Move it and store it.
Austin-based startup Sparefoot has teamed up with Penske Truck Rental to make it easy for folks to move and store their belongings this Memorial Day weekend.
Sparefoot informs us that this coming Tuesday is known in the business as “Crazy Tuesday” because it’s the unofficial biggest day of the year for the storage industry.
“This collaboration with SpareFoot will make for a more convenient moving experience for our customers,” Don Mikes, Senior Vice President of Rental for Penske Truck Leasing, said in a news release.
SpareFoot is the world’s largest online marketplace for consumers to find and reserve self-storage units, with comparison shopping tools that show real-time availability and exclusive deals.
Category: San Antonio (Page 52 of 62)
Congratulations! Thanks! to Dave Boggs, Butler Lampson, Chuck Thacker on #Ethernet ‘s 39th birthday, today.
— Bob Metcalfe (@BobMetcalfe) May 22, 2012
In 1973, there were no personal computers, says Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet.
But 39 years ago today, Metcalfe and David Boggs, Chuck Thacker and Butler Lampson at Xerox set out to build a network for them. The idea for Ethernet first appeared in print in a memo that Metcalfe wrote on May 22, 1973.
They borrowed the word – Ethernet – from physics and the term: luminiferous aether – “meaning light-bearing aether” and describing “a medium for the propagation of light.”
In 1979, Metcalfe co-founded 3Com Corp. to build Ethernet products.
And in 1981, 3Com shipped the first adapter for personal computers when IBM invented its desktop PC at its Boca Raton campus in Florida.
Today, Ethernet has evolved so much that what people refer to as Ethernet has little resemblance to the technology developed 39 years ago, Metcalfe said.
In this video, Metcalfe discusses Ethernet’s past briefly and he focuses on the future of the technology. It’s worth watching.
Today, Metcalfe serves as professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Moderator Laura Beck of Stripedshirt.com hoped the panel would spark fiery debate. But it turned into an event along the lines of Eeyore running out of Prozac during the rainy season when the Austin Technology Council 2012 CEO Summit hosted several entrepreneurs speaking on the topic “Why I Moved My Company to California.”
Panelists James Beshara, co-founder of Crowdtilt, Frank Coppersmith, COO of GameSalad, Matt Pfeil, co-founder of DataStax and Tom Serres, CEO of Rally listed numerous reasons why they moved to the San Fransisco Bay area or Silicon Valley, including vastly more venture capital money, a wealth of thought leadership and a pace of activity 20 times faster than that of Austin. The only thing they missed back home in Texas was the food—specifically barbecue and breakfast tacos with green chile.
The panel was part of day two of the second annual CEO Summit at the Hilton Hotel. The Austin Technology Council sponsored the two-day event in which more than 150 CEOs and other top level technology executives meet to discuss the outlook for Central Texas’ technology industry and how to recruit and retain technology talent. Though the agenda for Friday appeared to largely focus on what Austin needs to do to give its startup community more support.
Rally’s Serres said he went to Silicon Valley for the capital. “For every venture capital firm here there are about 1,000 in the valley,” he said. “And it’s a different style of investor here. In the valley, there’s a larger number of risk takers. I was going for a larger consumer tech play. I don’t think the talent is in Austin for a large consumer tech company.”
Beshara said he intended to move to the Bay Area only temporarily. But within three weeks, he’ddecided to stay. “Out there, things move so ‘friggin fast,” he said. “And speed is everything.”
Coppersmith pointed out that the thought leaders are in California.
“If you are in movies, you’re in L.A….if you’re in tech, you’re in Silicon Valley. It’s about getting access to the thought leaders.”
Pfeil pointed out that the Silicon Valley ecosystem is all about startups. Stanford graduates, he said, come out with a mission in life to “quit after their second year of work and become the next Google….UT is going to have to focus less on graduating great, world-class engineers and focus on graduating entrepreneurs who will start great, world-class companies.”
Panelists mentioned problems that were repeated throughout the day: Exponentially more venture capital money exists in Northern California; the Universities, the funders, the famous companies like Google and Facebook, in short the entire culture supports startups; access is immediate—startups can have face time with venture capitalists and angel investors regularly. In Austin, by contrast, a lot of investment money goes to oil and gas; funders are more conservative; there are inadequate flights in and out of the city making travel to and from Austin cumbersome; the University produces employees for Dell, not entrepreneurs.
Even the attributes Austin claims to have over the Bay Area, such as low taxes and quality of life were debunked by panelists. The taxes may be 60 percent higher, Beshara said, but his company’s valuation was 3.5 times higher. And, Serres said, he spends time at Napa, at Lake Tahoe “I have a great life (in California.)”
Beck kept hoping for a fight from the audience but instead a deafening pall settled over the room.
There were some arguments made in defense of Austin. It’s less expensive to fail here, for example.
Serres said that many tech areas, such as Boulder, Colorado and Raleigh, North Carolina, struggled with the same issue. But the important thing was for each of those areas to stop trying to be Silicon Valley and figure out what they do best.
Josh Baer pointed out that he knew a number of Austin entrepreneurs who had moved here from California and that not all of them needed the kind of heavy capitalization these entrepreneurs had sought. He acknowledged the shortage of financing on the traditional model but asked if there might be another model coming down the pike where Austin could excel. The consensus seemed to be “No.”
But while there was no battle in defense of Austin as a tech city, people afterward did talk in small groups about the fact that not every startup aimed to be the next Facebook or Google. Some entrepreneurs were just happy to build reasonably successful businesses from their ideas. Some are even happy to bootstrap those businesses. But there was agreement that Austin needed to fight against an identity as the place where the call centers for the Googles and the Facebooks of the world were located.
Later panels including one that gave the Investor’s Perception of Tech in Texas, addressed many of the same issues the first panel raised including the lack of nonstop flights and the lack of proximity to venture capitalists who want to play a hands-on role with the companies they fund.
The fact that there is a smaller number of startups in Austin than in the Silicon Valley means that top talent will be more reluctant to move here, because there aren’t “a lot of plan Bs” said John Stockton, Venture Partner with the Mayfield Fund.
Jimmy Treybig, Venture Partner with NEA pointed out that many Austin companies tend to think of their market as the U.S. with global expansion being an afterthought. In the Valley, entrepreneurs start out thinking of huge, emerging markets such as China, India and Brazil as key markets from the beginning.
Some advantages, Austin has, however, include the fact that companies don’t have to have a billion dollar target to get funded, unlike companies in the Valley. And SXSW is a huge caveat for Austin’s reputation as a tech center, Treybig said. By the end of the day, Austin did not walk away with any illusions it was gaining on Silicon Valley’s nearly 80 years of development as a tech center. But it did walk away with a laundry list of action items to push it to the next phase. And that might be more important.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
The Austin Technology Council CEO Summit heated up toward the end of its first afternoon Thursday when John Price, CEO of Vast, led a panel on compensation packages for tech employees.
Price asserted that Austin lives in a bubble in which “culture” competes successfully against higher salaries. But the bubble, he said, is going to burst as the city’s tech companies import more talent from places like Silicon Valley.
Price spoke at the second annual CEO Summit at the Hilton Hotel. The Austin Technology Council sponsored the two-day event in which more than 150 CEOs and other top level technology executives meet to discuss the outlook for Central Texas’ technology industry and how to recruit and retain technology talent.
Price, a veteran of Trilogy Enterprises, which touted its culture but lost many employees to startup fever, said the compensation of his company was based on money and ownership, not on “fun” or “culture.”
Panelists, who included Bill Arend, General Manager of Oracle Corp., Kip McClanahan, a partner in Silverton Partners venture capital firm, Matt Chasen, CEO of uShip, Kevin Reinis, CEO of Flocasts and Rod Favaron, CEO of Spredfast, all argued that, while it was important to keep superstars on at a high financial cost, many people in Austin stayed with companies because they liked the culture.
Speaking of that notion and his experience in Silicon Valley, Price said “At Facebook, none of these principles apply. Engineers are going to go with what they perceive as the best opportunity. These are smart people. They can do the math. They’re thinking ‘I believe I have talent. The only thing I have is time.’ Austin lives in a logical bubble that is going to pop. We have to show these people that they’re working for a company that has real traction.”
Kip McClanahan retorted with “I think you’re crazy.”
“What I’ve heard a couple of times across this panel is that we do what we can do to retain top talent given the tools that we have. If the companies in town can do that with liquid equity they do. They use the tools they have.”
Matt Chasen talked about an employee offered a 50 percent increase in salary from a Dallas company. The employee walked into his office and said ‘I just want you to know I got this offer but I’m not taking it because I love working herewith these guys.’ To which Favaron quipped, “I know your tech crew, they’ve got their own culture. It has nothing to do with you.”
Later on a panelist pointed out that Price’s tech staff, too, had a culture in which the engineers had bonded and that that played a factor in his turnover rate, whether he liked it or not.
The panel agreed that there was a difference between compensation for “rank and file” engineers and the superstars. And that companies needed to do what they could to maintain the company’s top performers. But the
exciting part of the debate seemed a black-and-white argument over whether Austin’s groovy, easy-going, “fun” startup culture was enough to attract the talent needed to supply the city’s thousands of tech companies.
Other panels in the afternoon included the Top Three Things Every Tech Leader Should Know with Trevor Schulze, Vice President of IT at AMD, Lance Obermeyer, CTO of Digby and Kevin Meek, Partner of Baker Botts LLP.
Among their conclusions:
CEOs should seriously weigh the advantages and disadvantages of creating “Native” apps. Obermeyer pointed out that few companies have programmers with the IOS skills to create a good app and hiring it done by an agency is extremely expensive. Using HTML apps when possible is a more financially feasible option.
Companies should know if they’re using open source software, even if some exists somewhere in their code, because trying to get financing or complete a merger based on a company that uses software it doesn’t own can seriously tangle negotiations.
Companies need to be extremely careful about letting employees bring in their own iPhones and iPads because of intellectual property issues. In five minutes an employee can upload and put in a storage center, such as drop box, information and programs that cost a company millions to create.
Other speakers included Mike Rollins, president of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce who talked about the city’s initiatives to give Austin access to more talent, including a connection with LinkedIn that would let jobseekers know what they were looking for was available in Austin.
Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace, talked about his trip to Israel, spurred by the book Startup Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle by Dan Senor and Saul Singer.
In the past, he said, America was the country that did the R&D and farmed manufacture out to other countries.
Now, he said, he’s talked to companies who farmed R&D out to Israel. America, he said is being disrupted. And the number one preventative to disruption is entrepreneurship.
“Do you know what America’s greatest invention so far is?” he asked participants. “The American dream. ..America is the place where the future came first. Texas has to be the place where the future comes first. We need to invite entrepreneurship into our communities, our companies. We have to open ourselves to disruptive answers, no matter how they affect our competitive landscape…or our bottom line.”
Finally, he said, we have to stop just having cities and create regions. An Austin, San Antonio region, for example.
Friday, the summit will continue, examining the question “Why Companies Leave Texas.”
Photo by John R. Rogers with Viusalist Images in Austin
The focus of the site is to attract mid-to-senior level technology workers to the Austin region. The site allows employers to post openings, review resumes and connect directly with qualified job-seekers. The site has 2,000 jobs seekers and 37 companies including Bazaarvoice, Microsoft and Google registered so far.
“Economic growth flourishes when employers are able to couple a favorable business climate with the right talent pool,” Clarke Heidrick, Board Chair, Austin Chamber, said in a news statement. “As a new talent initiative of the Chamber, AustinTechSource will support all Austin companies, big and small, with their goals of efficiently finding topnotch, experienced tech talent.”
Mass Relevance announced Wednesday that it has closed a $3.3 million venture capital funding round.
Austin Ventures led the series A round and other investors included Battery Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Allegro Venture Patners and Metamorphic Ventures.
Mass Relevance plans to use the money to accelerate its growth. Sam Decker, the company’s founder and CEO, said the company planned to triple in size this year in an interview with Silicon Hills News late last year.
Mass Relevance has 120 clients that use its real-time social media curation platform. It also signed a deal with Twitter last November that officially made Mass Relevance Twitter’s first curation partner licensed to re-syndicate Twitter content.
“The financing comes as leading brands, ranging from Madonna and MTV through Target and Purina, turn to Mass Relevance to use real-time social content to drive engagement on television, web and mobile,” according to the company. Its clients include the “Big Four” television networks, 7 of the top 10 2011 cable networks, as well as top brands like Target, Cisco, Ford, Samsung, New York Giants, Pepsi, Purell and Victoria’s Secret.
“People around the world are actively participating in social conversations about brands, media and entertainment, and this content is passing us by faster than ever before,” Decker said in a news statement.
A year ago, Mass Relevance raised $2.2 million in a large seed stage round of funding from Austin Ventures, Floodgate and angel investors.
Calxeda, which makes energy-saving chips for servers that power data centers, has raised $20 million of a $30 million offering, according to a statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The Austin-based company, founded in 2008 as Smooth Stone, announced $48 million in funding in November of 2010.
Calxeda’s funders include Advanced Technology Investment Co., ARM, Battery Ventures, Flybridge Capital Partners and Highland Capital Partners.
For more on the company, read the profile Susan Lahey wrote last year.
BY DAMON CLINKSCALES
FounderDating (and no, it’s not romantic) has just launched in Austin.
The online network allows you to connect with other talented folks who are ready to found a company in your area. The first live event for Austin will be held on May 23rd (apply by May 15th).
About the network:
High Quality – members are carefully screened for quality and readiness. Applications and members’ identities are confidential, but a few of the folks who are part of the network are former founders or early employees of: StackMob, Snapfish, Asana, Soundtracking, and hi5 just to name a few.
Balanced – 50% engineering & 50% non-engineering
Online Network – The event is just the beginning. FD is an invite-only online network of entrepreneurs looking for co-founders around the country that you become a part of.
You can apply at here (you don’t need to have an idea, just ready to work on a serious side project).
Here’s some more background: in a TechCrunch article.
BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
“Those who tell stories rule the world” – Plato
Lyn Graft at SXSW Storytelling for Entrepreneurs
He risked everything and his hard work paid off.
And Schultz, by all accounts, is a great storyteller who can articulate and share the passion of his vision.
That’s an essential part of storytelling for entrepreneurs, says Lyn Graft, chief storyteller and founder of LG Pictures in Austin. He has produced more than 450 videos for companies like CNBC, Microsoft, Dell, SXSW, Sweet Leaf Tea and RISE Global. He has filmed 300 entrepreneurs including founders of Starbucks, Whole Foods, Paul Mitchell, Playboy, Baby Einstein, Clear Channel, Craigslist, BET Television, The Knot and Tom’s Shoes.
Graft shared his knowledge of storytelling recently at a panel at SXSW in Austin.
“It’s about leaving an impression with the person you are talking to,” Graft said. “That’s the art and core of storytelling.”
Graft, who has founded eight companies, has pitched more than 200 people on his ideas and he’s been turned down 95 percent of the time, he said. The competition for startups is stiff, he said. What sets a company apart from the crowd is its story.
“We are all unique,” Graft said. “Your story should be unique. We’re all competing against deep-pocketed companies, what do you have that differentiates yourself?”
A good story has a beginning, middle and an end, Graft said. He recommended everyone listen to author Nancy Duarte’s TedX Talk on “common structure of greatest communicators.”
“You want to transport people to where your vision is,” Graft said.
Another great way to tell a story is to set up the problem, present the opportunity and provide the solution, he said.
A great story leaves the audience with a physical reaction like goosebumps, Graft said. He looks for the “GBM” or Goose Bump Moment in a story. How do you create that? You’ve got to reach down deep into your passion and tell why you do what you do, he said.
“Bottom line: speak from the heart,” he said.
It’s also important to know your audience and figure out how can you reach them.
And avoid ugly babies, Graft said. That means find the beauty in every story that you tell.
Learn from great storytelling entrepreneurs, Graft said. For example, Austin’s Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea and Deep Eddy Vodka, has the amazing ability to turn everything into a story, Graft said.
Stories don’t have to be complex, Graft said. “Fred Smith’s story: I can get your package there overnight. That’s the story of FedEx.”
Graft recommended other great sources to find entrepreneur storytellers: TED, TEDx, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. and Fast Company.
If you have a good story to tell, tell it, but you can’t fake it, Graft said.
“You can only put so much lip gloss on a pig.” Graft said.
