By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Being a woman in the technology industry is not easy.

The technology industry is male-dominated at all levels and the pay disparity can reach 50 percent for women, compared to the salary for men in similar jobs, said Lauren Hasson, founder of Develop(Her).

“I decided to own my own outcome,” Hasson said.

She learned to negotiate, and she tripled her base salary in less than two years by relying heavily on data and research. She also spent $10,000 on training materials, she said.

Hasson shared her story with more than 200 women attending the Women in Technology Summit at InnoTech Austin. Hasson was one of several speakers who shared their experiences throughout the day. Sessions ranged from talks on branding to addressing the issue of gender diversity and the “bro-code” in the technology industry.

Hasson has developed a free negotiation course for women to walk others, step by step, through how she transformed her life. Her course launches on February 3rd and she hopes to empower more than 10,000 women.

Next up, Marny Lifshen, author of “Some Assembly Required: A Networking Guide for Women” spoke on the importance of women crafting a personal brand.

For a brand to be effective, it must be authentic, distinct and consistent, Lifshen said. She thinks distinct is the most difficult one to achieve.

“How do you create a brand that separates you from all the other people who do what you do,” Lifshen said.

To achieve distinction, a person must think about what are their unique and impactful skill sets, Lifshen said.

“This is not a time ladies to be humble,” she said. “Be bold, be proud.”

Brands are based on experiences but also perceptions, Lifshen said.

And personal brand elements are both tangible and intangible and include: demeanor, your appearance, communication and your network, Lifshen said.

“Your physical brand must be professional, modern and well-groomed,” Lifshen said.

Communication is both verbal and nonverbal, Lifshen said. It breaks down to 55 percent is visual, 38 percent is tone and vocal and seven percent is words Lifshen said.

In the afternoon session, the talk shifted to how women in technology can navigate a male-dominated workplace.

In the session on Bro Code: Addressing the Issue of Gender Diversity in Tech, Barbary Brunner, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, said there is a culture in technology companies that exclude women.

The way to change the situation is to have more women in leadership positions in the technology industry, Brunner said.

In her position, Leigh Christie, senior vice president of global technology and innovation at the Austin Chamber of Commerce, seeks out opportunities to mentor other women and to provide them with opportunities for advancement.

Brunner asked the women in the room if they had been in a meeting where men had ignored their ideas or talked over them. Everyone had except for one woman.

When that happens, Brunner said she calls the men out on it. And she redirects them to acknowledge that it was her original idea.

Having rules of engagement in the workplace is one way to approach the situation, Christie said.

Virtual agents, virtual assistants, bots, and other automated technologies are supercharging workforces, said Doug Reeder, innovation leader at NTT DATA Services.

These technologies easily execute tasks that are mundane and repetitive, Reeder said.

“They allow people to do less of the mundane things,” he said.

Reeder delivered the keynote address Thursday morning at the InnoTech Austin conference at the Austin Convention Center.

Automation isn’t about displacing humans, but it’s about making them more productive by taking away labor’s most repetitive and time-consuming tasks, Reeder said.

“Don’t automate anything that isn’t highly efficient in the first instance,” he said.

The media has injected fear into most workers that these technologies are going to completely do away with their jobs, Reeder said. It may modify part of their jobs, but there are other things that most workers do in organizations at a more skilled level, he said.

One executive has more than 10,000 people in his organization and 2,000 of them are bots, Reeder said. There are people that manage those bots, he said.

This is a productivity enhancement, Reeder said. It is something to make jobs easier, he said. Some jobs will go away but that can be taken care of through attrition, Reeder said.

Virtual agents today can understand anger, inflection, emphasis, sarcasm, and nuisances in communications, Reeder said. The virtual agents use voice recognition and natural language processing, he said.

Machine learning algorithms are beginning to understand the context better than ever before, Reeder said.

Virtual agents can also do analysis on large numbers of customer service inquiries that can provide a business with better insights, Reeder said.

“And it’s very objective,” he said.

The other thing about virtual agents is they don’t get sick, they don’t go on smoke breaks, and they don’t have bad days, Reeder said.

“They’re very helpful,” he said.

Some of the areas robotic process automation can be used in a business include customer engagement, information technology support such as resetting a password, finance for order status consultation, procurement, payment posting and human resources for background checking, employment validation, personal data update and management, payroll claims and more.

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Opcity’s staff moved this week into new headquarters at the Bergstrom Tech Center in Southeast Austin.

The high-tech company occupies 50,000 square feet in Building 312, a two-story, glass and brick building built in 1985 for Lockheed Martin.

“We wanted a big home for our headquarters,” said Ben Rubenstein, Opcity’s co-founder, and CEO. ” We have been growing incredibly fast and having a centralized place where we can have our culture and really showcase our culture was really important to us and commutability as well.”

Opcity plotted where all its employees lived on a map and wanted to understand how long it took them to get to work, Rubenstein said.

“Getting downtown was super congested and parking was really hard,” Rubenstein said.

Opcity’s new building boasts lots of natural light and high ceilings and hundreds of free parking places, something that became a big issue for Opcity at its former downtown headquarters at 200 W Cesar Chavez. The company had to lease parking spaces from the Austin American Statesman, several blocks away so its employees could have a place to park downtown.

In May, Opcity, which has created data and analytics-driven technology platform for real estate agents and brokers, officially launched with the announcement of its $27 million Series A funding. Since then, the company has gone from 100 employees to 225 employees. It expects to more than double in the next year and has an option to lease another 50,000 square feet at its new headquarters, Rubenstein said. Opcity is hiring for “pretty much everything” including engineers, product, marketing, finance, accounting, customer service representatives, sales representatives, Rubenstein said.

Opcity is in 30 states right now and plans to be in all 50 by early 2018, Rubenstein said.

“This is actually our fifth office in two years,” said Michael Lam, Opcity co-founder, and chief financial officer. The company started in Rubenstein’s house and they worked out of Galvanize for awhile too.

“We have a model that better aligns to what brokers and agents are looking for,” Lam said.

Opcity makes a technology platform that matches home buyers and home sellers with the best real estate agents in their neighborhoods with no upfront costs. The company uses proprietary data and applied analytics to increase sales.

In addition, the company has gone from 350 broker partners to 1,000 and from 4,000 real estate agents to 13,000 real estate agents.

“Our matching algorithm has done a great job at connecting the right consumer to the right agent at the right time,” Rubenstein said.

On Wednesday afternoon, Opcity held an official opening event with members of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, Austin Community College and the Central Texas Food Bank.

Opcity’s new headquarters include an onsite gym with showers, a patio for work, relaxation and gatherings, a courtyard with ping-pong and other games, an onsite disc golf course and it also includes free lunch for all employees.

“Company culture is a top priority at Opcity,” Jill Dwyer, Opcity’s head of culture, said in a news release. “With a track record of building award-winning office cultures, it’s clear Opcity’s executive leadership kept its employees in mind throughout the new headquarters’ design and development phases.”

Opcity is Rubenstein ‘s second startup. He co-founded Yodle, which Web.com acquired in 2016 for $342 million.

Austin’s homegrown fresh baked cookie delivery company, Tiff’s Treats just closed on $25 million in funding to accelerate its national expansion.

Tiff’s Treats, started by former University of Texas at Austin students Leon and Tiffany Chen in 1999, now has more than 700 employees at 34 stores in Texas and Atlanta. They will soon open a Nashville store in Tennessee.

Although Tiff’s Treats makes cookies, at its heart, the company is a tech company using its custom-built sophisticated proprietary ordering and delivery platform combined with tools like Slack, Asana, Intacct, HotSchedules and more, according to a spokeswoman.

To date, Tiff’s Treats has raised $50 million in funding. The company’s latest investment round is led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital.

Tiff’s Treats plans to use the funds for continued national expansion, investment in its technology platform and to hire key senior managers. As part of the investment rounds, Lincoln Isetta, managing director of Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, will join Tiff’s Treats’ board of directors.

“Seeing our brand take off like it is, and be so warmly received into new markets validates what we’ve believed for nearly two decades now,” Tiffany Taylor Chen said in a news release. “Our warm cookie delivery service is unique, special, and in demand. Our company continues to grow, but each of our new locations is as committed as our very first to ensuring the Tiff’s Treats experience: a quality product delivered fast, fresh, and warm, by our team of dedicated employees.”

By LAURA LOREK
Publisher of Silicon Hills News

Two tech giants took the stage at Hogg Memorial Auditorium at the University of Texas at Austin on Monday afternoon to talk about technology and Microsoft.

UT President Gregory L. Fenves introduced them.

Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella visited Austin to meet with students, entrepreneurs and business partners. Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise at the Cockrell School of Engineering and McCombs School of Business, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder of 3Com, interviewed Nadella on stage in front of a packed auditorium filled with students and faculty.

“I visited Microsoft in 1979, met Bill and Paul and I think some progress has been made since then can you summarize Microsoft’s position in the world these days?” Metcalfe asked.

Nadella said he had grown up at Microsoft for 25 years and he thinks a lot about what makes companies successful. Technologies will come and go, Nadella said.

“We, at the core, are a company that is born to create technology so that others can create more technology,” Nadella said.

Microsoft is among the top five largest companies in the world by market capitalization, Metcalfe said.

Microsoft first showed up on that list in the ‘90s and most of the other companies back then were oil companies, Nadella said. And in the 2000s, Microsoft was still in the top five and many of the others were large industrial conglomerates, he said. And now the top five are all tech, he said. That doesn’t mean the top five will remain tech companies ten years from now, Nadella said.

“There is no such thing as a franchise that lasts forever,” Nadella said. “We have to reinvent ourselves.”

Now Nadella is referred to as the “re-founder” of Microsoft filling the big shoes of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Metcalfe said. He asked Nadella to talk about how he became CEO of Microsoft in 2014, the third CEO in the company’s 42-year history, following Gates and Ballmer.

Nadella said he’s a product of American technology reaching where he was growing up in India and the U.S. immigration policy allowing him to move here and live the life he has lived. One of the things that make the U.S. competitive as a nation is the ability to attract and retain immigrants, Nadella said.

Nadella arrived in the U.S. in 1992 and received a Master’s degree in computer science and an MBA. He joined Microsoft in 1992.

“A lot of what kept me at Microsoft for 25 years is this ability to stay in one place and reinvent yourself,” he said.

What role do startups play in Microsoft’s business, Metcalfe asked.

“What makes a startup scale-up is the concept that you come up with has become a hit,” Nadella said.

At some point, the concept runs out of gas, and a company needs a new concept and that’s where a company’s culture matters, Nadella said.

The startup mentality and the ability to come up with new ideas and question status quo is extremely important, he said.

Nadella said he’s learned from Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck and her work on developing growth mindsets.

As a result, Microsoft pushes itself to become a workforce comprised of learn it all’s and not know it all’s, Nadella said.

Microsoft also buys a lot of companies and startups that teach and reshape Microsoft’s culture, he said.

“It’s a huge part of what we want to do with startup communities outside but also startups that we acquire,” Nadella said.

Recently, Nadella wrote a book: “Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone.” It’s a book about philosophy, Metcalfe said.

In the book, Nadella reveals the source of innovation is empathy, he said.

“Innovation is about meeting unmet, unarticulated needs,” Nadella said.

Next, Metcalfe asked Nadella about artificial intelligence and the impact of Microsoft’s technology on society.

“AI is threatening jobs and life as we know it, how do you feel about that?” Metcalfe asked.

AI will be a defining technology in our lifetime, Nadella said.

AI is an empowering tool, he said. For example, Microsoft has developed Seeing AI, a smartphone app, that narrates the world for visually impaired people, Nadella said.

AI will also create new jobs, Nadella said.

Metcalfe also asked Nadella if AI is the killer app for quantum computing.

Nadella said he’s excited about quantum computing’s ability to speed up and solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

During the question and answer session with students, a student named Patrick said he had just interviewed at Microsoft and the final question was what question would you ask Satya Nadella so he asked him about when he uses growth mindset in his everyday interactions.

“I used it this morning in a meeting with Michael Dell,” Nadella said.

Every day, Nadella said he gets plenty of opportunities to confront his fixed mindset.

In addition to his talk at the University of Texas, Nadella also met with Dell in the morning and in the afternoon, he traveled to Capital Factory for a talk with Joshua Baer and a question and answer session with entrepreneurs.

South by Southwest officials announced this week that the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan will be a keynote speaker in 2018.

Khan joins previously announced SXSW keynote speakers Darren Aronofsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Barry Jenkins, Ester Perel, and Whurley.

South by Southwest Conference and Festivals take place March 9-18th. In addition, SXSW announced even more featured speakers including CNN chief interantional correspondent Christiane Amanpour, Forerunner Ventures founder Kirsten Green, President and CEO of the Aspen Institute Walter Isaacson, Vox editor-at-large Ezra Klein, serial entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, political strategist and commentator Symone Sanders, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, music producer Young Guru, James Beard Award-winning TV personality Andrew Zimmern, and many more.

“This diverse and dynamic group of speakers represents many of the burgeoning trends we see coming out of SXSW in 2018,” Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer, said in a news release. “From leaders in blockchain and AI ethics to supporters of women’s rights around the world and more, we’re excited to showcase more of the exciting ideas that make our event the foremost destination for creative people.”

SXSW Conference programming is organized into 24 Tracks divided between Interactive, Film, Music, and Convergence, presented in a variety of session formats. Continuing last year’s initiative, SXSW is offering expanded access to events for all registrants.
Keynotes

SXSW 2018 is sponsored by Capital One and The Austin Chronicle.

WeWork Cofounder and Chief Culture Officer Miguel McKelvey will be a speaker at South by Southwest Interactive 2018.

McKelvey cofounded WeWork in 2010 with Adam Neumann in New York City. WeWork is a privately held company with more than 3,000 employees. It has more than 160,000 members worldwide and it currently has 170 locations in 58 cities and 19 countries. McKelvey oversees the company’s culture and operations.

In Austin, WeWork has three offices and recently announced plans to open a fourth location downtown: WeWork West 6th. Opening in 2018, West 6th will accommodate a community of 1050 members. The space at 221 West 6th includes hot desks and private offices, conference room and phone booths, community bars, comfortable nooks, pantries, and complimentary fruit water and coffee.

WeWork also recently announced that it has a partnership with MassChallenge Texas to be located in WeWork’s new location.

“Over the past several years, we’ve had the privilege of building a strong and inspiring community of creators across Austin,” Nathan Lenahan, head of Operations for WeWork’s southern region, said in a news release. “With demand continuing to grow, we are opening our fourth Austin location in 2018. In addition to growing our physical footprint, we’re excited to announce a partnership with MassChallenge. MassChallenge’s work aligns with our mission to help people do what they love by providing the tools and resources they need, and we’re excited to work together to support and empower companies making a difference right here in Texas.”

“WeWork is quickly becoming a cornerstone of the Texas innovation community,” Mike Millard, managing director of MassChallenge Texas, said in a news release. “We are excited for our inaugural cohort to work out of WeWork’s newest location, and look forward to strengthening the local ecosystem of creators together.”