ihiji has joined the Austin Technology Incubator.
The Austin-based company makes software that allows companies to remotely monitor and support Internet enabled devices on a network. It has been part of ATI’s Landing Pad Program for the past two years.
ihiji founders, Stuart Rench, President; Michael Maniscalco, Vice President of Technology; and, David Rench, Vice President of Financ, sold their residential design build home automation company in West Palm Beach, Fla. in 2010 and moved to Austin under the ATI Landing Pad program.
ihiji joined ATI to tap into its network of peers, mentors, businesses and investors.
“Not only is Texas a great state for businesses, but Austin is on the rise, has a wonderful tech community and is also very livable. The structure of ATI was a good fit for our company and the Landing Pad Program helped us easily relocate from out of state and not miss a beat,” Rench, President of ihiji said in a statement. “ATI staff has been great. They’re there when you need them for ideas, thoughts, reviews and introductions. We’re also able to take advantage of multiple directors depending on our challenge, which is nice because they each have their own perspectives and areas of expertise.”
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Ziften Technologies just closed on $5.5 million in its Series B financing.
And the Austin-based startup released its first software product, Behavioral Lightweight Intelligence for Stressed Systems, nicknamed BLISS, which lets companies easily manage and deploy software across Windows desktop computers.
Ziften’s software leds to “improved uptime, business alignment, performance, security, and reduction of errors and annoyances,” according to the company.
With the latest round of funding, Ziften plans to add additional software products and market BLISS.
“We are ready to deliver BLISS to IT organizations everywhere,” Mark Obrecht, Ziften’s CEO, said in a news statement.
The two year old company has raised $11.3 million so far with the latest round led by Fayez Sarofim & Co. Other investors include Andrew Busey, former CEO of Challenge Games now with Austin Ventures.
Ziften serves several Fortune 500 companies in the aerospace, chemical and publishing industries already with its BLISS software product.
CopperEgg has raised $2.1 million to complete its first round funding.
The Austin-based cloud monitoring and analytics company also hired Bob Quillin as its new CEO.
Silverton Partners led the investment along with Webb Investment Network and several private investors including Kenny Van Zant of Asana.
To date, CopperEgg has raised $4.1 million.
“Cloud computing has grown dramatically over the last few years to address a broader base of customers who have ever increasing demands for speed, simplicity, quality of service and value,” Quinllin said in a news release. “CopperEgg is at the forefront of a second generation of companies who are enabling this mass adoption, through SaaS-based solutions that are smarter, faster, lighter weight, and more accessible than the previous generation of cloud monitoring tools.”
Quinllin previously worked at Hyper9, EMC Lonix and nLayers.
In March of 2007, I attended a fellowship in New York at Columbia University on Covering Globalization: Food, Trade, Agriculture and the Environment.
Gary Hirshberg, co-founder, CEO and president at the time of Stonyfield Farm, spoke to our group about the rise of the organic food market.
Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen started Stonyfield Farm in 1983 as an organic farming school with seven cows in Wilton, New Hampshire. The farm sold all natural yogurt as a byproduct. But Hirshberg eventually ditched the school in favor of making yogurt full time. Today, Stonyfield is the largest manufacturer of organic yogurt in the world with $356 million in sales last year.
What I didn’t know when I met Hirshberg was how much he and his family sacrificed and how they almost went bankrupt bringing Stonyfield organic yogurt to a mass market.
In fact, the road to the farm, a mile long muddy dirt road that often washed out and in which trucks often got stuck, served as a metaphor for the business, said Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, Gary’s wife. She writes a column for Inc Magazine and recently wrote a book “For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families” on blending the entrepreneurial life with a fulfilling family life. Meg Hirshberg recently led a Webinar session for Startup America in which she offered advice on how to blend the family and startup life.
Hirshberg recounted the difficulty of raising three young children in a home-based business and how troubling it was to keep asking her mother for money to keep the business afloat.
Hirshberg interviewed 250 successful entrepreneurs and their spouses to share their experiences so other entrepreneurs can learn from them.
“Building a business and a family at the same time is a huge challenge,” Hirshberg said.
When her husband would come home excited about some new venture, Hirshberg would cringe.
“My least favorite words were I have an idea,” she said.
She also dispels the myths of overnight success in entrepreneurship.
“It took us nine years to create this overnight success and we almost didn’t make it,” Hirshberg said. “We were on the verge of bankruptcy the entire time.”
The road to success contained many potholes.
They met at an organic gardening conference in 1984 and married shortly after that. They raised their family in a 19th century farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
“I hadn’t just married a man,” she said. “I married a business as well.”
The business was not romantic, Hirshberg said. It was demanding and stressful and they were constantly digging themselves out of holes and living on the brink of bankruptcy.
“Stonyfield survived and went on to thrive because Gary and our partner were determined” Hirshberg said. “We had a great business just no supply and no demand.”
Physically, the home-based business was quite uncomfortable. The smells from the farm permeated the house, which was drafty and had a mud floor basement where Meg would do the laundry. The family had to deal with a lack of privacy and a revolving door of employees.
“Things got a lot worse, before they got worse,” Hirshberg said. Stonyfield had a constant stream of creditors screaming at them and shareholders threatening lawsuits. The business gobbled up money including a $30,000 inheritance Hirshberg had from her father that she gave to Gary so he could buy fruit for the yogurt when the supplier refused to grant any more credit.
Stonyfield had 300 shareholders and most of them were friends and family. That added a “constant gnawing stress to our lives,” Hirshberg said.
Yet Hirshberg’s mother believed in the product and believed in Gary. She kept financing him when others would not.
“Frankly there were times I wanted to go bankrupt or do anything to be put out of misery,” Hirshberg said. “I really grew to hate the business. The financial risks Gary took were beyond my comfort level.’’
Entrepreneurialism is not a solo activity, Hirshberg said.
The entrepreneur’s spouse is put in a delicate position, she said. Both spouses need to believe in the entrepreneurial venture.
“The term work life balance doesn’t really apply to an entrepreneur,” Hirshberg said. “When you own a business it’s just life.”
The traits of an entrepreneur can make for a bumpy home life because entrepreneurs are obsessed and driven, Hirshberg said. They tend towards workaholism. They are highly distracted.
“Entrepreneurs believe in the impossible,” she said. “They will not be defeated and they will not give up.’
But the traits to building a successful business are the same ones in building a successful family life too, Hirshberg said. It takes perseverance and an intense commitment.
At Stonyfield, just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, Hirshberg said.
“If he and I could make it in business and in home than anyone can,” Hirshberg said. “It’s messy. It’s not perfect. But you’re doing the best you can.’’
The NuMat Technologies team, Chris Wilmer and Tabrez Ebrahim, won a $135,000 package Photo: courtesy of UT McCombs School of Business
NuMat defeated 37 teams from top MBA programs worldwide.
The competition was held last week at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business.
NuMat Technologies designs and creates high-performance materials to store clean fuels and produce them on a large scale for industry.
The NuMat Technologies team, Chris Wilmer and Tabrez Ebrahim, won a $135,000 package including Austin Technology Incubator office space, mentoring and consulting services; a full-page ad in Inc. magazine; $25,000 worth of consulting with the McCombs entrepreneurship faculty; and cash. The winning team will also close the NASDAQ Stock Market on July 27th.
NuMat Technologies’ COO Tabrez Ebrahim received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the university’s Cockrell School of Engineering. Ebrahim has also worked with cleantech startups at the Austin Technology Incubator, which has helped 200-plus startups raise over $1 billion in capital.
Other prizes awarded:
• Paramaxx from Thammasat University in Thailand won a $10,000 Wells Fargo Clean Energy Prize. The startup makes a product that can extract valuable natural minerals such as magnesium, nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial waste.
• Athena Laboratories won a $5,000 first runner-up prize for its FemtoSmooth™ laser technology that can treat cellulite in a minimally invasive, less painful manner.
• Ischiban from the University of Cincinnati won $3,000. The medical device startup company develops comprehensive diagnostic and monitoring systems to aid in the assessment of neurological status for conditions such as stroke.
• Sustainable Agriculture Solutions (SAS) from Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia also won $3,000. The company will produce an enhanced-efficiency fertilizer incorporating a patented nanotechnology called CDS® that protects crop nutrients, saving in fertilizer cost, increasing productivity and safeguarding the environment.
BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
“Those who tell stories rule the world” – Plato
Lyn Graft at SXSW Storytelling for Entrepreneurs
He risked everything and his hard work paid off.
And Schultz, by all accounts, is a great storyteller who can articulate and share the passion of his vision.
That’s an essential part of storytelling for entrepreneurs, says Lyn Graft, chief storyteller and founder of LG Pictures in Austin. He has produced more than 450 videos for companies like CNBC, Microsoft, Dell, SXSW, Sweet Leaf Tea and RISE Global. He has filmed 300 entrepreneurs including founders of Starbucks, Whole Foods, Paul Mitchell, Playboy, Baby Einstein, Clear Channel, Craigslist, BET Television, The Knot and Tom’s Shoes.
Graft shared his knowledge of storytelling recently at a panel at SXSW in Austin.
“It’s about leaving an impression with the person you are talking to,” Graft said. “That’s the art and core of storytelling.”
Graft, who has founded eight companies, has pitched more than 200 people on his ideas and he’s been turned down 95 percent of the time, he said. The competition for startups is stiff, he said. What sets a company apart from the crowd is its story.
“We are all unique,” Graft said. “Your story should be unique. We’re all competing against deep-pocketed companies, what do you have that differentiates yourself?”
A good story has a beginning, middle and an end, Graft said. He recommended everyone listen to author Nancy Duarte’s TedX Talk on “common structure of greatest communicators.”
“You want to transport people to where your vision is,” Graft said.
Another great way to tell a story is to set up the problem, present the opportunity and provide the solution, he said.
A great story leaves the audience with a physical reaction like goosebumps, Graft said. He looks for the “GBM” or Goose Bump Moment in a story. How do you create that? You’ve got to reach down deep into your passion and tell why you do what you do, he said.
“Bottom line: speak from the heart,” he said.
It’s also important to know your audience and figure out how can you reach them.
And avoid ugly babies, Graft said. That means find the beauty in every story that you tell.
Learn from great storytelling entrepreneurs, Graft said. For example, Austin’s Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea and Deep Eddy Vodka, has the amazing ability to turn everything into a story, Graft said.
Stories don’t have to be complex, Graft said. “Fred Smith’s story: I can get your package there overnight. That’s the story of FedEx.”
Graft recommended other great sources to find entrepreneur storytellers: TED, TEDx, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. and Fast Company.
If you have a good story to tell, tell it, but you can’t fake it, Graft said.
“You can only put so much lip gloss on a pig.” Graft said.
Nicole Glaros showing off her TechStars Cloud belt buckle in San Antonio
The only woman in the TechStars Cloud program, Nicole Glaros relocated from Boulder, Colorado to San Antonio with her husband, two-year-old daughter and one month old baby boy.
“It’s not a hard sell for me,” Glaros said. “To pick up and move for four months is not a big deal for us.”
Her husband Mark loves adventure and discovering new places too, she said.
“From our perspective it was an adventure,” Glaros said.
Adventurous is the perfect adjective to describe the outgoing Glaros, who is accomplished, smart, athletic and pretty and a powerful force in the technology startup world.
“TechStars is such a great environment,” Glaros said. “It doesn’t feel like work. I love what I do. “
Glaros moved into a house near Basse Road and San Pedro in January. She had just given birth to her son, Jackson, in December. Her mother also moved in, relocating for four months from Florida to help out with the kids.
“She put her life on hold,” Glaros said.
Family members are the unsung heroes of TechStars, Glaros said. While the entrepreneurs toil away 12 hour or longer days, seven days a week, spouses, kids, other family members and friends often have to adjust their lives.
Glaros knows their pain. She has worked with more than 100 startup tech entrepreneurs. Before joining TechStars, she founded three startups and worked at a technology business incubator, CTEK and other incubation programs in Colorado.
One day, Dave Cohen, a successful entrepreneur, angel investor and cofounder of TechStars, came to CTEK to pitch his idea for a new kind of technology incubator. CTEK’s leaders didn’t care for the idea much, but Glaros did. She sent an email to Cohen asking if he had time to meet her for a beer. He agreed to meet her for 30 minutes.
When Cohen arrived, he asked Glaros what her startup idea was. She said she didn’t have one. She just liked his TechStars idea and wanted to chat.
“That 30 minutes turned into three hours,” Glaros said.
Glaros ended up joining TechStars in 2007 and now serves as the managing director of the TechStars program in Boulder. She agreed to relocate to San Antonio to help Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud with its inaugural program.
TechStars is a highly selective startup accelerator that takes about ten companies per program and provides seed funding from more than 75 different venture capital firms and angel investors. It has five TechStars programs in Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle and San Antonio.
The TechStars Cloud was the first accelerator program exclusively focused on cloud-based computing startups. The first class ran from January through April 11th. Each of the companies received $18,000 and access to $100,000 credit line along with thousands of dollars worth of perks including free website hosting, marketing and other services.
“The goal for me to be here was just to give Jason the resources he needed to launch the TechStars Cloud program,” Glaros said. “Working with Jason has been pure joy. He did a wonderful job.”
Seats enjoyed working with Glaros too.
“I will miss working with Nicole immensely,” Seats said. “We had very different styles that gelled quite well together. She is demanding, tough, detailed, insightful and almost always right. I tried to internalize as much of her thought processes as I could to make myself better.”
Glaros said the TechStars Cloud program was the smoothest launch of a new program in TechStars history and she credits Seats, an accomplished entrepreneur who founded Slicehost and sold it to Rackspace, with that.
Glaros was also impressed with the 11 companies to graduate from the TechStars program.
“It was really cool watching them develop,” she said. “I think the highlight is always seeing the progress of the companies. You literally see them evolve from raw potential to a real thing.”
And they appreciated her.
“She’s brilliant,” said Matt Gershoff, founder of Conductrics, in the TechStars Cloud program. “She’s super smart, confident and incredible at being able to distill complexity into a simple narrative.”
Glaros played a key role in helping the companies hone their eight minute pitch to investors.
“She’s not a pushover,” Gershoff said. “She’s definitely respected. She will tell you the truth even if it’s hard to hear. She’s honest.”
Colin Loretz, founder of Cloudsnap in the TechStars Cloud program, also had high praise for Glaros.
“She was awesome to have around,” Loretz said. “She’s seen more pitches and more startups all the way through to Demo Day than anyone.”
“She sees all the problems you can possibly see,” Loretz said.
Glaros has watched entrepreneurs launch a company, exit the company through sale or acquisition and then come back to serve as a mentor in the TechStars program. She calls the mentors – successful technology entrepreneurs who volunteer their time to help the startups – the secret sauce of TechStars.
“It creates a sort of unified cycle of giving back,” Glaros said.
The startup movement gives Glaros hope that these bright entrepreneurs will go on to create jobs and innovative products that will revive the economy.
“The one thing you cannot outsource is brains, talent and creativity,” she said.
The TechStars program has a 92 percent success rate, Glaros said. TechStars latest stats show that 109 companies still operate, nine have failed and eight have been acquired.
The competition is really stiff to get into TechStars. Glaros had just finished selecting the latest companies for TechStars Boulder. She reviewed 1,172 applications for 10 spots.
“The idea is really quality over quantity,” Glaros said.
So how does an entrepreneur make the cut?
“When we’re looking at a company we’re going to take the best team,” Glaros said. “We want a really great team that is super passionate about what they do,” Glaros said. “The idea doesn’t matter much. Ideas aren’t worth anything. It’s the execution of the idea that is important.”
That means the background of the founders count the most even more than the idea they are pitching, she said. And a lot of those founders have a background in engineering, she said.
And few female engineers apply, she said.
Glaros said women also tend to be more risk-averse than men and not as likely to risk everything to startup a company. And they don’t have huge egos and ego plays a big role in being entrepreneur, Glaros said.
“You have to believe you are the only one on the planet that can solve the problem you’re trying to tackle,” she said.
But women make some of the best entrepreneurs, Glaros said.
“Women tend to underestimate how much they can do,” Glaros said. “They outperform their objectives.”
Women also tend to be very open and they ask for help when they encounter a problem, Glaros said.
Now that the first TechStars Cloud program has wrapped up in San Antonio, Glaros has packed up and returned home. But she remembers her time fondly in the city. She enjoyed visiting local restaurants with her family. She thinks San Antonio is a great place to raise kids.
And although TechStars Cloud enters it quiet period, Glaros thinks San Antonio’s startup scene is heating up under the leadership of Seats and Nick Longo at the Geekdom and others.
In Boulder, TechStars has been able to create a technology startup community. How can San Antonio replicate that?
“Community matters,” Glaros said. “When a community comes together and rallies all kinds of entrepreneurial magic happens.”
The community can help by becoming a customer of a startup, volunteering time and expertise and money.
“Embrace them – open up your address book and wallets,” Glaros said “That’s the best thing you can do.”
When successful entrepreneurs mentor and help startups a vibrant startup community can thrive, Glaros said.
“In Boulder, you can get a meeting with just about anyone,” Glaros said. “Accessibility to leadership is huge.”
Tech starscloud
View more PowerPoint from Laura Lorek
Photo courtesy of the University of Texas by Jill Johnson
And the incubator will be renamed the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs.
“This investment is a game changer that enables us to expand the scale and accessibility of the Texas Venture Labs model,” McCombs Den Thomas Gilligan, said in a statement. “It’s a vote of confidence as well, because of the reputation of Jon Brumley as an entrepreneur, a business build and a distinguished graduate of McCombs and the Wharton School of Business.”
Brumley made his money in the oil and gas industry. He founded six companies.
“Texas Venture Labs is a gem in the Texas entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Brumley said in a statement. “It provides critical, hands-on experience for aspiring entrepreneurs who learn as students the effort required to get a new venture through the financing process. For me, this gift is an opportunity to build our capacity to grow the economy of Texas, while giving a leg up to young entrepreneurs, who remind me a lot of myself at that age.”
Founded in 2010, the Texas Venture Labs has worked with 40 companies that have raised more than $25 million in investment capital. The incubator provides help to graduate students in business, engineering, law and natural sciences. Texas Venture Labs also sponsors the annual Venture Labs Investment Competition, being held this week.
By L.A. Lorek
Data centers gobble up energy.
But some of the smartest minds in the information technology industry want to change that.
They are meeting in San Antonio today and tomorrow to rethink the old ways of putting together servers, power and cooling units and the rest of the guts of data centers to save energy and increase efficiency.
It’s called the Open Compute Project, launched last April by Facebook with the goal of creating the most efficient computer hardware and software for data centers. Of course not everyone has joined the project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are not on board. But lots of major players like Facebook and Rackspace are.
And in just a year, the Open Compute Project has made data centers 38 percent more efficient to run and 24 percent less expensive to build, according to the organization. The group comes up with new hardware and software standards and then they share those with everyone else. The entire data center industry benefits from the open collaborative work of the best engineers in a variety of companies.
About 500 data center leaders from Intel, AMD, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Facebook, Rackspace and more met today at Rackspace’s headquarters in San Antonio for the third summit designed to hammer out designs and think up projects to improve the way data centers operate.
Frank Frankovsky with Facebook
First off, Frankovsky showed a slide listing dozens of new companies that have joined the movement including HP, AMD, Fidelity, Quanta, Tencent, Salesforce.com, VMware, HP and others. Frankovsky wrote a blog post on May 2 providing a full list of new members and detailing all the accomplishments in the past year.
And later on the stage, executives from HP and Dell both unveiled their newly redesigned servers dubbed Project Coyote and Project Zeus respectively.
The objectives of the Open Compute Project are scale, value, simplicity, sustainability and openness, Frankovsky said. That involves rethinking the entire data center from the racks that house the servers to the electrical systems that connect them together.
“We’re ditching the 19 inch rack design,” he said.
A big part of that is creating new 21-inch width standard for racks inside data centers to replace the outdated 19-inch racks, which date back to the 1950s, Frankovsky said.
“We want people to differentiate less and innovate more,” he said.
Following Frankovsky, Glenn Keels, HP, director of marketing of its hyperscale business unit, said the reason HP joined the Open Compute Project was because “leaders do not sit on their laurels” and “leaders develop standards.” HP is number one or number two in the data center markets it serves, Keels said. HP powers some of the largest cloud data centers in the world including Facebook, he said.The cloud market is small but growing exponentially between now and 2020, Keels said.
“HP has begun to think differently,” Keels said. HP is transforming servers and changing the experience with projects like moonshot, voyager and odyssey aimed at improving efficiencies in the data center, Keels said.
“Open Compute Project is the most robust group of problem solvers focused on the data center space and moving from technology and form factors of 1995 to today to reclaim stranded time, space and power,” Keels said.
“We have to reinvent ourselves every time and Open Compute is a fantastic forum for us to do that,” Keels said. “Standardization has the ability to unlock innovation.”
Keels unveiled HP’s Coyote open rack standard at the conference.
Then Forrest Norrod, vice president and general manager of Dell’s Data Center Solutions Group, showed off Dell’s new server and storage designs that meet the Open Rack specifications.
“Dell is deeply rooted in our support for open alliances,” Norrod said. “It’s in our DNA…We are very active in our support for open source.”
Rackspace is also active in the open source movement and in creating less expensive and more efficient data centers. Late Wednesday morning, Mark Roenigk, Rackspace’s chief operating officer, detailed the company’s plans in an interview.
Rackspace has nine data centers globally including two in the United Kingdom and one in Hong Kong. Its U.S. data centers are in Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and the Washington, D.C. area,.
“We shuttered two in San Antonio in the last six months due to inefficiencies,” Roenigk said. “There’s a great example of how quickly this technology is moving.”
In the last two years, Rackspace has seen a 22 percent efficiency improvement in its data centers, Roenigk said.
Rackspace plans to leverage the Open Compute Project designs for computer servers, storage, network and utilities in its next generation data center, which it plans soon, Roenigk said.
Overall, Rackspace has 80,000 servers online serving 172,000 customers today.
“We want to be influential in the design of the hardware,” Roenigk said.
So Rackspace works closely with original equipment makers like HP and Dell, he said.
“Most recently we’ve increased the density of a rack from 7 kilowatts to 18 kilowatts a rack providing more computing power coming out of a smaller footprint,” Roenigk said. “That means less cost which is passed on to our customers.”
Sustainability and saving energy is a core covenant of the Open Computer Project, Roenigk said.
“We were recently judged by Greenpeace in a report “How Clean Is Your Cloud,” Roenigk said. “We’re pleased that even though we’re a small player in the market, we’re in the middle of the pack.”
“We think we can be a big influencer in data center efficiency and the power used to power those data centers,” Roenigk said.
Those decisions on being green stem from the sources that Rackspace uses to power its data centers. That’s why it has bypassed states, which provide cheap power from coal sources in favor of hydro electric, wind and natural gas sources.
“We’re really about serving customers,” Roenigk said. “They pull us and push us in different directions all the time.”
Two years ago, only one in 25 customers ever brought up the subject of sustainability when talking about hosting, Roenigk said.
“Today it is more like six or seven in ten,” he said. “It is now a real part of the sourcing and procurement process.”
On Thursday, engineers attending the summit will hammer out their ideas in special sessions that go very, very deep, Roenigk said. The Open Compute Project has a formal process for people to bring forth their ideas, he said. The board decides which projects are going to drive the most value to the open source community. Then the engineers meet once or several times a week. When they are done, they publish their design specifications to members of the Open Compute Project to use, Roenigk said.
“Linux took 20 years to become a standard,” Roenigk said. “We will do what Linux did in 20 years in five years or less.”
The following video is from Rackspace and explains its role in the Open Compute Project.
Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News