Page 339 of 353

A Conversation with Geekdom’s Nick Longo on His Entrepreneurial Success

February 11, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By Luke Carrière
Lead Organizer of 3DStartup NYC

In August 1994, Nick Longo founded a coffee house in Corpus Christi, Texas, which became one of the first internet cafes in the world. He created a website for his coffee shop and began designing websites for others in his community. By 1996 it had became so popular that he designed software to help people make their own websites and called it CoffeeCup Software, Inc., a startup that went on to win Shareware Industry Awards Foundation (“SIAF Awards”) for Best Web and Internet Software for six years from 1999-2004. In 2000, Nick founded then spun-off Bluedomino Web Hosting, which hosted over 15,000 websites. Nick is now at Rackspace in San Antonio, Texas as “Chief Rainmaker & Director of Strategic Initiatives.” One of the initiatives he is involved in is a collaborative workspace for entrepreneurs called Geekdom.

How did you recognize the opportunity/research the feasibility of the idea?
That’s a good starting place. That was from being a user first. I think a lot of good ideas come from saying to yourself, “hmm this isn’t done right,” or, “I could do this better.”
So, opportunities seem to be right in our own backyard. We are really good at our hobbies and things we do everyday. For example, I’m a webmaster and I don’t like the tools that are available. The idea comes about to make my own software so life will be easier for me. If I can make my life easier for myself, then it is probably going to make someone else’s life easier too. That is exactly how CoffeeCup was formed. I wanted to make my life easier. I had an intuitive sense at it was going to help others because they must be running into the same problems.

How did you finance your business?
I started with just a Master Card. I bought a $500 computer. I setup the computer in my coffee house and slept on the floor for the first year. I spent 24/7 focusing on creation and distribution of software. I took no financing.

What did you do with initial profits?
I wasn’t concerned with paying myself the first year, except for minimal stuff. When I had to make the first hire, I stockpiled cash because I would need another developer. I used the income I earned early as my bootstrapping money. So, I would “save, save, save,” and then hire to make more software. It was really a bootstrap deal.

How long did it take for your company to become profitable?
Within the first three months I was able to close the coffee house. I paid myself as much as I could, of course, I was keeping it really low. At the end of year one I had already made another two pieces of software.

How did your idea change throughout the process?
Originally I put it out for free. But a few things that changed. First, I had no idea how big the market was going to become. I made an HTML editor and that was all I planned to make. Then, a few months later, I realized there was a lot more opportunity and I need to make more software. My original intent was only making an HTML editor. But by the time I was done there were 35 pieces of software. That was a major shift.

Did you ever think of giving up? If so why?
I’m not a big fan of the “fail” methodology. If I were operating on a “fail fast” mindset, I would have been discouraged at month 3, and at month 6. When you are doing it by yourself, or only one other guy, you have all these aspirations to make a million dollars, and then you realize you can barely pay yourselves. That can be discouraging. I don’t have a “fail” bone. I say to myself, “I am going to ride this out as far as I can for as long as I can before it fails.” When I start something I don’t start believing its going to be successful, I start believing that I don’t want to fail. I always keep this little “fear of failure” thing in my pocket. I don’t worry about it succeeding, I just don’t want to fail. That can be a major driving motivator. Sometimes it’s not healthy. I’m more concerned about paying the rent.

What was your initial role? What is your current role in the company now?
We didn’t use the word “startup.” Starting a new business automatically made me a founder. As business develops and you add more products and there are more revenue and profits which increase the amount of problems like taxes, accountants, insurance and employees. The role shift goes from Founder to CEO, and that is a hard transition to make. Founders have fun: CEO’s not so much. Then it becomes a daily process and a monthly process of watching numbers. Before I sold my business I spent more time during the last half, 5-6 years, hitting refresh and checking revenue and planning marketing and sales, than I did in the first half.

What are the most successful marketing techniques? Guerilla marketing?
Everything I do is guerilla. Try to spend least possible on anything normal. In 11 years I spent approximately $100,000 in total marketing costs. We did a lot of one-on-one marketing to our distributors like CNET and other download sites. We would take those guys out to parties, which was cheaper than paying for advertizing. In return, they would give us way better advertising spots than we could ever afford by being cool with them. I’m a big fan of contests. I’ve given away Super Bowl tickets, a Rolex, a Mercedes: I’m really big on contests. Surprisingly, that is cheaper than having a marketing budget. We would raid conferences, like crashing a wedding. We wouldn’t even buy tickets. We didn’t even look like we should be there. We handed out our software up and down every isle. I’d rather have a developer than spend money on marketing. It did take a lot of tricks to walk through the back door to get to the front door.

What is the worst advice you have ever received and why?
Well, to be honest with you I didn’t really take peoples’ advice. Our culture was a little weird. We used to talk about being in a petri dish. You were either in the petri dish or your not in the petri dish. We didn’t let much in and we didn’t go out of it. We were really making our own rules. I didn’t take much advice.
The best advice I got was to make it shareware and actually sell it and timeout the software. I remember that. It was from one of the founders of download.com. Besides that, we weren’t taking much advice. To me all advice was bad. If we ever heard it, it usually didn’t match what we were doing because the company was very rouge.

You were trailblazing?
If you want to call it that. If our attempts didn’t work it was okay because it was the internet. You could delete it and it goes away and its not a big deal. If you released software and no one bought it you could delete it and move onto the next project. We didn’t invest too much time in any one specific piece f software. We were developing software in really short amounts of time, the epitome of agile development or rapid application development. We would say, “if we add this feature…wait, lets just make it its own piece of software.” Every 2-week and 4-week blocks we were delivering another piece of software.

Which part of your job is actual work opposed to passion?
You’re mostly driven by passion, not by what the outcome will be. If you love what you’re doing you are probably going to get a good result. That doesn’t always have to mean money. Even today, CoffeeCup is pretty well known. We were trying to help people change their lives by using our software so they don’t have to work for the man any more. That made us anti-establishment. That drove our passion. All the people who worked for us were that way.
We didn’t follow any process. The smaller the team, and closer we are together, the more money we can make, and the more we can do what we believe to be the right thing, which was to make software cheap for everyone, so they don’t have to work for the man. If that was the mission, it was passion driven. It means 24/7 hours, but passion doesn’t have to be about hard work if your having fun. If you are having fun, it shouldn’t be work. So, if you find yourself thinking you are working too much it probably means you are losing some of the passion you started with on your first day.

How is the economy effecting your business?
I think that is product driven. During my tenure at CoffeeCup we went through the Dot Com Bubble Burst, and 9/11, and another stock market crash. Those were actually opportunities. When the economy is down people lose their jobs, which means more people want to do their own thing. More entrepreneurs and startups are born when the economy is down. CoffeeCup was there through a lot of the bad, but we made out better because of it.
If everyone has tons of money they will buy the expensive software, regardless of whether it works well or not. We were there for beginners and intermediates. It was perfect in goods times and bad. In bad we did better. That is an awesome market to be in: a business that is recession proof. I would always be looking for that.
There is a big difference between needs and wants. For example we need a car, we want a Mercedes. You are better off selling products or services that people need. “Want businesses” are hurt the most, not the “need businesses.”

What is your advice to future entrepreneurs?
First, find the thing that people need, not what they want. Second, absolutely do the thing that you are passionate about, not the thing that you think is going to make money.
Those are two super super important things. Right when you find the striking balance between those, that is when you will find yourself successful: worrying less about failing but knowing that it is still there.
Don’t drive for success: drive not to fail.

Reprinted with permission from 3DStartupNYC

WP Engine Cultivates a Lucrative Niche Hosting WordPress Websites

February 10, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News

WP Engine co-founder Jason Cohen knew there was a market for what he wanted to build. Because it was exactly what he needed.
The founder of four companies and a dedicated blogger, Cohen often made the front page of Hacker News. And every time he did, his site went down. Having a sudden surge of popularity and traffic, he realized, doesn’t do you a lot of good if it causes your site to crash until the traffic goes away.
It was easy to assume that, with 15 percent of all websites and 22 percent of new websites in WordPress according to WP statistics, others were having the same issues. WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and one of the web’s most popular content management systems.
“I needed to know what are the root pain points?” Cohen said. “Volume is one. Speed is another. It can often take three or four seconds for a page to come up. What about security? What about support? What about testing? Everything is live right now. Testing is where I can work it out and see it.”
Cohen talked to 50 people before starting the business, asking them: “Would you pay for this? What would you pay for this?” Once 30 people committed to spending $50 a month, he started to build his hosting company for the middle market, people with a lot of traffic “who aren’t CNN.” WP Engine launched in July of 2010. Cohen founded the company with Aaron Brazell, who stepped down last October to do consulting work.
When Matt Halfhill heard about Cohen’s infant company that hosted high volume WordPress sites, he said what so many of WPEngine’s customers say: “That’s exactly what I need!”
“That was my biggest problem ever in business,” Halfhill said. “So few hosts understand the nuts and bolts of how WordPress works. (WPEngine) breaks it down to the point where there are next to no inefficiencies.”
At the time he joined WP Engine, in 2010, Halfhill’s company NiceKicks had more than a million visitors per month. The site, which previews and reviews sneakers, was paying Rackspace $6,000 to $7,000 a month for the bandwidth to handle all its traffic. With WPEngine, it pays closer to $1,000. And its monthly traffic has more than doubled.
Rackspace spokesman Rob La Gesse said “While many providers choose to compete on price, Rackspace differentiates itself on service, which we call Fanatical Support®. With that being said, WPEngine and Rackspace have significantly different business models, products and pricing structures.”
Cohen has always been something of a prodigy. He was fresh out of college with his computer science degree when he was discovered by Jim Woodhill, a famous psychologist and venture capitalist who was on an email list of “random smart people” with Cohen’s dad.
“He is the kind of guy who doesn’t care as much about the idea as the team. He decides ‘I just need to collect certain kinds of people and I want you,’” Cohen said. The company Cohen started, however, didn’t create products but performed services. And though he was bringing in $1 million a year, the venture capital firm lost interest. Soon afterward, he connected with Gerry Cullen, a serial entrepreneur.
“He was young,” Cullen says of Cohen. “You want to know how young he was? He was so young I had to rent cars for him.”
The two created Sheer Genius Software.
“He was the genius software guy and I was the CEO lead developer,” Cullen said. “I was the leg guy and he was the brains….Jason was very fast on his feet. People asked him questions he just answered them, kaboom. I’d lift the flagstone up and all the little snakes would run and we’d get them. It was great happy times.”
For one order, the $750,000 big order, Cullen said, they were brought to London to develop a program for a government office. Cohen wound up having to jerry-rig a modem using ‘doorbell’ wire running from the building’s bathroom. And, because the monitors were so small and the offices so bright it was difficult to see the screens, Cullen created a little hut of foam board to make it dark enough.
“It was like we were showing weird porn in the government offices and we didn’t want anybody to see.”
They got the order.
After Sheer Genius, they started IT WatchDogs, which manufactured climate monitoring devices for server facilities. During that time, Cohen said, Cullen taught him all about the business end of startups. He taught him, for example, about the Stanford Test, a test he made up.
The Stanford Test is this: If you make something, can you give it away for free? Will people want it? Because if they won’t, there’s not much point in charging for it.”
IT WatchDogs demonstrated the Stanford principal. The first climate control monitor plugged directly into the servers. Server companies were horrified.
“They’re like ‘You’re not sticking that thing in my server!’” Cohen recalls. It failed the Stanford Test. Then they created a model that only plugs into the wall outlet and never touches the server. That model people wanted. They’d even pay for it.
Cohen and Cullen wound up selling IT WatchDogs. But about the same time they had started it, Cohen had, almost inadvertently, started Smart Bear Inc. He created a site online whereby programmers could submit code they were working on for peer review. It was an idea he was tinkering with that took off. He ran it until 2009 when he got an offer to buy the company that would give him enough money he never had to work again. After checking with some of his advisors—17 to be exact—he took it.
He took a sabbatical to stay home with his new baby. He began blogging almost obsessively. And then the idea for WPEngine arose.
He and Josh Baer, founder of Capital Factory and a serial entrepreneur in Austin who runs Other Inbox, put in a little bit of seed money and within seven months, the company was profitable. They hired two people and six months later it was profitable again. But all these baby steps were time consuming. So Cohen sought funding and wound up with $1.2 million last November. Silverton Partners from Austin led the round, which included prominent angels investors like Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup, Loic Le Meur, Dharmesh Shah, Jeremy Benken, Bill Boebel, Rob Walling and others. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, also participated with a strategic investment.
WP Engine now has an install base of more than 30,000 personal and professional WordPress blogs. It recently dropped its base hosting price from $50 a month to $29. And it has plenty of room to grow. More than 71 million WordPress sites exist worldwide and WordPress.com hosts about half of them.
WP Engine is always tweaking.
Halfhill said the company is super proactive. They’ll call him to say “You’re definitely sucking up a lot of resources, we might want to reconfigure. There are no charges for that. It just feels like they’re taking care of me as a customer. It’s just like breathing.”
Cohen, though, is a startup guy. He’s constantly percolating with other ideas. Lately he’s been really focused on the idea of honesty, how honesty should be the bedrock of businesses. He might do something with that at some point.
“People asked me, ‘When you had enough money to live off forever, why do a startup?’” Cohen said. “It’s just in you…some people have to do companies.”

Disclosure: Rackspace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

SXSW Interactive introduces nonprofits to powerful new social media tools

February 9, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By Luke Carrière
Special contributor to Silicon Hills News

The Austin Forum on Science, Technology and Society hosted a free event Tuesday evening to help nonprofit organizations get the most out of South by Southwest Interactive 2012.
The event attracted non-profit professionals, start-up founders, and University of Texas students. Several people tweeted throughout the evening using the hashtag #austinforum.
To kick things off, Hugh Forrest, director of the SXSW Interactive Festival showed a video by SXSWi, which is an example of how nonprofits can use technology to engage their followers. He advised nonprofits to create dynamic videos, rather than videos featuring their executive director speaking into the camera for 12 minutes, which would not communicate their mission as well. He also invited the audience to attend a free event on March 11: The 2012 Dewey Winburne Community Service Award Ceremony, which honors one of the co-founders of SXSWi, who “believed that the new media revolution could help level the playing field between the haves and the have-nots in our society.”
Next, Heidi Schultz Adams, senior director of engagement at LIVESTRONG, pointed to the power of social media in managing communications with seven time Tour de France Champion and Philanthropist Lance Armstrong’s 3 million followers. Lynn Freehill tweeted Adam’s advice on how to handle the debates that surface on social platforms, “Leave in negative comments, leave in positive comments–let the conversation unfold.” The bottom line about using social media was summarized by Ronald McDonald House Charities Austin, “Social media costs you, but it can also save money for a nonprofit. Be smart about it.” Yes, you will need to dedicate time and resources to ensure you do it right. Giving the task to an unpaid intern is not the way to manage and cultivate constituent relationships effectively.
David J. Neff, founder of Lights. Camera. Help said his nonprofit, like many in Austin, is constantly exploring ways to generate revenue. He said it can often be difficult for a nonprofit to reach the point where they can afford to hire their first full time employee. In contrast, startups have it easier than nonprofits because of the huge upside of potential profit they offer investors and employees. SXSWi can be a resource for nonprofits to stay on top of emerging technology and tools, he said. He recalled SXSW 2005, when he learned about the growing field of online video. That is now central to his nonprofit, which connects nonprofits with videographers to help them convey their mission in a video form. “SXSW Interactive is where I go to find out what’s going to be hot in two years,” Neff said.
Overall, the take-away from the event was that nonprofit leaders should stay aware of the powerful social media tools being developed every year. If SXSW Interactive is not within your budget, there are many free events to attend and affordable options like SXSWedu and SXSWeco.

Sara Peralta, a student at Texas State University, covering all things SXSW at SXSTXSTATE. Filed this Storify post on the event.

GameSalad Democratizes Game Creation and Prospers

February 7, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By L.A. LOREK
Founder of SiliconHillsNews.com

GameSalad Founders Dan Treiman (seated), Tan Tran (center) and Michael Agustin

Supporters of an Indian activist on a hunger strike created a computer game “Angry Anna” in his honor last year.
Fashioned after Angry Birds, the game features a slingshot to fling caricatures of protestor Anna Hazare and others at Indian politicians. The game took just three days to make using the GameSalad creation platform.
“Angry Anna speaks to games as communications tools,” said Michael Agustin, co-founder of Austin-based GameSalad.
In its first week, people played the game more than 250,000 times. The viral game, created on HTML5, the web’s publishing language, allowed it to reach an audience quickly. Players could log on to the game using their computers without downloading additional software or plug-ins. They could also easily share the game by embedding it on websites or posting it to Twitter or Facebook. It’s just like a YouTube video and that’s what the GameSalad founders set out to do when they created the company. They wanted to develop the “Youtube” of game creation platforms online.
“We wanted to democratize the creation of video games,” Agustin said, during a recent interview at the company’s new headquarters at 9600 Great Hills Trail.

Michael Agustin, co-founder of GameSalad

And that is what the GameSalad Creator does. It lets anyone design, publish and distribute games online, regardless of their skill level, with easy to use, drag and drop tools that require no coding. GameSalad games can be published to all kinds of platforms including iOS devices like the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, Mac desktops, or to the Web.
So far, people have built and published 30,000 games with the GameSalad Creator. That includes more than 40 top 100 games in Apple’s App Store.
“We see 1,000 new games a month,” Agustin said.
The GameSalad Creator tools are easy to use and that appeals to everyone from professional game developers to kids.
Abdulrahman Al Zanki, a 15-year-old in Afghanistan, created Doodle Destroy in three days using the GameSalad tools. It has been downloaded nearly 1 million times. He’s since built eight other games for the iPhone and iPad.
Conner Haines, an 11-year-old CEO of FlipFlopGames, builds games for kids with cancer using the GameSalad platform. He creates the games for free and any proceeds from the sale of a game goes to the Make A Wish Foundation.
“I really like to think of game or app ideas and just bring them to life and let the whole world play or use them,” Haines wrote on his website.
Agustin formed GameSalad, formerly known as Gendai Games, with Tan Tran, and Dan Treiman in 2007.
“We wanted to enable people to create content easily online,” Agustin said.
It’s working. GameSalad is the number one platform for iOS development and boasts 300,000 developers, Agustin said. The company has 42 employees in Austin, San Francisco and Los Angeles and 20 contractors and it is hiring.
“We are always looking out for top folks,” Agustin said. “We’re one of the largest game companies in the world.”
Initially, Agustin and the other founders bootstrapped the company for three years. That is they put their own money into it and ran it off the revenues generated from the business. They joined the Austin Technology Incubator in July of 2009 and worked out of its offices until recently. GameSalad graduated last month from ATI.
ATI’s former IT and Wireless Director Bart Bohn met the GameSalad founders at a 2008 Texas Funding Symposium. He then invited them to the 2008 Wireless Seed Stage Forum and the 2009 Entrepreneur’s Lounge at SXSW.

Michael Agustin, co-founder of GameSalad at ATI graduation

“Michael, Tan and Dan and the rest of the crew are extremely passionate about what they are doing,” said Bohn, now CEO and founder of AuMANIL. “The time they spent working on GameSalad early on has really paid off.”
The founders got a product up early, sold games and funded their company with the proceeds, Bohn said.
“It let them progress farther in the maturation process,” Bohn said. “It gave them a better vision of their company and they could move faster when they raised money.” They could also hold on to a larger ownership stake, he said.
The GameSalad founders also saw the potential early on in the mobile space, Bohn said.
Venture Capitalist Aziz Gilani with DFJ Mercury in Houston first met Agustin at SXSW in 2009.
“I knew he was going to do something great, but was unconvinced about the market he was going after (desktop casual games.) We still kept in touch, and spent some time together at SXSW 2010,” Gilani said. “He had shifted his focus to iOS which was an area that I was much more excited about. After SXSW I went back to Houston and bought a Mac so that I could install and play with the tool. I was floored by how easy it was to create games and knew we had a hit on our hands.”
Houston-based DFJ Mercury led a $1.1 million seed investment in GameSalad in July 2010. Then in March of 2011, the firm participated in the $6.1M Series A financing led by Steamboat Ventures, Disney’s venture capital firm.
With the venture investment, Disney Executive Steve Felter, who previously worked as chief operating officer of DigiSynd, a social media marketing company Disney acquired, became the chief executive officer. He works out of San Francisco along with Agustin, who became the chief products officer.

Frank Coppersmith, GameSalad COO

Frank Coppersmith also joined GameSalad last year and he oversees the Austin office as the company’s chief operating officer. Previously, he served as vice president of finance and administration for Austin-based Challenge Online Games, which Zynga acquired in 2010.
The competitive advantage GameSalad has is its intense focus on making game design accessible, Gilani said.
“GameSalad was designed from the ground up to be a code-free, yet insanely powerful game design tool that anyone can use,” Gilani said. “That is an extremely hard feat to accomplish, and is only possible because of Michael’s heritage from Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center.”
At Carnegie Mellon University, Agustin studied with Randy Pausch, professor and founder of the Entertainment Technology Center. Pausch died in 2008 from pancreatic cancer. He wrote The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times bestseller.
Pausch pioneered the non-profit Alice project, an innovative 3-D environment that teaches programming to young people via storytelling and interactive game playing.
Pausch made quite an impression on Agustin and his quest to democratize the game development and distribution industry. Agustin received his master’s degree from Carnegie Mellon and his undergraduate degree from the University of Texas in computer programming.
“GameSalad was also blessed by making several smart strategic decisions early on,” said Galini with DFJ Mercury. “They were building games with HTML5 before it was trendy. They also decided very early on to deeply engage with their community of developers, enlisting their biggest contributors as “Sous Chefs” and having an extremely open dialogue with them about the company’s direction. GameSalad understands that it can’t be successful unless its game creators are successful, so their opinions have a huge impact on the direction of the company.”
In 2012, GameSalad is focused on its game developers and looking for more ways to generate profit for them, Agustin said. It is also going to expand the feature set of its existing tools and focus on distributing games internationally. Europe is the second largest market behind the United States for GameSalad and it’s looking to expand into Asia.

On Austin’s North side on technology row, the GameSalad offices, outfitted with IKEA furniture, are filled with game developers. Posters of its games developed by its own programming team, hang on the walls.
“They are very focused and very dedicated,” Bohn said. “They went out and learned a bunch from a lot of people in the industry. Their passion and their ability to listen and evolve and take feedback and incorporate that into what they are doing has helped lead to their success. I’m so excited for what they are doing. I end up being a huge cheerleader for them.”

Apollo Endosurgery Inc. Lands $47.6 million in Financing

February 6, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Who’s got $47.6 million in new financing?
That would be Apollo Endosurgery Inc. The Austin-based medical device maker announced that it has landed a big round of funding to develop its line of minimally invasive, scarless surgical procedures.
Apollo Endosurgery’s investors include Novo A/S, Remeditex Ventures, CPMG, Inc., PTV Sciences and H.I.G. BioVentures.
The company will use the money to launch its OverStitch Endoscopic Suturing System and other flexible surgical tools that allow surgeons to perform numerous procedures without making incisions into the patient’s skin.

Movie Night for TechStars Cloud at Geekdom

February 3, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Who knew Microsoft made movies?
Microsoft will screen its new movie on entrepreneurship, Ctrl+Alt+Compete tonight at 6 p.m. at Geekdom, a collaborative workspace in downtown San Antonio.
“Ctrl+Alt+Compete is a new documentary that takes a revealing look at the startup and emerging business scene through the eyes of 5 founders and their teams and tells a story of the passion, fortitude and insanity that is bringing a startup to life,” according to Microsoft.
The first TechStars Cloud program kicked off in San Antonio on Jan. 19 with 11 companies that all moved to the city from outside the state. Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros, managing directors, run the TechStars Cloud program at Geekdom on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre. The three-month incubator and mentoring program ends with a demo day in April.
Microsoft has been at Geekdom all day teaching the TechStars Cloud entrepreneurs about Microsoft Azure, said Nick Longo, director of Geekdom.

Austin Entrepreneur Andrew Busey joins Austin Ventures

February 3, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Austin Ventures announced that Andrew Busey, a well-known Austin entrepreneur, has joined its firm as a venture partner.
Busey formerly served as vice present and general manager at Zynga, makers of Farmville.
“In his new role, Andrew will help the venture team identify and attract very early-stage companies,” John Thornton, general partner of Austin Ventures, said in a news statesman.
Busey built Challenge Games into large social gaming company which Zynga acquired. He also co-founded Pluck, which DemandMedia acquired.
He is a graduate in computer science and marketing from Duke University and holds an MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Lori Hawkins, technology reporter with the Austin American Statesman, has covered Busey for a long time and has written a good story on his latest move.

Create a Video at the Austin Video Marketing Marathon

February 2, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Tech startups looking to get a high-quality video to publicize their business might be interested in the Austin Video Marketing Marathon.

LocalizeAustin and UPG Video Marketing are hosting a video shoot for Austin small business on Thursday, Feb. 16th at Center61, a co-working community for social entrepreneurs and nonprofits.

Up to 15 businesses can register to make a video on the spot to promote their business. The entire process takes about an hour.

TaskRabbit to launch in Austin and San Antonio in March

February 1, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Got some IKEA furniture that needs assembling?
No worries.
In March, TaskRabbit launches in the Austin and San Antonio markets and people will be able to post all kinds of tasks on the site for others to perform for a fee.
The most popular task in San Francisco is assembling IKEA furniture, said Johnny Brackett, TaskRabbit spokesman.
TaskRabbit, which launched in 2008 in Boston, is now available in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, New York City and Los Angeles.
“Austin makes sense as the next step,” Brackett said. “We look for urban cities and tech-savvy cities.”
TaskRabbit saw a lot of demand from people in the Austin and San Antonio area requesting the service, Brackett said.
Nationwide, TaskRabbit has more than 3,000 people who work as TaskRabbit runners. Anyone over the age of 21 can apply to run errands.
“It’s sort of like a college application,” Brackett said. The site does federal, county and other background checks to license its errand runners. The whole process takes around five to seven days but it can also take up to four weeks. TaskRabbit is accepting applications now for the Austin and San Antonio market.
“Some of our most active Taskrabbits are running two to three tasks a day and cashing out $5,000 a month,” Brackett said.
In addition to furniture assembly, other popular tasks include cleaning, grocery delivery and lunch delivery. The site provides a platform for micro-entrepreneurship, Brackett said.
“We even get some unique ones like paint a mural on my wall or help me prank my colleague by wrapping everything in cellophane,” Brackett said. “We’re saving people time. It’s all about living more efficiently.”
Trust and security are really important to TaskRabbit, Brackett said. It has built in a reputation engine into its system so that errand runners are reviewed on a task by task basis. They’ve also built some game features into the site to reward so-called Taskrabbits for completing tasks.
“We’re all about transparency and ratings and reviews,” Brackett said.

WeAreAustinTech plans to launch in March

January 31, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Joshua Baer, founder of the OtherInbox and founder of a gazillion startups, has a new venture he’s heading up. He has joined with a handful of people in the Austin technology community to create WeAreAustinTech.
Each week the site will highlight an “icon” in the Austin technology community in a video interview posted to its site.
“The past two Saturdays I’ve been huddled under hot camera lighting with Toyin Akinmusuru, Ruben Cantu, Rene Lego, and Austen Trimble interviewing some of the top movers and shakers in the Austin tech community who also happen to be many of my idols,” Baer wrote in his weekly Startup Digest. “It’s been an incredible experience and we’ve captured unique and moving content. We will be unveiling the site soon, but for now you can follow us on Twitter @weareaustintech and Like us on Facebook.”