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It’s Not All About Winning at Startup Weekend San Antonio

July 24, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The final pitch session on Sunday at Startup Weekend San Antonio

Even though Leslee Martinez’ team Trakk-EM didn’t win, she enjoyed the experience of Startup Weekend San Antonio.
Trakk-EM had one of the largest teams with seven people. Martinez’ idea was to create a watch with built-in GPS that connected to a mobile phone app. If a child went missing, the parent could simply alert everyone in the network immediately with the app and track the child on the phone.
“I’ve been at Sea World when my daughter was lost,” Martinez said. It’s one of the scariest experiences for a parent, she said. She found her four-year-old daughter but that experience prompted her to come up with the idea for the watch and mobile phone app.
Martinez, a senior majoring in business management at the University of Texas at San Antonio, may enroll in a technology program at the university. She wants to go on to compete in its technology competition.

Kyle Jennings, software engineer and former combat medic, participated in Startup Weekend San Antonio

Kyle Jennings who helped Trakk-EM with the design for their website and mobile phone app also gave a testimony for OurPart.US, a crowdfunding site for veterans.
Jennings, a former combat medic and now a software engineer, spent weeks in the Audie L. Murphy Veterans Memorial Hospital in San Antonio following an operation on his back because he also contracted double pneumonia.
His wife had to care for him and their newborn son and toddler daughter at home. He said he could have used a site like OurPart.US to connect him with resources for his house to provide him with more independence.
He would also contribute to projects for other veterans.
“I think there are a lot of people who want to take care of wounded veterans,” Jennings said. “I think it’s a great idea. I’d like to see it out there.”
Jennings’ idea for a family budget site actually got picked on Friday night at the beginning of Startup Weekend San Antonio. But his team for Remainder.com dissolved when they tried to join forces with BudgetAllies.com. The entrepreneurs had different visions for the site. He went on to help other teams instead.
Jennings still enjoyed the experience.
“I basically love my job,” Jennings said. “I love it so much I do it on weekends. For me, it’s not about coming here and winning. I like honing my craft and helping others. That’s what I’m passionate about.”
He’s also a member of Geekdom, a new co-working and collaboration space on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown. Geekdom hosted the event. It provided office space, conference rooms, couches, a fully-stocked break room with refrigerators loaded with Red Bull and Alamo Beer and presentation space.
“The venue is key in the support of this event,” said Michele Stewart, one of the organizers of Startup Weekend San Antonio.
“I think people really enjoyed sleeping here all night long,” Stewart said. “With the support of Rackspace we were able to make it a fantastic weekend.”
Rackspace sponsored the event and provided all the meals and snacks and other support.
Startup Weekend San Antonio is in its infancy, said Royce Haynes, a coordinator and entrepreneur who flew in from Boulder, Colo.
“This is only the beginning,” he said. “I think we’re going to see a really robust startup community in San Antonio.”

TrueAbility Wins San Antonio Startup Weekend

July 22, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 7 Comments

Team photo of TrueAbility, which took home the top prize at San Antonio Startup Weekend. Photo courtesy of San Antonio Startup Weekend.

A team of four former Rackspace employees claimed the top prize at San Antonio Startup Weekend.
True Ability, a service that lets companies test the technical aptitude of job candidates, won the panel of judges over.
“TrueAbility helps companies hire great techs,” Frederick Mendler, CEO, said during his pitch.
One of the things lacking in the startup community is domain expertise, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom.
“The biggest missing element is someone who knows the business they’re getting into,” he said.
TrueAbility knows the marketplace, Longo said. The need exists for startup companies to tackle bigger problems and TrueAbility is doing that, he said.
The company has 30 years of experience hiring technical talent and has hired more than 1,000 people at Rackspace, Mendler said. The TrueAbility platform will allow companies to know in advance how competent its job candidates are in different technical skills like Unix, Php and Java Script among other skills.
The team is made up of Mendler, Marcus Robertson, Luke Owen and Dusty Jones.
Following the big win, the team retired to their office at Geekdom to drink champagne and celebrate.
“We’re going to take tomorrow off and let the Red Bull wear off and get out of our systems,” Mendler said. “Then we’ll come back and focus on building the site out. We think there’s an opportunity to have $1 million in revenue in the next eight months.”
The judges thought TrueAbility had a solid business model and a well-formed and experienced team.

Frederick Mendler pitching TrueAbility at San Antonio Startup Weekend photo courtesy of San Antonio Startup Weekend

The judges also liked BikeIdentity, which garnered second place. BikeIdentity reported that 1.5 million bikes are stolen every year and 48 percent are recovered but less than 5 percent go back to their owners. BikeIdentity wants to solve that problem with NFC tags on bike frames that the police could scan to find the owners. The tags would retail for around $10. BikeIdentity estimates it will reach $12 million in revenue in 3 years. The team was seeking a $150,000 investment to bring its product to market.
SoundFly, a seven second broadcasting service on Twitter, took the third place prize.
“What would you say to the world in 7 seconds?” asked Ramesh Danala, during his presentation. SoundFly gives people the ability to accurately convey tone, emotion and personality with friends and family.
“People can Tweet and text, but the power of talking is amazing,” Danala said.
Dan Pernik first pitched the idea for SoundFly on Friday night. The idea didn’t get enough votes to become one of the selected projects. But when a team broke up over night, SoundFly got a new life. Inaddition to Pernik and Danala, Sundip Lal and Elliot Adams from New Orleans, joined the team.
“SoundFly was one of the ideas that has big potential,” said Pat Matthews, a senior vice president at Rackspace and one of the judges. “It definitely is an exciting idea.”
At the end of the day, most of the ideas that come out of San Antonio Startup Weekend won’t work, Longo said.
“That’s not why they’re here,” he said. “They leave here constantly learning. They now have a network.”
People can have ideas all day long, but they’ve got to execute on them, he said.
“This program forces them to execute,” he said. But people can’t fall in love with their ideas, he said.
“Never get married to your ideas” Longo said. As San Antonio Startup Weekend proved, they change and teams must adapt or die.

54 Hours with No Sleep, No Problem at Startup Weekend San Antonio

July 22, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Danny Willford, a developer, has been up since San Antonio Startup Weekend started on Friday. He’s working for two teams.

When the sun set Friday night in San Antonio, a group of dedicated entrepreneurs and entrepreneur wannabes gathered to create new companies during a 54 hour period as part of San Antonio Startup Weekend.
By Sunday morning, about a dozen people had dropped out. They either left because their idea wasn’t picked as a project on Friday night or they didn’t like the team they joined or they just wanted to go home. No one really knows why they left because they are gone. Ideas pivoted. Personalities conflicted. Teams disintegrated. Others formed.
Only the hardy remain, and these men and women are a dedicated bunch who have toiled all night long, in many cases, to bring their companies to life.
Tonight they will pitch their ideas in front of a panel of judges.
Danny Willford, a developer from Kyle, hasn’t gotten a wink of sleep since the event began. He left briefly on Friday night to meet some friends in San Marcos to celebrate his 26th birthday. But instead of driving the short distance to Kyle from the party, he turned around and came back to Geekdom, a collaborative workspace on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre downtown, which is hosting the event.
When he returned at 3 a.m., he met up with Brian Curliss, one of the guys behind Massage by Students. They talked for two hours about Curliss’s idea and the project. By the end, Willford agreed to work on Massage by Students’ project even though he had already joined the OurPart.US team, which is developing a crowdfunding site for veterans.

Willford doesn’t mind the extra work. He loves Startup Weekend. A few months ago, he moved from Chicago to take a job as a PhP Java Script developer for MicroAssist in Austin. He has participated in two Startup Weekends in Chicago, the last one was last Fall.
“This is a great way to meet new people,” Willford said.
Like a few others participating in San Antonio Startup Weekend, Willford has not slept. A comfy white couch sits just a few feet from his chair in an office room. He removed the fluffy blankets to resist the temptation to lie down. He stays awake thanks to Red Bull, snacks and adrenaline.
A few hours ago, Chris Spence, one of the founders of Apartment Assurance, who vowed to stay up the entire weekend, crashed at 7 a.m. on Sunday. He’s now sleeping in a office on three red bean bag chairs with the lights off. Curliss with Massage by Students fell asleep around 5 a.m. on a red couch in a really dark interior conference room. He asked his team to wake him up at noon.
But Willford has no intention of sleeping. He’s got too much work to do. He’s creating the back end of the Massage by Students website and also working on creating the website for OurPart.us.
Why does he do all this work for free? In fact, he paid $100 to participate in this madness.
“This is really fun,” he said. “The organizers at this one are the most fun I’ve ever seen. They stay up with us. They give us free beer. I really like the Alamo Beer.”
But his real motivation for participating in San Antonio Startup Weekend is to create new products and eventually found his own company.
“I can’t wait to be my own boss and launch something successful,” he said. “Having the ability to say that I made something that people use and like. I would find that to be really gratifying.”

Startups Burning the Midnight Oil at Geekdom

July 22, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 15 Comments

Members of Trakk-EM hash out the details of their idea

It’s after midnight at Geekdom and nestled in conference rooms throughout the 11th floor, groups of entrepreneurs continue to hash out business plans, design websites and figure out problems vexing their startups.

Cans of Red Bull are littered about along with empty water bottles, discarded coffee cups and Alamo Beer bottles. Bags of peanut M&Ms, Skittles, Mini-Hershey Bars, Pop-Tarts, Oreos, Rice Krispies Treats and more line the breakroom shelves.

Two of the members of Massage by Students working past midnight

In the Berners-Lee conference room, Josh Thielbar, a Rackspace employee by day and entrepreneur by night, pitches his BudgetAllies.com startup, a budgeting service aimed at families. He’s got a webpage designed already and a five minute pitch down solid.
“That’s a great pitch,” said Brian Curliss, head of the Massage by Students startup, a web platform that connects massage school students to local clients.
Thielbar is packing up to head home to his wife and three kids. He is a team of one. On Friday night, he had three people working on the project, but the team dispersed and the members either left the program or went to other ventures. Still, he plans to carry on and pitch to judges on Sunday night.
“I’m going to get first or second,” he said. “I didn’t come here to not win.”
He says his stiffest competition is TrueAbility, a team formed by four former Rackspace employees.
At that, Curliss objected. His team spent the day talking to people who run massage schools in San Antonio. He’s in it to win it too. They set up a consumer survey to get more feedback on the service. Curliss drove down from Dallas and has spent the entire weekend sleeping on a couch at Geekdom. Greg Stein, another team member, drove in from Austin and Yosef Javed travelled from Lake Charles, La. They say one guy drove 20 hours from California to participate in Startup Weekend San Antonio. Five people make up the Massage by Students team.
Initially, Massage by Students focused on marketing massage schools. San Antonio has seven of them. But after visiting a few Saturday afternoon, they decided to “pivot” or shift the focus of their startup away from schools to students who need a Customer Relationship Marketing or CRM platform. They plan to sell listings on their site to only 18 students in addition to the massage schools and they predict they can earn recurring monthly revenue of $2,000 to $6,000 in San Antonio and up to $100,000 nationally.
On Sunday, they’ve invited local massage students to visit Geekdom to give hour-long massages for $20.

The two member team working on Apartment Assurance

Chris Spence says he’ll stay up the entire 54 hours of Startup Weekend. He pulled an all nighter last night and he’s still up at 1 a.m. on Sunday.
He’s working with his co-founder, Jonathan Khan, on Apartment Assurance, a legal service for apartment dwellers. They’ve done market surveys and lots of research. They’re trying to hash out how much to charge for the service.
“We’re trying to decide whether to charge $14.99 a month or $19.99 a month, we’ve got to make the numbers work,” Spence said.
“I think it should be $9.99,” Khan said.
And so it goes in the life of a startup. By the time they’ve got to pitch later on Sunday, they’ll have all those details nailed down.
The crowd starts to thin out around 1 a.m., but a few people are letting off steam playing games of ping pong. The Trakk-Em team is still working in the commons area.

From Idea to Startup in a Weekend

July 21, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

The Massage by Students Team Hard at Work at #SWSanAntonio

For the past two years, Keith Casey with Twilio has lived in Austin but he never visited San Antonio until Friday.
That’s when he made the 75 mile trip down I-35 to visit Geekdom, a collaborative coworking space on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre for Startup Weekend San Antonio.
“People are fired up,” Casey said on Saturday. He’s been commuting back and forth all weekend. “It’s nice.”
Casey volunteered to serve as a mentor to the eight teams formed at the San Antonio event.
Startup Weekend San Antonio kicked off Friday evening with a meet up over pizza and Alamo beer. Afterward, the 57 participants listened to Royce Haynes, a coordinator and entrepreneur who flew in from Boulder, Colo., give an overview of the program.
Andrew Hyde, an entrepreneur from Boulder, Colo., held the first Startup Weekend in 2007. Since then, 91 countries have hosted 468 events with 45,000 attendees.
Jennifer Navarrete, a social media entrepreneur, hosted the first Startup Weekend in San Antonio in 2008, the last time the event took place here.
The latest San Antonio Startup Weekend came together through the efforts of Allen Torng and Michele Stewart from Austin and Cristal Glangchai from San Antonio. Rackspace sponsored the event along with Geekdom. Other sponsors can be found on the event’s website.
After the presentation, the organizers had everyone play rock, paper, scissors to determine the order of presenters for the fast-pitch session. The last person standing got the first presentation slot. Everyone got 60 seconds to present to the group. If they went over their time, an annoying buzzer went off.

Startup Weekend San Antonio Organizer Michele Stewart chats with Geekdom Member Angel Marquez

Following the pitch, they each received a large white sheet of paper listing their project name, their name and a few words describing it, which they posted on a nearby wall.
After the fast pitch session, everyone received three yellow sticky notes. They voted on their favorite ideas with the sticky notes. The projects with the most votes got chosen. Those projects included Trakk-EM, a child tracking service, TrueAbility, a test to screen the technical ability of potential employees, BudgetAllies, a consumer budgeting service, Bike Identity, a RFID system to track stolen bikes, Massage by Students, a service that connects student masseuses with consumers, OurPart.us, a crowd fund raising program to help injured veterans remodel their homes, Apartment Assurance, a legal service for apartment dwellers, and Remainder.com, a budgeting service.

Part of the team behind TrueAbility taking a break

The heads of each team then told the crowd the type of services they were looking to fill. The teams formed and people went to work.
“There’s a lot that happened over night,” said Torng, one of the organizers
The team with Apartment Assurance pulled an all nighter, he said. They worked until sun up and continued to work throughout the next day, he said.
Another team, Remainder split up and a new team, SoundFly, a seven second micro-broadcasting site, emerged, Torng said.
The team behind Massage by Students spent the day visiting massage schools and interviewing potential customers to determine market demand, Torng said.
“The idea is to get in front of your potential customers,” he said.
When Casey first visited with the teams, he stayed in the background and listened. Then after a while, he asked them all the same question.
“I ask them where’s your revenue,” Casey said. “So many of the ideas are great hacks. But they’ve got to shift their mindset from creating a project to creating a product that they have to be able to sell.”
Casey asks every team to figure out who is going to give them money and design their product for those customers.
“Nobody really understands the full implications of that in the first hours,” Casey said.
But Saturday after lunch, he revisits the revenue question with the startups and by then they’ve got good answers to the revenue question, he said.

The Trakk-EM team at work

And by Sunday, the teams should have websites, product demos and pitches polished. At 5 p.m. they will pitch before a panel of judges and the best team wins a package of startup services valued at several thousand dollars.
One thing is for sure, no one goes hungry at Startup Weekend. The participants receive breakfast, lunch and dinner and several hundred dollars worth of every kind of snack imaginable. Saturday night they dined on County Line barbeque and Rackspace dropped off buckets of Blue Bell ice cream and fixings around 9 p.m. One refrigerator held just Alamo beer and Red Bull on Friday and by Saturday night it was almost empty. Torng was going to go on another Red Bull run Saturday night.

Startup Weekend San Antonio Kicked Off Friday Evening at Geekdom

July 20, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Geekdom Launches Seed Stage Fund for Startups

July 20, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Geekdom is taking a gamble on new technology startups.
The collaborative coworking site today launched the Geekdom Fund, seed stage capital for technology startups in San Antonio.
The fund will provide startup teams with $25,000 equity investments and free office space at the Weston Centre downtown where the Geekdom is based, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom and one of the fund’s administrators.
The fund provides a big missing piece of the puzzle in San Antonio’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, Longo said.
“Funding is always the point people want to get to,” Longo said.
The money comes from Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, and other executives at Rackspace and other angel investors, Longo said. The fund seeks to give San Antonio technology entrepreneurs a head start in launching their products into the marketplace.
“You apply with a great idea and a great team,” Longo said. “You have to be a member of Geekdom to apply. If you want to relocate here, we want you.”
Geekdom is a collaborative workspace, which launched late last year and has grown quickly. The site occupies the 11th floor of the Weston Centre and has expanded to the 10th floor and plans to expand to two additional floors in coming months.

Nick Longo, director of Geekdom is also one of the administrators of the Geekdom Fund, a $25,000 per startup seed stage fund.

Geekdom has attracted numerous startups already including Roughneck Graphics, ZippyKid, Grapevine, Embarkly and TrueAbility.
The money allows people to build a website, build an app and quit their job and pursue their startup dream, Longo said. The Geekdom fund has already invested in some startups based at the center including ZippyKid and Embarkly.
“Part of our criteria is you haven’t received funding from somewhere else,” Longo said. “This is seed money.”
To apply, visit the Geekdom site and fill out the application. It also asks startup teams to fill out a lean canvas form and list the people on their team.

Disclosure: Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Deadline Looms to Submit an Idea to SXSW Panel Picker

July 20, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The crowd at SXSW’s Panel Picker Meetup at Molotov’s on Monday

Hey procrastinators, the deadline is midnight tonight to submit that great panel idea to the 2013 South by Southwest Interactive festival.
It’s also the deadline for film and music panels.
Last Monday, SXSW held a meetup at Molotov in downtown Austin that several hundred people attended. I met Tammy Lynn Gilmore with SXSW Interactive there.
She’s posted some tips on the SXSW Interactive blog how to submit a great idea. One of the tips is to keep your idea focused. You have about 35 minutes to speak and then take questions and answers. So you don’t have time to ramble on about all kinds of things.
My big takeaway from attending the show numerous times, is to be original, be humorous where appropriate, put on a great show and leave them wanting more.
That kind of talk takes planning. So it’s great SXSW has everyone thinking about their talk so far in advance. Good luck. Now I’ve got to go submit my panel idea.

Audingo Lands $3 Million in Angel Investment

July 18, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Audingo, a social media platform provider for celebrities, has landed $3 million in angel funding.
The Austin-based startup connects celebrities with fans by phone, text, email or video.
“With angel investors’ latest commitment of capital, Audingo is making the platform available to personalities and organizations nationwide so they can more intimately engage with their supporters via social media,” according to the company.
“Audingo is about belonging to the inner circle of select personalities and organizations,” Matt Merritt, Audingo co-founder and president, said in news release. “Audingo’s vision is for subscribers to connect with their chosen personalities and organizations on a deeper level than other social media platforms allow – like having a few close friends, versus many acquaintances.”
Audingo CEO Michael Boukadakis founded the company in November of 2010.

Startup Grind Meeting July 26th Featuring ATI Director

July 18, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

At the SXSW Panel Picker meetup earlier this week, I met Andi Gillentine. She’s cofounder of Whit.Li, a startup focused on mining social networks to compile personality reports.
Gillentine is also director of Startup Grind Austin, which has a meeting on July 26h featuring Isaac Barchas, the director of the Austin Technology Incubator at the University of Texas. The discussion focuses on the ATI and how it supports local startups.
The meeting kicks off at 6 p.m. with networking and pizza followed by a fireside chat, questions and more networking. Register here.
The Startup Grind is a monthly speakers series focused on entrepreneurship.