buy,” Wilcox said.

For more on MineralSoft, listen to the entire interview and please rate and review the Ideas to Invoices podcast on iTunes and you can also support Ideas to Invoices on Patreon.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Dosh, an app that gives consumers cash back for purchases, is disrupting the $200 billion advertising technology industry from Austin.

Ryan Wuerch, founder and CEO of Dosh, said Austin is one of the best places to create a big consumer tech company.

And Dosh is quickly growing from 10 people a year ago to more than 70 today and by the end of the year 200, Wuerch said. And already, millions of consumers have downloaded the app, which has given back more than $19 million in cash to consumers since launching last year.

Wuerch, a serial entrepreneur, has built a billion-dollar company before. Before Dosh, he launched Solavei, which was acquired in late 2015. He also founded Motricity which went public in 2010, obtaining a market value that exceeded $1 billion.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Wuerch discusses how he is going to give back more than $1 billion to consumers using the Dosh app.

In 2011, after Wuerch retired to Texas and traded walking his dog for walking his Longhorn on his ranch, he came up with the idea for Dosh. He saw three things converging on a global basis, the average household income was $48,000, social media changed consumer behavior and he saw an opportunity to create a compelling consumer product to disrupt the $200 billion advertising industry.

He joined forces with Ed Mock, who is Dosh’s co-founder and executive vice president of product and innovation, to create the cash back app.

Ryan Wuerch, founder and CEO of Dosh

“We want this to be the one app that everybody wants,” Wuerch said.

Dosh, which is slang for cash, is available via the Apple App Store or Google Play Store. To activate the app, a consumer inputs credit cards into the Dosh app and then they receive cash back for purchases made using those cards. The Dosh technology finds coupons and deals from the brand or merchant and automatically applies them to the consumer’s purchase. The app also has a feature called discovery that has special offers.

One of the most attractive parts of the Dosh app is the travel purchases. Instead of booking through online sites, Dosh lets consumers book hotels directly. They give 85 percent of the difference between the retail price and the wholesale price available to travel sites to the consumer.

For example, Wuerch spent a night at Le Meridien in San Francisco. The best price on online sites was $199 for the night. In the Dosh app, it was $199, but when he checked out the app put $67.03 in cash back into his Dosh wallet in his app where he could immediately move it to his bank account or transfer it to a charity.

Dosh is tied to the same credit card that a consumer already uses so they still get their loyalty rewards from the credit card issuer. What Dosh is giving back is from the brand or merchant.

By October, Dosh had 20,000 people card linked into the app. It took until Dec. 1st to give the first $1 million back to customers. But in December, the app hit a viral momentum and the app became the number one shopping app in Apple and number four in Google.

“We now have approximately six million people downloading it,” he said.

And 1.1 million have linked their cards and it is growing significantly every single day, he said. To date, Dosh has given more than $19 million in cash back to consumers, Wuerch said.

“This is what we all live for internally,” he said.

“We do not sleep in this company until we move the first billion dollars to millions of people,” he said. And he thinks the opportunity to do that is in the next two years.

Dosh has raised $27 million to date and soon expects to announce a new round of funding, Wuerch said.

That investment in technology has set the company apart from its competitors, Wuerch said. There are lots of free cash back apps and websites but many often require consumers to mail in receipts or take additional steps. Dosh works seamlessly behind the scenes, Wuerch said.

Dosh has no paid acquisition for consumers, Wuerch said. It doesn’t spend money on ads, he said.

“It’s all happened through word of mouth,” he said.

Originally, Dosh thought the target market for the app would be people 28 to 48, but they got it wrong. No matter how young or old and how much money they have, everyone wants to keep more money in their pocket, Wuerch said.

“We had it totally wrong. It’s everyone that we’re seeing,” Wuerch said.

For more discussion about Dosh and Wuerch, please listen to the entire podcast. And please rate and review Ideas to Invoices on iTunes.

Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, photo by John Davidson.

When South by Southwest started in 1987, it was a music only event and in 1994, the Interactive conference launched.

“There was this thing called the Web but not many people understood what it was,” said Hugh Forrest. “What was state of the art in 1994 was CD-ROMS. You had this disc that you could put a whole encyclopedia of information and content on. And that was, at that time, phenomenal and groundbreaking and worthy of many, many panels.“

“We look back at that two decades later and think how quaint that was,” Forrest said.

And in 20 years from now, people will look back at what was state of the art in 2017 and 2018 and think how dumb, stupid and trivial and quaint that was, Forrest said.

This Ideas to Invoices podcast kicks off our second season with a talk with Forrest, an Austin Icon and chief programming officer at SXSW.

An Austin native, Forrest graduated from Austin High School and majored in English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.

Before SXSW, Forrest held several jobs in the newspaper industry and he started an alternative newspaper in town, The Austin Challenger, a rival to The Austin Chronicle, which runs SXSW.

In 1988, Forrest joined SXSW to head up the Interactive operations.

Forrest has seen the city change from a sleepy college town portrayed best in Richard Linklater’s Slacker showing off Austin as an “Eden for the young and unambitious” to today’s bustling tech center.

SXSW Interactive has gained an international reputation as one of the world’s most influential tech events. It’s been called Spring Break for Geeks among other nicknames.

Today, SXSW Conference and Festivals is a ten-day-long convergence of tech, movies, and music now entering its 32nd year.

Interactive used to be the smallest of the three conferences for SXSW, behind Music and Film and now it’s the largest.

Roland Swenson, CEO of SXSW, had a vision that Interactive would grow to become a huge part of the festival, Forrest said. He could envision a day when everything from music to film to software goes from physical products to digital ones. Yet, in the beginning, Interactive struggled to find its footing and lost money for several years, Forrest said. Swenson said to stay the course and eventually it would turn around and it did, Forrest said.

“We were also very fortunate to be at the right place at the right time on social media,” Forrest said.

SXSW got a reputation as a place to launch a startup with Twitter gaining a lot of traction there in 2007. Other startups to launch out SXSW include Foursquare and Gowalla, an Austin-based check-in startup, that launched on the same day in 2009. Facebook bought Gowalla and Foursquare is still around, but it has pivoted many times since then. Meerkat, an online streaming app, also launched in 2015 and went out of business due to increased competition from Periscope and others.

AirBnB also tested out its concept at SXSW but didn’t get a lot of traction. It only rented out a few places and one was to Brian Chesky, one of the founders.

In 2015, William Hurley, known as Whurley, launched Honest Dollar at SXSW and won the SXSW ReleaseIt and ATI pitch competitions. A year later, he sold Honest Dollar to Goldman Sachs and made the announcement at SXSW.

SXSW is known worldwide as the birthplace of new ideas and that is still true today, Forrest said.

“We strive to be a place to be to come and discover what’s going to be hot in two years,” he said.

In 2011, SXSW launched the Startup Village and it features the SXSW Accelerator competition, ReleaseIt pitch competition and this year, a new pitch competition for Block Chain startups in cooperation with Capital Factory, Forrest said.

SXSW also attracts all kinds of top-notch speakers, celebrities and politicians including President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama.

Still, there are people Forrest has not been able to get yet. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, is one of the people Forrest has had on his radar for some time that he is working to get to speak at SXSW.

Lots of international speakers and startup founders, that Forrest hopes to get to SXSW.

And Oprah is another one.

“It will happen one of these years,” he said.

For more about trends at SXSW 2018 and pivotal moments from SXSW’s history, listen to the rest of the podcast.

Editor’s note: This podcast kicks off our second season. We are looking for a sponsor for the next 30 episodes of Ideas to Invoices, please contact LauraLorek@gmail.com to sponsor. Also, please rate and review Ideas to Invoices on iTunes. Thank you!

Robyn Metcalfe, founder of Food+City at UT Austin, photo by John Davidson.

Engineers are becoming the new farmers, according to Robyn Metcalfe, founder, and director of Food+City at the University of Texas at Austin.

In a movement Metcalfe labels “Fab to Table,” she sees a food revolution going on right now that will lead to more personalized food products on the family dinner table.

“Who is going to be farming and creating our food in the next generation?” Metcalfe asked during a discussion on the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

In the future, people will look to engineers at Carnegie Mellon, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Davis, to provide the new ways to grow, manufacture and supply food, Metcalfe said.

But people are still an integral part of the process, Metcalfe said. The food system will include both people and machines working together to produce food and distribute it to the growing cities, she said.

These changes are going to dramatically affect how people get fed, Metcalfe said. Even things like a shift in the way people consume protein will affect the food network, she said.

“It’s really the protein revolution that is a part of this conversation,” Metcalfe said. “And crickets, cricket protein, bug protein is a part of that. And it will affect the supply chain if you have more protein coming from plants, crickets and other things, other than meat, there is a whole shift in the way food is produced, how it finds its way to your plate. And a big re-engineering of the supply chain as those protein sources change.”

Currently, Metcalfe is writing a book about the food supply chain for MIT that will be published in the next year.

In Austin, Metcalfe launched Food+City, formerly known as the Food Lab, four years ago, to bring attention to how people in cities are fed around the world.
“It’s really a two-part mission: telling stories and inspiring entrepreneurs to launch startups to solve problems,” Metcalfe said.

Every year, Food+City hosts the Food Challenge Prize, which focuses on the food supply chain. The prize awards technology that solves problems such as tracking and tracing food, cold storage, robots, drones, driverless cars and other ways that change how food gets distributed.

In 2018, Food+City will host the Food Challenge Prize, a pitch event featuring finalists, at South by Southwest.

As a food historian, Metcalfe looks at past lessons to spur innovation in the future of the food industry. She is also a visiting research scholar and lecturer in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin.

Metcalfe has written for and produced Sunset Magazine, authored two non-fiction books, served as a visiting research scholar at Boston University and founded a non-profit educational farm in Maine. She has a Cordon Bleu certificate for culinary skills, a Cheese Certificate and is an ultra-marathoner.

Metcalfe’s varied background has prepared her to run Food+City, which just published the third edition of its print magazine, which blends food, technology, art and innovation into beautifully written, photographed and laid out stories.

“We love it. We love the feel of paper. We do believe in the blend of art and science, digital and art. And we think this is a great expression of that. There are drawings in it. There’s photography in it. There’s a lot of people and humanity in it. And I think this leads to where we think our food economy is going. It will be an elegant creation that consists of both digital and analog, people and machines hopefully in the future,” Metcalfe said.

In 2015, Metcalfe wrote an article in TechCrunch titled “The coming food bubble” about all the investment flowing into food startups, primarily in Silicon Valley.

“The bubble is hovering,” Metcalfe said. “I think it has lost some air. It hasn’t exploded.”

It has resulted in the deflation of a lot of food startup valuations, Metcalfe said It was fueled initially by the fear of missing out, she said.

“I think we are experiencing sort of that pause, and reconsideration and more learning and less sort of just panicked participation in the market,” Metcalfe said.

Metcalfe is also seeing this trend in the latest submission pool of startups to the Food+City Challenge prize. She is seeing more intelligent startups and those further down the pipeline of solving problems.

Last month, Metcalfe completed a 150-mile ultra-marathon, seven-day desert trail run in Patagonia, Argentina. She had to carry all her food, water and other supplies with her during her trek. It is the sixth ultra-marathon she has completed since 2006.

“I just feel you learn a lot. You always learn you are capable of lot more than you think you are,” Metcalfe said.

For more information about food innovation, listen to the entire Ideas to Invoices podcast with Metcalfe and please subscribe, rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

Rob Hirchfeld, founder and CEO of RackN

Hirschfeld has 15 years of experience in the cloud and infrastructure industry. He has served four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and previously worked as an executive at Dell. He’s also a serial entrepreneur. On this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Hirschfeld discusses how he has fine-tuned his storytelling skills throughout the years to better communicate with customers, investors, and others.

Hirschfeld founded RackN in October of 2014, the company has received some angel investment, earns money and is currently raising money.

He founded ProTier in 1999, which Surgient founded in 2004. He also founded Zehicle and has worked for several other technology companies and startups.
Hirschfeld goes to technology conferences to speak and market RackN. He also blogs regularly and he launched a podcast on data center operations space called the latest shiny: L8ist Sh9y.

“Content creation is about telling a story about why your technology is important,” Hirschfeld said.

The content strategy is about helping people find the company and understand what it does, he said.

“If you are solving a problem for someone, it’s not difficult to articulate that problem in a way that people will read,” he said.

Content creation raises awareness and creates engagement, Hirschfeld said.

“It really is a much more natural way to interact,” he said.

A significant part of what RackN does is understanding how difficult it is to manage data centers and solve data center operators problems with its software, Hirschfeld said.

RackN is in Austin because there is a great technical community here.

“We love the culture,” he said.

It’s easy to recruit in Austin, Hirschfeld said.

RackN came out of the TechRanch program led by Kevin Koym. That helped the company launch, Hirschfeld said. Today, the company is active in the meetup scene and Capital Factory, he said. Andrea Kalmans with Lontra Ventures is an advisor to the company too, he said.

Storytelling is essential for technology startups to reach customers, partners, investors, and others, Hirschfeld said. RackN hired a public relations firm to help it hone its story and refine its pitch deck, he said.

“Of all the things you do in a startup, storytelling is so critical and so essential,” he said.

For more on Hirschfeld’s interview, please listen to the entire Ideas to Invoices podcast. And please visit iTunes to rate, review and subscribe to Ideas to Invoices.