It’s that haunting time of the year when zombies, ghouls, princesses and werewolves march up and down the streets in search of tricks and treats.
But it’s also a time for reflection.
After all, Halloween is the eve of all hallows day or Day of the Dead in Latino culture. It reminds us that we’re all mortal. We’re on this earth for a fleeting moment in time. So this time of the year, we should remember our ancestors and also give thanks for the life that we have today. Gratitude will carry us through some of our darkest moments.
And if you’re running a startup, you’re going to have dark moments. You probably barely notice Halloween or Thanksgiving or Christmas for that matter because you’re grinding away and working on the business without a thought to the calendar changing and the marching on of time.
But that’s the wrong thing to do.
Throughout two decades of covering entrepreneurs and tech companies I’ve learned that the happiest entrepreneurs tend to be the most successful. So here’s a few treats:

1. Take time to have fun. All work and no play makes for one miserable entrepreneur and no one wants to buy products and services from someone who looks like a sad Panda. So don a happy Panda costume and eat some candy. If you have kids, go trick and treating with them. If you don’t have kids, go trick or treating anyway.

2. Let those creative juices flow. Carve a pumpkin. Bake a pumpkin donut. Create a costume from scratch. Look at Pinterest and attempt to recreate one of those perfect Martha Stewart-like arts and crafts projects like cake ball brains with oozing cherry blood. It doesn’t matter whether it works out. In fact, if it doesn’t then it’s just as much fun.

3. Don’t be stingy. Give, give and give some more candy, your time, your money, your expertise, your attention and yourself. When you give to others, you receive so much more in return. It’s that warm fuzzy feeling that lets you know you’re human.

4. You always hear people tell startups to get out of the building – well this is your opportunity. Go to a party, a bar, a neighborhood gathering. Talk to other people outside the startup world about what they are doing and you can also ask them about what they think of your product.

5. Don’t forget to say thank you! Studies show that saying thanks is good for business. It’s cheap. It’s effective. Don’t miss an opportunity to say thank you to coworkers, partners, clients and investors. And studies show that trick or treaters who say thank you receive more candy.

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Maybe Ordoro is taking the “Hire slow, fire fast” adage too literally. But right now, the nine employees and their Belgian investor share a vision about what they’re doing and how they’re doing it: To wit, building a sustainable company with a great culture. And they’d rather limp along for a bit with one too few developers than move too fast and introduce anyone who’s out of sync.
Ordoro (Or-door-oh) handles all the tasks that happen after someone orders a product from a small business. They have created a Web application for ecommerce retailers to fulfill orders, track inventory and manage suppliers. They create the shipping labels from various organizations like USPS and FedEx, change the quantities for sale on various sales channels, notify the customer through the channel—like Amazon—that the item has been shipped. Tasks that have to be done but that can really chew into a business owner’s day.
Founders Jagath Narayan, Sangram Kadam and Naruby Schlenker had all worked for corporations before grad school and knew they wanted to be entrepreneurs. They batted around ideas for companies, talked about which parts of corporate life they would preserve and which they would ditch, and had long talks about kind of culture they wanted to create. But they didn’t settle on an idea until Narayan, formerly a solution architect and project manager for I2 Technologies which consults with some of the world’s largest supply chain companies, was hired to help a therapist with his side business selling toys used in child psychotherapy.
“I spent a couple weeks with him, working in his warehouse and realized he has a pretty good website with close to a million dollars in sales every year….. But he had antiquated software, was using spreadsheets, didn’t have anything to manage the whole business. So it occurred to me that maybe we should look into that space,” Narayan said.
They created a fictional product that would handle, for small businesses, all the processes enterprise software handles for giant companies. It would help them calculate optimal inventory levels and keep track of what was in stock as well as managing order fulfillment like shipping. They cold-called 100 businesses to discover whether there was a market for their idea.
“They said ‘That all sounds fancy, but I can’t even ship my daily orders out’,” Narayan said. Just the few minutes it took to go to the USPS website, type in the information, get the shipping label and move the product out the door took for each item could eat up a day. Plus they needed help communicating with suppliers. If Ordoro would fix those problems, four or five businesses said, they would pay $100 a monthly for that service.
With that validation under their belts, the three went to look for a developer co-founder. No one fit…and fit was crucial…until they met Ben Weatherman who had worked for National Instruments and Accenture and was working for Bazaarvoice. Ben became their co-founder but still worked a full day at Bazaarvoice, staying up all night sometimes to create the product that would be Ordoro’s solution. They issued an minimum viable product. But after the company had garnered about 50 customers and was getting feedback on other functions the founders realized they needed more developers.
They got a small round of angel investment and hired two more developers—slowly. They also started partnering with bigger companies in the space that offered complementary services, like Amazon, Shopify, Ebay that helped small businesses sell their wares but didn’t offer order fulfillment software.
From the perspective of one of their customers, Robert Fiumara of Fiumara Apparel, it’s a little bit of a miracle. Other solutions, he said, have more bells and whistles. But they also take up to a month to fully implement and require expensive training software. Getting up and running on Ordoro took less than an hour.
Ordoro can link to all the customer’s sales channels: Amazon, Shopify, Ebay and more. As soon as a sale is made, Ordoro creates a label with a tracking number and lets the sales channel—say Amazon—know that the sale is completed and shipping begun. It also changes the number of items listed on every sales channel. If a customer has 10 of a given item and three are sold, it lets all sales channels know that there are only seven left. If the inventory goes to zero, it may remove that item listing altogether.
Fiumara started looking into other solutions because he really wanted a reporting function. Finally, he called Ordoro and was told “All you had to do was ask.” They would immediately begin sending him reports and were in the process of adding a reporting function to their services. In fact, Narayan said, part of his job is communicating customer requests to the development staff, who adds functionality ongoing.
When they linked up with partners like Amazon and Shopify, Ordoro’s founders knew they needed more developers and customer support. They started pitching to VCs from coast to coast and they were getting inbound calls as well. They had several local angels interested, but not as lead investors. Then Josh Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory, advised them to build their profile on Angel List.
That’s where they were discovered by E-Merge, a Belgian company looking to invest in the U.S. They weren’t planning to lead the round, but after two days in Austin, they committed $750,000. The other angels quickly anted up the rest of the $1.2 million.
“After a few calls, we had the feeling that this was a good investment,” said partner Patrice Decafmeyer. “We invest in very early stage companies,” he said. “It’s a very big risk for us to invest in these businesses. They can change over time when you take them so young. So mostly we invest in people. They were very open minded, easy to work with to discuss with. We could really see that we could have open discussions…and there was no hard feeling if we don’t agree.”
E-Merge, Narayan said, fits the company perfectly in terms of “mindset” which is so key to Ordoro’s growth and culture. E-Merge’s partners use their own money, so they’re under no pressure to recoup their investment quickly. They’re willing to wait 10 years or more, Decafmeyer said. Nor are they very “corporate” as Narayan said. They talk or Skype regularly and the investors visit every few months.
“We have a very good relationship with them,” Narayan said. “They’re not like the overlords who fly in in suits. They’re very…chill. Sometimes they make recommendations. Sometimes we say no sometimes we say yes. Since they’re a bit removed, they do see big patterns which sometimes we miss.”
A lot of investors might want an excel spreadsheet with numbers—nomatter how fictional—describing quarterly revenues for the next five years, Narayan said. Not E-Merge. As long as Orodoro keeps growing, they’ll continue to fund the company.
“The coolest thing about our lead investors is they’ve invested in a bunch of companies like ours and wound up with exits of half a billion dollars. They know how a company like us needs to be run. Their philosophy matches really well with our mindset.”
Sometimes Ordoro can be stubborn. In several calls the investors recommended they hire more developers. Ordoro balked. The suggestion came again. Again they balked. Finally the investors said “We will write a check for two new developers.” Whether it was the money or just a wakeup call, Ordoro realized maybe their investors were right. It was time.
“If we hire the wrong person, there’ll be friction,” Narayan said. “None of us had worked in a startup before. We had all worked at big companies…. a lot of things we knew we hated was micromanaging projects. If you have to run a Microsoft project plan or a Gantt chart and say ‘You’ll work on this from 11 a.m. to 5’. Running a business is almost like a creative art. We don’t have Gantt charts, we have a list of priorities. Here’s what we’re going to work on for the next two weeks. You have to hire really good people who don’t need to be micromanaged and who are fully committed to the company. You have to hire really smart people and have really strong trust between you.”
Every developer, they said, has a half-day test, has to meet with everyone in the company and all team members have to agree that the person is going to fit in.
“We are on high alert at this point,” Narayan said. “Right now we’re a nine person company. But as we scale these things we do now will become more and more important.”
They believe in the Apple philosophy that money, and exits, are a byproduct of building a really good company.
“Our plan is to make this a profitable company which can sustain on its own. If we build the company with that mindset, that it’s going to be around for a really long time, an exit is a byproduct.”

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Ten companies pitched perfectly at the inaugural Austin Techstars Demo Day before a packed house at the Austin Music Hall Tuesday afternoon.
No one read from a script or even flubbed a line.
The Techstars Austin class presented well thought out business plans and many already had customers and revenue.
The companies included: Accountable, a HIPPA compliance program, Atlas, a health and fitness wearable bracelet, Embrace, a customer relationship program, Filament Labs, a patient management platform, fosbury, a mobile coupon site, Gone! – a marketplace to resell used goods, MarketVibe, a business-to-business content marketing platform, ProtoExchange, a network of 3D printers, testlio, a network of software testers and ube, a smart home appliance to control lighting from a smartphone.
Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars Austin, has headed up the past two Techstars cloud programs in San Antonio. He moved to Austin this year to oversee the new program.
“Techstars being here is largely about the community being here,” Seats said. More than 70 people volunteered in Austin to mentor the companies, he said.
Techstars Austin is the latest addition to the Techstars program nationwide, which started in Boulder, Colorado. Techstars Cloud has taken place the last two years in San Antonio. But it has taken far too long to get the program to Austin, said David Cohen, its founder and CEO.
“We’re pumped to be here,” Cohen said.
Techstars also has programs in Boston, Boulder, Chicago, New York City, Seattle and London. The 13-week Austin accelerator program, which started in August, took place on the fifth floor of the Omni Building downtown. Techstars gives the companies $20,000 each in exchange for a six percent stake.
This Demo Day, however, the companies presenting did not ask for money. New rules issued by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the JOBS Act meant that the startups could not publicly state their fundraising goals, Seats said. So while many were raising funds, they could only speak privately to accredited investors until the new equity-based crowdfunding rules are hashed out, Seats said.
To kick off the program, Jason Bornhurst, co-founder of Filament Labs, donned green scrubs to talk about Filament Lab’s “Web dashboard that drives the entire patient experience.” The platform is a patient portal that allows doctors and other caregivers to put information about the patient’s treatment online, including doctor recommended homework and medicine. The system delivers personalized care, cuts down on hospitalizations and increases overall efficiency, Bornhurst said. The software as a service starts at $299 a month for a small clinic up to $699 for larger clinics. Corinthian Health is rolling it out live at its 20 clinics by the end of the year, Bornhurst said.
“We’re Filament Labs and we empower patient engagement,” he said.
Next up, Kristel Viidik pitched testlio, a community of testers who find bugs in mobile software apps. The three-person team travelled from Estonia to participate in Techstars Austin. They plan to apply for work Visas so they can remain in Austin.
“Software testing is a whopping $90 billion marketplace,” Viidik said.
Testlio is the “go to spot” for professional testers with more than 1,200 signed up, Viidik said. The company has also landed several agencies as customers and is testing software for dozens of companies already, she said.
“We make sure software works,” Viidik said.
Then Bart Bohn pitched Embrace, which changed its name from AuManil. The company has created customer relationship management software that engages customers in a conversation. Its tools rely on customer data and analysis to increase revenue, retention and customer satisfaction, Bohn said. The company is currently working with BuildASign.
ProtoExchange has created a cloud-based network of 3D Printers. The network lets businesses find production and materials in real time to make their products in scalable and efficient way.
“We are ProtoExchange and we are bringing manufacturing to the cloud,” said Jonathan Placa, co-founder and CEO. The three-person team is from New York.
Atlas created a wearable wristband for health and fitness tracking that goes beyond just being a smart pedometer, said Peter Li, its co-founder and CEO. Atlas’ wristband can detect which exercise the user is performing and count reps and sets. It can count steps, squats, pushups and just about any activity.
Brooke Stacey, a fitness model, demonstrated the Atlas wristband in action on stage.
Following a short break, Gone!’s Nico Bayerque took to the stage to tout his marketplace for used goods. The app allows a consumer to take a picture of something they want to sell and then Gone finds a buyer for the item and sends a box with a shipping label to the seller’s house. The seller simply puts the item in the box and mails it off. Gone! takes a cut of each transaction.
Erica Douglass pitched MarketVibe, formerly Whoosh Traffic, a business-to-business content marketing platform. The goal is to drive customer engagement, which leads to more sales, she said.
Cloudability, a former Techstars Cloud company based in Portland, is testing its service.
Kevin Henry, CEO of Accountable, a HIPAA compliance program, demonstrated how his software could help a company become complaint with federal healthcare regulations in five easy steps.
The cloud-based software as a service company costs $99 per month for small companies up to $449 per month for larger organizations.
Fosbury, based in Amsterdam, has created a mobile coupon company and has already created more than 100,000 “passes” for companies, said Lucas Tieleman, founder.
The last team to pitch, ube has already raised more than $1 million and is selling its $79 smart home light control panel at Amazon.com. The company also sold $500,00 worth of products to more than 2,000 customers during a Kickstarter campaign, said Utz Baldwin, its founder. The company already has nine employees and is expanding, he said.
Overall, the audience reacted positively to the Techstars pitches with lots of applause and Tweets congratulating the teams.
Keith Casey with Twilio served as a mentor to testlio. He met with the team for a few hours every week throughout the program.
He think’s they’ve hit upon solving a big problem in the marketplace.
“The first 18 days when an app goes live is the most critical time,” Casey said. “If it doesn’t’ work, you’ve lost your audience. You either launch it right or forget it.”
Paul Ford with SoftLayer also served as mentor to the Techstars Austin teams. He was impressed with the overall quality of the teams.
“The quality of the hardware stuff is just amazing,” he said.
“They were so incredibility impressive,” said Chelsea McCullough, executive director of Texans for Economic Progress. “There was not one less than stellar company.”
While lots of companies talk about data mining and big data, McCullough said she was impressed with Embrace’s presentation on using data and analytics to retain and improve customer relations.
“They’ve taken data mining to the next level and made it actionable,” she said.
Fred Schmidt, an investor, mentor and partner at Capital Factory and an executive with Portalarium Games, liked the number of international companies involved in the Techstars Austin class.
“I was really pleased with the number of international connections coming out of this class,” Schmidt said.
More Austin companies need to think globally, he said. He’s working to foster more connections between Austin and London’s technology community.
Ben Dyer, entrepreneur in residence at UT and founder of Peachtree Software, liked testlio. He had a vice president of testing when he ran Peachtree Software.
“I understand the problem,” he said. “If they can do what they were talking about it’s pretty darn impressive.”