Category: San Antonio (Page 35 of 62)

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

After three weeks of intense product development, market research, business creation, mentor consultation, and pitch practice, a group of young entrepreneurs presented their startups at Geekdom in San Antonio.
First off, a young man named Jacob Adberstein pitched a new educational startup called Adaptive Mind.
“Our revenue system consists of having free and premium accounts. The premium accounts will have more space, be able to work offline, have more tools, and you can customize the site’s look,” said Adberstein. “We need your support to make our project a reality. We are looking for mentors who can help us with software development.. .. We also need your help for $8,000 that will be used for software tools and libraries, marketing, and legal matters.”
Adberstein is 14 years old.
He is just one of 26 high schoolers and middle schoolers participating in the VentureLab High School Startup Boot Camp at Geekdom. One of many VentureLab programs, the boot camp is designed to take students through every aspect of creating a startup. At the beginning of the camp, the students had two days to create business models or products. They then voted on the best four and spent the rest of the camp preparing their startups – and tangible products – for the first San Antonio High School Startup demo day.
“There is no pretending,” said High School Startup Director Nick Honegger. “They get the real life experience of starting a company from the brainstorming, to the marketing, to the launch, to asking investors for how much they need funding-wise.”
The students touched every aspect of startup creation, which also included making profiles, Kickstarter pages, and demo videos with scripts. The program was so hands on that many of the students are now equipped with the confidence to continue through life as entrepreneurs.
“We learned just a ton about everything that has to do with starting our own business. So that even if our ideas now don’t work, we would be able to, in the future, still start up another company,” said student Brenda Kirlin, 15, from Providence Catholic School.
She presented Shéri Sandale, which is manufacturing a new type of sandal with thicker soles for better comfort and interchangeable straps for added style options. The startup did 130 surveys of potential customers ages 13 to 30. They want to sell to both large department stores and individuals on their website. Shéri Sandale plans to sell their product in starter kits with one sole and two straps. For every kit sold, they will donate a kit to Seton Home – an organization that shelters and supports homeless teen mothers. They are asking for $5,000 in funding for advertising and manufacturing costs.
Each startup’s idea and business model was constantly critiqued by mentors. Similar to the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom earlier this year, there was plenty of tough love for each group.
“We came, we gave our pitch, and they destroyed us,” said Adberstein from Jose M. Lopez Middle School. “Every day we came all happy, and left all sad.”
Adberstein persevered, however. He kept working alongside his brother and the rest of his team and still presented Adaptive Mind for the demo day.
Adaptive Mind is a website that students can use to collect and organize text, photos, and video into notebooks and guides to help themselves and their peers learn more efficiently. It is built for both computers and mobile devices and supports forums where users can answer others questions and share information. The website even has a virtual assistant named Intelar which can help students search databases connected to the site.
Students came to the program with varying skill levels. For G.W. Brackenridge High School graduate Maletina Sanchez, 18, the experience was eye-opening.
“At first I was a little hesitant because I didn’t know much about business and marketing. But as days progressed and became a week and two weeks, I experienced something I have never experienced. I learned so much,” said Sanchez.
Sanchez and home schooled student Eliana Swart, 14, were the two-person team behind the headphone making startup More 4 A Beat. More 4 A Beat’s headphones are designed to stand out in the same way as mobile phone covers — giving the user a unique design and style. The team used a 3D printer to manufacture a prototype of the product and are looking for $2,000 to start marketing and manufacturing. The startup hopes to partner with eBay Inc. and Etsy.com.
Not all students were new to the startup process, however. Ronald Reagan High School Senior Canzhi Ye is an iOS developer and the co-founder of San Antonio startup Rectangle. The program sill helped Ye sharpen his skills in a variety of areas.
“In terms of entrepreneurship I learned a lot such as doing market research, asking for money, that kind of stuff,” said Ye. “Pitching was kind of hard in the beginning, but we practiced every day so eventually we got much better at it.”
Ye’s team created Fresh Finds – an app that promotes shopping at farmers markets by giving users access to deals and discounts once they arrive at the market. When the team did their market research, 83 percent of iPhone users said they would be interested in using the app. Fresh Finds plans to make revenue by charging farmers to list deals and by using paid and ad-based forms of their app. They are currently looking for $5,000 to expand their company.
Founded in January 2012 by Cristal Glangchai, Venturelab is an evolution of a previous Geekdom company named ESTEAM which focused on STEM education. The educational nonprofit organization has multiple programs designed to fill gaps in the current education system and empower youth entrepreneurs. VentureLab adopted and modified the High School Startup program, originally created by Engineer Jeremy Guillory, which debuted last year at Anderson High School in Austin.
The first San Antonio High School Startup bootcamp was sponsored by Rackspace, Geekdom, and Akimbo. Mentors for the program included Nick Longo, Pat Condon, Mario Ochoa, Winslow Swart, Richard Ortega, and Greg Cerveny. According to Condon, programs such as the boot camp play a crucial role in motivating young people to consider entrepreneurship in the future.
“If a parent or a family friend was an entrepreneur, that’s a number one indicator whether somebody — a young person — will become one. To me not everyone has a parent that is an entrepreneur and this is one of the ways to expose young people early in life into creating something of their own,” said Condon.

It’s no secret that men far surpass the number of women, especially in leadership positions, in the science, technology, engineering and math fields, known as STEM.
“The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that by 2020 there will be more than 1.4 million computing-related job openings,” according to a “Girls in IT: The Facts” report by the National Center for Women & Information Technology. “At current rates, however, we can only fill about 30% of those jobs with U.S. computing bachelor’s grads. Girls represent a valuable, mostly untapped talent pool.”
So what’s the solution?
Reaching girls when they are young and encouraging them to pursue careers in STEM fields.
And VentureLab, an educational organization at Geekdom, understands that problem and wants to be part of the solution.
VentureLab has launched a new program for girls five to 13 years old, which will educate them on entrepreneurship, science and technology. The second program, with 30 participants, kicks off Monday and runs through Friday next week at Geekdom. The first program featured girls making smart phone apps, creating websites and making 3D models.
During the program, girls come up with ideas for companies and then create prototypes of them. On Friday, the teams will pitch their business ideas to classmates, parents and Geekdom members.
Cristal Glangchai, CEO and Founder of VentureLab, created the program with the goal of increasing the participation of women in entrepreneurial activities in San Antonio. She also wants to fill the gap of women in the workforce by reaching girls earlier and encouraging them to pursue STEM fields. She also runs 3 Day Startup San Antonio, a weekend entrepreneurial “bootcamp” for budding college and professional entrepreneurs.
“The girls who signed up for 3 Day Startup would often back out the day before,” Glangchai said in a news release. “When I asked them why, they said they were intimidated. Our programs work to provide an inviting atmosphere for girls and women. We give young women the tools to feel more confident and creative in entrepreneurial and leadership roles.”
VentureLab’s other co-ed programs include Youth Startup for 5 to 12 year olds, High School Startup for teenagers and 3 Day Startup San Antonio.

The year-old San Antonio startup TrueAbility, which tests people for their technical aptitude, closed on $2 million in funding led by Austin Ventures.
The company, founded by former Rackspace employees, also received money from the Cloud Power Seed Fund 2013, a special San Antonio fund set up to invest in TechStar Cloud companies.
TrueAbility previously raised $750,000 from Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston and Rackspace co-founders Patrick Condon and Dirk Elmendorf.
The company now has 10 employees and is set to double in size this year, said Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer. The company plans to spend the money to further develop its technology platform, AbilityScreen, which tests job candidates for skills as Linux system administrators and for other technical skills, he said. The company will also hire a marketing director and spend money on marketing and advertising.
“TrueAbility has codified a process that is vital to the rise of a new technical workforce that we are seeing emerge,” Thomas Ball, Austin Ventures General Partner, said in a news statement. “The founding team brings a wealth of technical hiring knowledge and a platform that is easy to deploy and scale worldwide.”
Ball will also be joining the TrueAbility board.
TrueAbility plans to continue to maintain its offices at Geekdom, a San Antonio-based coworking site. In addition to Mendler, the other co-founders are Marcus Robertson, Luke Owen and Dusty Jones. The company won Startup Weekend San Antonio a year ago. It also was a finalist in the South by Southwest Accelerator competition and it graduated from the TechStars Cloud program last Spring.
“Without Geekdom we would not have gotten this far,” Mendler said.
Three weeks ago, TrueAbility launched its Ability Screen product officially. Its customers include Rackspace, WPengine and BazaarVoice. The company makes money by matching job candidates with employers. For each successful placement, TrueAbility gets a fee.

By Ian Panchèvre
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Brian Meece, co-founder and CEO of RocketHub, visited Geekdom on the evening of May 22nd to share the secrets of successful crowdfunding.
RocketHub – “the world’s crowdfunding machine” – is one of the fastest growing crowdfunding communities. RocketHub, located in New York, publicly launched in February of 2010. Since then, the platform has supported over 25,000 crowdfunding campaigns and has secured an exciting partnership with A&E called Project Startup.
Meece began by defining crowdfunding as “an event that harnesses networks for funds, awareness, and feedback.” This definition broadens common understanding of crowdfunding beyond simply an alternative form of raising capital.
“The press tends to focus on the funding. But the awareness and feedback can also be really important,” elaborates Meece.
Meece went on to sketch the history of raising money from a crowd. “I like to think of this as a new spin on an old idea,” Meece explained.
By “old idea,” Meece meant, really old idea. Like 16th century old. The funding model for a Renaissance virtuoso – such as Leonardo da Vinci – was pure patronage. “Da Vinci relied on a handful of wealthy patrons to fit the bills so he could make cool stuff.”
Whereas now, through the power of the web, modern entrepreneurs and creatives can “rely on communities to fund their endeavors.”
Fast forward to the 1970s, when NPR and PBS pioneered new fundraising techniques, and we begin to witness a modern conception of crowdfunding take form. The two main takeaways from the grassroots methods of NPR and PBS is that local communities need to be engaged to rally around projects, and the process of requesting funds needs to be personalized to the target audience.
Now, in this era, we are “hyperconnected in ways we’ve never been before in human history.” It is this hyper connectivity that serves as “the foundation on which social funding now plays on top.”
“There is a reason we are seeing this emergence of crowdfunding now,” notes Meece. “And it’s because we are all super connected thanks to social media.”
Nowadays, crowdfunding is so ubiquitous that traditional methods of raising early-stage capital – say, from VCs or Angels – are confronting the real possibility that they will be usurped by the whims of the crowd.
According to GoGetFunding, the number of active crowdfunding projects around the world has exploded from 283 in 2010 to 536 in 2012. Moreover, the estimated volume of funds raised has posted similarly impressive growth: $1.5 Billion in 2011 compared to $5.1 Billion thus far in 2013.
Though exciting, such dramatic growth also has a downside.
Meece observes that “there is a lot of competition just for mindset, just for attention.”
Meece then outlined the three key pillars to successful crowdfunding that the data behind 25,000 campaigns has revealed: Project, Network, and Goods.
First, in order to have a successful crowdfunding campaign, your project has to “grab people’s attention. It has to hook them emotionally.”
Jedi mind trick number one: “The message will travel further if folks really understood not only what you are doing but who you are and why you are doing it.”
Meece supported this claim with a few examples of successful projects that did not blatantly beg for money, but rather, articulated the positive vision motivating their cause (i.e. the “why”) to rally support.
Even though there is an information overload, “emotional scarcity is still out there.”
“If you can change people’s emotional state, you will be rewarded with funding, awareness, and great feedback,” concluded Meece.
The second pillar of successful crowdfunding is the ability to leverage networks. Meece views crowdfunding as an event because “it has event dynamics, it’s driven by social components.” And of course, “people want to go where other people are.”
To successfully leverage a network, it needs width (i.e. the network needs to be large) and it needs depth (i.e. there needs to be influence).
Meece elaborates by explaining that “Crowdfunding takes social capital and converts it into real capital,” when influencers earn the trust of the community. In those cases, support will come not just from your immediate fans (i.e. your first degree of influence) and their friends (i.e. your second degree of influence) but also from complete strangers.
“Nobody wants to be the first one dancing on a dance floor.”
True to form, successful campaigns are authentic and emotionally rich. They earn trust among immediate contacts to build momentum and initial traction. Then they reach a tipping point and the campaign goes viral.
The final pillar of success involves the goods that are offered for financial support.
“The rewards should be good, it should be stuff that people want,” said Meece. After all, people aren’t giving money to a charity. Rather, people are supporting a project in exchange for some sort of reward.
To that extent, Meece encourages prospective crowdfunders to identify different “levels of impact.” Different price points, that correspond with different rewards, enable supporters to commit at a level with which they are comfortable.
A $20 commitment is the most popular price point. Whereas a $75 commitment is the average price point. Rewards that vary by price point need to be creative, interesting, and to a certain extent, tangible.
Meece wrapped up by sharing RocketHub’s new partnership with the television network A&E.
Project Startup is an upcoming A&E series that will feature select crowdfunding partnerships from RocketHub.
Naturally, Meece is delighted with the partnership. Not only does A&E provide great exposure for some of RocketHub’s campaigns, but the network is so committed to RocketHub’s mission that it will also be adding funds to certain projects on top of what is raised from the crowd.
At the end of the talk, Nick Longo, a Geekdom co-founder, shared some promising news. Geekdom is working with RocketHub to explore ways of creating a “Geekdom Hub” to showcase Geekdom startups that pursue crowdfunding through RocketHub.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.