By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Cian O’Cuilleanain, co-founder of Gravity Centres in Dublin, fell in love with SXSW three years ago when he first attended Interactive.

“Everybody was so welcoming, there were all these opportunities opening, there was the energy of the town. I went back home and started pitching Austin all the time in Europe, saying: ‘Go and experience it, you’ll know what I mean.’ There’s something palpable about Austin; I can’t put it into words.”

Then he met Fred Schmidt, tireless powerhouse behind the Capital Factory International initiative, and in 2015, amidst the hubbub of Interactive, the opening of the Irish Consulate and the visit from the Irish Prime Minister, Gravity Centres and Capital Factory signed a memorandum of understanding that is the local incubator’s first major link to the international startup community.

Gravity Centre, opening in April near Dublin’s Silicon Docks on the River Liffey is starting with 6,500 square feet on the Dart Station between Dublin’s tech hub and the city center. Since Dublin is the only English speaking country in the Eurozone, it’s optimal for many U.S. companies to launch European operations there. Capital Factory and Gravity Centre companies, traveling across the Atlantic will find that they have not only a workspace but, as O’Cuilleanain explained it, a “one-stop shop” for help with everything from visas and other legal services to marketing, real estate and the best places to eat and get their laundry done. Plus they’ll be a community of friends to instantly connect visitors to the city.

“We already have relationships with other tech hubs, this makes us international,” said Schmidt. “A lot of (Capital Factory) companies have customers in Europe. This gives them a presence on the ground. Before, if you wanted to establish a presence you could hire an independent contractor or a distributor rep firm. Now thanks to these incubator-accelerator co-working spaces you can plug them into a community of support. They’re not in a vacuum. They’re part of a larger enterprise sharing best practices and best resources.”

Taking Texas To Europe

O’Cuilleanain was trained as a spacecraft systems engineer. He was a graduate researcher at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and also studied at the International Space University in France. There, he said, he experienced “interdisciplinary, intercultural programs that brought everybody together coming up with innovation and cross pollination across organizations to create new products and solutions to the world’s biggest problems.”

That was the inspiration for Gravity Center. “I was trying to figure out how to scale that in Europe,” O’Cuilleanain said. “How do you create an environment where people can take that risk, and build more of a network and community….? I look at it in a systems engineering way,” he said. “How can startups catalyze economic development and real innovation?”

He met with Edel Flynn, his co-founder, who formerly was CEO at the Digital Hub in Dublin. Digital Hub was established by the Irish government. O’Cuilleanain wanted to create something driven by the entrepreneurial ecosystem itself.

“In my experience of hosting both early stage teams and multinationals during their international expansion, the importance of community has always been at the forefront,” Flynn said in a statement. “We are delighted to be linking our community with Capital Factory’s, strengthening market access for both and provide essential supports that will help companies scale faster.”

O’Cuilleanain’s first impression is polite and earnest but his humor is queued up just behind that first impression. In 2013 he met the tireless Fred Schmidt and the two struck up a fast friendship.
“I can be feeling discouraged and talk to Fred on the phone for two minutes and be completely energized, inspired and ready to go,” said O’Cuilleanain. They built the Capital-Factory-Gravity-Centre relationship together. It was blessed by a mention in the SXSW keynote of Taoiseach Enda Kenny (the Irish Prime Minister).

Through Schmidt, Capital Factory is on its own track to build Austin’s identity as an international startup hub. Dublin, Schmidt said, is a perfect start.

“They have an expression in Ireland,” Schmidt said: “Cead Mile Failte, a hundred thousand welcomes. It embodies the same thing we practice here in Austin. It’s about, ‘We are inclusive. We want to get to know you. It’s not just some tag line.”

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

At South by Southwest, the University of Texas at Austin showed off some of its technological innovations this year.

On Sunday, the UT Village featured a series of panel sessions on topics such as 3D printing, connected vehicles and big data. During a reception in the evening, UT students and faculty showed off a variety of inventions from electronic skin tattoos to a new whooping cough vaccine in the ballroom of the Radisson Hotel & Suites Austin downtown.

Ashish Deshpande, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, leads a group of students developing the HARMONY robotic exoskeleton. The robot is designed to provide physical therapy for people who have suffered from a stroke or spinal cord injury.

“It’s a one of a kind robot,” Deshpande said. “We believe there is a big need in delivering better therapy for people.”

The robot provides targeted therapy for the upper body, particularly the shoulders and arms. It’s designed to help people regain their motor skills so they can feed themselves and groom themselves, Deshpande said. The robot has one patent pending and the group is looking for partners and investors to take it to market, he said.

Also in the healthcare area, Nanshu Lu, UT assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics, leads a group that has created an electronic skin tattoo. The sensor is thinner than a Band-Aid and it can collect all kinds of information on the body’s functions from hydration to heart rate. It’s a platform technology, backed by National Science Foundation grants, that Lu calls the Epidermal Sensor System.

“The beauty is it acts like a secondary skin,” Lu said. “It can stay in the same position for multiple days.”

Her husband, Pulin Wang, sported the electronic tattoo on his arm connected to sensors to show off its capabilities.

The big challenges now are coming up with a small power supply and a wireless data collection system, Lu said. Then the devices will be ready for mass production, she said. Her lab plans to commercialize the technology as a mobile health monitoring system.

“The system is multi-functional,” Lu said.

Another team at UT created “Project Ranger: The Next Revolution in Light Microscopy.” They’ve been working on the project to create an ultra high-resolution microscope.
“This lets you see things you normally can’t see inside cells,” said Martin Poenie, associate professor in molecular cell & development biology.

The key to the high resolution is polarized optics, he said.

UT financed the project which has patents pending, said Tom Baughman, program director for life sciences in the Office of Technology Commercialization at UT. The technology allows research to examine live cells under a microscope, he said.

UT researchers have also discovered a better vaccine to prevent whooping cough. It’s an antibody-based treatment.

“This is a more targeted and effective treatment than the current vaccine,” said Josh Laber, PhD candidate in chemical engineering.

Other innovations on display included the UT 3-D Printing and Vending machine, Single Frequency Cellular Communications, Waste to Crude technology and GPS-based Augmented Reality.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Honest Dollar, the company that’s been sweeping the 2015 SXSW pitch scene like Adele at the Grammy’s in 2013, won the Austin Technology Incubator pitch competition Monday morning. There was no cash prize but, as CEO Whurley explained, Honest Dollar just closed out a $3 million round, so that’s okay.

Bart Bohn, partner in IT and wireless at ATI said he chose the four companies pitching based on their likelihood of succeeding in the market.

“I pulled companies from across Austin,” Bohn said. “This is really a showcase of Austin companies…. I chose them because they have large market opportunities and the right team to get the breakaway momentum.”

Honest Dollar competed against three other Austin companies.

Capstone Metering has a technology that helps with water conservation and resource management. The EPA estimates that 16 percent of water in systems is lost or wasted. At the same time producing water consumes 13 percent of electricity produced every day in cities. CEO Scott Williamson said Capstone was created to monitor and stem the loss of water in municipal and other water systems.

Atlas Wearables CEO Peter Li showed the latest version of the company’s wristband which measures calorie burn on 50 exercises and is 50 meters waterproof. The new model measures not only heart rate but recovery time for a new stamina metric.

Riskpulse alerts supply chain companies about storms, forest fires, road conditions and other issues that might result in accidents or loss to materials in transit.

Riskpulse and Capstone are ATI companies.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

For the first year, South by Southwest Interactive featured a “Robot Petting Zoo” at its festival.

A room at the JW Marriott Hotel downtown housed a variety of robots including drones, tiny programmable bug-like Ozobots, an autonomous six-legged social robot known as DAR-1, the Double Robotics telepresence robot and Bujold, one of the most heavily used robots for search and rescue following the 911 World Trade Center disaster.

Robots aren’t just for science fiction movies any longer. They are showing up in the classroom, in the workplace and in the sky with the increasing popularity of drones.

David Santilena, aviation director for Borg Fest, was touting the organization’s series of events in Austin. He showed off Nikko, a mind-controlled flying monkey drone at the event.

“Robots are just extending the abilities of humans,” Santilena said.

Also on display, Ozobot showed off how a tiny circular robotic device can be used to teach children the early stages of coding. Kids can draw color combinations of red, green, blue and black to control the robot on paper or on an iPad. The Ozobot is designed and programmed to remember and playback up to 500 different moves.

The company, based in Redondo Beach, Calif. launched in 2013 and focused on getting more kids involved in coding, said Jodi Mixon with Ozobot. Ozobots costs $49 and can be used both digitally with iPads and on paper.

“I have found an immediate link between social and emotional needs being met with kids working with robotics,” Mixon said. It gets kids away from a screen and gets them working collaboratively.

“They love to interact with it,” she said.

In the workplace, Double Robotics, based in Sunnyvale, Calif., sells a telepresence robot for $2,500 that uses two iPads for communications and remote control. The robot rolls around and provides access to places the operator can’t be at physically, said Nick Brewer, head of events for Double Robotics.

“It’s just a tool,” Brewer said. “It’s like a hammer. You can do great things with a hammer. You can do terrible things with a hammer.”

The telepresence robot lets homebound students who can’t attend school, attend school virtually through their robotic presence, Brewer said.

And just for the record, Brewer said, he’s against “killer robots.”

If you are in Austin, we hope you are having a fantastic time at South by Southwest Interactive.

It’s one of the most thought-provoking tech conferences in the world and it continues to draw fascinating speakers and attendees. Having so many creative people in one place leads to a great time and lots of ideas percolating and perhaps serendipitous moments that could lead to the next big innovation.

SXSW is the birthplace of our print edition. This is our second annual SXSW edition of Silicon Hills News. We launched the magazine last year after a successful Kickstarter campaign. This year’s magazine features a lot of photos of local startups and some fascinating profiles on Bob Metcalfe, Honest Dollar, People Pattern, EvoSure and Vast.com and feature stories on perks,funding, women-led ventures and startups to watch.

Silicon Hills News held another Kickstarter campaign at the end of last year to produce two 2015 tech calendars with a focus on startups in Austin and San Antonio. The photo on the cover of this magazine is of the team at Austin-based OneSpot, an online advertising network for brands and companies. The company, founded in 2012, was featured in our last issue and that photo is displayed for the month of March in the Austin Tech Calendar. John Davidson, a local Austin photographer, took that photo and many of the other ones of Austin startups in this issue of the magazine including the photo of Bob Metcalfe at UT, Henry Yoshida and William Hurley of Honest Dollar, Laura Bosworth with TeVido Biodevices, the team from Clarify.io and the founders of EvoSure. And Gary Hartman in San Antonio took the photo of Magaly Chocano of Sweb Development and the photos of the Geekdom-based startups Promoter.io, TrueAbility, YupiCal and Storific.

Thank you to everyone who contributed to our Kickstarter campaigns last year and to all of our advertisers and sponsors of Silicon Hills News. And thank you to the writers of this issue Susan Lahey and Tim Green. And I also did a few stories myself.

This year, Susan and I will be covering South By. So please look online daily for our stories. Last year, nearly 33,000 people attended SXSW Interactive, which featured 2,400 speakers and 1,100 conference sessions. This year, the show takes place from March 14-17th and is expected to be even larger. Also, this year, the SXSW Startup Village has doubled in size and takes up the fourth and sixth floors at the Hilton Hotel across from the Austin Convention Center.

If you’re looking for a paper copy of the Silicon Hills News magazine, you can find them at Fogo de Chao’s Entrepreneur’s Lounge, the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Capital Factory, Techstars, Austin Technology Council and at various panels and places at SXSW. We’re also going to drop some copies by We Work Coworking. And if you see Susan or me, just ask for a copy.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A few unicorns will die this year, said Bill Gurley, a prominent venture capitalist with Benchmark in Silicon Valley.

Unicorns are giant technology startups, backed by venture capital, that hope to turn into multi-billion dollar companies and are currently valued at $1 billion or more. Gurley didn’t specify which companies he thought might bite the dust.

Gurley made his remarks during a talk with Journalist and Book Author Malcolm Gladwell at South by Southwest Interactive Sunday. During the hour-long discussion, Gladwell quizzed Gurley on a variety of topics from healthcare to ridesharing to hacking. Near the end of the talk, an audience member, via Twitter, asked Gurley if he thought a tech bubble existed.

“I don’t know that we are in a valuation bubble,” Gurley said. “We are taking on, in these startups, especially these so-called unicorns, a level of risk that we haven’t seen since 1999.”

Burn rates, the amount of cash companies are losing every month to operate, are higher than they have ever been, Gurley said. And in Silicon Valley, more people are working for unprofitable companies than ever in the history of the industry, he said.

Despite that, there is no fear in Silicon Valley right now, Gurley said.

The problem is startups can’t choose not to play, Gurley said. They are forced to play the game on the field, he said. If a competitor raises $900 million, then the startup must go and raise money, he said.

Gladwell asked him if he ever thought about just closing up shop.

“The best way to protect yourself against the downside is to enjoy every last bit of the upside,” Gurley said.

A number of entrepreneurs today don’t even remember the Dot Com bust of 2000, Gurley said. They were in 9th grade when that happened and the further they get away from that event, the more risk they are willing to take on, he said.

Gurley and his partners at Benchmark led early investments in GrubHub, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Snapchat, Twitter, Uber and Yelp.

A big part of Gurley’s talk with Gladwell focused on problems in the healthcare industry.

Gurley said he is a skeptic when it comes to solving the healthcare problem.

“The real problem is there is an assumption of market forces when you do a startup,” he said.

But those market forces are completely “mucked up in healthcare,” he said.

Government incentives, in part, are to blame, Gurley said. In 2009, the federal government passed the reinvestment act and put in place a program where a doctor is paid $44,000 to implement Electronic Health Records, Gurley said.

“It’s just shocking to me,” he said.

To date, the payments total $29 billion for doctors to implement software they weren’t actively implementing on their own, Gurley said. The doctors also get another $17,000 to make meaningful use of their Electronic Health Records.

“That’s the exact opposite of what entrepreneurs do,” Gurley said.

As a result of the messed up economics, it’s really tough for startups to compete in the healthcare industry, he said.

The U.S. spends 17 percent of Gross Domestic Product on healthcare, but Singapore spends just 1.7 percent of GDP on healthcare, Gurley said. That’s because everyone in Singapore is a shopper looking for the best healthcare deal, he said. The Singapore government pays a portion of its citizens’ healthcare costs on a sliding scale tied to income, he said.

In the U.S., the healthcare system is ballooning to largess, Gurley said. The costs of healthcare procedures vary widely. An MRI might cost $400 at an independent clinic and $3,200 at Stanford Medical Center, he said.

Obamacare depends, largely, on high deductible insurance plans and that could create shoppers out of everyone except for acute medical cases, Gurley said.

The biggest opportunity for having a massive impact on healthcare is in data aggregation and analysis, Gurley said.

Gladwell asked why does the hospital continue to exist? “Why are you delivering babies in the same place you are treating colon cancer?” Gladwell asked.

“It’s messed up,” Gurley said.

High deductible plans could simplify the whole system and bring back market forces, he said.

Gladwell asked Gurley, an investor and board member in the transportation alternative Uber, about the company’s transformative effect on the transportation industry.

“It is transformational in many, many ways,” Gurley said.

Uber is one of the largest job creators in town. Globally, Uber has created 300,000 jobs so far, he said. For many people, the job allows them to have a flexible lifestyle, he said.

Uber is also having a dramatic impact on reducing DUI cases, Gurley said.

Highway traffic fatalities result in 35,000 deaths a year with 10,000 of those related to driving under the influence, Gladwell said.

“If something like Uber could cut that by a third, that would have a significant impact,” Gladwell said.

Austin, a city known to enjoy its libations, was slow to get in board with ride-sharing, Gurley said. But the impact ride sharing is having on the youth is considerable. They are not drinking and driving as much, he said.

Developers in San Francisco are lobbying the city to remove rules requiring parking spots in San Francisco, Gurley said. People are not dependent on cars like they once were, he said. They don’t need a car and they don’t need a parking spot, he said.

Gurley joked that 30 percent of traffic is just people driving around looking for a parking spot.

But in San Francisco, the city with the highest employment growth rate in the country, traffic congestion is actually down, Gurley said.

For 80 years, the U.S. grossly underestimated the demand for public transportation and limited the supply for public transportation with city, state and federal governments.

The ridesharing industry is five times bigger in San Francisco than the entire black car and limo market and it’s growing at 300 percent a year, he said.

“At first it was an alternative to taxis,” he said.

But now ridesharing is cheaper than taxis and it’s touching the economics of the industry, he said. And it’s affecting the rental car industry. People are renting fewer cars, he said.

Overall, 97 percent of cars are idle, he said. The technology is allowing for greater efficiency in transportation alternatives, he said.

Gladwell pointed out that people of retirement age are now using Uber as an alternative to driving.

“I think you’ll see more in this area,” Gurley said.

And he pointed out that a lot of parents are putting their kids in Uber cars to take them to school activities and events.

The car is no longer a necessity, Gurley said. And, in fact, many young people don’t even want one, he said.

“Millennials don’t give a shit about cars,” Gurley said.

Today, many kids turn 16 and they won’t get a driver’s license, Gurley said.

Gurley also said he’s “more of a skeptic on driverless cars than most people.” The technology hasn’t yet been perfected to allow for driverless cars, he said. A driverless car has to be way better than a human driver, as opposed to just as good, he said.

“I think we are way off from that,” he said.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

As Hugh Forrest tweeted recently, “It’s not your mother’s SXSW any more” when the sitting head of a nation comes to SXSW as Ireland’s Prime Minister Enda Kenny spent time with venture capitalists at SXSW and spoke briefly with reporters Sunday, the day Ireland officially opening the Irish consulate.

“We’ve come through a difficult period in the last few years,” Kenny said. But today, while investment in Europe is down, investment in Ireland is up and a Grant Thornton report showed that 93 percent of countries rate their investment in Ireland as a success. The country was also listed as Europe’s top entrepreneurial country by Oracle Capital Group.

“Ireland is the fastest growing economy in Europe and we understand exactly how important investment is,” Kenny said. About 20 Irish startup companies travelled to Austin for SXSW.

Kenny pointed out that Ireland is the only English speaking country in the Eurozone and that it has “barrier free access” to a market of half a billion people. Like Austin, he said, Ireland strongly supports the role of private investment and a thriving tech and startup community in the growth of the country.

“If you have an interest in doing business in Europe, consider Ireland.”

The Irish consulate is only the second international consulate to open in Austin.

Kenny also met with Gov. Greg Abbott to discuss trade, according to the Texas Tribune.

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

No matter what kind of wallet a customer wants to use, PayPal plans to support it.

“It’s exciting there are different people entering the industry,” said John Lunn, Senior Director, PayPal and Braintree Developer Relations. He spoke to Silicon Hills News at the PayPal Social Media Lounge Saturday, which the company is sponsoring for a second year in a row.

“People want to pay in different ways,” Lunn said. “Our philosophy has always been to allow people to pay the way they want to pay.”

For example, PayPal has enabled bitcoin checkout through a partnership with Coinbase and it will enable other wallets that are successful, Lunn said.

The mobile and online payments industry has become much more democratized, Lunn said. The world is moving to a cashless society, he said.

PayPal’s tools make it easy and affordable for a small business to compete with much larger retailers, Lunn said.

“There’s no reason why only the big retailers should have the latest technology,” Lunn said.

PayPal is also heavily promoting the benefits of mobile payments with its app for consumers to buy goods such as coffee hassle-free. Last September, the company introduced One Touch mobile payments, a single touch payment platform on iOS and Android phones. The One Touch system stores credit card information and allows consumers to easily check out with a click.

At the SXSW show, PayPal partnered with Lyft to offer discounts to riders who used its app. It also sponsored a special Lyft Magic Mode on an iPhone for a chance to get picked up in a Ferrari F430 Spider. 1963 Bentley, Tesla Model S or another special car. The promotion ran Friday through Sunday.

And PayPal brought ABC’s Shark Tank’s Star Daymond John in Saturday afternoon to preside over a special PayPal Duel between two startups in the PayPal Social Media Lounge. Online voters selected the two finalists, PBAmericano, a specialty peanut butter maker and Earhoox, a clip that keeps earbuds on ears. Both startups pitched their companies to John.

In the end, John chose Jeff Becker and Helmut Wyzisk, owners of Earhoox as the winners of a $30,000 cash prize from PayPal and coaching support from John throughout 2015.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

No one ever really knew what Trilogy did, as Chris Taylor, CEO of Square Root and a former Trilogy employee pointed out on a SXSW panel Sunday morning. What they knew about was how Trilogy recruited, which was precisely the way a cult recruits.

On a panel called Trilogy: A Killer Network Can Transform Your Town, former Trilogy employees Taylor, John Price, CEO of Vast, Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine and Scott Francis, co-founder of BP3 spoke about the unusual recruiting and bonding strategies Trilogy practiced and how it created an extraordinary network of talented people who have helped to transform Austin with companies like Capital Factory, HomeAway and Bazaarvoice.

Price related being pulled into the office of Trilogy CEO Joe Liemandt one day after Liemandt learned that a Stanford engineer they’d been courting chose a different startup. “We’re going out of business,” Liemandt told Price. Price thought Liemandt was being dramatic. But Liemandt’s view was that if recruits were turning Trilogy down and the managers didn’t care, they were going down. At that moment Liemandt, (affectionately referred to as Joe), made Price VP of recruiting.

“But I don’t know anything about recruiting,” Price said.

“You don’t know anything about marketing either,” Liemandt replied.

Building a Cult

“It was one of the boldest moves an executive ever made,” Price said. He was told he had an unlimited budget. So he ‘dramatically overpaid’ new employees. He offered them cars. He entertained them. His motto was “money, recruiters, beer, repeat.” They called it Trilogy University.

“The first thing you have to do in a cult is isolate,” Price said. So they housed the new recruits separately and wouldn’t let anyone else in the company touch them. They told them they were entrepreneurs and they should operate like entrepreneurs. And every year, when Liemandt revised his vision of what the company should be, they told the new recruits that’s what the company was, so that when they emerged from Trilogy University, they acted as if they worked for the company they’d been described.

The next step, Price said was to “create cohesion and bonding at the level military guys have in a fox hole when they have bullets flying overhead.” They always began a new session with what they called SEE, requiring new people to stand in front of the other newbies and share their most Significant Emotional Experience.

And the last thing was creating audacious stretch goals that forced people to rely on one another.

“If you ever study cults,” Price said, “this is how they do it.”

Then there was the fun. Taylor said he showed up his first day in Austin, ready to report to work and looking for a place to live. He stopped in at the Trilogy office for just a minute and someone came out and greeted him with “You’re just in time! We’re going to Vegas!”

Taylor balked “But I have to find an apartment.”

“But,” the other person said, “it’s Vegas.”

So two hours after arriving in Austin, he was on a plane to Vegas.

At the same time, Liemandt expected them to know the ins and outs of a business thoroughly and be able to articulately and convincingly be able to make the business case for their intrapreneurial ventures. So before presentation meetings with him, Trilogy employees were known to get physically ill from fear.

A Rare Network

Their intention was to hire only the best which, Francis points out, was “an obnoxious statement then and it still is.” But in 1998, four years after Price became VP of recruiting, they hired 262 people: 22 from Stanford, 14 from MIT, huge numbers out of every major school.

And because of the bonds created in the “cult” of Trilogy, each of the alumni now has a huge global network of likeminded talent on whom to call. When Brett Hurt founded Bazaarvoice he put out a notice to his Trilogy network and said “I am starting a company and I need a CTO.”

Anyone in the Trilogy network, Francis said, is likely to preach recruiting as the silver bullet for a great company just like anyone who worked for Google is likely to preach that “it’s all about the data.” It’s not all about any one thing, he said. But putting effort and resources into recruiting is a powerful way to build not only a company but a community.

Trilogy’s great failure though, panelists said, was that it celebrated success within Trilogy but if you left to start your own thing, you instantly stirred bad blood. Taylor said that was one major difference he made in starting his own company, to celebrate people who left to try their own companies and follow their dreams. One of the best advertisements to future talent, he said, is alumni who have a good relationship with the company.

“I’ll still get a call or a request to have a lunch from someone in the Trilogy network and I treat them just like they’re my employees,” Price said. “It’s really all about the commitment and the development of these people. Just because Trilogy did not have a liquidity event doesn’t change the fact that it became what it became.”

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dell is working on numerous social good and environmental sustainability initiatives including making packaging out of wheat straw and recycling the components of its discarded computers, according to a SXSW panel at the Dell Lounge 1101 E. 5th Saturday. The company has also connected with actor, director and producer and activist Adrian Grenier as its new Social Good Advocate.

David Lear, Dell’s Executive Director of Sustainability held up the wheat straw packaging and said the company had originally toyed with using rice hulls for packaging but that wheat straw is usually discarded and in China it’s burned, creating an air pollution problem. So using the wheat straw has many benefits. “It’s not sexy….” Began Lear, but moderator Rebekah Iliff broke in with “That’s what you have him for.”

Grenier’s job, both as an individual and Dell advocate, seem to be making sustainability efforts more attractive to the general populace. He will be active in hammering out plans for sustainability and social good with the company. He advocates for causes such as zero waste, created a television show called Alter Eco about millennials finding ways to create sustainable lives, and is in the process of creating a film called The Loneliest Whale about a hybrid whale that communicates on a frequency different from all other whales. The real focus of that film is waste in the oceans.

Other initiatives Dell is putting in place for its five year plan include recycling 2 billion tons of waste by the year 2020, Lear said. It’s called Dell’s Legacy of Good 2020. The company has partnered with Goodwill to collect and recycle used computers to reduce waste and the need to mine and produce new minerals.

After the panel, Deborah Sanders, Director of Global TakeBack for Dell said the company recycles metals, plastic and more from discarded Dell computers and is very careful about how it sources metals. Most electronics, as a filmmaker in the audience pointed out, knowingly or unknowingly use conflict minerals, minerals that are mined through abusive and even fatal practices in countries such as the Congo.

Grenier suggested some sort of platform where Dell users and others could make suggestions and Dell could crowdsource other environmentally sustainable and socially proactive initiatives.

“One of the things I’m really enjoying about this partnership so far is that Dell has real tangible goals,” Grenier said. “That’s exciting because you can measure it. If you can’t show your progress it becomes an iffy proposition…and I think your wheat straw box is cool.”