Category: San Antonio (Page 53 of 62)
Nicole Glaros showing off her TechStars Cloud belt buckle in San Antonio
The only woman in the TechStars Cloud program, Nicole Glaros relocated from Boulder, Colorado to San Antonio with her husband, two-year-old daughter and one month old baby boy.
“It’s not a hard sell for me,” Glaros said. “To pick up and move for four months is not a big deal for us.”
Her husband Mark loves adventure and discovering new places too, she said.
“From our perspective it was an adventure,” Glaros said.
Adventurous is the perfect adjective to describe the outgoing Glaros, who is accomplished, smart, athletic and pretty and a powerful force in the technology startup world.
“TechStars is such a great environment,” Glaros said. “It doesn’t feel like work. I love what I do. “
Glaros moved into a house near Basse Road and San Pedro in January. She had just given birth to her son, Jackson, in December. Her mother also moved in, relocating for four months from Florida to help out with the kids.
“She put her life on hold,” Glaros said.
Family members are the unsung heroes of TechStars, Glaros said. While the entrepreneurs toil away 12 hour or longer days, seven days a week, spouses, kids, other family members and friends often have to adjust their lives.
Glaros knows their pain. She has worked with more than 100 startup tech entrepreneurs. Before joining TechStars, she founded three startups and worked at a technology business incubator, CTEK and other incubation programs in Colorado.
One day, Dave Cohen, a successful entrepreneur, angel investor and cofounder of TechStars, came to CTEK to pitch his idea for a new kind of technology incubator. CTEK’s leaders didn’t care for the idea much, but Glaros did. She sent an email to Cohen asking if he had time to meet her for a beer. He agreed to meet her for 30 minutes.
When Cohen arrived, he asked Glaros what her startup idea was. She said she didn’t have one. She just liked his TechStars idea and wanted to chat.
“That 30 minutes turned into three hours,” Glaros said.
Glaros ended up joining TechStars in 2007 and now serves as the managing director of the TechStars program in Boulder. She agreed to relocate to San Antonio to help Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud with its inaugural program.
TechStars is a highly selective startup accelerator that takes about ten companies per program and provides seed funding from more than 75 different venture capital firms and angel investors. It has five TechStars programs in Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle and San Antonio.
The TechStars Cloud was the first accelerator program exclusively focused on cloud-based computing startups. The first class ran from January through April 11th. Each of the companies received $18,000 and access to $100,000 credit line along with thousands of dollars worth of perks including free website hosting, marketing and other services.
“The goal for me to be here was just to give Jason the resources he needed to launch the TechStars Cloud program,” Glaros said. “Working with Jason has been pure joy. He did a wonderful job.”
Seats enjoyed working with Glaros too.
“I will miss working with Nicole immensely,” Seats said. “We had very different styles that gelled quite well together. She is demanding, tough, detailed, insightful and almost always right. I tried to internalize as much of her thought processes as I could to make myself better.”
Glaros said the TechStars Cloud program was the smoothest launch of a new program in TechStars history and she credits Seats, an accomplished entrepreneur who founded Slicehost and sold it to Rackspace, with that.
Glaros was also impressed with the 11 companies to graduate from the TechStars program.
“It was really cool watching them develop,” she said. “I think the highlight is always seeing the progress of the companies. You literally see them evolve from raw potential to a real thing.”
And they appreciated her.
“She’s brilliant,” said Matt Gershoff, founder of Conductrics, in the TechStars Cloud program. “She’s super smart, confident and incredible at being able to distill complexity into a simple narrative.”
Glaros played a key role in helping the companies hone their eight minute pitch to investors.
“She’s not a pushover,” Gershoff said. “She’s definitely respected. She will tell you the truth even if it’s hard to hear. She’s honest.”
Colin Loretz, founder of Cloudsnap in the TechStars Cloud program, also had high praise for Glaros.
“She was awesome to have around,” Loretz said. “She’s seen more pitches and more startups all the way through to Demo Day than anyone.”
“She sees all the problems you can possibly see,” Loretz said.
Glaros has watched entrepreneurs launch a company, exit the company through sale or acquisition and then come back to serve as a mentor in the TechStars program. She calls the mentors – successful technology entrepreneurs who volunteer their time to help the startups – the secret sauce of TechStars.
“It creates a sort of unified cycle of giving back,” Glaros said.
The startup movement gives Glaros hope that these bright entrepreneurs will go on to create jobs and innovative products that will revive the economy.
“The one thing you cannot outsource is brains, talent and creativity,” she said.
The TechStars program has a 92 percent success rate, Glaros said. TechStars latest stats show that 109 companies still operate, nine have failed and eight have been acquired.
The competition is really stiff to get into TechStars. Glaros had just finished selecting the latest companies for TechStars Boulder. She reviewed 1,172 applications for 10 spots.
“The idea is really quality over quantity,” Glaros said.
So how does an entrepreneur make the cut?
“When we’re looking at a company we’re going to take the best team,” Glaros said. “We want a really great team that is super passionate about what they do,” Glaros said. “The idea doesn’t matter much. Ideas aren’t worth anything. It’s the execution of the idea that is important.”
That means the background of the founders count the most even more than the idea they are pitching, she said. And a lot of those founders have a background in engineering, she said.
And few female engineers apply, she said.
Glaros said women also tend to be more risk-averse than men and not as likely to risk everything to startup a company. And they don’t have huge egos and ego plays a big role in being entrepreneur, Glaros said.
“You have to believe you are the only one on the planet that can solve the problem you’re trying to tackle,” she said.
But women make some of the best entrepreneurs, Glaros said.
“Women tend to underestimate how much they can do,” Glaros said. “They outperform their objectives.”
Women also tend to be very open and they ask for help when they encounter a problem, Glaros said.
Now that the first TechStars Cloud program has wrapped up in San Antonio, Glaros has packed up and returned home. But she remembers her time fondly in the city. She enjoyed visiting local restaurants with her family. She thinks San Antonio is a great place to raise kids.
And although TechStars Cloud enters it quiet period, Glaros thinks San Antonio’s startup scene is heating up under the leadership of Seats and Nick Longo at the Geekdom and others.
In Boulder, TechStars has been able to create a technology startup community. How can San Antonio replicate that?
“Community matters,” Glaros said. “When a community comes together and rallies all kinds of entrepreneurial magic happens.”
The community can help by becoming a customer of a startup, volunteering time and expertise and money.
“Embrace them – open up your address book and wallets,” Glaros said “That’s the best thing you can do.”
When successful entrepreneurs mentor and help startups a vibrant startup community can thrive, Glaros said.
“In Boulder, you can get a meeting with just about anyone,” Glaros said. “Accessibility to leadership is huge.”
By L.A. Lorek
Data centers gobble up energy.
But some of the smartest minds in the information technology industry want to change that.
They are meeting in San Antonio today and tomorrow to rethink the old ways of putting together servers, power and cooling units and the rest of the guts of data centers to save energy and increase efficiency.
It’s called the Open Compute Project, launched last April by Facebook with the goal of creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data centers. Of course not everyone has joined the project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are not on board. But lots of major players like Facebook and Rackspace are.
And in just a year, the Open Compute Project has made data centers 38 percent more efficient to run and 24 percent less expensive to build, according to the organization. The group comes up with new hardware and software standards and then they share those with everyone else. The entire data center industry benefits from the open collaborative work of the best engineers in a variety of companies.
About 500 data center leaders from Intel, AMD, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Facebook, Rackspace and more met today at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio for the third summit designed to hammer out designs and think up projects to improve the way data centers operate.
Frank Frankovsky with Facebook
First off, Frankovsky showed a slide listing dozens of new companies that have joined the movement including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, HP and others. Frankovsky wrote a blog post on May 2 providing a full list of new members and detailing all the accomplishments in the past year.
And later on the stage, executives from HP and Dell both unveiled their newly redesigned servers dubbed Project Coyote and Project Zeus respectively.
The objectives of the Open Compute Project are scale, value, simplicity, sustainability and openness, Frankovsky said. That involves rethinking the entire data center from the racks that house the servers to the electrical systems that connect them together.
“We’re ditching the 19 inch rack design,” he said.
A big part of that is creating new 21-inch width standard for racks inside data centers to replace the outdated 19-inch racks, which date back to the 1950s, Frankovsky said.
“We want people to differentiate less and innovate more,” he said.
Following Frankovsky, Glenn Keels, HP, director of marketing of its hyperscale business unit, said the reason HP joined the Open Compute Project was because “leaders do not sit on their laurels” and “leaders develop standards.” HP is number one or number two in the data center markets it serves, Keels said. HP powers some of the largest cloud data centers in the world including Facebook, he said.The cloud market is small but growing exponentially between now and 2020, Keels said.
“HP has begun to think differently,” Keels said. HP is transforming servers and changing the experience with projects like moonshot, voyager and odyssey aimed at improving efficiencies in the data center, Keels said.
“Open Compute Project is the most robust group of problem solvers focused on the data center space and moving from technology and form factors of 1995 to today to reclaim stranded time, space and power,” Keels said.
“We have to reinvent ourselves every time and Open Compute is a fantastic forum for us to do that,” Keels said. “Standardization has the ability to unlock innovation.”
Keels unveiled HP’s Coyote open rack standard at the conference.
Then Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, showed off Dell’s new server and storage designs that meet the Open Rack specifications.
“Dell is deeply rooted in our support for open alliances,” Norrod said. “It’s in our DNA…We are very active in our support for open source.”
Rackspace is also active in the open source movement and in creating less expensive and more efficient data centers. Late Wednesday morning, Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s chief operating officer, detailed the company’s plans in an interview.
Rackspace has nine data centers globally including two in the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong. Its U.S. data centers are in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C. area,.
“We shuttered two in San Antonio in the last six months due to inefficiencies,” Roenigk said. “There’s a great example of how quickly this technology is moving.”
In the last two years, Rackspace has seen a 22 percent efficiency improvement in its data centers, Roenigk said.
Rackspace plans to leverage the Open Compute Project designs for computer servers, storage, network and utilities in its next generation data center, which it plans soon, Roenigk said.
Overall, Rackspace has 80,000 servers online serving 172,000 customers today.
“We want to be influential in the design of the hardware,” Roenigk said.
So Rackspace works closely with original equipment makers like HP and Dell, he said.
“Most recently we’ve increased the density of a rack from 7 kilowatts to 18 kilowatts a rack providing more computing power coming out of a smaller footprint,” Roenigk said. “That means less cost which is passed on to our customers.”
Sustainability and saving energy is a core covenant of the Open Computer Project, Roenigk said.
“We were recently judged by Greenpeace in a report “How Clean Is Your Cloud,” Roenigk said. “We’re pleased that even though we’re a small player in the market, we’re in the middle of the pack.”
“We think we can be a big influencer in data center efficiency and the power used to power those data centers,” Roenigk said.
Those decisions on being green stem from the sources that Rackspace uses to power its data centers. That’s why it has bypassed states, which provide cheap power from coal sources in favor of hydro electric, wind and natural gas sources.
“We’re really about serving customers,” Roenigk said. “They pull us and push us in different directions all the time.”
Two years ago, only one in 25 customers ever brought up the subject of sustainability when talking about hosting, Roenigk said.
“Today it is more like six or seven in ten,” he said. “It is now a real part of the sourcing and procurement process.”
On Thursday, engineers attending the summit will hammer out their ideas in special sessions that go very, very deep, Roenigk said. The Open Compute Project has a formal process for people to bring forth their ideas, he said. The board decides which projects are going to drive the most value to the open source community. Then the engineers meet once or several times a week. When they are done, they publish their design specifications to members of the Open Compute Project to use, Roenigk said.
“Linux took 20 years to become a standard,” Roenigk said. “We will do what Linux did in 20 years in five years or less.”
The following video is from Rackspace and explains its role in the Open Compute Project.
Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News
To get an idea for what it’s like to attend BlogathonATX, you’ve just got to peruse some of the posts from attendees on its blog.
Those posts include “I just ate a 40 year old sandwich,” “New Study finds Bumper Stickers Linked to Driving Skills” “They used to call me an editor” and one of my favorites: “Why Am I a Vaginal Surgery Consultant.”
To say that this is a “quirky” group of writers is an understatement. But creativity and innovation springs forth from having fun. This event generates lots of good times.
But BlogathonATX has a serious side. Corporate bloggers attend to find out tips on everything from using social media to the importance of hashtags and cultivating an online audience. A late afternoon session is devoted to blogging for business.
“If I can learn a few things, why not ?” said Jake Wengroff, social media editor with Frost & Sullivan in San Antonio. He attended with Laurel Brewer, an intern at Frost & Sullivan. They plan to share their newly acquired knowledge with others at their company next week.
BlogathonATX started off as a free grass roots movement but has evolved into a twice a year organized event that costs $40 to attend but includes breakfast, lunch, sushi and a happy hour. It’s quite social.
In 2010, Ilene Haddad held the first BlogathonATX at Conjunctured coworking to network and swap ideas with other bloggers. Since then, she’s held two other events that have all sold out at various coworking spaces around Austin.
This is the fourth BlogathonATX and the largest one yet with 120 attendees. It’s being held Saturday at TechRanch, a technology company incubator in North Austin.
In the main conference room, dozens of people hunch over laptops tweeting and blogging and checking their e-mail. In a world full of screens, it’s difficult to really know what people are doing behind them all. But at least a few have tweeted out links to their blog posts.
“It’s the same group of people, but it’s bigger,” said John McElhenny, a social media consultant who writes the Uber.la blog. The big draw is “being around people that are all doing it,” he said.
But he doesn’t like the label blogger. He just wrote a post “Nobody’s going to read your blog.” Because he thinks blogging is a dated term.
“We’re building websites,” McElhenny said. “We’re building content. We’re building narratives. I don’t think we’re blogging.”
Haddad is not a hardcore blogger.
“I am a fan of bloggers. I am a fan of their creativity,” she said. “I admire writers. I want to be a better writer so I hang out with them hoping some of it will rub off.“
Haddad also has a slew of sponsors that back the event including Tech Ranch, Neuro, Lonely Gourmet, Writers’ League of Texas, Dirty Dog, Yelp, Fit Club Austin, BuildASign, Beanitos, Mass Relevance and Firecat Studios. Neuro offered up passion in a bottle, a red punch that quickly got snapped up.
Roanna Flowers, known on Twitter as @LegsMagee, didn’t need to drink bottled passion. She has her own for blogging. She writes the LegsMagee.com blog about her life and times in Austin.
Every Sunday, she dedicates an “observation day” on her blog to go to a different part of Austin and write a poem, take pictures or write about her observations.
“I like to get away from the computer and get away from the smart phone,” she said
Magee has been in Austin for six years and works as a project manager at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Just like exercise, she sets aside 30 minutes every day to write.
“It’s just part of my routine, the same as working out,” she said.
Christine Cano came to BlogathonATX for inspiration and motivation. It’s her first time attending the event but she had heard quite a lot of buzz about it. She’s been blogging for two and a half years. She pens FormFittingFashion.com about fashion and style. She really liked the session by Lauren Modery on “Branding Yourself Online.”
“It’s about being honest about your blog and your writing,” Cano said. “Your audience doesn’t want something cookie cutter. They want you to be yourself.”
At WhaleShark Media, the “Employee of the Month,” known as its “Top Shark” gets to spin a wheel of fortune and win a prize.
Employees nominate the hardest working WhaleShark employee and management votes on the winner.
In the past, Top Sharks have won free flights and hotel stays anywhere in the U.S., Super Bowl tickets, elliptical machines and more.
Recently, Austin-based WhaleShark added a new prize: a timed three minute shopping spree in Costco. The employee and one helper can load up on as much merchandize as they can get to the register in three minutes. Then Cotter Cunningham, WhaleShark CEO, pays for the purchases and they get to walk out of the store with the merchandise.
Recently, “Top Shark” WhaleShark employee Angela Wong hit the jackpot.
On Thursday, Angela, cheered on by 80 employees, took on Costco and won, said Brian Hoyt, head of communications at WhaleShark Media.
“The grand total – Angela is now the proud owner of nearly $25,000 in merchandise,” Hoyt said. “Including: 3 flat screens, 10 cameras, 2 computers, several Dyson vacuum cleaners and case of nice champagne!”
The wheel of fortune is just one of the ways WhaleShark rewards employees, Hoyt said. The company is focused on attracting and retaining the top technology talent in Austin, he said.
Dan Gillmor quizes Bob Metcalfe about the Tech Bubble. Photo by Photo by Antonio Jimenez, aka @eleditor
On Saturday, Metcalfe, University of Texas professor of innovation, told a group of 280 journalists that a tech bubble still looms.
He pointed to the recent acquisition by Facebook of Instagram for $1 billion as proof.
Metcalfe made his remarks in response to a question by Dan Gillmor, technology journalist and director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Gillmor covered the dot com boom and bust as a columnist with the San Jose Mercury News. Metcalfe gave the morning keynote address to the University of Texas’ 13th International Symposium on Journalism, held at the Blanton Museum of Art.
Metcalfe is not alone in making the Web 2.0 Tech Bubble assertion.
Since the last bubble burst in 2000, everyone’s been talking about the next bubble. In 2007, the Web 2.0 Tech Bubble Video debuted and got people talking about overvaluations and silly names for companies. Back then Facebook was valued at $15 billion. Now it’s valued at between $75 billion and $100 billion and it plans to go public soon, according to this Washington Post story.
Last week, Dave Winer, software developer, writer and entrepreneur, penned a blog post declaring “It’s definitely a bubble.”
“We’re in a bubble now, and like all bubbles unless you’re thinking about it the “right” way, you don’t see it. That’s how bubbles are. It wouldn’t be a bubble if it were easy to see,” according to Winer.
But I think it is easy to see.
I covered the last tech bubble as a technology writer for Interactive Week magazine. I was based in Dripping Springs, just south of Austin and one day the UPS guy delivered a bottle of champagne to my front door. It was attached to a thank you note from the editor. The staff of about two-dozen reporters pumped out a ton of copy and each one of us brought in millions in advertising. The magazine made a $30 million profit in 2000. Ziff Davis, the parent company, gave us stock options. We got paid a lot better than newspaper reporters. And we held our company retreat at The Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs. We were flying high. I travelled all over the country covering companies in San Jose, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, Chicago and then it was all over in a flash. The dot com bust hit and the magazine folded.
Many of the companies I wrote about no longer exist: Webvan, Pets.com, Toysmart.com. Austin’s dot bomb list included Garden.com, DrKoop.com and Living.com. Interestingly, Andrew Busey, the then 29-year-old CEO of Living.com, went on to found a string of successful companies and is now a venture partner with Austin Ventures focused on software and Internet startups.
The astronomical valuations for statups with little track record or profits has got to raise a few eyebrows. Just take a look at Groupon. It shows “how social media companies can game the numbers,” according to this Forbes’ article.
Still, it’s up to the market to decide what a company is worth.
Today, Square is rumored to be valuing its startup at $4 billion.
Meanwhile, Twitter’s valuation is pegged at $7.7 billion.
And dozens of entrepreneurs keep getting pumped out of tech incubators like pies in a bakery.
Investors hope one of those pies possesses the secret sauce that makes it the next billion-dollar valuation.
And Instagram, an 18 month old company with no revenue and 13 employees, provides hopes to them that some smart entrepreneurs with a bright idea will be the next billion-dollar startup.
At lunch at the journalism conference, I asked Gillmor if he thought any good came out of bubbles.(Daniel Gross wrote “Pop! Why Bubbles are Great for the Economy.”
Gillmor said absolutely not. He pointed to the last big bubble – the housing bubble and the resulting financial meltdown of the banks, collapse of the housing market, countless foreclosures and mortgage fraud. Gillmor said nothing has changed. The banks have gotten bigger and no one has been held accountable. Regulation has not gotten stricter.
Did the dot com bust have any lasting positive impact? Not for the people who lost a lot of money investing in them.
So when will this tech bubble burst? That’s the multi-billion dollar question that no one seems to know the answer to yet.
Loku is a local search site that promotes local discovery and highlights the quirks of each city. Loku recently released a mobile application that lets users discover what’s happening right around them like events, restaurants, news and tips as well as it lets users establish themselves as local experts for their cities. With the release of the app, Dan Street, CEO of Loku, has given us some more insight into the operations of Loku in this Q&A.
Why did you leave the investment firm of KKR to enter the startup world?
Prior to doing a startup, I worked at great firms like Bain, KKR, and Dell. I really liked my time at each of those places. But around 2007, I lost two grandparents who were really important to me, and thought about what I wanted to do in my life. I realized that one of my big goals was to use my career not just for me, but to leave something positive behind. Loku came out of that inspiration.
Why did you create Loku?
In particular, I chose local discovery because it meant something to me. For me, local grew out of a childhood ideal. I grew up in a lot of smaller towns and suburbs, where everybody knew each other, and you knew the local store owners. Sort of like Austin. As I grew my career, I ended up in urban places like NY or SF. I loved those cities, but felt like I lost something great about smaller towns. The purpose of Loku is to bring a smaller town feel to urban areas.
Loku had raised $1.68 million in angel and seed stage funding so far, do you plan to seek additional funding? If so, how much and when?
Yes, we’ll likely raise more money. We’re going after a big opportunity, with really tough technology. These kinds of businesses don’t come cheap.
How many people use Loku?
We don’t release numbers, I’m sorry. But it’s nearing 6 figures, and growing 50%+ each month.
Loku recently introduced its mobile app what has been the reaction to it?
People are really excited about our mobile app. We’ve seen great engagement stats, including 26+ flips and over 5 minutes per session. Although we have a long way to go, our ambitions are much higher, we’re excited to be where we are.
How does Loku make money?
At this point, our focus is on delivering the best experience for our users and attracting more folks to join our app — the app and community only get better with more people onboard. We have been successful with a number of revenue models but plan on focusing on users in the short-term.
Who are your competitors and how does Loku differentiate itself in the local search space?
Our idea, making discovering new things you’ll love on your cell phone a fun game, hasn’t really been done. There are a lot of people who might come close, but we don’t think anyone is a direct competitor at the moment.
Is Loku’s headquarters in San Francisco? What role does the Austin office play in the company?
We were started in Austin, and our heart is here. We recruit heavily from UT and Rice (my alma mater) and all but one of our employees went to school in Texas. At this point, having our exec team in SF is the right thing for our business. There is expertise in our space in the Bay Area that you can’t find anywhere else. At the same time, we’re committed to having dual HQ in Austin – it’s where we’re from.
How many employees does Loku have? Are you hiring?
We’ve got 14 people, which is a lucky number. At this point, we only take interns, and some of them end up with full-time offers. We do not hire outside of our intern program at the moment. As the app continues to take off, we will be adding folk in the next few months, but primarily through our internship program.
What are Loku’s plans for the future?
We really want to impact lots of people in a positive way. If we can make it fun, and cool, to be involved in your local community, we’ll all be very happy. To do that, we’ll need to launch native mobile apps, expand the cities we cover, and keep getting better every day.
When I first heard about The Lean Startup, I thought it was a weight loss program for entrepreneurs.
Then I launched my own startup news site and an executive at Rackspace, the site’s first corporate sponsor, sent me Eric Ries’ bestselling book via UPS.
That night I cuddled up with the blue book and a glass of Pinot Noir in my office’s big red leather chair. I felt sure that I was about to uncover the secrets to launching a successful news site. And in a way I did. But it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be.
Instead, Ries covered a lot of the ground that I have treaded as a business reporter for the past two decades covering incredible companies like International Business Machines Corp. and its transition from the inventor of the original 1981 IBM PC to failed OS/2 software developer to a powerhouse service business. Ries also focused on lean manufacturing based on the body of work of James Womack who studied Toyota’s lean manufacturing operations. (Toyota announced plans to open a Tundra truck plant in San Antonio in 2005 and I was lucky to interview Womack about Toyota’s lean manufacturing processes) Ries has taken Toyota’s lean production principles and applied them to the startup world. That means startup workers are keenly in tune with customers and the company creation process by working in small batches and changing and adaptly quickly in a process known as iteration.
When my 13-year-old son walked into my office and asked what I was reading, I told him about the lean startup process of launching a product as quickly as possible and then adapting and changing it frequently.
“Mom that’s Windows,” Teddy said.
I laughed but realized that’s been a long standing process of software developers. And it has worked. So why not apply it to the broader process of launching companies.
Ries’ book is not a step by step manual on running a lean business. But it does provide enough examples and information to explain how this process is beneficial in the innovation cycle. Failure is an important part of the process. But it’s also important to learn from failure and to adapt.
In the two decades I’ve been writing stories about successful entrepreneurs almost all of them recount a time when they stood at the edge of a cliff and they almost lost it all. Some of them did and they were able to climb their way back up to the top of the hill again. Others just sidestepped the danger zone and were able to persevere in the face of enormous obstacles (like no money, competitors, unproven market, product failures and more).
The lean startup process makes a lot of sense and so does learning from others that have been there and done that. That’s why so many lean meet ups have become popular hangouts for entrepreneurs. Austin’s Lean Startup Circle has 1,010 members. San Antonio also has one that just started up. .
And next weekend, entrepreneurs have a chance to immerse themselves in the lean startup process during a three day weekend program called The Lean Startup Machine.
In Austin, Ash Mauyra has become an expert in the lean startup process. His book, Running Lean, was just released for a second printing by O’Reilly books last March. He’s one of the leaders of the lean startup weekend and so is Josh Baer, a serial entrepreneur and founder of The Other Inbox and Jason Cohen, founder of WP Engine.
Do you have a lean story to tell? Comment below and let us know. We want to write your story. And meanwhile, i will keep iterating and pivoting and building Silicon Hills News through bootstrapping and employing lean principles.
Umbel, which measures digital audiences, Tuesday announced that it has raised $3.7 million.
Austin Ventures led the Series A round. Other investors included Herbert Simon, Chairman and Director of the Simon Property group and owner of the Indiana Pacers, and Gordon Paddison, CEO Stradella Road, and former EVP New Media Marketing at Newline Cinema.
The Austin-based startup also announced that Paul Krasinski, the former senior vice president of digital media and analytics at Arbitron, joins Umbel as its new chief executive officer.
“Seth Goldstein, the former co-chair, IAB Social Media Committee and Turntable.fm co-founder, joins Umbel’s Board of Directors alongside Thomas Ball, a Partner at Austin Ventures,” according to a news release.
In 2010, Meredith Maycotte, Higinio (H.O.) Maycotte, Travis Turner and Nick Goggans founded Umbel. The company began a collaboration with Arbitron in August of 2011.
“Umbel leverages social data at great scale to deliver unique insights about the people who engage with any site, service or brand,” according to a news release. “The company is currently in private beta and will be using the recently raised funds to aggressively execute on its product roadmap and further business development goals. Umbel is expected to bring its first product to market in Q3 of 2012.”
“We’re on the precipice of a new era in audience measurement where brands will demand granular data and the technology is available to deliver upon the market needs,” Paul Krasinski, CEO of Umbel, said in a news release. “It is exciting. I’m proud to join Umbel’s ambitious and talented team and extend the traditional media research principles using social and big data. Umbel has an incredible opportunity to make a large impact on the future of audience measurement.”
Umbel’s customers include the Boston Bruins, Streetwise Media and Austin City Limits.
Lumeris announced plans Tuesday to build a software engineering and innovation center in Austin and to hire 100 software engineers, project managers and consultants.
The St. Louis-based healthcare technology company develops software applications for healthcare providers to access on the Internet. Its technology seeks to improve quality and reduce healthcare costs.
Lumeris has raised $220 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins, Caufield & Byers, Camden Partners, Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Partners and Sandbox Capital.
“Healthcare is a $2.6 trillion industry that is now embracing cutting edge information technologies to improve quality and drive down costs,” John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins said in a news release. “Our country’s economic future and health demands we succeed with this mission. We spend more than any other country in the world, but our life expectancy barely makes the Top 50. We can do better. The enormous talent pool in Austin makes it a great place to fuel Lumeris’ growth and innovation.”
Lumeris and Essence Healthcare, its sister company, have 550 employees in St. Louis, Boston and Hyderabad, India. It has annual revenue of $500 million.
Lumeris want to hire Web app developers and cloud experts. For more information on job postings and recruiting events, visit Lumeris’ website.
“There is no bigger technical challenge or worthy mission than fixing our country’s healthcare system,” W. Michael Long, CEO and Chairman of Lumeris said in a news release. “The digital revolution occurring in healthcare driven by breakthroughs in digital communications and data management and a national economic crisis created in part from unmanaged healthcare costs is moving fast. We need Austin’s best and the brightest who want to build really interesting things and improve the lives of their friends and loved ones. That’s my definition of cool.”
Long was previously CEO of Austin-based Continuum that was purchased by Computer Sciences Corp. He then helped launch healthcare giant Healtheon/WebMD, serving as CEO and Chairman.