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The 10 Best Startups in Austin?

March 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

With more than 500 people in attendance there was a line out the door for Capital Factory’s event: The 10 Best Startups in Austin. Several of the companies were high-tech takes on low tech problems. For example, Weeva was created when founder Kim Gorsuch thought her father was going to die.
“We realized we would lose more than him, whe would lose his memories and his stories and that was a big part of our personal history.” Weeva lets many people in a family or friend group—anyone invited—share stories around a person or experience. Anyone invited into a private group can log onto Weeva and tell his or her part or version of a story. Weeva can even collect the stories and bind them into a book.
Local Plant Source helps professional farms that grow landscaping plants who usually have to bulldoze $6 billion worth of plants every year because landscape designers have no demand for them and they have no mechanism for selling the plants directly to consumers. Founder Andy Fletcher said Local Plant source lets buyers find and purchase plants, streamlines delivery services and allows farms to sell, rather than destroy extra plants.
Loop & Tie has transformed corporate gift giving. The company targets huge gifting organizations which might include property managers, who give large quantities of gifts, many of which are commoditized and not all directed to a recipient’s taste. With Loop & Tie, the company can send a gift and the recipient can either receive the gift or choose from other selections in the same price range (without ever knowing how much the giver paid).
NuHabitat gives home buyers something they’ve wanted for decades: access to the Multiple Listing Service. Founder Jeff Burke said that on other home listing sites it takes a week or more to update listings, by which time the home could have sold—in a hot market like Austin. So many of the homes listed are no longer for sale. Plus, there’s inside information that previously only agents had access to. With NuHabitat, agents can pay $50 a month and offer the full MLS to customers with only their information, rather than information from several different agents. And it’s updated every 10 minutes.
Rail Yard helps connect businesses with the best telecom services for their businesses. It is used by commercial real estate companies to provide added value in finding the right business space.
Other companies included Aceable, which offers mobile driver’s ed courses that cost a fraction of what traditional driver’s ed courses cost. Founder Blake Garret said the company has designed the platform flexibly to move into other verticals as well as moving into the global education market. Cratejoy which provides solutions for subscription e-commerce companies—think Dollar Shave Club—such as customer rebilling that ‘s flexible and subscriber address verification. Famigo provides a safe place for kids to play on smart phones and tablets without seeing inappropriate materials or wandering into e-commerce sites or a parent’s social media. Mahana, provides a comprehensive solution for restaurants and customers including tracking customer preferences and alerting customers to wait times at various restaurants. And Spokefly, the Airbnb of bicycle rental.

Startups from Around the World at SXSW

March 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

There were startups from Guatemala and Germany, Malaga, Spain, France, Australia, Russia, Denmark, Sweden and more at the invitation-only SXSW Global Startup Forum at City Hall. In addition to local dignitaries like Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell and SXSW Interactive Director Hugh Forrest, was a panel of venture capitalists moderated by Laura Kilcrease of Triton Ventures and including David Teten of ffVenture Capital, Pablo Salazar of Naranya Ventures, Rogelio de los Santos of Alta Ventures and Sandeep Kumar of Tech Ranch.
Teten, whose company is based in New York, said he had recently done a study and one of the interesting data points was that VCs get better returns when they invest outside of the hotspots of New York, Boston and Silicon Valley.
“Intellect is equally distributed. Great ideas are equally distributed. Capital,” he said, “is not.”
To find the great ideas outside their geographic area, the VCs said, they go to a lot of conferences, host their own events and talk to a lot of people. De los Santos said a warm lead is always better than a cold introduction but he won’t turn someone away if they contact him on Twitter, email or any other mode of communication. Teten said his company was working to attract good companies by providing strong support and mentorship for the companies they already fund.
Kilcrease asked Kumar what best practices entrepreneurs can use to encourage investment.
“The first thing is to get a customer,” Kilcrease said. “ One of the challenges entrepreneurs have is they think they can only get a customer after they get a product. That’s actually not true.” All they need is people who say they would pay for the product.
When asked by a member of the audience how many rejections constitute an actual rejection, the VCs said “One.” If something in the company changes, the market changes, the numbers change or the track record of the startup changes you might come back in a year. Otherwise no means no. However, startups should expect to get hundreds of rejections before they get a check.
“I’ve had several incidents where I’ve said to an entrepreneur ‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t think it’s a good time to meet with you and they acted insulted.” Teten said. “We do make mistakes all the time (not investing in good companies) but it’s not possible to do the job and meet with everyone. You have to have a high filter.”
There’s also a matter of fit, the VCs said. “It’s harder to get out of a marriage with an investor than to get out of a marriage,” Teten said, “so you’d better make sure you’re comfortable with the VC. That they’re someone you want to have around the table.”
In the tech world, Salazar said, there’s “A lot of arrogance on both sides…everybody believes they’re going to be the next Twitter. So it’s hard to find the right fit between two arrogant parties.”
When asked about the playing field for exits, Salazar said that the more mature U.S. market has many companies that “are born with the exit in mind. Other countries don’t have that hunger. That makes a lot of difference on how not only how the company is designed but also executed. That only exists in the U.S., England and maybe Germany. In other countries, entrepreneurs have to change their mindset and focus on the exit from day one.”
Conversely, Teten said, his company doesn’t focus on exits at all. “Once you have a real business there’s always some way to exit,” he said. “The exit is totally unpredictable from the seed stage and we usually have a small stake in the company at exit anyway. Why worry about something we have no control over and can’t predict?”
The event was part of a new push by SXSW to incorporate startups from all over the world.

Michael Dell on the Past, Present and Future of Technology

March 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

In 1984, Michael Dell dropped out of the University of Texas to found Dell Computers.

“At the time, it didn’t seem like that big of a risk,” Dell said. “I didn’t have anything to lose.”

He saw a really compelling opportunity to launch a company focused on the way computers were being sold and distributed.
He made a deal with his parents that he would go off and do his company for a semester and if it worked, he would keep doing it and if it didn’t, he would go back to school.

Dell spoke Thursday night at the Omni Hotel in a keynote address put on by the UT Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency as part of its UTEWeek. Brett Hurt, co-founder of BazaarVoice and Entrepreneur in Residence at UT, interviewed him before a packed ballroom of a couple hundred people.

At the beginning of his company, after several months, Dell presented his parents with a financial statement on the company’s performance. He still has that statement.

“For the first nine months, the company had revenues of about $6 million,” Dell said. “It was profitable from day one. It had about a 15 percent operating margin.”

The company had very little expenses, Dell said. The second year, Dell grew to $33 million in revenue. For the first eight years, the company grew 80 percent a year compounded and six years after that it grew at 60 percent a year compounded, he said.

“Put all those numbers together and you get tens of billions of dollars,” Dell said.

The essence was this was the dawn of the microprocessor age, Dell said. He came up with a way to deal with customers that gave the company a competitive advantage – the direct from Dell selling model, he said.

Hurt asked Dell if students should drop out of college to found a company. Hurt said he used Dell as an example of a Longhorn student who saw an opportunity and dropped out to pursue it.

“I get angry letters from parents sometimes,” Dell said. “I have to be a little careful.”

The decision is a personal one and generally a student should know it inside, he said. They shouldn’t have to get a lot of advice, he said.

“If I had gone and asked for advice, people probably would have said you’re nuts, it’ll never work, don’t drop out of school” Dell said. “But I wasn’t motivated by what other people thought.”

Hurt asked Dell what are some of the big ways entrepreneurship has changed since Dell launched his company.

Now the infrastructure and resources like startup labs and incubators make it a lot easier for entrepreneurs to launch a company, Dell said.

“The great thing we have in this country is we have a culture that accepts and embraces risk,” Dell said.

Job creation in the economy come from new and emerging businesses, Dell said.

The U.S. culture treats failure in a way that causes people to want to continue pursuing ventures, Dell said. That culture of risk taking is a huge competitive advantage for the U.S., he said.

Hurt asked Dell what advice he would give his 17-year-old self if he could go back in time. Dell said he would have learned more about management and building teams.

Dell took one class at UT focused on business: macroeconomics. He learned to buy low and sell high. He was a biology major. And he was only in school for a year.

“A lot of it was learning by making mistakes and experimenting,” Dell said.

When an entrepreneur does something that has never been done a naïve perspective or a different perspective is often where breakthroughs come from, Dell said. If you know too much, it’s not helpful, he said.

“I think there are things you can learn from experience but when you are doing something that has never been done before it’s more response time, thinking on your feet, agility that have a higher premium than necessarily experience,” Dell said.

In the world today, the rate of change is accelerating in all industries because of technology, Dell said. That’s creating new opportunities, he said. This is where people with new perspectives, they tend to be younger, bring new ideas, he said.

Hurt asked Dell why he took the company private last year. Dell completed a $25 billion buyout to take the company private last October.

“We were a public company for 25 years,” Dell said. “The stock appreciated 13,500 percent during that time.”

About six or seven years ago, Dell started changing its business from products to solutions, software and services, he said.

It began investing in different areas to provide more solutions to its customers, Dell said. The company made a number of acquisitions.

Dell wanted to focus on more long term planning, he said.

“Our decision making is simplified greatly,” Dell said. “It’s kind of like it was when we started the company…It allows us to dedicate our energy to our customers.”

Dell refers to itself as “the world’s largest startup.”

Since going private, Dell is incubating new businesses and crowdsourcing ideas, Dell said. It’s working with customers in new ways, he said. It launched a venture fund and it has all kinds of resources for entrepreneurs, he said. Cloud, mobile, social and cyber security are all key areas of focus for the company, Dell said.

Another trend Dell is excited about is in data applications. A huge opportunity exists in data analytics, particularly in industries like healthcare, Dell said. Dell has seven billion images in its medical archive, he said. What’s interesting is when Dell layers predictive analytics on top of that archive and can provide information to doctors around the world, he said.

Hurt asked Dell about the role the city has played in Dell’s success. Dell said Austin has been a wonderful place to grow his company. He has hired a lot of people out of the University of Texas. Today, Austin is still great, he said. UT is one of the main things that attracts people to move here, he said.

“There really hasn’t been a better time to be alive in the world,” Dell said. “This is a fantastic place. It’s hard to imagine a better place to be.”

Hurt said there’s quite a bit of pessimism out there about entrepreneurship.

“There’s always whiners and complainers, but screw them,” Dell said.

Dell has done a lot to make Austin a better place for all of its citizens. Last year, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation donated $60 million to create the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. Dell joked that it was the closest he would come to becoming a doctor. He went to UT to study biology with the intention of pursuing a medical degree.

During a question and answer session with the audience, Dell recounted his first job as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant at the age of 12 in Houston, his hometown. He soon got promoted to water boy and then assistant maitre d. He then got hired away by a Mexican restaurant. He later worked in a store that sold jewelry, stamps and coins and when he got his driver’s license at 16, Dell worked for the now defunct Houston Post delivering newspapers.

“I think those early job experiences are unbelievably valuable,” Dell said. They taught him a lot of lessons.

Another audience member asked Dell about mistakes he made early on.

Dell recounted how he didn’t know the company needed an Federal Communications Commission approval to sell computers. The FCC shut the company down. They had to scramble to get an FCC approval, he said.

“That was certainly a pretty major crisis at the time,” Dell said.

In the late 1980s, Dell had a problem with inventory management. The company ended up learning a lot about inventory management, he said. But it was a near fatal experience at the time, he said.

In fact, in the first three or four years, Dell could have gone out of business five or ten times, Dell said.

“Fortunately they weren’t big enough mistakes to put the company out of business,” Dell said.

British Airways Dreamliner: The Wellness Plane

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jon Driscoll with Mass Relevance, Virginia Miracle with Spredfast and Matt Curtis with HomeAway.

The British Airways direct flight that just started its inaugural journeys back and forth from London to Austin isn’t your average plane ride. It has been calibrated to reduce jetlag. For example, the lighting is different from other planes. The air pressure was set for 6,000 feet rather than 8,000 feet which is supposed to reduce dryness and other stressors on the body. And the windows are much larger to connect passengers to the flying experience. Instead of passengers pulling down blinds, they can adjust the amount of light coming in electronically.

The point, said Glenn Morgan, head of service transformation for British Airways, is to “create a whole wellness experience, getting passengers there in the best shape they can be.”

Open Platform

And they’re only beginning.

“We’ve opened up the platform for APIs,” said Morgan. “A lot of companies are doing great things in the travel space, hotel finders, transportation, putting that information together. We work a lot in the valley, and we were talking to a company very much like Capital Factory and they said I bet you have no single business problem that a startup isn’t working on right now. And he’s right.”

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner’s body is made of carbon fibers rather than metal, wrapped and then baked in an autoclave until it is a very hard substance. It goes in the oven looking like a cone made of roofing asphalt and emerges shiny. The lighter substance allows for 20 percent reduction in fuel costs, 20 percent reduction in maintenance costs and a 60 percent reduction in noise.

The Dreamliner is part of a transformation British Airways is aiming for in the flying experience which includes keeping track of how regular passengers like to travel and accommodating their preferences, putting passengers with connecting flights at the front so they don’t miss their connections and texting passengers when bags missed a connection, so they don’t have to stand forever at the carousel.

Representatives from British Airways and Boeing spoke at Capital Factory Wednesday before the British Airways Inaugural Kickoff party where flight simulators and photo booths with captains outfits were available.

Move Your Company to Europe

Following the presentation on the plane, serial entrepreneur and Capital Factory partner Fred Schmidt interviewed Matt Curtis, director of government relations for HomeAway, Virginia Miracle, chief customer officer of Spredfast and Jon Driscoll, Chief revenue officer of Mass Relevance about their experiences expanding their companies into London.

It’s crucial, all three said, to understand the culture before you either try to hire someone or move someone abroad. Driscoll talked about finding it suspect when his London employee said he really needed an office, because Mass Relevance was started in a coffee shop.

“But just try to find a place to work in downtown London that’s quiet, has internet access and a bathroom you can use,” Driscoll said.

Also, things tend to take more time. English employment law doesn’t include employment at will—in which, without cause, either the employee or employer can terminate. And while in Austin someone can be hired on Wednesday and working the following Monday “as long as we get their Mac on time,” Miracle said. In London you go through the whole process of hiring and the new employee says “Great! And I can start in three months!” Driscoll reported.

And the order of operations, who to hire when is another challenge, Miracle said.

Having someone in the position who is a really adept communicator is huge. All three said it is important to hire local people. Even if you augment your staff with Americans, locals know the culture and can steer you away from big mistakes. For example, Mass Relevance puts social media on TV. But publicly owned TV is a far cry from the private stations in the U.S.

Also, Driscoll said, they launched in London with a sales focus. He wishes they’d started with a customer service focus.

Curtis said HomeAway retains a number of employees in the countries where it operates, partly because it has grown by acquiring other companies and it just creates goodwill to keep those people on.

The big question often is, when is time to go? All three responded that when you can’t serve your international customers from home any more, it’s time to take the plunge.

SmartHost of New York Wins the StartupBus 2014 Competition

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

“Sweat equity is the best startup capital” – Mark Cuban

A banner bearing Mark Cuban’s quote hung on the wall at Rackspace’s event center Thursday as it hosted its third annual StartupBus event featuring teams from all over the country and Mexico.
All of the StartupBus participants riding on the eight buses for the past 72 hours put in plenty of sweat equity.
They arrived at Rackspace ready to pitch their startups. Some of them had working prototypes, apps and websites ready to go and a few already had customers. Rackspace hosted working sessions, semi-finals, finals and a mini-conference.
The conference featured talks by Guy Kawasaki, Elizabeth McBride, an intellectual property attorney, Robert Scoble with Rackspace and Michael Johnstone from Mark Cuban Cos.
StartupBus, a competition that started in 2010 with one bus headed from San Francisco to SXSW. It has since grown nationwide and has branched out internationally.
Smarthost, an android app that aggregates and analyzes the market for short-term housing rentals on sites like AirBnb and HomeAway, won the StartupBus competition. The five person team met on the New York City bus and came up with the idea and built and deployed it within the 72 hours, said David Redding, the Android developer.
“It’s live in the Google Play store right now,” he said.
As the winner, this year, SmartHost has the option of spending three months at the StartupBus house in San Francisco further developing its product. Redding said all the team members have jobs and they’ll meet later to consider what they plan to do.
Bridgefy, a four-person team out of Mexico City, won runner up in the competition. Bridgefy created an Android app that allows people to chat privately without an Internet connection, said Jorge Rios, with the team. He said the team plans to seek investment and continue to develop its product.

Rod Canion Recounts How Compaq Fought IBM and Won

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

A true life David vs. Goliath story played out in the early days of the PC industry-pitting upstart Compaq Computer against industry behemoth IBM Corp.

Rod Canion, co-founder of Compaq, recounted the tale during a conversation Wednesday night with Brett Hurt, Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Texas. The Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency sponsored the event as part of its UTEWeek.

In the early days of the PC industry, PCs became open architecture machines because IBM, the number one computer company in the world, put a skunkworks team in Boca Raton, Florida and ordered them to create an IBM PC in one year.

That IBM team created the first IBM PC, which debuted in 1981 based on open architecture including Intel’s microchips and Microsoft’s DOS operating system.

“The point is everything that went into the original IBM PCs was off the shelf,” Canion said.

IBM expected they would sell thousands, Canion said. They sold millions and became the leader in the PC industry.

“The PC, as a product in business, was just starting to catch on,” Canion said.

The must-have software application of the day was VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet that created the driving force that caused PCs to permeate businesses in a short amount of time, he said.

Around that time, Canion and his co-founders left Texas Instruments looking for a product to start a company with because they knew the PC industry would explode creating great opportunity. They wanted to create a rugged, portable PC.

“But it almost died before it started because I had enough experience to know we couldn’t get software adapted to it,” Canion said. He knew VisiCorp would never provide its software to a startup.

That’s when Canion came up with the idea of creating a portable computer that would run software written for the IBM PC. They would create compatible software. In 1982, they put together a four page business plan and a few weeks later they landed venture capital from Kleiner Perkins, Silicon Valley’s premier VC firm.

“In about five weeks, from the conception of the idea to when we started the company, we were off and running,” Canion said.

They thought they would be able to buy an operating system from Microsoft to run on the computer. They found out that was wrong. They figured out a way to take what Microsoft did have and fix the incompatibilities in 12 months so they could run IBM’s software, Canion said.

The sewing-machine sized Compaq portable was the first 100 percent IBM-compatible PC and the first portable one.

In January of 1983, when Compaq Computer shipped its first PCs, they essentially ran all of the IBM PC software, Canion said. Then the company licensed its modified version of MS-DOS back to Microsoft for it to sell to all of the rest of the industry.

“That’s the point where the industry standard really began,” Canion said.

That’s when a large number of computer companies began to run all the same software, Canion said. By 1987, IBM, Compaq and about a dozen other strong brands in the compatible arena accounted for 75 percent of the PC industry. Apple had been relegated to a niche.

“This powerful industry standard had really taken hold,” Canion said.

IBM didn’t like the idea. They came out with a proprietary product, PS2 and they offered their competitors the ability to buy a license by paying 5 percent of royalties. Dell and others began to buy licenses from IBM to the PS2. But Compaq didn’t give up.

Nine months later, they came up a competitive advanced architecture to IBM that would run all of the old software. Canion said they knew if it was IBM vs. Compaq they would still lose.

“IBM’s brand was too strong,” he said.

Instead, Compaq put together an alliance with Microsoft, Intel and HP to compete against IBM. Compaq was going to give its technology to all of the other companies. Eventually, they got seven other companies to sign on and became known as the gang of nine. By September, they held a press conference, and by then they had gotten 80 companies behind the new standard, essentially the whole industry everyone but IBM and Apple behind the Open standard, Canion said.

Four years later, Compaq passed IBM to become the industry leader in PC sales. But more importantly, the company got an open architecture PC standard adopted that led to lower prices and more consumer choice, Canion said.

A few years later, Compaq passed the $1 billion mark in annual revenue, the first company to hit that milestone so quickly.

Canion provides more details on Compaq’s challenge to IBM in his new book “Open: How Compaq Ended IBM’s PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing.” He signed copies of the book following his talk.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Bigcommerce Mixes Business with Pleasure

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By Stacy Alexander Evans
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A recruiting event that features a cover band playing ’80’s era glam, staff avatars swiped from the Street Fighter video game, leadership who are not shy about proclaiming their love of beer: clearly the Bigcommerce team knows how to have a good time, yet their revelry is wrapped inside a crisp, clean package.

Co-founder Mitchell Harper, a native of Australia, lays it on the line: “We wanted to make all of our office locations accommodating, fun and innovative,” he says “so people didn’t feel like they “had” to come to work, but rather, that they wanted to come to work.”

This playful attitude has become synonymous with startup culture, but for Harper and his partner Eddie Machaalani—who founded the company together in Sydney in 2004 and opened their Austin office in 2009 after a name change from Interspire to Bigcommerce—their passion and enthusiasm is grounded in their mutual devotion to small businesses.

Simply put, Bigcommerce is a one-stop shop for small business: a veritable mashup of self-service tools for web design, ecommerce and marketing, but with more DIY customization options than many of the stand-alone products.

Air Plant Worlds is one Austin business that’s had some success with the Bigcommerce platform, and cofounders Leila Nazari and Sean Findley are a startup success story all their own. They launched at the end of last year, and for the month of December—just six weeks after going live—they had over 3,000 unique visitors to their site and 12,000 page views, quite a feat for a new concept featuring the artful presentation of soil-free plants in glass and wooden containers.

According to Findley, Bigcommerce outshone its competitors in the realm of expandability. “We were looking for something that would be easy enough to use in the beginning, at launch, but still be powerful enough to where it could grow with us.” In addition, Nazari says you just can’t beat the streamlined capabilities of a single provider. “Before you had to have a bunch of different accounts and go to all these different places to do different things, but Bigcommerce puts all of those things in the bag all together.”

Harper says Air Plant Worlds is a great example of what can be done with the Bigcommerce tool kit, claiming “it does make it really easy to build a beautiful online store exactly like theirs in a matter of hours.”

According to this cofounder, with his company’s tools, a client’s ingenuity knows no bounds. “This is a delicate product, but by displaying a ‘shipping made easy’ banner in bright orange on every page,” says Harper, “they proactively address a concern many online consumers may have. In addition to telling shoppers what to expect and the savings they can receive, it also links to the site’s shipping and returns policy so there are no questions left unanswered.”

In addition to this client-centered business model, Harper says he also owes his success to a solid relationship with his cofounder, Machaalani.

As evidenced by the existence of Techman-About-Town Damon Clinkscales’ cofounder matchup service Founder Dating, choosing the right cofounder is not unlike choosing a mate, with the stakes being just as high. Harper agrees.

“In my view, you don’t want to get either of these wrong,” says the man from down under, “I’m sure divorce is just as hard as parting ways with a cofounder. We were both lucky in that we seemed to stumble upon each other by chance and got along from day one.” He takes this notion of fostering relationships one step further by saying it doesn’t hurt that their wives are friends. “We’ve got their support when we need to focus on the business for extended periods of time,” says Harper, “such as when we’re raising capital or spending time on the road for public relations.”

Through it all, a common link can be found—relationships. Bigcommerce makes client relationships abroad as important as those closer to home. To this end, mixing business with pleasure becomes much more than a game of ping-pong in the office.

As Brad Feld, managing director at the Foundry Group famously said, “You can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated.”

Three Honored at UT Entrepreneurship Awards for 2014

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

John Arrow, founder of Mutual Mobile and winner of the Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year Award at UT at Austin.

The University of Texas at Austin has become a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity.

And UTEWeek, the third annual celebration of entrepreneurship featuring more than 15 events at UT, kicked off last Friday and runs through this Friday. The events showcase student entrepreneurial ingenuity.

On Wednesday night at the McCombs School of Business at UT, the Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency held its second annual awards dinner to recognize some of the movers and shakers in the startup community on campus.

Sriram Vishwanath, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, won the Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year award. He has served as an advisor to Lynx Labs, a startup launched by UT students. The company makes a camera and software that can capture environments in 3-D. Vishwanath also advises M87, a company run by engineering graduate students. It has

Sriram Vishwanath won Faculty Entrepreneur of the Year at UT at Austin. Photo courtesy of UT.

developed patented technology to boost the performance of wireless networks.

John Arrow, former Longhorn and founder of Mutual Mobile, won the Alumni Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Arrow kicked off the evening by giving a brief talk on his experiences at the University of Texas as a student. He had a tough time getting in. But he finally found a way through a recommendation from a professor. Arrow ended up dropping out his senior year to found Mutual Mobile, now one of the largest app development companies in the country.

Hunter Monk, founder of MSpaces, a Longhorn Startup company, received the Student Entrepreneur of the Year award.

Monk’s startup brought in $30,000 in revenue last month and is expected to have revenue of $360,000 for the year. He recently joined Capital Factory’s Incubator program.

Hunter Monk, founder of MSpaces and winner of the Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award at UT at Austin.

Monk runs what he dubs as a “professional AirBnb.” He rents apartments, furnishes them with second-hand furniture and then rents them out. He participated in the Longhorn Startup class last semester.

Following the dinner, Brett Hurt, co-founder of BazaarVoice and Entrepreneur in Residence at UT, quizzed Rod Canion, co-founder of Compaq for the first University of Texas Entrepreneur Week keynote address.

Written.com Wants to Bring Content and Companies Together

March 5, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By TIM GREEN
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

The team behind Written.com

As advertising becomes more pervasive (is that even possible?), it’s harder for companies to find ways to make their brands stand out.

One way is to associate the brand with authoritative and objective content that makes the reader more knowledgeable about what the company sells. But getting the content that attracts the right audience is an endeavor fraught with uncertainty.

“It’s really challenging to create something that’s successful, that drives a consistent audience, that ranks really well in Google,” said Josh Kerr, chief executive and one of four co-founders of Written.com, in laying out the problem.

The company proposes to provide a company with subject-appropriate content weighted with a built-in audience and seamlessly place it on the company’s website. The result is an interested audience with a predisposition to buy what the company is selling.

“We can go to a brand and say we can bring you proven engagement and that’s totally different from traditional products that are out there,” said Marc Smookler, the co-founder who heads marketing.

Written.com

Written finds the content not by commissioning bloggers to write custom-made posts, but by scouring the Web for already-written blog posts that have large and loyal followings.

For bloggers, the arrangement enables them to get paid for work they’ve done – even if it’s old.

“The stuff you wrote a long time ago, it’s still valuable,” said Connor Hood, the founder who heads technology. “As long as it had an audience. That’s the key.”

John Price, CEO of Vast.com, is one of Written’s early customers and he likes what the company delivered.

“It was both in content and in targeting the exact type of content I needed and that Google has already ranked as super high quality,” he said. “You can’t beat it. It is such a powerful value prop they have.”

Price posts the content on the blog on Carstory.com, a Big Data-based mobile app that Vast developed for sales people at automobile dealerships. Sales people use it during face-to-face selling with customers.

“We’re getting all kinds of traffic as a result of the content,” Price said. “And it’s beyond that because it makes it seem that we’re actually an authority on the subject.”

The Written founders, Kerr, Hood, Smookler and Jeremy Bencken, who heads product development, are entrepreneurs who bring complementary expertise to the operation. They each have started, developed and successfully exited previous companies.

They knew each other from working around the Capital Factory and found they had common interests in blogging and marketing and the technology that could bring the two together.

Bencken said he and Kerr talked about how to move content from a blog to a website.

“Then we hit on this idea,” he said. “You could take a piece of existing content, move it over to a site that is interested in having that content, but also all the traffic.”

They tested the concept with their own blogs and it worked, he said. And it’s continued to work as they’ve expanded.

The four founders formally started the company in January 2013. They landed seed round of investment of $1.1 million in October from LiveOak Venture Partners of Austin, Floodgate Fund of Palo Alto, Calif., and Austin-area angel investors.

Telling their story in their Brazos Street office, the founders pick up on each other’s threads, filling in thoughts and deferring to each other for additional comments.

The Written process begins working with the client company to identify the audience the company wants to attract. Written starts with keywords and other factors such as identifying thought leaders the audience follows and whether the blog carries advertisements.

“We take all that intelligence and data and then we kick off a search to go identify articles that fit that criteria and are ranking really well,” Kerr said.

Beyond finding appropriate subject matter, Written makes sure the blog articles will bring an involved audience with them. It looks at a variety of factors such as page views, bounce rate, time spent on the site and more, Bencken said.

“The trick to bring an engaged audience is to start with content that is engaging,” he said. “So that’s what we’re looking for when we’re analyzing how much we can offer a blogger.”

With Written’s software, Google understands that the article, now on the company’s website, was written by the blogger so he maintains his Google Author Rank.

Once it identifies an appropriate blogger and article, Written runs it by the company. If the company likes it, Written takes care of the rest, moving the content to the company website and handling the pricing, the payments and the licensing.

“We deliver to the brand great content that will engage readers, that will drive new audiences to the brand and these people won’t just read that one article, they’ll read, two, three, four articles on your site,” Kerr said. “And that’s what we’re seeing.”

Price said the content Written delivered to Carstory.com brought with it a target audience that wants to take the action of downloading the Carstory app.

“And it’s working,” he said. “It’s generating leads while we’re asleep. It’s just unbelievable.”

Written’s concept seems custom made for the era of content marketing, but the founders and its investors say there is more to it.

“Audience development extends to every part of the marketing mix, and that’s our big picture,” Kerr said. “Connecting brands with an interested and engaged audience is our focus, so while the content marketing space may be the most direct way into those discussions, our value proposition really reaches much further than that.”

Krishna Srinivasan, a principal at LiveOak, shares that take.

“This is a platform that consolidates spending a brand would do over search, social media, Internet,” he said. “All of this is discoverable using this platform. So it is a much broader play.”

As for competition, Kerr said Written has seen no other company with a similar offering.

He said Written offers an alternative to the competition of the status quo – companies hiring journalists and bloggers to provide high quality content.

“Frankly, we’d rather let those great journalists and bloggers do what they do best and what their readers and audiences respect them for, and find a way to support them doing it,” he said. “That’s really the value of Written.com to bloggers out there.“

Written’s goal, he said, is to develop a marketplace where writers create successful content on one side and brands that need the writers’ audiences on the other side.

“That’s really how to maximize the value proposition between both so we can make those matches and in some way solve that problem,” he said.

To which writers might say: Write on.

We Walk and Others Pitch at San Antonio New Tech

March 5, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Estrella Hernandez presenting We Walk at San Antonio New Tech

At Alamo Heights Junior School, Estrella Hernandez, 13, came up with an idea to get students moving.

She learned in sixth grade health class about the obesity epidemic in San Antonio and the city’s growing population of people afflicted with diabetes, a chronic disease associated with being overweight.

Hernandez said she wanted to create a solution to encourage kids to get fit. Her brainchild is We Walk, a mobile phone app designed to track kids movement like a pedometer. It also provides them with rewards for completing quests, or walks.

Hernandez presented her startup at San Antonio New Tech Tuesday night at Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space downtown aimed at fostering more startups. She was one of four people to present at the event, which takes place every month to showcase the city’s latest technology ventures.

We Walk’s program includes different types of quests, or walks including personalized quests as well as historic quests in which kids can earn double points for answering questions at the end of the walk. It also includes City Quests that tie into city-sponsored events like Siclovia, an event in which the streets are closed to encourage biking, walking and other activities.

We Walk has received initial funding from the 80/20 Foundation and SA2020. Sweb Apps in San Antonio is developing We Walk’s app, which Hernandez hopes to launch at Siclovia in two weeks.

A similar program on the market already is MapMyWalk, a mobile phone app that tracks walks, developed by MapMyFitness, an Austin-based startup recently acquired for $150 million by Under Armour. The company also makes MapMyRun an MapMyRide.

Hernandez also worked on We Walk’s website during the summer at VentureLab’s program for girls. She also worked closely with Geekdom mentors during the past two years to develop her idea. She’s now an ambassador with the Mayor’s Fitness Council.

David Barrick, co-founder of We-Walk presenting at San Antonio New Tech

David Barrick, co-founder of LightPhile presenting at San Antonio New Tech

David Barrick, the co-founder of LightPhile, focused on the stage lighting industry, also presented his hardware and software startup.

LightPhile has created a software interface for the iPad that communicates with its custom hardware device to control the entire concert lighting experience. The total cost is $500 for the iPad and $500 for hardware device. Customers can program lighting sequences into the software and then simply hit play to control the lights throughout a concert or presentation.
“It’s not complex at all,” Barrick said.

Barrick, a UTSA Electrical Engineering sophomore, has three years iOS development experience and his co-founder Logan Butler, who attends Baylor University, has experience in the lighting industry.

Also at San Antonio New Tech, Ryan Beltran, founder of Elequa, a water purification startup, also gave some information about Clean Tech Open, an accelerator and competition. He participated in the program last summer and he’s encouraging more San Antonio startups to apply to be part of it.

Lastly, one of the founders of Crmsyn pitched a customer relationship management software startup.