By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

At South by Southwest 2018, Ingrid Vanderveldt, chairman, and CEO of Empowering a Billion Women by 2020 movement, launched MintHer, a financial resources network for female entrepreneurs.

Vanderveldt, who previously served as the first entrepreneur in residence at Dell, spoke at SXSW 2018 on “Empowering a Billion Women with $1 Billion in Capital by 2020.”

On Tuesday morning at the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer of SXSW, interviewed Vanderveldt following his presentation SXSW 2018 early observations.

“What I was happy to see this year was the involvement of the women,” Vanderveldt said.

This year, Vanderveldt noticed more women coming in for SXSW and more attention on the women speakers, she said. She had women flying in from all over the world for the MintHer launch. She hosted a “Champagne Crawl” with women and self-proclaimed “Man-bassadors” to various Austin boutiques. She also hosted a VIP dinner.

In 2015, Vanderveldt and the Empowering a Billion Women by 2020 movement worked with Dell Financial Services, Frost & Sullivan, and Xero, to release its “Business in a Box” software platform for women fueled with a $100 million IV credit fund.

“When we launched the $100 million fund, not a single woman applied,” Vanderveldt said. “We launched in May of 2015 and not a single woman applied. The guys did. The guys blew up the fund.”

The women were buying the “Business in a Box” services but they couldn’t scale fast enough, Vanderveldt said.

“We realized how important mentorship and education and building scalable ecosystems to help women start, grow and build their ventures and build confidence before they ever go apply for the funding,” she said.

MintHer seeks to provide those things.

“We went into development for three years and spent over $3 million and 7,500 people on the engine of this platform, but we essentially built out a matching platform to match women entrepreneurs to funding resources and revenue opportunities,” she said.

Dell allocates $4 billion a year to diverse and women-led companies, Vanderveldt said. Other companies are trying to allocate big contracts to women-led ventures and they are having trouble finding them, she said.

“So this platform now qualifies and vets potential deal flow and matches them to the revenue opportunity,” Vanderveldt said.

To ensure startups can meet the scale up and supply requirements for the big companies, that’s where the $100 million credit fund comes into play, Vanderveldt said.

“One of the things we’re really looking at is women showing up,” Vanderveldt said.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

From amazing weather to Elon Musk‘s pop up appearance, blockchain technology, and internationalization, South by Southwest 2018 is over but not forgotten.

Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer of SXSW, gave an overview of seven early observations from SXSW 2018, during a Tech Talk event with the Austin Chamber of Commerce Tuesday morning at the chamber’s offices.

“We as SXSW staff have one perception of how the event went,” Forrest said. “I think it went pretty well. But I also know that beginning this week we will also spend roughly a month reading lots and lots and lots and lots of attendee feedback.”

Often times, that attendee feedback tells you things that were great and things that you didn’t know were not so great, Forrest said.

“I’ll have a different picture, perception of the event, after reading that,” he said.

“While SXSW 2018 was generally a successful event, we can’t ignore the backdrop of SXSW week 2018 which was the bombing stuff which certainly was one of the darkest weeks in Austin in recent memory,” Forrest said. A 23-year-old domestic terrorist planted a series of bombs in March that killed Anthony Stephan House, 39, and Draylen Mason, 17, and seriously injured Esperanza Herrera, 75 and he rigged tripwire and package bombs that led to other injuries. While none of the events occurred at SXSW, the tragedies were felt by everyone in Austin and beyond.

In the presentation, Forrest’s first observation, “sounds somewhat trite,” he said. But Austin had really amazing weather this year, Forrest said.

“This is the first year in at least a decade where we didn’t have one day of rain or one day of cold,” he said.

Austin looks great all the time but looks a lot better with beautiful weather, he said. And great weather helps spread people out and mitigates overcrowding problems, Forrest said.

The second observation focused on diversity and inclusiveness.

Esther Perel, a couples’ therapist, gave the opening Interactive keynote on Friday on the importance of relationships determing a person’s quality of life. It’s a really powerful talk, Forrest said. And it’s available on SXSW’s YouTube channel. He encouraged everyone to watch it.

“Patriarchy doesn’t just hurt women, it hurts us all,” she said during the speech and in a takeout quote featured on Forrest’s slideshow.

SXSW had a lot of programming focused on diverse entrepreneurs and organizers made sure to bring those panels and discussions into the main venues, Forrest said.

The third observation focused on the blockchain buzz and how blockchain can be used in a lot of different applications including healthcare, Forrest said.

The fourth observation focused on internationalizing Austin. The Mayor of London Sadiq Khan gave a keynote address about inclusiveness in the technology industry and the need for government regulation. SXSW also featured talks from the Prime Minister of Ireland Leo Varadkar, Techfugees’ CEO Josephine Goube from Paris and Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon.

“Lot of international presence in Austin,” Forrest said.

It’s easier for internationals to get to Austin and the reputation of SXSW is stronger than ever internationally, he said.

SXSW named global connections as the trend of the event. The trade show had more than 30 different companies exhibiting and international houses exhibited throughout Austin including the first ever Africa House, Forrest said.

“All of these countries and cultures use technology in slightly different ways, use creativity in slightly different ways but Austin is a platform for them to come together and see which ways they can cooperate and which ways they can build new relationships,” Forrest said.

Mayor Steve Adler has a vision for a more international Austin as well as things the Austin Chamber of Commerce is working on to bridge connections with other countries, Forrest said.

The fifth observation is more City of Austin support for SXSW.

SXSW worked a lot with the City and the new city manager Spencer Cronk, who recently took over the job after moving from Minneapolis, on crowd control.

“At this point, when you are planning a big event like SXSW literally 25 percent of your planning time is related to safety and security,” Forrest said.

And the number sixth observation is “Elon happened.”

“The Elon Musk thing was pretty amazing,” Forrest said. “If it happened two weeks later with the backdrop of the week they had last week it wouldn’t have happened.”

“For as long as I’ve worked at SXSW I’ve never been a part of something that came together this quick,” Forrest said.

“We got an inkling that he was going to be in town on Wednesday and we reach out to Elon and his people every year, can you speak at SXSW because Elon is kind of a pinnacle for so much of our community. We usually get a polite no, it’s not going to quite work this year. When we reached out Wednesday this year, they said that might work.”

SXSW staff pulled together a venue, ticketing, production for Elon Musk’s Q&A talk within 24 hours, Forrest said. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, SpaceX and other companies, made a surprise appearance at the SXSW Westworld panel on Saturday. Late that day, SXSW announced a special Q&A session with Musk on Sunday. And despite the daylight savings time change making it even earlier than usual, a line of people stood around the block outside the Austin City Limits theater at 10 a.m. waiting for the noon talk.

“It was a nice SXSW touch,” Forrest said.

By comparison, when SXSW had President Obama speak a couple of years ago, SXSW staff spent six months preparing for the event, Forrest said.

Last but not least, the seventh observation is the Fairmont Hotel opening.

“That was a great thing for us and the city,” Forrest said.

The Fairmont gave SXSW more hotel rooms and meeting space to accommodate people, Forrest said. It was touch and go up until March on whether the hotel would open on time, he said. Not all of the hotel sleeping rooms opened on time, but SXSW was still able to accommodate about 600 guests at the Fairmont, Forrest said.

(My SXSW Facebook Live video of the new Fairmont Hotel – taken during SXSW)

SpareFoot, the Austin-based online self-storage marketplace, announced Thursday plans to acquire SiteLink, a software maker for the self-storage industry, founded in 1996 and based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As part of the deal, Cove Hill Partners, a private equity firm in Boston, will acquire a majority stake in the combined company. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

SpareFoot CEO Chuck Gordon will become CEO of the combined company and Ross Lampe will remain president of SiteLink. The deal is expected to close in the next 30 days.

“We’re excited to combine two of the most respected and successful technology companies in self-storage,” Gordon, CEO of SpareFoot, said in a news release. “This deal and partnership with Cove Hill allows us to increase investment in our products to help self-storage operators run their businesses cost-effectively and help consumers find the perfect storage solution.”

SpareFoot, founded in 2008, works with more than 12,000 storage facilities in the U.S. on SpareFoot.com and SelfStorage.com. Before the acquisition, SpareFoot had raised $59 million in venture capital, according to a company spokeswoman.

Correction: Due to incorrect information on CrunchBase, the amount of money SpareFoot had raised was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

SpyCloud announced this week that it has received $5 million in venture capital funding.

Austin-based Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners led the Series A round. SpyCloud plans to use the funding on product development, security research and to expand its database of assets. It also plans to hire more employees.

SpyCloud, founded in 2016, previously raised a $2.5 million seed funding round from Silverton Partners and March Capital Partners.

The cybersecurity company has created a software platform, database and other tools that specialize in account takeover prevention. It can find vulnerabilities in a company’s computer system before cybercriminals can strike. SpyCloud’s software flags employees and customer accounts that have security issues early on.

The company uses a database of exposed accounts, leaked passwords and other identification information. It mines that information to check the security of a company’s computer systems and accounts. It has more than “32 billion current assets and billions of new assets being added every month,” according to the company.

SpyCloud reports stolen or leaked passwords is a huge problem. It cites a report from Verizon that shows 81 percent of hacking breaches last year involved stolen or leaked passwords.

SpyCloud’s software, data and tools help companies avoid security breaches and protect their systems from being infected with keyloggers or malware.

“There isn’t a company in the world that doesn’t run the constant risk of having its employee or customer accounts exposed, and that leads to a host of other issues,” Ted Ross, CEO, and co-founder of SpyCloud, said in a statement. “The only chance businesses stand against these increasingly-proficient criminals is to know as soon as possible which accounts have been exposed and to take preventative measures well before credentials make it onto the dark web.”

SpyCloud, which emerged from stealth mode in June of last year, reports it has already protected “tens of millions of employee and customer accounts for notable companies across the finance, retail, healthcare, and technology industries.”

“The continued customer traction and growth SpyCloud has achieved is a testament to both the immediate demand for its technology and the unparalleled collective experience of the team,” Kip McClanahan, general partner of Silverton Partners, said in a news release “We look forward to helping them capitalize on those strengths to make ATO prevention universal table stakes in the enterprise.”

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Billionaire Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, said he expects Austin’s Oracle campus to grow to about 10,000 employees in coming years.

“We are going to have a handful of hubs in the United States,” Ellison said. “Austin is one of the key places we want to be because that’s where we think our people want to be.”

Ellison made the remarks during a surprise visit to cut the ribbon on the new Austin Oracle campus Thursday. The first 560,000 square foot building and parking garage opened to employees in January and already has more than 2,000 employees with a capacity of 2,500 employees.

“We bought all this real estate and we’re not done yet,” Ellison said. “We think this is a phenomenal facility to house fantastic people that hopefully will come to Oracle whether they are experienced or right out of college and be able to develop their careers, learn new technologies and grow as the company grows.”

Oracle, based in Redwood Shores, Calif., is going through its biggest growth phase in its history and is hiring lots of people, Ellison said. Oracle is also building a big facility in Santa Monica. It always seeks to build near water so employees can go rafting or kayaking during their lunch hour, Ellison said.

“I think this facility is going to grow to about 10,000 people,” Ellison said. “We have big plans.”

During a real estate tour to scout for the location for the Austin campus, Ellison recounted a story about how he refused to get out of the car to look at property in Cedar Park. He told them he only wanted to look at properties in downtown Austin near the water. The real estate brokers told him there was only one property. It turned out to be the property on Lady Bird Lake that is now the home of the Oracle Waterfront Campus at 2300 Cloud Way.

At the building site, Ellison decided immediately he would take the property and the adjacent 295-unit Azul apartment complex that was under construction. It is now a housing option for employees.

“This is Texas. In California, the prices here are like free,” Ellison said. “You buy one home in California, Mark’s home, actually, it costs about the same as this.” (Mark Hurd is Oracle’s CEO who also accompanied him on the real estate tour and was at the ribbon cutting Thursday.)

Ellison bought all the commercially zoned property nearby. They ended up buying up 43 acres. Ellison said they were on the property about a half an hour and bought it all.

“Oracle is expanding in Austin to attract, hire and train the best talent to support the unprecedented growth of our cloud business,” Oracle’s CEO Hurd said. He also has an office at the Austin campus.

At the event on Thursday, Ellison cut the ribbon on the facility with Hurd and other dignitaries. Then Oracle held a party with food trucks, beverages and games for its employees and invited guests. It featured bands Black Joe Lewis and American Authors.

Earlier in the afternoon, Oracle held a VIP reception and gave tours to media and other invited guests of its new facility.

“You have so many people who live in the area that can walk or bike to work,” said Downs Deering, senior vice president of Oracle Digital Application Sales, during a media tour. He’s been in Austin off and on since 1993 and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and he previously worked at Dell for 15 years.

Oracle is working to create an inviting experience for its employees with veranda views of the lake, an onsite full-service cafeteria, gym and free parking for its employees, Deering said. On-campus amenities include a food truck court, expansive business training and conference center, game rooms on every floor, terraces and outdoor collaboration areas. It also has beach volleyball and basketball courts, flag football field, B-cycle station and access to Lady Bird Lake hike and bike trail.

Oracle is creating the modern-day company town with apartments nearby for employees. The employees at the Austin campus focus on creating digital applications and sales. Also, Oracle recently announced that Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator’s first U.S. residential program will be located in Austin.

During the tour, Oracle showed off its Cloud Solutions Hub with demonstrations of augmented reality, virtual reality applications to oversee manufacturing operations, intelligent bots and blockchain technology for healthcare applications like tracing pharmaceutical drugs.

Deering also showed off the training rooms for new hires who get up to 200 hours of training before they start their jobs at Oracle.

“They get continuous training afterward,” he said.

Oracle is also bin-free at the desk and doesn’t provide employees with garbage cans, Deering said. It is encouraging employees to recycle. They must take their waste to a central location for landfill, recycle and composting, he said. And it’s cashless at the cafeteria and the on-site Starbucks too, he said.

Oracle hires from 24 of the top universities in the country, Deering said. It hires a lot of communications, marketing, and business graduates to become sales associates, he said. At their desks, Oracle gives them a University pendant to put on their wall. In Texas, Oracle primarily hires from UT, Texas A&M, Baylor and Southern Methodist University, Deering said.

The managers don’t have offices, Deering said. They have desks on the floor with the sales representatives. They can go into offices along the wall which Deering referred to as “huddle rooms” for conferences. And each floor has a local theme that highlights “aspects of Austin’s culture including local art, music and murals.”

The balcony on the fifth floor provides expansive views of the city and Lady Bird Lake. The work area feature lots of natural light and an entire wall of glass that provide views of the lake and downtown.

Facebook Live video of Ellison speaking to the crowd at the Austin Oracle campus ribbon cutting.

By Laura Lorek
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Todd Nevins is pulling the ripcord on his life this week.

The host of the Go Hunt Life podcast in Austin and founder of CLICKplacement, an AdWords business, is moving to Mexico.

Todd and his wife, Allison, have sold most of their belongings, everything from their couch to their George Foreman grill, they have stashed some stuff with relatives, and they have packed up the rest into an SUV. They are driving on Friday with their English bulldog, Deuce, to San Miguel de Allende, located in the Central Highlands of Mexico.

The self-proclaimed digital nomads have spent the past two years in Austin but they decided to move back to Mexico to build their online businesses and to explore Mexico’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and for independence, adventure, and excitement. Nevins runs CLICKPlacement, an AdWords marketing agency he founded a decade ago and Allison founded TexMex Fun Stuff in 2016, an e-commerce store that sells Mexican imported goods on Amazon.

Todd has produced more than 90 episodes of Go Hunt Life, a podcast he started two years ago focusing on people who uproot their lives and pursue their passions. He hasn’t missed a week posting a new episode. He is also one of the founders of the Austin Podcast Community and helped created the Startup Studio, a podcasting studio, at Galvanize.

“Our guests have inspired us to pull the ripcord again and blow up our comfort bubble that we have built here in Austin and go live in Mexico,” Nevins said. “My wife’s heart has always been in Mexico.”

The Nevins moved to Austin two years ago from Merida, Mexico where they lived for 5 years. They also lived in Dallas for 18 years prior to Merida. Allison’s business has grown tremendously, and they are going to Mexico to source handmade products directly from artists and suppliers. They will live in several cities throughout the country for five to seven weeks at each place, staying in Airbnb rentals and working out of coworking spaces.

“The Go Hunt Life Podcast will certainly continue, and we are going to roll in more video,” Todd said.

He’s been working with Lyn Graft, founder of Storytelling for Entrepreneurs in Austin, on the videos.

“Todd is kind of a natural host,” Graft said. “He asks interesting questions because he’s a very curious person and he wants to know who you are, what you do and how you got to where you’re at.”

“That interest in who you are as a human leads to great content,” Graft said. That translates directly into his podcast as he explains how people decide to “make that crazy professional or personal decision to do a 180 in life.”

“Todd’s curiosity and desire to constantly be the student means he’s definitely going to be successful to be an on-camera storytelling host,” Graft said.

“He’s effectively living what his podcast is all about,” Graft said. “He’s again pulling his own ripcord. He’s woven himself into the fabric of Austin really well and has become part of what makes us special because of his energy, enthusiasm, and support for other entrepreneurs and his desire to get stories out.”

The series is called Los Nevins Go Hunt Life in Mexico and will be posted to YouTube. The first video episode is going to be the drive to Mexico, they are crossing the border at Laredo, followed by a feature on San Miguel de Allende. After that, they travel to Guanajuato and then Mexico City, followed by Puebla and Merida. Next year, they’ll travel back to Central Mexico.

“Everywhere we go has co-working spaces,” Nevins said. “Mexico City has 10 WeWorks.”

Nevins will be working out of Impact Hub in Mexico City, which is a part of the ImpactHub coworking sites in Austin.

“I learned a lot in Austin during the last two years and I’m going to share it however I can,” Nevins said. “I’m taking the pride that I felt building the Austin Podcast Community, I’m going to go down there and take my podcast experience and AdWords experience into the tech hubs in Mexico City and see if I can help or be a conduit. That’s my goal going in.”

His goal is to help as many people as he can because that’s what happened to him when he came to Austin.

“This is still a small town,” Nevins said. “There’s still accountability. There’s a community aspect to it and an accountability aspect that makes it a beautiful spot for somebody to come in and make some impact and feel like they are a part of something.”

The technology industry and startup innovation are vibrant in Mexico, Nevins said.

“I’m taking all of what I’ve been given here and sharing it,” he said. “The last two years, my wife and I joke that we feel like we’ve gotten a master’s degree on the next phase of our life.”

Out of all the episodes on Go Hunt Life, one sticks out for Nevins. It’s episode 40 about Roz Savage, an environmental activist and ocean rower who holds four world records for being the first woman to solo row across three oceans. She upended her life as a management consultant in London to row across the Atlantic Ocean in a 23-foot rowboat and she faced harrowing life-threatening challenges as a result but overcame them with hard work and courage.

“I’ve interviewed multiple people whose lives have turned into world records,” Nevins said. “I never lose sight of the fact that it’s a privilege that these people have given me their time.”

Nevins’ passion is living an unconventional life of adventure and meaning and location independence.

“It’s no secret that I yearn to do that,” he said. “I respect people who are living against the grain.”

One of the world’s biggest groups of digital nomads resides in Chang Mai, Thailand where the Internet is super fast, living is easy and relatively inexpensive, Nevins said. In the digital age, being a nomad is no longer the exception, but the norm in some communities, he said.

Nevins grew up in Illinois and four days after graduating from Southern Illinois University, he bought a one-way plane ticket from St. Louis to Dallas. Initially, he worked at Telecheck as a sales executive and sales manager for six years. He then left to launch his own business as an executive recruiter focused on the financial services and healthcare industry.

In December of 2010, Nevins left Dallas with Allison, who quit her corporate job, to move to Merida, Mexico. He continued to work from there remotely. They moved to Austin to focus on the AdWords business.

“This time it feels like we’re going back to Mexico and it’s going to be a comfortable landing,” he said.

Mexico’s central time zone makes it easy for Nevins to connect with his customers in the U.S. and Canada, he said.

Todd is going to be missed in Austin where he has been a member of Galvanize since its founding two years ago, said Bill Blackstone, general manager of Galvanize Austin.
During South by Southwest, Galvanize invited Todd and Allison as guests of Galvanize for a VIP reception with Casa Mexico where the Consulate General heard Todd’s story and gave him his personal cell phone “just in case” Blackstone said, The reception included Mexican dignitaries, leadership of Fondo de Fondos, local investors and tech leaders, and talented Mexican entrepreneurs.

“Todd represents the best of our community – he’s always willing to help other entrepreneurs, he’s serious about growing his business, and he works to make sure everyone around him feels included,” Blackstone said. “As an original member of Galvanize Austin, it’s been amazing to see his business and network grow. While we’re sad to see him leave Austin, we’re excited to see what he and his wife will accomplish in Mexico.”

Umuse has created a digital assistant for the email inbox box that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning and becomes smarter over time.

To bring the product to market, the Austin-based startup led by Scott Abel, former Spiceworks Founder and CEO, announced Wednesday that it has raised $5 million in seed funding from Shasta Ventures, Next Coast Ventures and Floodgate Capital.

In 2006, most people just had to deal with email, Abel said. But then all these other things started to creep into the business including Basecamp and Asana and custom applications in the late 2000s like HipChat and Slack. By the time Abel left Spiceworks in 2013, he was receiving hundreds of messages a day across four different applications.

Umuse takes all those disparate message streams and brings them into one integrated feed and prioritizes them by looking at a customer’s inner circle of communication and who they talk to the most often, Abel said. Its technology is called “Inner Circle technology: to help users quickly find those messages that matter most. Through machine learning, the software builds a personal communication graph of conversations, which adapts and learns over time.”

“The algorithm weighs who you talk to, how often and how quickly you respond, and auto-opens messages from those people so that they stand out in your feed,” according to Umuse. “Users can tune and customize these settings as needed, so they have complete control.”

Umuse also makes its search engine more powerful for its customers to find information across email and chat streams, Abel said.

Employees today receive a huge volume of correspondence via email, chat, text and other messages and that has led to all kinds of problems like lower productivity, frustration, distraction and important information getting lost in the sea of communications.

That’s the problem Umuse solves by putting the information into a single, Facebook-like message feed. Umuse works with existing services like Gmail and Slack. With Umuse, customers can quickly scan, zoom, reply to and search messages across multiple channels.

“Email has gone from being a tool that works for people, to additional work they now have to do. Add in chat, text and other forms of messaging and it just exacerbates the problem, creating a drain and drag on worker productivity,” Thomas Ball, Co-founder and Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures, said in a news statement. “Companies need a better approach to bring all these communication channels together. With the Umuse team’s deep experience developing simple solutions to complex problems, I’m excited to see how they solve this one.”

UMuse, founded in 2016, already has more than 5,000 “alpha” users who have been trying out early versions of the product and providing feedback. Now the company is releasing the software to beta users who can download it from the company’s website.

The company chose the name Umuse because it was something that was evocative and captured the role of the digital assistant for the inbox.

“It’s your personal messaging muse whispering in your ear,” Abel said.

Umuse is based in the Westlake area and has 12 employees. It may add one or two more this year, Abel said.

Lots of people have tried to tackle the email inbox management problem and failed, Abel said.

“It is a tough problem,” he said. “But I think somebody’s got to keep trying. It is still a big problem.”

Umuse: The Power of One from Umuse on Vimeo.

By Dave Manzer
Sponsored Post on Silicon Hills News

Here’s an opinion that won’t be popular among our friends in the technology news media: It’s coverage of SXSW risks perpetuating a very narrow and biased view of what a true startup ecosystem looks like.

Don’t believe me? You need only look at the headlines coming out of the event, which are dominated by “Big Tech” stories, celebrity founders/investors news, and a handful of “hot takes” either proclaiming SXSW to be past its prime or just not very interesting. But most of these publications only send a handful of people to SXSW, and then don’t return to Austin for at least another year.

Mind you, there are some exceptions out there, most notably Silicon Hills News, which focuses on the Austin-San Antonio tech scene and devoted over a dozen articles to this year’s event.

Among those that covered SXSW, what you aren’t seeing much of are stories about innovation from lesser-known startups and organizations that aren’t in the unicorn club (aka don’t have outrageously large funding rounds), or have the good fortune of counting celebrities like Ashton Kutcher as an investor. I worry that the tech press is losing its hard-earned reputation as an authority on startups, and instead taking us down the proverbial rabbit hole — giving us an incomplete vision of startup reality tinged by celebrity, biased by a Silicon Valley startup model, and warped by Big Tech.

In dismissing SXSW, or taking a very high-level perspective where only major brands and Elon Musk are worth their time, the major tech press outlets are not only brushing aside Austin and its robust startup ecosystem, but also the startups coming from around the globe. To be sure, Austin has its share of challenges — access to funding is the most frequently referenced. But the thing is, large VCs have been looking outside of the Valley for a while, and lately have been more vocal about it.

The problem for non-Silicon Valley- or NYC-based startup ecosystems might not be a matter of being enough like the larger markets, but rather that the national tech media isn’t there to cover and report on the innovative things happening every day. How many other cities without a SXSW anchor are going unnoticed? It’s been my most frequent thought at this year’s SXSW.

With SXSW, Austin was an easy draw for the greater technology industry and its attendant media to take notice of. With a large population and a crop of major tech companies (Dell, National Instruments, Indeed, Apple, etc.), the city has a nice pipeline of talent and is an attractive relocation spot thanks to its unique culture (breakfast tacos and BBQ y’all!). Austin also has a dozen or more incubators/accelerators in town, with Capital Factory even putting on an “ATX Startup Crawl” featuring over 100 startups or startup-adjacent organizations the first night of SXSW.

But the interactive portion of SXSW isn’t just about Austin. It brings together exciting and innovative startups from around the world. Where else are you going to see people get excited and talking about a perfect bread maker appliance, a company that could render plastic surgery as unnecessary for looking younger, a 3D-printed house, or a backpack that doubles as a motorized skateboard worthy of Back to the Future Part II? It’s a shame there aren’t more headlines from major news outlets celebrating this side of the conference.

Here’s what I do know: Where there is a strong tech media presence there is more awareness of innovation and a greater likelihood of investors and users embracing the new startups. What Silicon Valley and NYC have in common is a very strong media culture, which works in lock step with the entire startup ecosystem — from startups and tech talent to angels and VC firms. The popularity of SXSW was aided by a national tech media hungry for exciting stories of startups and their disruptive technology, and the media’s coverage of SXSW helped put Austin in front of a global audience that helped propel its growth, making it a destination for startups and established tech companies the world over.

Now, with the tech media in retreat across all media outlets — traditional news outlets like CNN and WSJ have fewer tech stories, tech blogs like Mashable have radically scaled back operations — there is a pressing need for Austin to grow its own startup media ecosystem that looks and feels like Austin. Eventually, the rest of the world won’t be able to ignore it.

Dave is the president of Manzer Communications, a marketing communications and PR agency serving technology startups and fast-growth enterprises. Dave founded PR Over Coffee, is a mentor at Startup Aggieland and launched Startup Over Coffee, a crowdsourced map for startups and startup professionals in Austin.

This is a sponsored post.