Finding Funding for your startup is hard, but Greenhouse is trying to make it easier.
The company is one of several firms taking advantage of the JOBS act of 2012, which relaxes regulations for equity investing and allows individuals to own stock in new startups without being SEC accredited. This means that you, or a friend of yours, can own equity in fledgling startups – as long as you go through a web portal that handles the legal issues.
This is exactly the service that Greenhouse provides. Founders R.C. Rondero de Mosier and Nathan Roach are based in Austin and San Antonio respectively, and hope to create a crowdfunding community in the south Texas area that benefits startups and investors as well as the local economies. With equity crowdfunding, the Greenhouse users will actually own part of the local startups they invest in, creating an incentive to stick with and promote such startups in the future.
“This creates a larger community because you turn your purchasers into advocates, and people are going to be ideally more long term engaged with you,” says Rondero de Mosier.
The JOBS act rules will go into effect as soon as the SEC releases regulations for those rules. Under old rules, only SEC accredited investors could purchase equity in private startup companies – or companies that had not already made an initial public stock offering. Such investors had to be either worth around a million dollars or prove that they made more than $200K annually for several years – a rule which Rondero de Mosier says excluded around 94 percent of Americans from investing in small businesses without public stocks. Once the new rules pass, companies like Greenhouse will open the door for those people by providing a web portal for such investment.
According to Forbes.com, the new rules will allow individuals making less than $100K – most of us – to invest five percent of their annual income in equity crowdfunding. Individuals making more than $100K may invest 10 percent.
Greenhouse is currently in beta, and plans to launch once the SEC rules are fully implemented. Users can sign up for the beta at FundGreenhouse.com.
Category: A Slice of Silicon Hills (Page 3 of 3)
BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
This week, we talked with Circle Media founder and CEO Mark Piening about his new startup. Incorporated just last January, Circle Media officially launched at SXSW and was one of the five finalists in the Startup Austin Fast Pitch Competition. The Austin based company does data analysis for both event promoters and sponsors to help them better understand, and interact with, customers at their events.
“How do you help these sponsors and these producers of live events make the best live event experiences possible? The only way to do that is to know the audience.” says Piening.
Piening says that the value in knowing the audience comes from sponsors being able to specially target certain demographics. In some cases, sponsors could even connect with and interact with event attendees — offering them coupons or spontaneous opportunities which make the event a more personal and memorable experience.
To do this, the company collects data from event ticket sales, registration, drinks sales, tweets that reference the event, Facebook posts, Foursquare check-ins, consumer data sources and more. They then analyze the data and present it to clients to help them make informed marketing decisions.
The company presents the information through an online dashboard that gives clients everything from who came to their event to what those people said about the event afterwards — helping the clients make better decisions about programming, merchandise, concessions and anything else that was part of the experience. Piening believes this approach can create a fundamental shift in how marketing works.
“We think that the 21st century is the era of authenticity,” says Piening. “It’s an opportunity [for marketing] to really connect with people like friends, be treated like friends, and be respectful like friends in how they communicate with people.
Circe Media has already secured a fortune 50 software company and is in the process of process of implementing a solution for that client. They are currently recruiting marketing agencies and seeking other fortune 500 clients.
Circle media is now hiring developers with experience in Node.js, REAK, Redis, and user experience.
This week Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore interviews StoryPress founder Michael Davis about his new iPad app for creating and saving family history through audio stories.
“StoryPress is trying to change the way that family history is preserved and passed down from generation to generation by making it fun and easy to record stories with you own voice,” Davis said.
Davis got the idea from his grandmother. A year and a half ago she had just received an iPad, and was looking for a recording application to record personal stories. None of the available applications were satisfactory – simply providing her with a big MP3 file which she had no idea how incorporate into something bigger. Davis created StoryPress to fill this need.
“Not only do we have the right interface to make it fun and easy, but we came up with the prompts so it’s not intimidating,” Davis said.
The StoryPress app can essentially interview its users by giving them a series of prompts grouped together in topic modules. After choosing one of the modules, users simply respond to each prompt given. When they are done, StoryPress automatically ties all the narration segments together into one audio book. If users feel the prompts are too constricting, they may also do a simple self recorded narration.
The current version app – launched last December — allows users to create audio books with custom book covers images, but future versions will allow users to add pictures and other media.
“The goal is to make it a real multimedia experience where the user can add pictures, background music, videos, and have the story live on one permanent URL,” Davis said.
Future versions of the app will also provide stock photos of iconic American imagines through several eras, as well as musical accompaniments, which users can purchase and add to their audio books.
Users will be able to create their first five stories for free, but will have to pay a yearly cloud storage cost of $49 of they want to create more. If users want a more tangible copy of their audio books, they can also order CD versions from StoryPress for a fee.
StoryPress has seen 4000 downloads so far, and they will be kickstarter April 1 to access more funding. StoryPress will be releasing an Android tablet in mid April.
UMeTime, which has signed up more than 120 businesses in Austin to use its hyperlocal deal app, is featured this week on Slice of Silicon Hills News.
In this episode of Slice of Silicon Hills News, Host Andrew Moore interviews Dan McKernan with UMeTime about a new way to connect businesses with customers. UMeTime allows businesses to create and market their own discounted deals as wells as blast out three hour specials to nearby customers with the UMeTime app. The startup was created by four close friends from California who recently moved to Austin for its startup friendly climate. The hospitality in Austin and Texas have been incredibly helpful to the young company, which launched its app four weeks ago, McKernan said. Silicon Hills News did this Q&A with one of the founders a few weeks ago.
The company plans to launch in five to ten more university markets in Texas by the end of the year.
This week, Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore interviews Grapevine’s Co-Founder Erik Larson about the company’s latest version of its software.
Grapevine, based at Geekdom, makes a reputation management software program aimed at businesses in the hospitality industry like restaurants and hotels.
Kirpeep’s Leticia Barrientos, vice president of outreach, talks with Slice of Silicon Hills Host Andrew Moore about the startup’s plans for South by Southwest this weekend.
The company, based at Geekdom, is having a swag challenge at SXSW. More than 5,000 people signed up for the challenge, which quickly sold out, Barrientos said. They have established a waitlist. To find out more, the startup will based at Free Lunch Friday’s Rig at SXSW at 604 East 7th Street in Austin.
Kirpeep is an online marketplace that allows people to exchange, buy or sell goods and services. For more on the company, please read this profile on the company.
Disclosure: Kirpeep is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News. And Geekdom is a sponsor.
Matt Peterson, founder and CEO of Dejaset, a music technology company in Austin, dropped into the Silver Fox Studios today to chat with Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore.
Dejaset allows bands to capture recordings of live performances and sell them immediately to fans. Peterson has created an application for the bands to record their content and another one for consumers to buy the songs.
The company, based at the Austin Technology Incubator, raised $750,000 in seed stage capital last year. They’re preparing for a big rollout of its service at South by Southwest next week.
This week on Slice of Silicon Hills News, host Andrew Moore interviews Vid Luther, founder of ZippyKid, a WordPress hosting site.
The startup, founded in 2010, is based at Geekdom, a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.
Moore interviews Luther at the Silver Fox Studios, which is also a sponsor of Silicon Hills News, on the 10th floor of Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
This week, Andrew Moore talks with Frederick “Suizo” Mendler, co-founder of TrueAbility.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded by four former Rackspace employees, known as Rackers, has created an online testing and assessment system for technical job candidates. The TrueAbility test gives recruiters and employers an accurate view of a job candidate’s technical skills.
TrueAbility, which recently raised $750,000, is also part of the TechStars Cloud program taking place at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio. And it’s one of the finalists in the South by Southwest Accelerator program.
Silicon Hills News Reporter Andrew Moore interviews Wimbo Music’s Chief Technical Officer Greg Cerveny in the first episode of Slice of Silicon Hills. The show is recorded and produced at the Silver Fox Studios at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
If you’re interested in being on a future show, please send us an e-mail. The goal of the show is to shine a spotlight on Austin and San Antonio technology companies and entrepreneurs and those visiting the area to participate in local incubators.
