By Laura Lorek
Founder of Silicon Hills News

About 40 entrepreneurs turned out on a drizzly and cold Wednesday morning to Abel’s On the Lake in Austin to meet with angels.
At 9:30 a.m. about a dozen angel investors talked with entrepreneurs at round tables in the empty restaurant.
The Central Texas Angel Network, known as CTAN, holds office hours to give entrepreneurs advice and insight into its funding cycle.
CTAN holds five funding cycles each year. Applications for the first funding cycle of 2014 are due on Friday. The nonprofit organization accepts applications online through GUST.
CTAN charges entrepreneurs a $250 fee to apply for funding consideration. And if an entrepreneur is successful, CTAN takes a $5,000 administrative fee if $200,000 or more is raised and $7,500 if $500,000 or more is raised from CTAN members.
The funding process is kind of complex. So office hours are a great way for entrepreneurs to get feedback on their companies. The angels speak bluntly and tell those seeking funding what they can expect during the process which lasts about four weeks, if they make it to the final pitch event.
In 2013, CTAN funded more than $9.6 million worth of investments in 17 new and 16 follow-on companies within its existing portfolio. That’s a new record from its record $8 million worth of investments in 2012, according to Brent Elyea, its executive director.
On Friday, some entrepreneurs had never been through the process before and came unprepared. Others had boxes with products. One team toted samples of food products. Another entrepreneur had a blue slick looking drone-like device.
The event lasted until 11:30 a.m. That meant that with the large crowd each entrepreneur got to meet with between three to four angel investors for about ten minutes each session.
CTAN regularly holds office hours at Abel’s On The Lake and the event is worth going to for entrepreneurs looking for some frank advice and feedback on their ventures.
Having gone through the process, here’s my advice on pitching to the angels:

• 1. Arrive early. The event starts promptly at 9:30 a.m. and the early bird entrepreneurs get the first meetings with the angels in attendance. Some angels show up later and so do some entrepreneurs. But if you get there at 9:30 before a funding cycle deadline, there will be a crowd and you’ll spend time waiting. We waited 90 minutes to talk to three angels for a total of 30 minutes.
• 2. Talk to Executive Director Brent Elyae in advance of the event to find out, if possible, which angels will be attending. CTAN has close to 150 members. It’s important to do research on them beforehand because each angel investor is different. Some come from tech backgrounds and others are from consumer products or family businesses. It’s important to find the right fit for what you are pitching.
• 3. Practice, practice, practice a 2 minute or less pitch. The session only lasts 10 minutes and you want to get as much feedback as possible to determine whether your venture is a good fit for CTAN.
• 4. Ask them questions to make sure they are active investors. Like ask them what they have invested in and how many companies they have backed. If you get their names ahead of time, you can research this.
• 5. It’s important to talk to as many people as possible about your startups. A few angels liked what we are doing. A few of them didn’t. They all gave us valuable feedback.
• 6. Read everything you can ahead of time about CTAN, its investment cycle, its portfolio companies, blog posts on pitching and that way you’ll be prepared.
• 7. Bring business cards. Leave them with everyone. They talk to a lot of people and you want to make a good and lasting impression. Make sure to thank them for their time. They are all volunteering.
• 8. Write notes. I wish I had done more of this. I was so busy focusing on the pitch and listening to the feedback that I didn’t write down key points. I think I would ask them next time if I could record the interviews with my iPhone to listen to later. Sometimes it’s hard to remember everything when you’re doing a round robin meet and pitch.
• 9. Attend another CTAN office hours event. It got easier the more people we talked to. And we met a woman who had been to office hours a few times. She had a polished pitch and knew exactly which angels she wanted to meet with at the event.
• 10. Network with the other entrepreneurs while you’re waiting in line. You can learn a lot from their experiences.

SpareFoot, the largest online marketplace for self storage, plans to double the size of its call center.
The Austin-based startup is holding an invitation-only open house from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Jan. 14 at its headquarters at 720 Brazos St.
The company plans to hire 31 new workers for its Austin call center.
To attend the open house, job candidates are encouraged to apply online and to send their resumes and cover letters by Jan. 11 to Rachel Morse at rmorse@sparefoot.com with “ACE Team Open House” as the subject line of the email.
“Employees of the SpareFoot call center, known as the Amazing Customer Experience (ACE) Team, handle inquiries about self-storage rentals from customers across the country,” according to a news release.
For more information, please visit the jobs section of the SpareFoot website.

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Austin’s tech industry continued to boom in 2013.
Austin ranked number one on the Milken Institute’s list of best performing cities for 2013.
Austin ranked number two on Livability Index’s list of the best U.S. cities for people 35 and under.
It was a big year for high-tech startups with President Obama’s visit to Capital Factory in May to shine the light on all the innovation springing forth from Austin. Then the first Techstars Austin class debuted.
In April, Google announced Austin is the latest city to get its 1 Gigabit high speed Internet network. The launch of Google Fiber in Austin means that high tech startups will continue to flourish as 1 Gigabit high speed Internet becomes a standard. AT&T also launched its 1 Gigabit network.
And the world’s biggest startup, Dell went private in a $24.9 billion buyout led by Michael Dell, its founder.
National Instruments also announced a major expansion and Apple began manufacturing its latest computers in Austin.
And RetailMeNot went public in the biggest tech IPO of the year.
Bob Metcalfe’s invention, Ethernet, turned 40 years old.
On the downside, the $100 million startup Calxeda ceased operations and laid off its staff weeks before Christmas.
And the community lost a major champion and supporter of Austin technology with the death of Scott Robinson, the former Austin Chair for The Startup America Partnership.
The news of Robinson’s death was one of the posts with the most traffic in 2013, which shows that Silicon Hills News isn’t a traditional mainstream media publication. We’re part of the community we cover. We’re a startup covering startups and that’s evident in some of the stories that garnered the most traffic on the site for Austin technology in 2013.

1. Big Data Creating Big Opportunities for Entrepreneurs to Solve Big Problems

2. Main Street Hub Provides 24/7 Social Media Monitoring for Businesses

3. Mapping the Austin Tech Startup Scene

4. The Bitcoin Industry Takes Root in Austin

5. TechStars introduces its first Austin Class

6. Virgin America’s Nerd Bird Flight from Austin to San Francisco

7. Patent Trolls Threaten to Bankrupt Companies and Stifle Innovation

8. A Slice of Silicon Hills News Features Austin-based Maker Square

9. The State of Austin’s Tech Scene

10. Icon Lets People Create a “Wicked Smart” Digital Business Card

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

In college, when most students are the very models of poor nutrition choices, Michael Olaya and Taylor Pechacek, the founders of Loop Health, were hashing out technological solutions to the question: How do we empower positive health decisions in between doctor’s visits?
Olaya is the son of a physician and grew up seeing a shift in medicine, away from reactionary care.
“We always had these conversations…exploring ideas for software that could solve a lot of these problems with behavior and lifestyle choices,” Pechacek said. “There’s a huge gap of data in between office visits.” Chronic health problems, he noted, happen over time and add up. “You don’t see the longer picture. So we created this idea of feedback loops using game theory as a way people could influence better habits. It’s not really a science problem, it’s a data problem…. With better perspective and awareness you can create better decisions over time.”
But it had to be simple for people to use. No matter how enthusiastically some people may begin to record their calories, most people quit after a short time. Their solution was Pictrition, which lets users take photos of their food to keep a record of the kinds of choices they tend to make. You snap a picture of your food, post it anonymously, and allow others to rate it. For an extra fee, you can enlist the feedback of a nutritionist. On average, people tend to rate 30 photos of other people’s food for each one they post, according to the founders. If you score well, you could win a prize. Loop Health, the parent company of Pictrition recently teamed up with Techstars company HighFive, an advertising platform that links health-based apps to tangible rewards, so if you’re a high-scorer on Pictrition, you might win a gift certificate to a health-food store or similar bonus.
“You may ask ‘What’s the incentive for me to go through and rate these?’” said Pechacek. “It’s about peer-to-peer learning from each other…I want to eat healthy, let’s both play. And it’s scaleable. The more people who play, the more accurate it gets…. Down the road, if we have enough players and we have a robust enough app it will be an extremely valuable tool.”
There are, of course, outliers: Vegans or Paleo fans who will never rate certain foods highly. But that only adds to the community’s richness, Pechacek said.
Olaya and Pechacek applied for admittance to the Tech Wildcatters incubator and were named finalists. In the process they met Brian Johnson, who had a health physiology degree from the Cooper Institute. At the time, Pechacek said, “The idea wasn’t well formed. We didn’t know what we were doing. We met a lot of people who gave us direction.”
Shortly thereafter they met Jonathan Harvell who was working on a similar app that was more of a quantified self app. They also connected with Evan Davis as their CTO and co-founder.
In the summer of 2012 they started building Pictrition. By the end of the year, they were running out of money and Olaya had to sell their cars to keep the company going. Then the company applied for the SXSW pitch competition “Move Your Company to Austin.”
Gordon Daugherty, investor and advisor, discovered Pictrition when he was reviewing applications for the pitch competition. “We accepted their application to pitch and…we met a couple of times,” Dougherty said. “They wanted my advice on moving to Austin. A few of us (investors) invested a little bit of money just to get them to Austin, around $40,000-to-$50,000. So they quit their day jobs, loaded up their Uhauls and came to Austin.”
Brett Hurt, Bazaarvoice founder, Larry Walker of Silicon Labs and Jeff Jackson of Thayer Ventures in San Francisco were other investors/mentor who helped the company move to town. The company was accepted into the Capital Factory incubator and started building out their application, testing it, and meeting with potential partners.
Dougherty said he was inspired in equal parts by the team and the idea.
“I really fell in love with their focus and dedication, their scrappiness. They are very efficient. They’re not the type to waste money. They’ve really bonded together as a team. They live together in the same house. They’re focused. A lot of companies that have good ideas that don’t have that will fail.”
Walker of Silicon Labs likes the idea that the founders come from north Texas, rather than the usual places. “They’re smart, they’re articulate, they have good ideas, they’re full of beans, they’re Texans….” he said. “I thought it was kind of cool that they didn’t come from the usual suspect places…they don’t harbor illusions about how much work it takes.” A lot of founders, he said, went to see the Mark Zuckerberg movie and think that’s how entrepreneurship works. This team was ready to pivot if necessary.
And it has been necessary a couple of times. Last fall, Walker said, they became engrossed in perfecting Pictrition, loading it up with features before launching. All their mentors advised them to just “get it out there” and let the marketplace dictate iterations. Loop Health officially launched at DEMO in October. Also, while Pictrition is a good app, their mentors wondered whether it was enough to sustain a growing company. So the team evolved to Loop Health, a corporate wellness platform that connects more than 100 apps and wearables into a portal with a dashboard. Companies can keep track of how often employees are using their apps and devices and reward healthy choices.
So while the company has been, as Walker said, willing to adjust their preconceived ideas and dreams, the focus on making the world a better place through tracking daily health has stayed consistent.
A lot of companies, Walker said, are focused on being acquired by some huge company. “They were just excited about moving to Austin, getting a house and getting to work on the idea…. Their focus is, we want to change the world in this way and do it sustainably.”

People Pattern announced it has received $4.5 million in Series A funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures.
The Austin-based company also received additional participation from private investors.
People Pattern plans to use the money to market its software as a service platform which automates the collection and analysis of audience data. The company has built a data-driven analytics marketing platform. It lets marketers get more information about how to engage active and prospective customers.
The product is still being Beta tested and plans to go live soon.
Ken Cho, who previously founded Spredfast, and Jason Baldridge, associate professor of Computational Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, founded the company.
People Pattern’s platform identifies high impact audience segments based on social and enterprise data, moving beyond simple demographic and psychographic data. Marketers are empowered with advanced, predictive segmentation data in real-time to better understand, target and engage active and prospective customers. With People Pattern, social marketing can be a science, not just an art.
“The next, critical wave of marketing is to leverage the massive amounts of data collected and interactions happening every minute of every day,” Bryan Stolle, general partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures, said in a news release. “People Pattern has an entirely unique approach of applying science and predictive analytics to uncovering who is saying what about your company or brand. These insights lead to the creation of actionable personas and microsegments, powering companies to engage directly with their audience in a real-time, in meaningful, targeted ways.”
As part of the financing round, Stolle will join People Pattern’s board.