BigCommerce, the ecommerce platform, announced Wednesday that it has closed on $64 million in growth equity funding, led by Goldman Sachs.

Other investors include General Catalyst, GVC Capital and Tenaya Capital. To date, BigCommerce has raised more than $200 million.

“Our mission is to help every business selling online maximize success through the benefits of SaaS,” Brent Bellm, CEO for BigCommerce said in a news release. “Ecommerce is constantly evolving, and brands need technologies that allow them to stay current and competitive. With this funding, we will continue investing aggressively in our platform, technology and team to serve customers’ needs at every phase of their growth.”

“We are excited to partner with Brent and the BigCommerce team,” Holger Staude, Vice President Private Capital Investing at Goldman Sachs, said in a news release. “BigCommerce is an acknowledged leader in SaaS ecommerce for the mid-market, and given its track record and scale we see tremendous opportunity for continued growth.”

BigCommerce has recently struck strategic partnerships with Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Square and PayPal. In particular, BigCommerce expanded its partnership with Instagram to enable shopping on the platform for its brands.

“The overwhelming interest we received for this round further validates our belief that the future of ecommerce is powered by SaaS,” Russell Klein, Chief Development Officer for BigCommerce, said in a news release. “We look forward to leveraging Goldman Sachs’ considerable resources and expertise.”

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

From dog walking services to robot teaching assistants, 10 startups pitched their ventures at the sixth annual Techstars Austin Demo Day.

This year’s class included six teams from the Carolinas and Virginia and four from Austin and half of them had female founders. They made their pitches to investors, mentors, community members and the media on Friday at Brazos Hall in downtown Austin.

Overall, Techstars footprint in Austin is growing.

In 2013, Jason Seats, venture partner at Techstars, launched Techstars Austin and in 2016 he handed the operation over to Amos Schwartzfarb, managing director of Techstars Austin.

Earlier this year, Techstars announced its second program in Austin focused on impact companies, Techstars Impact, headed up by Zoe Schlag, managing director. She just selected the first cohort of 10 for-profit companies focused on solving social problems.

“Austin is quickly becoming one of the best cities in the country, if not the world, to launch and grow a company,” Schlag said.

Techstars Impact program begins in June and on August 23rd, the cohort will pitch during its Demo Day, Schlag said.

During the 90-day program, Techstars companies receive mentorship from the Austin community and beyond. They also receive a $100,000 convertible note. And Techstars contributes $20,000 for expenses and receives 6 percent common stock from each company.

Some of notable Techstars Austin alumni companies based locally include Convey, ThreatCare, LawnStarter, SelfLender, WriterDuet, Patient.io, Atlas Wearables, and Authors.me.

“This is the Demo Day season I think and it feels like the biggest one in the seven years I’ve been here in Austin,” said Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin and inventor of Ethernet. He attended the Techstars VIP Demo Day pitches. “The quality of the pitches has gone up and up and up.”

The most compelling feature of a company is traction, Metcalfe said. And quite of few of the latest Techstars startups showed revenue growth during the last year.

“A large majority of these companies have bootstrapped their operations,” Schwartzfarb said.

That meant several already had customers, revenue, and traction and had tested their ideas before they entered the program, Schwartzfarb said.

The 10 Techstars Austin startups included the following:

The Waggle Company, based in Charlotte, North Carolina: It provides dog walking services through an online platform and is launching in Austin next month, said Meggie Williams, CEO, and Co-Founder. The company hires its dog walkers as employees, not contractors, she said.

The Huffington Post surveyed 1,000 dog owners and found that 38 percent love their dog more than their spouse, said Williams.

“It’s not just a dog, it’s your buddy, it’s your best friend,” she said. “And you would do anything to make sure your dog is healthy and happy.”

The Waggle Company has 60 employees and has completed more than 45,000 visits and is one of the largest dog walking services in the Southeast in less than two years, Williams said. The company is on track to reach $1.8 million in revenue this year, she said. Pet services is a $6 billion industry and it’s growing fast, Williams said. The startup is expanding into the mobile dog grooming and dog daycare industry as well, she said.

Mesur.io, based in Danville, Virginia, enables farmers to accurately water and fertilize seed by using its Earthstream product to provide real-time environmental measurements and advanced analytics.

“Today, more than 70 percent of the world’s drinkable water is used in agriculture,” said Tom Rump, CEO of Mesur.io. “Due to the lack of real-time insight, it’s estimated that as much as half of that water, half is wasted.”

In the marketplace today, there are very few solutions to solve the problem, Rump said. So Mesur.io has created the Earthstream platform to provide the solution, he said.

It is currently working with family farms in the U.S., principally in the sustainable and organic growing category, Rump said. That’s a $1.5 billion market, he said. He estimates his products can save farmers as much as 35 percent of their spend on water. The company will work with 10,000 family farms this year, Rump said.

“We are going to grow, and grow, and grow,” he said.

Van Robotics, based in Columbia, South Carolina, creates smart robots named Abii that tutor children in a wide variety of subjects and deliver personalized instruction.

Only one out of every four students test proficiently in math today, said Laura Boccanfuso, co-founder, and CEO of Van Robotics. With her robot tutors, she is seeking to reverse those statistics so that three out of every four students will test proficiently in math.

Abii is in five school districts across the country in a test pilot, Boccanfuso said.

The smart robotics market is worth $20 billion in the U.S., Boccanfuso said. Van Robotics plans to introduce the robot first in schools as a teaching assistant and then in the home market and eventually the international market, she said.

DocStation, based in Austin, is a clinical software platform for pharmacists that connects payers and pharmacists to cut costs and improve patient outcomes.

“Forty-eight percent of the American public suffers from a chronic illness,” said Samm Anderegg, a pharmacist, and CEO of DocStation.

DocStation launched in February and pharmacists have already added more than 5,000 patients to its platform, Anderegg said. It has earned $400,000 in revenue from health plans across seven states and is on track to add $4.2 million in additional revenue by the end of 2018, he said.

“And with the right partners we can do so much more,” Anderegg said. “DocStation transforms your local pharmacy into a community health plan.”

Locus Insights, based in Austin, which uses proprietary eye-tracking technology to provide real-time information on how users look on their smartphones.

“With this technology, we are unlocking access to a whole new world of data that has never been gathered before,” said Tom Jackson, co-founder and CEO of Locus Insights.

Allstacks, based in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, measures the productivity of software engineers on a development team.

“We bring all of your engineering data into one place,” said Hersh Tapadia, CEO and co-founder of Allstacks. “And we help you bridge these knowledge gaps.”

Allstacks can help companies identify their top performers and which employees are struggling and burning out, Tapadia said.

Allstacks has been working with more than a dozen companies since launching its beta last November. It is gathering insights from more than 35,000 user accounts today, Tapadia said.

Rosso & Flynn, based in Austin, is an online butcher shop.

“Sadly, the massive growth of factory farming really severed our connection to the land and we’ve had a generation of Americans growing up on bad food,” said Manuel Rosso, CEO and Co-Founder. “Fortunately, the pendulum is beginning to swing in the other direction.”

Consumers want more than just a brand, Rosso said. They want transparency, they want quality ingredients and they demand to know what goes into their food, he said.

The natural and organic categories are growing two to three times the rate of the rest of the grocery market, Rosso said.

“The food we eat is getting better,” he said. “But there still is a lot of work to be done.”

Rosso & Flynn plans to expand to the rest of Texas and then nationwide, Rosso said.

Transmute, based in Austin, is a blockchain development platform.

“We help enterprises build blockchain security into the fabric of your applications,” said Karyl Fowler, Chief Executive Officer of Transmute.

A data breach in the U.S. costs an average of $7.3 million to resolve, Fowler said.

The financial impact of a world rampant with cybercrime is quickly approaching $6 trillion a year (according to Cybersecurity Ventures’ report), Fowler said. This is a direct result of weaknesses inherent in the databases companies like yours rely on today, she said.

“The question isn’t if your data will be compromised, but when” Fowler said.

That’s why they built the Transmute platform to give companies a way to easily upgrade the security of their applications with blockchain technology, she said.

“Blockchain is a technology that is nearly impossible to tamper with due to its novel use of cryptography,” she said.

Milkful, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, makes lactation snacks for breastfeeding moms.

Only 22 percent of breastfeeding moms make it to the seven-month mark, as recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, said Dina Carey, founder, and CEO of Milkful.

Carey launched Milkful after her first daughter, Lawson Rose, was born in 2014. Carey wasn’t able to breastfeed for as long as she wanted and decided to create nutritious snacks for lactating moms to get the proper nutrition they need to continue to breastfeed their babies for as long as possible.

With an original investment of just $3,000, Carey took her business degree and culinary training and launched Milkful.com. In just its first 18th months since launch, the company has bootstrapped its way to nearly $2 million in online sales, she said.

“And that means we have supported more than 22,000 moms across the country in meeting their nursing goals,” Carey said. “Guys we are impacting lives in a big way here.”

Milkful reached its $2 million in revenue with just one product sold exclusively online and a team of just two people. Now it plans to expand its product line and connect moms with its online community, Carey said.

And, with the help of Milkful, Carey was able to reach her nursing goals with her second daughter, Iyla.

SkillPop, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, provides community-based pop-up classes.

Haley Bohon, founder of SkillPop, launched the company a few years ago to make learning new skills easy for adults. Today, more than 20,000 students have taken a class with skill pop, she said. The classes include everything from hand lettering to public speaking.

“These things are huge and they are just the beginning,” Bohon said.

SkillPop has a waitlist to teach classes and its classes sell out within hours, Bohon said.

“Because these classes have turned into amazing social experiences that our customers are obsessed with,” she said.

“It all comes down to the rapid growth demand for experiences,” she said.

As a bootstrapped and profitable company, SkillPop has done more than $750,000 in revenue since January of 2016, doubling year over year, Bohon said. And SkillPop is on track to hit $1.5 million in revenue this year, she said. It is in five markets already and it continues to expand, she said.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Pioneers in pot see a huge market developing nationwide for legal cannabis, and they think it’s not if, but when, legal marijuana will become a huge market in Texas.

That’s the big takeaway from the first ever Austin Cannabis Entrepreneur conference held last Thursday and Friday at the Hyatt Regency downtown.

“I think we are ahead of the curve in Texas,” said Hugh Forrest, programming director at South by Southwest, who created the conference. “It is a market that is being disrupted and that’s what entrepreneurs like.”

The Texas market for adult recreational marijuana is worth about $2 billion initially based on the population and use rates, said Troy Dayton, co-founder, and CEO of The Arcview Group, based in Oakland, Calif., a research firm focused on the cannabis industry.

“Texas is a great market because there is a lot of money in Texas,” Dayton said. “And it has a particular type of investor. Particularly people who have been investors in oil and gas – they are used to being pioneers and taking big risks in the possibilities of things. There is a lot of excitement here.”

Legal cannabis has already become a $10 billion industry, up 33 percent in 2017, according to an Arcview report. It forecasts by 2021, the legal market will more than double reaching $24.5 billion.

About 200 people attended the Austin conference.

Among them, Elena Marquez with Culinary Cannabis Consultants, based in Colorado, helps cannabis companies expand into the edible cannabis industry. The products can include soda, gummies, chocolates, candies, cakes, and more, she said.

“The laws are challenging in Texas right now, but there is a national and international push for this industry to become legally valid,” said Marquez who is originally from Austin. “It’s been taboo for so long, but it really isn’t.”

Today, 29 states, the District of Columbia, Guam and Puerto Rico allow for comprehensive public medical marijuana and cannabis programs, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first states to legalize marijuana for adult recreational use. Since then seven more states and the District of Columbia have followed, according to the Marijuana Policy Project.

Texas still has some of the most restrictive cannabis laws among all the states. In 2015, Texas passed the Compassionate Use Law, SB 339, to allow the use of “low THC-Cannabis” and cannabidiol, also known as CBD oil, a therapeutic ingredient and low in THC, which produces psychoactive effects. The CBD oil can only be used to treat patients who have been diagnosed with intractable epilepsy.

The Texas law was monumental, but it didn’t go far enough, said Heather Fazio, Texas Political Director of the Marijuana Leadership Campaign. She’s hopeful the law will be expanded to cover more illnesses and that some of the barriers will be taken down so that more than 30 doctors in Texas can prescribe the CBD oil to patients.

Compassionate Cultivation, a startup based in Manchaca, a suburb of Austin, was the first facility to receive a license from Texas’ Department of Public Safety to grow marijuana legally for medicinal purposes. It opened its door in February. It is one of only three facilities in Texas to receive a license even though more than 40 applied.

Despite the passage of legalization in the states, federal law still classifies marijuana as an illegal controlled substance. And that creates a lot of uncertainty in the market.

“The laws need to change on the federal level to give states more rights,” said Rep. Jason Isaac, R-Dripping Springs. He wants to expand the Texas law to cover more illnesses such as PTSD, autism, and cancer.

There is tremendous opportunity in this emerging market for startups, said William Hurley, known as Whurley. He spoke at the first session of the conference on “Why Austin is Ripe for Cannabis Startups.” He has seen more than 50 pitches for cannabis-related startups in the last few years. He hasn’t invested in any of them yet, but he sees the market maturing.

“This is a movement that is really unstoppable,” said Carlos Martinez, managing partner at OM Greens, an investment firm in the legal cannabis industry. “This is a trend that is now inevitable. We’re going to have legal cannabis – it’s just a matter of when.”

Real estate is one of the safest investments in the cannabis industry right now, Martinez said. There is about $25 billion of infrastructure needed in the states that are legal right now, he said. Examples include retail, manufacturing and grow operations, he said.

Among the leading Texas pioneers in pot is Country Music Star Willie Nelson with his marijuana brand called Willie’s Reserve, which raised $12 million in January.

Willie’s Reserve came to market in Colorado and Washington in August of 2016.

It’s difficult to do a multi-state brand because of legal limitations in moving products across state lines, said Emily Paxhia, co-founder and managing director of Poseidon Asset Management, which invests exclusively in the cannabis industry. It’s best done through licensing and partnerships, she said.

Willie’s Reserve launched in California last week, partnering with Flow Kana, a cannabis provider that works with small farmers.

Aside from CBD oils and cannabis overall, the industrial part of the hemp plant has more than 25,000 derivative products, Paxhia said. It includes applications in plastics, cement and carbon nanotechnology, she said.

CanopyBoulder , the oldest accelerator in the cannabis industry in the U.S., has launched several successful startups such as Wurk, an HR payroll software company, BDS Analytics and Leaf, a home growing unit.

“The startups are providing the infrastructure for the cannabis industry,” said Patrick Rea, co-founder and managing director of CanopyBoulder, which has made 79 investments since 2015.

“There are so many opportunities and voids in the industry that need to be filled,” Rea said.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

The dust might have settled on South by Southwest 2018, but the ideas and energy remain.

Last month, Silicon Hills News put on an event at Galvanize Austin recapping the highlights from SXSW 2018, including local startups that made a big impact, 20 technology trends and 10 speeches to watch or listen to.

Also, the SXSW organizers named “Globally Connected” as the breakout trend of the event. SHN will do another post highlighting some of the countries that stood out at this year’s festival.

The recap of the top 20 breakout tech trends to watch, according to Silicon Hills News:

The top 10 speeches to watch or listen to of interest to the Central Texas community:

And lastly, here’s the list of the top five local startups that gained traction at SXSW:

StrangeWorks – Officially launched at SXSW 2018 and William Hurley, known as Whurley, gave a keynote speech on quantum computing at the event.

Icon 3D – Officially launched at SXSW. They may have generated the most buzz at the show by building a house using an industrial size 3-D printer loaded up with concrete. They won in the SXSW Accelerator’s Social and Cultural category for its construction-technology that is working to build “the first up-to-code 3D printed home in the United States (using concrete as substrate).”

GrubTubs – It won the Hyper-Connected Communities category in the SXSW Accelerator competition for its system that recycles food scraps from restaurants and provides them as feedstock to local farms.

MasSpec Pen – The only Austin-based startup to win an award in the 2018 SXSW Interactive Innovation Awards. The MasSpec Pen was created by the Eberlin Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.

Samsa – This Capital Factory-based startup won the 100K Blockchain Challenge award at SXSW. Samsa created an online cryptocurrency platform that lets users create custom portfolios from a basket of indexes.

Also, here’s another recap of SXSW that may be of interest: Hugh Forrest Provides Seven Early Observations on SXSW 2018.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher Silicon Hills News

Young people are demanding change in society, said Amal Clooney, an international and human rights lawyer.

Eleven-year-old children are speaking out at the March for Our Lives event and companies are beginning to take notice and make changes, Clooney said, during the closing keynote last week at the WorkHuman 2018 conference in Austin. She attended March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C. a few weeks ago and she is inspired by their efforts.

“With the gun control issue, you had companies stepping in as well and saying yes, we’re a corporation but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a stand,” Clooney said.

She mentioned Dick’s Sporting Goods banning the sale of assault rifles. And both Wal-Mart and Dick’s raised the minimum gun purchasing age to 21. Amal and her husband, Actor and Activist George Clooney, donated $500,000 to the organizers of March for Our Lives.

“Companies are part of this debate,” Clooney said. “Companies can move things forward in our society.”

Companies and individuals can make a difference in demanding change in the world, Clooney said during a chat with Steve Pemberton, author of A Chance in the World and Chief People Officer of Globoforce, which sponsors the annual WorkHuman conference.

Clooney felt compelled to make a change. She was a corporate attorney when she switched to become a human rights attorney. She took a huge pay cut. And as part of the change, she moved from New York to The Hague for a United Nations investigation and then she moved to a bunker in Lebanon for another UN investigation. A lot of her family and friends questioned her decision, but ultimately she did what she thought was right, she said.

“Forge your own path,” Clooney said.

A lot of Clooney’s work is “unglamorous” involving big binders of material and highlighters with her sitting behind her desk with glasses on. She’s also writing a book “A right to a fair trial in international law.” She joked that it wasn’t exactly a page-turner. Clooney, a practicing attorney at Doughty Street Chambers in London and a visiting professor at Columbia Law School, advocates for neglected and exploited groups. Clooney sued members of Isis for committing genocide and acts of kidnapping, rape and violence against Yazidi women.

“Unfortunately, I see a decline in free speech and an increase in hate speech and a tolerance for hate speech,” Clooney said.

There are more journalists in prison than ever before, Clooney said.

At the same time, there is hateful speech emanating from the White House, she said.

“Where you have Mexicans called rapists, African countries called shitholes, a celebration of the idea that you can grab women’s genitals without their consent, you have white supremacists who have been called very fine people and the idea making religion a way to prohibit entry to the United States. That’s hateful speech coming from those who should be setting a much better example,” Clooney said.

It’s shocking that there is not more outrage, Clooney said.

“What leaders of the free world say is going to send a message to others about what is acceptable behavior,” Clooney said.

In 2016, the Clooneys established the Clooney Foundation for Justice to respond to some of the big problems the world is facing. They set up schools in Lebanon to help refugees. One in four people in Lebanon is a Syrian refugee, Clooney said.

They also brought a young Yazidi man to a small town in Kentucky to live in their home there. Her 84-year-old father in law slept on the couch for months at the house to make sure the young man got acclimated to his new environment. Now he’s studying at the University of Chicago.

“We want to be able to scale that,” Clooney said.

The Clooneys are also developing a Trial Watch Project to monitor and report on trials around the world that might violate human rights.

“Our approach with all of the projects in the foundation is to partner with the private sector,” Clooney said. “It’s the private sector that has all this talent.”

They partnered with Google and HP for the Lebanese school project, she said.

For Trial Watch, the foundation partnered with Microsoft to develop an app, Clooney said.

Overall, the world is headed a good direction, Clooney said. Her parents named her Amal, which means hope in Arabic and so she’s destined to be an optimist, she said.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

To succeed, businesses must have a just cause, said Simon Sinek, the bestselling author of Start with Why.

“A cause so just that not only do people feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves, but they are willing to sacrifice in order to advance that cause,” Sinek said during a keynote address last week at WorkHuman 2018, a conference of human resource professionals. It took place at the Austin Convention Center.

The cause has meaning, Sinek said. It leads employees to work hard, give their best ideas, and sacrifice time away from family to travel to spread this message and sell products because they believe in them, Sinek said.

“A just cause is something you believe in,” he said. “It’s not anything you are against. It is what you stand for.”

“The companies that we love and admire tend to have a just cause that underlies what they do,” Sinek said.

Sinek says it’s about why a company is doing something. What is its purpose?

He cited Southwest Airlines, based in Dallas, as an example of a company with a just cause.

“Southwest Airlines is not an airline – they stand for freedom,” Sinek said. “They stand for the average working Joe…Their history was all about giving the freedom of travel to people who used to take the car or the bus.”

Apple wasn’t founded to be a computer company, Sinek said.

“They were founded to give power to the individual to stand up to big brother,” he said. “The personal computer was the perfect tool to advance that just cause.”

In addition to a just cause, companies must have courageous leadership, trusted teams, competition, and a flexible playbook, Sinek said.

“What is the point of having a just cause if we have don’t have leaders who prioritize the advancement of that cause,” Sinek said. “Then it’s just marketing.”

Courageous leadership comes in many forms, Sinek said.

At a corporate level, it’s committing our organizations to do the thing that advances the cause even if it costs us in the short term, he said.

For example, drugstore chain CVS, a healthcare company, sold cigarettes until the company’s leadership a few years ago banned the sale of cigarettes across all its stores.

“They took billions of dollars of revenue out of their stores,” Sinek said. Wall Street went apoplectic and CVS’ stock price dropped in the short term, he said.

But the stock price rebounded as the action created so much goodwill among its customers, Sinek said. And CVS believes that because of their actions smoking has declined in the U.S., he said.

“That’s courageous leadership on a company level,” he said.

To succeed, businesses also must have trusting and vulnerable teams, Sinek said.

He spent time with SEAL Team Six, “there about 3000 guys that are regular SEALs, only about 10 percent of them are SEAL Team Six,” Sinek said. “They are the best of the best of the best.”

What sets SEAL Team Six apart is its members are selected based on performance and trust, Sinek said.

“The high performer of low trust is a toxic leader,” Sinek said. “They would rather have the medium performer of high trust or even the low performer of high trust, over the higher performer of low trust.”

“Now the problem in business is we have a million metrics for performance and we have negligible or no metrics for trustworthiness,” Sinek said.

“And so we keep promoting people who literally are toxic leaders because they keep making or padding their numbers and they are destroying the fabric of our companies,” he said.

“The most gifted natural performer who is helping everybody on the team,” he said. “We don’t recognize them. We don’t reward them. And that’s why we don’t incentivize that behavior throughout the company.”

Companies need to create an environment where people feel safe coming forward when they make a mistake or are in over their head or are stuck or having troubles at home without fear of retribution, Sinek said.

“If you do not have that where the people feel comfortable to express themselves that way, what you do have is an organization where people are showing up every day lying and hiding mistakes,” Sinek said.

Sinek told the audience of HR professionals that too many HR departments fail their people.

Today’s abuse of power in the workplace is because of the failure of HR departments, Sinek said. They do not see themselves as the advancement of the people, they see themselves as the advancement of the executives, he said.

“There has to be someone standing up for the people,” Sinek said.

A leader is simply the one who acts to look after the people first, he said.

“And HR should be the leaders of the people within the organization,” Sinek said.

Companies also must have worthy adversaries, Sinek said.

Competition is extremely valuable because it pushes us harder and reveals weaknesses to improve upon, Sinek said.

“People who are actually better at what you do than you: admire them, study them and learn from them,” he said.

“The goal is not to beat them,” he said. “The goal is to outlast them.”

Lastly, companies need to have a flexible playbook to innovate and change with the times, Sinek said.

In 1975, Kodak invented the first self-contained digital camera. They couldn’t imagine having to blow up the whole company. So they suppressed digital photography for fear that it would undermine the strategy that they had chosen, Sinek said. In 2012, Kodak went bankrupt.

Companies with closed playbooks and a refusal to compete when someone better comes along will go out of business, Sinek said.

“They could not make a decision with short-term liabilities for the long-term gains,” he said. “So they ultimately put themselves out of business. It wasn’t the market. It was their decision.”

RealCo, the San Antonio-based accelerator that launched last year, announced this week plans to expand into Austin and Boulder and the hiring of a new managing director.

Richard Grote, who lives in Boulder part-time, will become the new managing director.

Grote has spent the “past 18 years building and mentoring startups, as well as nurturing the now thriving startup community in the Boulder/Denver area,” according to a news release.

“I’m incredibly grateful for and humbled by the opportunity to join RealCo as Managing Director,” Grote said. “This team and community of mentors, founders, and investors have created a truly amazing program to help startup founders build real, VC-ready companies.”

Previously, RealCo was known as the RealCo Seed Fund. Michael Girdley, co-founder of Codeup and co-founder of Geekdom Fund, headed it up with Teresa Evans, co-founder of San Antonio Science and associate director of Alamo Angels along with Chris Saum, co-founder and director of business development of MUD Geochemical. Evans has left. Saum lives in Austin and will lead RealCo’s expansion into that market.

RealCo, based at Geekdom, is a 15-month long program that focuses on getting startups ready for a Series A round of investment. It provides networking, capital, mentors, co-working space at Geekdom, access to investors and more. Startups in the program receive $100,000 in funding. It currently works with seven startups: Dauber, dearduck, FileThis, FunnelAI, MR Presta and two more startups in stealth mode.

“RealCo is built around the idea that startups today are part of a global ecosystem from day one,” Girdley, founder of RealCo and managing director of the Geekdom Fund, said in a news release. “Having partners geographically distributed reflects the reality of successful company-building today.”

RealCo will host an AMA, Ask Me Anything, with Grote on Thursday, April 12th. at the Geekdom Event Centre in San Antonio.

Silicon Hills News did this Ideas to Invoices podcast with Saum and Evans about the RealCo Seed Fund Program last year.

YouEarnedIt, a startup focused on rewarding employees at companies, has landed an investment from Vista Equity Partners, based in Austin.

The Austin based startup also received investment from its previous investors, Ridge Ventures and Silverton Partners. It did not disclose the financial details of the deal. Previously, YouEarnedIt raised $8 million in venture capital.

“It has always been my vision to push the boundaries of employee engagement and give companies a better way to support their people and amplify their culture,” Autumn Manning, co-founder and CEO of YouEarnedIt, said in a news statement. “To be working with Vista – one of the best software investors available – to grow our presence in the HR software market is great validation for what we have built at YouEarnedIt and where we can go from here.”

The company, founded in 2013, plans to use the funds to hire additional employees, on further product development and sales and marketing.

“When Autumn and I launched YouEarnedIt, we understood that the importance of prioritizing culture to build incredible teams and companies was pivotal for businesses to succeed,” Kenny Tomlin, serial entrepreneur and co-founder of YouEarnedIt, said in a news statement. “

YouEarnedIt works with more than 400 customers worldwide. Since last January, when Vista raised $6.5 million in Series A funding, the company has doubled in size and overhauled its employee engagement and rewards platform.

“Employee engagement and productivity continues to be a top focus for companies,” René Yang, principal at Vista Equity Partners and co-head of the Endeavor Fund, said in a news release. “YouEarnedIt’s innovative approach to employee engagement provides a true platform for companies to enhance their culture of engagement and create incredible transparency across the organization. We are thrilled to be partnering with YouEarnedIt to help the business continue its strong trajectory of growth.”

YouEarnedIt also added James Mann as its Chief Financial Officer and Michael Logan and Executive Vice President of Sales.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Voice can be a powerful lever for change, said Adam Grant, bestselling author and professor at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Grant moderated a panel at WorkHuman 2018, a meeting of human resource professionals put on by Globoforce, at the Austin Convention Center Wednesday morning featuring key leaders in the #MeToo movement including Tarana Burke who started the Me Too movement in 2006. Other panelists included Ashley Judd, actress, and activist, who came forward early on to accuse Hollywood Producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and investigative journalist Ronan Farrow, who broke the story with the first allegations of assault and rape against Weinstein in The New Yorker.

“You three have literally changed the world,” Grant said. “You’ve raised awareness about bias and harassment and you’ve given people the opportunity to speak up and drive real change.”

Burke, a survivor of sexual assault as a child, created the Me Too movement as a way to change the lives of other survivors who had also been assaulted. She also works to educate and prevent sexual assault and harassment.

“It’s not just about healing the individual, it’s about healing the community,” she said.

Tearing down the wall of shame and talking about sexual violence lets victims know that it isn’t their fault, Burke said.

At the age of seven, Judd said she was sexually assaulted and she told two adults who didn’t do anything to help her. From a young age, she vowed to always speak out when something didn’t seem right.

“People like Ashley speaking out early on were absolutely a lifeline,” Farrow said in getting the story out there about Weinstein. “Every single voice counted.”

“For the victims of sexual assault in this story, the women who spoke out about harassment were part of the foundation they could stand on,” Farrow said.

This was about systems ultimately, Farrow said.

“This was not just about Harvey Weinstein, this was not just about the entertainment industry, this was a phenomenon that it was very clear to me it was playing out in every single industry,” Farrow said. “And that men and women from blue-collar workers to executive boardrooms were dealing with this range of issues from harassment to assault. And that there were elaborate systems in place that could be utilized by the most powerful and the wealthiest, usually men in this country, to silence voices that spoke out against them.”

It became apparent that the systems were just as much of the story as the underlying allegations, Farrow said.

“A lot of those systems play out within structures of the private sector and powerful companies and they involve people at the very top of those companies commandeering the process and what you do is important,” Farrow told the HR professionals in the room.

People who speak out can make all the difference, Farrow said.

The systems at companies are set up to silence and intimidate women and the criminal justice system is not set up to help them either, Farrow said. And the media landscape, before these stories, was very inhospitable, Farrow said.

Reporting systems inside companies are broken Grant said.

Companies can’t create policies after things go wrong, they must create a culture beforehand that prevents sexual harassment and assault in the workplace from the beginning, Burke said.

Institutional courage comes from individuals that just grow “a damn backbone” to stand up and do the right thing, Judd said.

Judd cited University of Oregon Professor Jennifer Freyd’s work with the acronym DARVO that refers to a reaction sexual offenders may display in response to being accused of wrongdoing. DARVO stands for “Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender.”

“Cherish the whistleblower is really important to protect that culture of it being Ok to come forward and divulge,” Judd said.

Hiring and promoting women is absolutely key, Judd said.

“Because it’s fundamentally about the asymmetry of power,” she said.

To affect change, individuals in companies need to have difficult conversations, Burke said. People are deathly afraid of being uncomfortable even for a couple of minutes, she said.

“We need to be uncomfortable as a country,” Burke said. There is still so much more to unpack, she said.

People need to learn how to listen on a more deep and humane level, Judd said.

Grant brought up the topic of Intersectionality, which refers to the ways different forms of discrimination intersect like racism and sexism in the experiences of marginalized people.

Amplification is what makes a difference, Burke said. Right now, people don’t talk about R. Kelly or Bill Cosby as much, the focus has been on Weinstein, she said. White women of privilege need to speak out on behalf of women of color too, she said.

Starting with the most privileged people and hoping that it trickles down to those that have the least, those people will get left out, Burke said.

“We have a very unique opportunity in the world to have a culture shift,” Burke said.

In the first 24 hours that #MeToo went viral there were 12 million engagements with the hashtag MeToo, Burke said.

“Everyone of those persons represents someone with courage,” she said.

And if 12 million people were infected with some disease within 24 hours all conversations would be focused on finding a cure, Burke said.

“We would be talking about how did we get here. How do we stop it and how do we make sure it never happens again,” Burke said.

It’s important not to derail the conversation with talk about inappropriate hugs and abstract concerns in the workplace, Burke said. Farrow echoed that sentiment.

The focus should be on sexual violence that is destroying lives, Farrow said.

“Place principles above personalities,” Judd said.