Category: Ideas to Invoices Podcast (Page 8 of 10)

Jan Ryan is a well-known advocate for women in the Austin technology community.

She founded Women@Austin in 2013 after identifying a need for women to promote themselves and their companies in Austin.

In October, Ryan joined the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas at Austin in the new position of Director of Creative Entrepreneurship and Innovation. In that job, she plans to help students gain entrepreneurial skills and launch ventures of their own.

Ryan is an entrepreneur, former software technology executive, and an angel investor, strategic advisor and mentor to many startups in Austin. She is a partner at Capital Factory and Techstars.

Ryan co-founded Social Dynamx, which was acquired by Lithium Technologies in 2013. Before that, Ryan was CEO of Sigma Dynamics, which was acquired by Oracle. She was also senior vice president of sales for Austin-based Vignette Corp., which had an initial public offering in 1999.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Ryan gives advice on the importance of sales and customer acquisition, knowing when to persevere and when to quit and the importance of promoting women to leadership positions and promoting female-led startups in the Austin tech industry.

Ryan is also a huge advocate of design thinking and the creative economy.

The creative economy is the fastest growing sector of the economy right now with creatives making up 11 percent of all workers, Ryan said.

“We talk so much about keep Austin weird, keep Austin weird, what we really mean is keep Austin creative,” Ryan said. “That’s what we are doing. We are seeing Austin emerge with many different new creative industries, but also innovation and creative ideas.”

With a topic like artificial intelligence, students at UT Austin in design are going to have to take courses in how to design AI because, in four or five years, everyone is going to be moving in that direction, Ryan said.

Austin can lead in AI and become the hub of that world, Ryan said.

“We are just building on this ecosystem and strengthening it to make Austin an even bigger player on the national stage,” Ryan said.

To listen to Ryan’s full interview, please downloand the episode on iTunes and subscribe to Ideas to Invoices also please rate and review us.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Will Mitchell, co-founder of Contract Simply, discusses how his startup pivoted from a consumer marketplace called Renovate Simply to a business to business enterprise software company for the construction and banking industry.

The co-founders of Contract Simply spent last summer in Mountain View, California in the Y-Combinator program. Mitchell and his co-founder, Andrew Latimer, moved to California, rented an apartment and furniture and spent three months in the accelerator program.

The company initially got rejected when applying to the Y-Combinator program as Renovate Simply. So they re-examined their business and decided to focus directly on the construction contracting market. With the new concept, they got into the program.

Y-Combinator invests $120,000 in the startups for a seven percent equity stake.

The program was worth it, Mitchell said.

“It’s great at giving you a stamp of approval,” he said.

The network of folks for sales, marketing and product development and fundraising is incredible, Mitchell said.

“The program is very good at focusing the company and its objective,” he said. The focus is on revenue, customers and traction, he said.
“They do a fantastic job on emphasizing what’s important,” he said.

Contract Simply, founded in 2013 as Renovate Simply, raised a round last summer from the Central Texas Angel Network. The company recently closed a round of financing, which it will be announcing soon, Mitchell said.

Contract Simply has five employees. The company is hiring engineers and sales people, Mitchell said.

The cost of living and laid-back lifestyle are attractive features for being based in Austin, Mitchell said. The company has raised money from both coasts and has investors in 15 states and the geographic restriction of fundraising hasn’t been limiting for Contract Simply, Mitchell said.

Contract Simply is based at Link Flex, a co-working space in North Austin.

For more information, listen to the full interview below and please go to iTunes to subscribe, rate and review the Ideas to Invoices podcast.

Stephanie Breedlove founded Breedlove & Associates in 1992.

She built the nanny payroll company into a multi-million-dollar business with more than 10,000 active clients.

In 2012, Care.com acquired her company for $55 million and it became Care.com Homepay, according to an article in Forbes.

Today, Breedlove is an angel investor with the Central Texas Angel Network and an author of “All In: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Think Bigger, Build Sustainable Businesses, and Change the World,” published in 2017.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Breedlove recounts her entrepreneurial journey and lessons along the way. She launched her company, Breedlove & Associates, a payroll and tax business for parents to pay their nannies while working at Accenture in Denver.

“My very first entrepreneurial venture was Breedlove & Associates,” Breedlove said.

Her dad worked at a corporation for the first 20 years of his career, but in his 40s he left that world and bought a small business. He was her entrepreneurial role model.

When Breedlove started her business, the funding ecosystem didn’t look like it does now. Breedlove and her husband, Bill, didn’t have enough equity in their home to qualify for a commercial loan. They couldn’t beg their parents to invest, Breedlove said. So, they started running projections to see if they could self-fund and they found they had about two and a half years of runway to do the business.

Growth is much slower with self-funding, Breedlove said. She also didn’t quit her day job until the business had proven itself.

Breedlove tested the idea with a minimal viable product and worked to service clients in the evenings and on the weekends, she said. At about two years, the business had grown to the point where she needed to either shut it down or take it national, she said.

Once she launched, Breedlove went without a paycheck for 15 months. She then started taking $1,000 a month for the next 12 months. When money was tight and the business struggled, Breedlove persevered because she loved what she was doing and she believed in the business.

“I had absolute blind optimism in the idea,” Breedlove said.

Breedlove also had a detailed 10-page business plan that became benchmarks for the long-term success of the business.

“Planning is never overrated,” she said.

When Breedlove & Associates hit $300,000 in revenue, Bill, Breedlove’s husband joined the business full time as a co-founder. He quit his corporate job and they both worked full time on the business.

“We love being business partners,” Breedlove said. “And I think one of the main reasons it works is that his talents are opposite of mine. And I think a lot of cofounders make that mistake and they look for people who see, not only the world through the same lens as them strategically, but have the same talents because birds of feathers flock together and it feels good. But I think where you have opposite there is comfortable conflict that is created and that’s where the best ideas are born. And that’s how it was for us and that’s why it was successful for us.”

In the world of the gig economy and mobile economy and people can work anywhere, moving from the home office to a real office was essential, Breedlove said.

“We felt like having an office would allow us to come together more effectively as a team,” Breedlove said.

Culture and employee development are critical for success, said Breedlove.

In the early days, hiring employees is extremely important, Breedlove said.

“Those first employees are critical,” she said.

One of the first ten hires Breedlove made has been with the company for 13 years and she was selected as Breedlove’s successor when she left the company.

The $1 million mark in annual revenue was important but success was defined by continual growth and providing great service, Breedlove said. The company crossed the $1 million mark after five years.

“And I have to admit once we crossed the $1 million mark, the march to $5 million and then $10 million and then beyond $10 million actually became easier,” Breedlove said.

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

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Adam Salamon is the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Next Coast Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm.

Salamon most recently served as co-founder and chief operating officer of Perk Inc., a rewards and engagement platform that went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year.

RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year for more than $40 million in a stock deal.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Salamon talks about how Perk, which spun out of Jutera Labs in 2011, initially built a web-based browser that rewarded users with Perk points. Consumers could then redeem those perk points for gift cards and other items.

But Salamon and his co-founder Roj Niyogi, quickly learned that there were too many hurdles to getting consumers to switch their Internet browsers. So, they pivoted and created a mobile-based rewards app that rewarded people with Perk points for watching videos, playing games and doing other tasks. They built up their user base to more than one million users. They targeted people who wanted to save money.

Perk also raised $60,000 in a seed stage investment initially from an Austin angel investor. They later raised $1 million from a family office in the Bay area of California. With that money, they ran the business for three years from 2011 to 2014 before seeking an additional $2 million. At that point, they brought on Ted Hastings as CEO, based in Waterloo, Canada. Under his guidance, the company went public on the Toronto stock exchange. It then completed a series of acquisition of other rewards-based companies. At the end of last year, RythmOne PLC and Perk struck a deal for RhythmOne to acquire the company for more than $40 million in an all stock deal.

At the time of sale, Perk had a dozen employees in Austin and 15 employees in an office in India.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher with Silicon Hills News

Andrea Kalmans, a principal with Lontra Ventures, is a force in the Austin and San Antonio technology community.
She spends her time mentoring entrepreneurs and working with technology startups.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Kalmans, an angel investor, discusses how she has seen Austin change and grow its technology industry since she moved here with her husband, Walter, in 1999. She also talks about what she looks for when deciding which startups to work with and mentor.

Kalmans, who is from Minnesota, got her undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She later earned her MBA at the University of Texas at Austin. She also worked as an executive at Dell in its software and peripheral business. Before that, Kalmans worked at Salomon Smith Barney in its media investment bank in New York City.

At Lontra Ventures, Kalmans focuses on the firm’s technology portfolio with investments in artificial intelligence, analytics, audio and video, big data, database technologies, developer tools, high-performance computing, IT infrastructure and Internet of Things and Web optimization.

Kalmans is a mentor at Techstars Austin, Capital Factory, The Dell Medical Catalyst Program in Austin and the RealCo Accelerator/Geekdom Fund in San Antonio.

Kalmans is an investor in Nexd, an Austin-based artificial intelligence startup focused on sales processes. She is also an investor in Austin-based StopLight, founded in 2014 by Marc MacLeon, and a 2015 graduate of Techstars Austin. The company makes software for engineering teams to document, test and build Web APIs. Other investments include BlazingDB, a Techstars Boulder 2015 graduate, that provides organizations with speed and scale in data warehouse solutions and Bitfusion, which provides an artificial intelligence infrastructure management software to companies.

One of Kalman’s investments, Experiment Engine, a graduate of Techstars Austin, recently got acquired. San Francisco-based Optimizely bought Experiment Engine in April of 2017. Claire Vo, CEO and Founder of Experiment Engine, moved to San Francisco with her family to work for the company, Kalmans said.

“I work with people who folks who are an exceedingly high energy level and brilliance level,” Kalmans said.

To get in touch with her, send a thoughtful email to her at AKalmans@lontraventures.com.

Do not send a LinkedIn request with no introduction and don’t ask her for coffee.

“The let’s grab coffee line is really overused,” she said.

Entrepreneurs should seek to make trustworthy friends in Austin, Kalmans said.

“Give of yourself and people will give to you,” Kalmans said.

Austin needs to focus on building awesome companies, Kalmans said. There isn’t a shortage of venture capital here, she said. Entrepreneurs can get on a plane and get venture capital if they have a great idea, team, and startup, she said.

Capital, talent, and other resources flow freely now in a global economy, Kalmans said.

For more on the conversation with Lontra Ventures’ Kalmans, please listen to the entire Ideas to Invoices Podcast. And please subscribe, rate and review Ideas to Invoices on iTunes.

In 2010, LiveOak Venture Partners saw a vast opportunity in the Austin and Texas market for early stage technology entrepreneurs.

“But there was not as much capital available as many of the local entrepreneurs would attest to,” said Krishna Srinivasan, general partner with LiveOak VP.

So, in 2013 to 2014, Srinivasan and his partners raised the $108 million LiveOak Venture Partners Fund I, “which shockingly even to date is the largest fund raised for technology venture capital here in the Texas market going back to 2008,” Srinivasan said.

“Again, an indication of how capital starved this amazing market is,” he said.

LiveOak VP’s strategy is to be the first institutional investor in Texas-based tech companies. The VC firm generally writes $2 million to $4 million checks and takes board seats in the companies it invests in. It tailors its involvement to the needs of each of the startups it invests in, Srinivasan said.

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Srinivasan and Ivelin Ivanov, CEO and co-founder of TeleStax, a startup that enables service providers to develop communications applications, discuss the investment landscape for early stage technology entrepreneurs in Austin and Texas. Telestax is a LiveOak VP portfolio company and is the firm’s latest investment.

LiveOak VP is raising a new $110 million fund, according to documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. But Srinivasan declined to discuss the details citing regulatory compliance.

Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video, and data. Before Telestax, he was director of research and development at JBoss /Red Hat.

In 2011, Ivanov and his co-founders established Telestax and raised $1.2 million in seed stage funding. The founders had been through the early stages of building Web infrastructure with JBoss/RedHat.

They saw the huge traction of web applications and mobile applications and saw it as a challenge to connect the two.

“Telestax came out of an idea, curiosity, and passion for enabling developers to build creative applications that involved real time communications,” Ivanov said.

“Now it’s a mainstream adopted trend where every disruptive application from real estate to HR to retail to Rideshare to Austin travel they have very significant real-time communications component,” he said.

Telestax makes a communications platform called RestcommOne, which blends telecommunications applications with enterprise applications to deliver real-time communications.

In July, LiveOak Venture Partners led a $4.7 million Series A funding round for Telestax. The company plans to use the money on product development, customer support, and marketing. Telestax has more than 170 commercial customers including Avaya, MetTel, Ping An Bank, T-Mobile, Unifonic and NTT-AT. Its platform supports 900 million calls and 200 million messages daily.

In general, LiveOak VP looks to back “the best and brightest companies in Texas,” Srinivasan said

Originally, when Srinivasan met Ivanov two years ago, the company had a solid team tackling a problem in a large market. In a few years, the company demonstrated remarkable traction and did it in a scrappy fashion with little capital, Srinivasan said.

Overall, LiveOak VP has 18 portfolio companies with 14 investments in Austin, two in Dallas, one each in Houston and San Antonio. One of its investments, StackEngine, got acquired by Oracle. It’s about to announce another investment in an Austin startup bringing the number of portfolio companies to 19 with 15 investments in Austin.

Srinivasan sees Austin’s investment landscape improving.

“There feels like there is a lot of capital available for the first round,” Srinivasan said. “The challenge comes in with the Series B round.”

LiveOak VP is cultivating relationships with firms on the coasts to come in and work with these opportunities, Srinivasan said.

“Things are a whole lot better,” he said.

The LiveOak VP fund is having some great success in the portfolio, which has raised $100 million in last 12 months, Srinivasan said.

“If we are there as the first institutional investors, big investors will follow us in subsequent rounds,” he said.

To be considered for an investment, entrepreneurs can submit plans on LiveOak VP’s website or get introduced by anyone that knows the LiveOak VP partners. Entrepreneurs can also email one of the partners directly using their first name and the domain LiveOakVP.com so Krishna@LiveOakVP.com.

“But you don’t need an introduction,” Srinivasan said. “A partner takes a look at every single email submission so we don’t miss out on a diamond in the rough. CS Disco came to us that way.”

It’s also a complete fallacy that Austin entrepreneurs don’t go after big ideas, Srinivasan said.

“Our portfolio is filled with people going after big ideas,” he said. “Telestax is a big idea.”

For more on the conversation with LiveOak’s Srinivasan and Telestax’s Ivanov, please listen to the entire Ideas to Invoices Podcast. And please subscribe, rate and review Ideas to Invoices on iTunes.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Embrace the big idea and do a big fat startup, Ben Dyer, successful entrepreneur and mentor, advises new entrepreneurs.

In the last six and a half years, Dyer has seen at least 10,000 startup plans since he’s been in Austin. The free beer app is not a worthwhile pursuit, he said.

“It’s just as easy to work on a consequential idea as it is to work on a free beer idea,” Dyer said. “At the end of the day, you feel like you accomplished a lot of good for some people out there that are your customers.”

To new entrepreneurs, Dyer advises them to really start out working on something worthwhile and work with people they enjoy working with and being around. Dyer is featured in this episode of the Ideas to Invoices podcast recounting his experiences as a pioneer in the computer and software industry. And a big fat startup is flush with cash and plans to spend it to scale its business. Dyer prefers it to a Lean Startup.

And Dyer has a lot of experience starting and scaling tech start-ups.

In the 1970s, Dyer got introduced to four electrical engineers from Georgia Tech who had opened a computer store, Computer Systems Center, in downtown Atlanta, the third computer store in the country. They were selling the Altair 8800, a Microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and Ed Roberts, based in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

“They needed someone like me,” Dyer said. “None of them had any business experience at all.”

Dyer graduated from Georgia Tech with a BIE degree and went on to earn his MBA in finance from Georgia State University.

“I joined them and just had a blast inventing an industry there,” he said. “I got to deal with what I call the pioneering customers who made our industry possible.”

But it became evident that people needed something to do with the computers and that’s when the software division came into being.

“It moved from a hobbyist market to a real business opportunity,” Dyer said.

In 1978, some people in the company wanted to open more computer stores and some wanted to work on software development. So, on Labor Day, they met with lawyers and divided everything up and Dyer joined the software business as president and founder.

The name Peachtree came from an expensive PR person who came to the offices of the software business located on Peachtree Street and told them to name the company, Peachtree Software, Dyer said. There are a couple dozen Peachtree Streets in Atlanta.

“Outside of Atlanta it was a really good brand name,” Dyer said.

In the early days, Peachtree Software had one competitor and they happened to be based in Austin, BPI, Dyer said.

Peachtree Software had a very rapid rise, Dyer said. In those days, Dyer sold the software to a couple dozen computer manufacturers lined up on Ventura Blvd. in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California. They would package the software to sell with the computers. Peachtree had licensed its software to Vector Graphic, which IBM chose to reverse engineer to make the IBM PC.

At the COMDEX Computer Expo in Las Vegas in 1980, Dyer met with IBM executives and they wanted to license Peachtree Software for the new IBM PC.
Shortly after COMDEX, Dyer was in Boca Raton, Florida where a “skunk works” team inside IBM created the IBM PC. It was called the KGB project and it was under special key codes and Dyer didn’t have access to the room where the hardware was kept, he said.

Shortly before the debut of the IBM PC in August of 1981, Management Science America, based in Atlanta, heard that Peachtree Software was to be included in the launch of the IBM PC and they bought the company.

After selling Peachtree Software, Dyer founded Comsell, an early computer imaging, and interactive media company. It was a great technology for computer aided selling of real estate.

An executive from Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. approached Dyer at a trade show and told him he had exactly what he needed.

And Dyer said, “Yes I do.”

He had no idea what the guy needed but yes was the right answer, Dyer said.

Turns out Murdoch’s News Corp. wanted the technology to sell travel services to consumers. They bought the company in 1987.

“I called them the Murdochians,” Dyer said. “My employees and I traveled the world with them.”

After the Comsell acquisition, Dyer took a “low tech” sabbatical and became the president of a bank in Georgia.

His next major venture after that was going back to digital media and the CD-ROM. He created a company called Intellimedia that developed sports education and training products using CD-ROMs to display images and videos. The company worked with Cox Media Group, based in Atlanta.

“We had a good run with that until 1995 when AOL caught on,” he said.

The last part of the 1990s the company did a lot of Internet development work. Dyer got involved in venture funding in the next decade and then did a little investment banking.

Dyer came to Austin in 1998 with his oldest child. His son enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall of 1999. And Dyer’s daughter also attended UT seven years later. His daughter graduated in 2010. Dyer decided to move to Austin in 2011.

He worked as an entrepreneur in residence at UT with Longhorn Startups and he chaired a committee for the South by Southwest accelerator. He also served as a mentor to dozens of companies.

He’s still on two Georgia Tech boards and he goes back and forth a lot. In 2014, he got involved in a life sciences startup based in Atlanta. He spent two years working on that project.

Today, Dyer serves as an advisor to Polygraph Media, a Facebook advertising and marketing partner with Facebook, founded by Chris Treadaway. He is also an Entrepreneurial Advisor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at UT.

“I actually prepped myself for this assignment by binge watching Mad Men,” Dyer said. Something comes up almost every day where he can relate today’s advertising agencies and industry with the fictional one depicted in Mad Men, he said.

Dyer also writes TechDrawl, a tech, and business blog for the past 12 years, based on his experiences. He is currently working on a new book called Startup Decision Making based on his experiences.

Listen to the full podcast and please subscribe, rate and review Ideas to Invoices on iTunes.