Tag: Austin (Page 10 of 37)

Mahana Helps Restaurants Roll Out the Red Carpet

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagonas, co-founders of Mahana

Bryan Menell and Richard Bagdonas, co-founders of Mahana

At a restaurant like Swift’s Attic, when someone is an especially good customer—perhaps because they come in a lot, host big parties or drink expensive Bourbon– you don’t reward them with a punch card good for a free muffin. You might send out a complimentary appetizer, said co-owner CK Chin, and you want to make sure it doesn’t show up on the bill. You might slash their wait time. You might give them the table they prefer. But with 60 percent turnover in the restaurant industry, there’s a good chance that if the owner’s not around, the hostess won’t have a clue whether the guy who walked in is a big spending regular or transient who eats nothing but salad and bread sticks. That’s part of the idea behind Mahana.

If a restaurant uses Mahana, and its customers download the app, the restaurant picks up a beacon that signals the customer is near and has a chance to invite him in for a special pairing of his favorite food and drink. If the customer walks in, Mahana lets the host know and gives information the restaurant has gleaned about the customer, meaning the host can welcome the diner by name, offer a favorite table or suggest a special based on previous purchases. Mahana also clues the customer about wait times for a table before the customer ever walks in. Mahana members can share what items they liked on the menu and especially loyal customers can expect perks, like a bump up the waiting list or an appetizer on the house.

In Praise of Market Validation

Mahana Co-founder Richard Bagdonas previously founded SpeedMenu, an ordering and payment app for the restaurant industry…and it taught him something.

SpeedMenu and other companies, he said, “saw a problem they were experiencing and went to solve it,” Bagdonas said. “But they didn’t ask restaurants whether their problem was shared by the restaurant. They thought ‘I’m having this issue, other people must be having this issue, if I solve it, people are going to love it.’

With the founding of Mahana with serial entrepreneur Bryan Menell, Bagdonas began with market validation, asking restaurants about their pain points.

“Not once did they say paying by credit cards was a problem,” he said. “They don’t need you to order a beer or food on your phone, they have someone there to take your order. Just because that person might be busy doesn’t mean they want to replace that person with something else…. Their biggest problem is there’s a chair over there and nobody is sitting in it and nobody is buying food. If they don’t sell the food, it has to get thrown out. They have the food. They have the staff and they have the chair that’s worth maybe $40,000 a year.”

Restaurants needed butts in seats. They needed people coming in, and people coming back, because the cost of acquiring a new customer is just as daunting for restaurants as for other businesses. They needed to be able to identify their best customers and to communicate with them in a way that doesn’t burn them out.

Stuart Thomajan, co-founder of Swift’s Attic and a partner in other popular restaurants such as Uchi and Delish, said that Mahana helps restaurants give valued customers that red carpet treatment, even if it’s the hostesses first day.

“People will go through histrionics to show the hostess they’ve been there before. They’ll say ‘Is Stuart here?’ or ‘Do you have that table in the corner?’” Thomajan said. “They’re trying to let the hostess know ‘Hey, I’ve been here before….’ When you’re serving 2,000 people a week you don’t always have the opportunity to know everybody. We want complete consistency in service. We want to make them feel special. I hoped somebody would develop this tool. Manaha gives us the opportunity to show customers the respect they deserve.”

As a former bartender, Chin said, he cultivated the ability to remember customers’ drinks. He uses that same skill to identify restaurant customers and reward them. Mahana adds “a superhero level of memory to my management.” Nor do customers seem to feel it’s “creepy” that the restaurant is keeping tabs on them. If the restaurant was doing it without getting their opt in. he said, it might be different. But customers treat this as a rewards program.

One of Mahana’s more valuable features, Thomajan said, is that it lets him send emails selectively to customers who would be interested in special events or new menu items at the restaurant without barraging customers with mail constantly. He doesn’t want to send customers emails about specials they wouldn’t be interested in–like sending an email about a steak dinner to a vegetarian or news of a Bourbon special to an alcoholic. “The next time they get an email from Swift’s Attic they won’t open it,” he said. Being able to build relationships with customers, he said “is huge to me.”

Thomajan though is less excited about the feature that lets customers know how long the wait is before they even come to the restaurant. At Swift’s Attic, it can be two hours.

“I’m not loving the idea that a two hour wait will be published to the world,” Thomajan said.

From Southern California to Austin

Before starting Mahana, Bagdonas and Menell founded Subtle Data, a platform for point of sale API developers. But as Subtle Data, they said, they’re “plumbers” setting up the infrastructure. They liked the idea of creating something customer-facing. As business partners, they complement each other. Bagdonas, Menell said, “won’t let me code” because Menell’s IT skills are more dated. But as Bagdonas talked, Menell pulled some documents off a fax machine, pushed them in front of Bagdonas and Bagdonas signed them without dropping a word or skipping a beat. He trusts Menell to be the business guy and “create a structure for the technology” so Bagdonas can keep his focus on software.

“I call him my work wife,” Menell joked.

Both came from Southern California. But they didn’t meet until they got to Austin. Menell was a senior tech consultant for Andersen Consulting working with clients like Apple and with Anderson Windows. After two years, he started his own consulting company Exact Consulting Systems Inc., (Exact stood for Ex-Anderson Consulting). It was the mid-1990s. Computers were still new and companies were beginning to adopt customer relationship management systems. Exact began to implement CRM systems for some of the largest call centers in the world, such as Gateway 2000. The company grew fast to $22 million in revenues. And then he sold it, in 1996 to BSG in Austin and that’s what brought him to town.

Bagdonas grew up in Southern California and had been writing software since he was a kid. In high school, his teacher offered to teach a semester of Pascal. The students loved it so much, they wound up studying it for four years and writing programs that, Bagdonas has no doubt the teacher was selling to industry. At the age of 14, Bagdonas and some friends got interested in voice recognition. They worked tirelessly on creating a voice recognition program but eventually the project failed. For one thing, they had no money. For another, the technology just wasn’t there. Later he realized voice recognition is still one of the hardest things for a computer. Too many words sound the same, even when spoken in a neutral accent. Add a regional accent and the opportunity for mistakes grows exponentially.

But Bagdonas had caught the entrepreneurial “bug.”

“I realized, oh my God, you don’t have to aspire to go work at IBM. You can aspire to be IBM. That’s a beautiful thing,” he said. “I’m very much the scientist but through business I get the opportunity to be creative.”

At 16, he launched a mobile mechanic business, going to people’s cars and fixing them wherever they had broken down. He wore fake glasses in an effort to look older. The business lasted five years and he employed three mechanics. His next venture was to learn to be a commercial pilot. His father, who died when he was 12, had been a pilot and Bagdonas was working his way through his licenses when he got in a horrible motorcycle accident. He needed 11 grafts, some with artificial skin. The damage was such that he was unable to pass the FAA’s health screen for pilots.

He became assistant vice president and director of emerging technologies for Prosoft, a company that trained aerospace engineers to program. While there, he authored four books on data communications, telecommunications, the convergence of voice, video and data and data for sales people. Prosoft moved Bagdonas to Austin. Around 2000, Menell incubated one of Bagdonas’ companies and Bagdonas built some support software for one of Menell’s customers. Menell was an advisor with SpeedMenu and later left the Dachis Group to be CEO of Subtle Data.

Right now, they said, Mahana is going to work to “crush” the Austin market, though there are restaurants in Washington D.C. and New York waiting to get on the list. Thomajan said the founders are very responsive to every suggestion he makes as a customer. He and Chin will also be including Mahana in their new restaurant, Wu Chow.

Now, Mahana’s wrapping up its seed round of financing and getting ready to expand. SXSW, they said, “was very good to us.” The company won, among other things, the Silicon Hills News/Austin Technology Incubator and Central Texas Angel Network pitch competition, which entitles them to a series of stories about their entrepreneurial journey. So, SHN will be revisiting Mahana as they work on financing and expand their services.

Boxer Aims to Simplify Email Management

April 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By JAIME NETZER
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Boxer’s motto is, “Email isn’t broken, it’s just unfair.”

It’s about an overload problem, says Boxer CEO and co-founder, Andrew Eye. “People are all frustrated by overload, and they tend to pick a scapegoat,” he says. “Email is a convenient scapegoat, people say it’s old, it’s broken, it needs to be replaced.” But, he says, it’s not actually broken. By and large, the emails that we get are those we want—or wanted at some point—to receive. Spam isn’t nearly the problem today that it was years ago. (“Google helped us solve that problem,” Eye adds.) But mobile email still comes in one continuous, linear stream. And that, Boxer says, is unfair.

The answer is a kind of email triage: With Boxer, a mobile email management app, users can utilize gestures to swipe their inbox clean. “The thing people want to do the most with email is delete it. It’s important to people to be able to as quickly as they can make a decision, take an action. In a lot of cases that decision is just, ‘is this important to me or not?’”

With Boxer, users can delete email, but they can also acknowledge receipt of email. As its website says: “That’s right, we added a Like button to email.”

Boxer, founded in 2012, previously known as TaskBox, has created an email application that lets people manage their email accounts. Its application supports Exchange, Google’s Gmail and Google Apps, Yahoo! Mail, Apple’s iCloud, AOL mail and Microsoft’s Outlook and Hotmail. Its app is available for free download through Apple’s iTunes app store.

The company, based in Austin, raised $3 million in venture funding last year. Boxer also acquired Enhanced Email to boost its Android development in February of this year and it now has 15 full time employees, according to TechCrunch.

Randolph Bias, professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin and an expert on tech usability, agrees that mobile email is the challenge to meet at this point in time: “Mobile email management is difficult for the same reason that so many tasks are hard to translate to the small device—we users have experience with the functionality on our laptops or tablets, and thus “mental models” of how the process should work and expectations about what functions will be provided, and it is hard to squeeze all that onto the small screen,” Bias explains. “Or, more to the point, [it’s] hard to decide which functionality to keep up close to the surface and which to bury, several keystrokes or gestures away.”

For his part, Bias was mostly impressed with Boxer’s functionality, but would offer up one change, to the Like function. “They should’ve used some other term, like “received,” that better expresses the user’s intent,” Bias says. “Plus, if I get an email that says “Aunt Edna died,” I don’t want to “like” it.”

But other customers have been thrilled with Boxer, which also offers integrated to dos and combined inboxes. “Boxer makes dealing with mobile email fast and easy, and it has completely replaced the default mail app on my iPhone,” says Michael Trafton, a Boxer user and Austin-based start-up entrepreneur. “I love being able to delete or archive my emails with a simple swipe of my finger.”

“Like most business owners, I’m drowning in email—I receive hundreds of messages a day,” Trafton adds. “Boxer makes it easy for me keep on top of my email. I can process my inbox with one hand—a simple swipe will delete or archive a message, or I can dash off a quick reply using message templates—no typing necessary. If an email needs further action, I add it to my ToDo list and it’s waiting for me when I get back to the office.”

That kind of control is exactly what Eye has in mind. “The mobile inbox is such a huge opportunity to make people’s lives better, to make them feel more in control, to make them feel like they’re accountable, like they responsive,” Eye says. “The inbox has never been associated with these types of words, but it’s really this wonderful source, if I want to know all the things I’m supposed to be looking at and thinking about.”

Wonderful, that is, as long as you have an app to help with you the decoding. To learn more about Boxer, visit www.getboxer.com.

ihiji’s Invision Cuts Down on IT House Calls

April 7, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LESLIE ANNE JONES
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Stuart Rench, founder of ihiji, photo by Leslie Anne Jones

Stuart, founder of ihiji

Remote diagnostic tools have been available to big companies with complex computer networks for many years, but the options for your average residential IT support provider were limited. It’s a waste of time and expense for the IT guy when he has to go to a house just to reboot the printer. Stuart Rench knows this from experience, and his ihiji invision – a little black box that plugs into a wall socket and lets specialists monitor what’s going on with the network remotely – is now saving many IT guys many trips.

Rench started his first company in Florida in 2005. There, he installed home automation systems for high net worth individuals – homes with $500,000 in-home theater systems and dimmable lighting controllable by touchscreen interface. On occasion, a client would come in on his private jet late on a Friday night after months away, something wouldn’t be working and Rench or one of his partners would have to go figure it out.

For several years, they tinkered with a prototype that could monitor networks remotely and eliminate needless in-person visits. In March 2010, Rench and his team packed up their computers and servers and relocated to Austin to work on ihiji full-time, but it took awhile for business to pick up.

“We were ahead of what the market needed,” Rench said. In the four years since moving to Austin, the team grew to eight members, but shrank down again for a period during slow sales. Today, it’s back up to nine full-time members, including three sales people. In those four years, the Internet of Things grew, home networks became more complex, and so too did the need for monitoring and support. “Now we’re the go-to company.”

The ihiji invision – which allows IT service providers to remotely see all the devices on a network and diagnose and maintain those connected devices – is now in 46 states and 25 countries and sales are strong. Some of ihiji’s clients are big national brands, but many are small businesses, one- or two-man shops for whom the ihiji invision helps conserve time and resources. Rench says their customers come from both ends of the geographic spectrum: He has a lot of clients who are city dwellers and remote monitoring saves them from having to waste time in traffic to visit clients in person; and he also has rural customers who need to cover a lot of ground – one client in Montana services homes within a 500-mile radius. Another customer based in New Zealand works exclusively on IT systems for mega yachts, ihiji’s service and monitoring solution is especially useful to him since his clients’ boats go all over the world. Earlier on, ihiji’s customers were mainly IT providers servicing residences, but Rench says now they have more clients who service commercial networks too.

Ihiji’s team works out of an office at Austin Technology Incubator, where they’ve been since arriving in Texas. Today, Rench says their focus is on making sure their upcoming products are ones people really want, not just what they think they might want, and to that end they’re paying close attention to feedback. So far Rench says, “We haven’t built anything where weren’t pushed in that direction.” Now the company is looking to grow its product line and expand the platform’s capabilities.

It used to be that IT service and system integration were seen as two separate jobs. Drawing on his industry experience, Rench equates them to a ven diagram with an ever-increasing area of shared space. “If I project forward, there will be very little difference between the two,” he says.

The home automation industry is in a growth phase, and the pace is expected to pick up with the proliferation of devices like Nest, the Wi-Fi-enabled smart thermostat, whose parent company Google bought in January for $3.2 billion.

“Only three percent of American homes currently have home automation systems, but we are only starting to approach the point at which such systems can really save people money and make their lives easier,” said Howdy Pierce, co-founder of engineering consultancy Cardinal Peak. “In the next five years we expect penetration of the Internet of Things to grow exponentially.”

With more devices on their networks, homeowners will likely need more help maintaining it all, and in turn the IT industry’s need for remote monitoring systems will grow, which will be good for ihiji. Things are already looking up, Rench says, “We’re on track to double revenues over the next year.”

Funded in Austin…or Not at SXSW

March 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Josh Kerr of Written, Cotter Cunningham of RetailMeNot and Utz Baldwin of Plum, photo by Susan Lahey

In many ways, Written’s Josh Kerr was the poster child for how one gets funding in Austin at the Funded in Austin panel at SXSW Tuesday afternoon.

Kerr spoke glowingly of the help, support and advice he got from Capital Factory. He talked about building relationships with various angel investors over coffee, lunch or drinks until he gave them the ask. And he gave interesting tips: For example he suggested telling angels he’d love to have them invest even a small amount just to get them involved, and usually they upped the number because the investment he suggested seemed too small.

And the company wound up with $1 million seed round.

By contrast Utz Baldwin of Plum (formerly Ube) said finding funding for hardware like his lighting system that can be operated by your smart phone has found few Austin funders. It did, however, raise nearly $1 million on Fundable.

Finally, Cotter Cunningham of RetailMeNot explained that funding had been a little bit different for his company because his business model entailed buying existing businesses, which is an easier sell in some ways than getting funding for an idea alone. He got a $30 million round.

The panel, moderated by Shari Wynn Ressler, founder and CEO of Incubation Station, explored the process and hurdles of getting funding in Austin. All the panelists agreed that raising money is pretty much the CEO’s full time job, which can be a challenge.

For one thing, as Baldwin said, there were parts of developing the user experience he really wanted to get more involved with because it’s part of the business he enjoys. But he didn’t have time because he was busy raising money. Kerr said his team initially resented the fact that while they were doing the work of creating the company, he was wining and dining investors. Once he got the money though, they forgave him.

Beware the Soft Yes

“It was a little tricky with our model,” Cunningham said, “because it’s difficult to raise money and do an acquisition at the same time.” On the one hand were the funders doing their due diligence and collecting data and on the other were the selling businesses asking “Are we going to do this or aren’t we?”

Kerr said he kept the amount Written was asking for small, so that it looked like they were close to success. Then as more money came in, he upped the raise amount.

Cunningham and Kerr worked on building their networks, asking “Who do you know?” Baldwin wound up raising money from people he knew might be interested in the idea. After a ten minute phone call to a retired Cisco executive, for example, the exec gave him $150,000.

People who initially say no might change their minds if you make tweaks to the product that they suggest or if someone else takes the lead investment position, panelists said. Cunningham said “You have to be persistent. “Some of the people who gave us money told us ‘Until you called four times we weren’t paying attention.’”

But when making the ask, you have to know exactly how much money you want and exactly what you’re going to do with it. You also need to have practiced your pitch “a million times.” Cunningham said. And it’s best not to shoot for your most likely big funder on the early pitches. Practice on less likely candidates so you have it down when you’re shooting your big gun. That was a mistake Kerr made, going to Austin Ventures with his first pitch.

“In a matter of seconds I became uninvestible when they asked what we were doing with the money,” he said.

All the panelists experienced “the soft yes” which is not a definitive no but a “let’s keep talking” that never results in anything. Entrepreneurs need to guard against the emotional roller coaster of thinking a soft yes is the same as a yes.
Baldwin said that after his company won a People’s Choice award at DEMO, Sandhill Road (investor central in Silicon Valley) opened its doors to them. But one investor would say “You don’t want to be a hardware company, you want to be a software company” and another offered suggestions about the company’s business model. Baldwin was changing up the pitch deck after every meeting and he wound up with a garbled story.

“You have to nail that pitch. Exude absolute confidence in what you’re doing, demonstrate absolute domain knowledge and ask at every meeting if there are any red flags. ‘What do you see in this that would keep you from investing in my company?’”

Know Your Investor

While a hardware product like Plum’s, has trouble finding funding in Austin, the others talked about the difficulty of getting funding from outside Austin because investors often want to be able to keep a close eye on the companies they’ve invested in. But Cunningham said he’s had success pitching the benefits of Austin, such as a much lower attrition rate than that of Silicon Valley.

“In Palo Alto, most of the companies have a 20-to-25 percent turnover rate. Someone will be sitting in the office saying ‘I just got a call from Twitter and they’re willing to offer me 50 percent more than you’re paying me. In Austin that doesn’t happen. Our voluntary attrition is under five percent.”

Any form of investment takes a lot of investigation, panelists said. Friends and family may cough up the money but they’ll call every week and ask how their money is doing or require reports you wouldn’t normally have to generate, which is a time suck. There are numerous angels in Austin who go to all the meetings but invest very little. And there are some investors who are more trouble than they’re worth. It’s important to call their references and find out if they’re the kind who like to call you up at midnight with a question.

Entrepreneurs structure deals differently as well. Baldwin said his Fundable investors were happy with uncapped convertible notes and responded to discounts for early investors. Kerr, though, said all his early investors expected caps.
All the panelists said it was crucial to hire the best attorney available, not to scrimp or hire a relative. Kerr suggested finding an attorney who would work for equity.

At the end of the session, one audience participant asked where a new Austin startup could go to find more information about funding and Kerr recommended Capital Factory, which he had mentioned several times through the session. Claire England of Tech Ranch stood and asked a question, prefaced by the comment: “There are a lot of resources out there besides Capital Factory” to which Kerr responded that he wasn’t trying to be an advertisement for the incubator/accelerator.
Baldwin leaned over, looked at Kerr’s Capital Factory t-shirt and said “Nice shirt.”

Hire, Fire or Skip? Find out With Austin-based ROIKOI

March 8, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

ROIKOI is a new hiring application recently launched in Beta and the company is making a big splash at South by Southwest Interactive.

Austin-based ROIKOI is the signature sponsor of Entrepreneurs Lounge, an invitation-only party aimed at entrepreneurs, investors and insiders, held on the rooftop of Fogo de Chao every night through Tuesday. ROIKOI’s giant banner hangs from the rooftop.

Andy Wolfe, founder of ROIKOI

The company, founded by Andy Wolfe, an ex-BazaarVoice employee, is backed by a number of successfull local entrepreneurs including Brett Hurt, founder of BazaarVoice and Andrew Busey, serial entrepreneur and mentor. The startup has raised $1 million to date.

ROIKOI is built around a fairly simple question – of everyone you’ve ever worked with, who would you hire and who would you not? The app is designed like a “game” that allows users to anonymously vote whether they would hire, fire or skip people they have worked with. The app features the top people leaderboards organized by company, geography and industry.

“Only great scores and great people show up. Negative scores and individual votes remain private. Apps like Secret and Whisper have shown that anonymity is key to authenticity, but ROIKOI is able to focus on the positive and use its data for good.”

ROIKOI seeks to solve the problem of finding top talent for companies from those who know them best. It seeks to provide better feedback than LinkedIn’s endorsements or Klout’s system.

Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Bigcommerce Mixes Business with Pleasure

March 6, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By Stacy Alexander Evans
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

A recruiting event that features a cover band playing ’80’s era glam, staff avatars swiped from the Street Fighter video game, leadership who are not shy about proclaiming their love of beer: clearly the Bigcommerce team knows how to have a good time, yet their revelry is wrapped inside a crisp, clean package.

Co-founder Mitchell Harper, a native of Australia, lays it on the line: “We wanted to make all of our office locations accommodating, fun and innovative,” he says “so people didn’t feel like they “had” to come to work, but rather, that they wanted to come to work.”

This playful attitude has become synonymous with startup culture, but for Harper and his partner Eddie Machaalani—who founded the company together in Sydney in 2004 and opened their Austin office in 2009 after a name change from Interspire to Bigcommerce—their passion and enthusiasm is grounded in their mutual devotion to small businesses.

Simply put, Bigcommerce is a one-stop shop for small business: a veritable mashup of self-service tools for web design, ecommerce and marketing, but with more DIY customization options than many of the stand-alone products.

Air Plant Worlds is one Austin business that’s had some success with the Bigcommerce platform, and cofounders Leila Nazari and Sean Findley are a startup success story all their own. They launched at the end of last year, and for the month of December—just six weeks after going live—they had over 3,000 unique visitors to their site and 12,000 page views, quite a feat for a new concept featuring the artful presentation of soil-free plants in glass and wooden containers.

According to Findley, Bigcommerce outshone its competitors in the realm of expandability. “We were looking for something that would be easy enough to use in the beginning, at launch, but still be powerful enough to where it could grow with us.” In addition, Nazari says you just can’t beat the streamlined capabilities of a single provider. “Before you had to have a bunch of different accounts and go to all these different places to do different things, but Bigcommerce puts all of those things in the bag all together.”

Harper says Air Plant Worlds is a great example of what can be done with the Bigcommerce tool kit, claiming “it does make it really easy to build a beautiful online store exactly like theirs in a matter of hours.”

According to this cofounder, with his company’s tools, a client’s ingenuity knows no bounds. “This is a delicate product, but by displaying a ‘shipping made easy’ banner in bright orange on every page,” says Harper, “they proactively address a concern many online consumers may have. In addition to telling shoppers what to expect and the savings they can receive, it also links to the site’s shipping and returns policy so there are no questions left unanswered.”

In addition to this client-centered business model, Harper says he also owes his success to a solid relationship with his cofounder, Machaalani.

As evidenced by the existence of Techman-About-Town Damon Clinkscales’ cofounder matchup service Founder Dating, choosing the right cofounder is not unlike choosing a mate, with the stakes being just as high. Harper agrees.

“In my view, you don’t want to get either of these wrong,” says the man from down under, “I’m sure divorce is just as hard as parting ways with a cofounder. We were both lucky in that we seemed to stumble upon each other by chance and got along from day one.” He takes this notion of fostering relationships one step further by saying it doesn’t hurt that their wives are friends. “We’ve got their support when we need to focus on the business for extended periods of time,” says Harper, “such as when we’re raising capital or spending time on the road for public relations.”

Through it all, a common link can be found—relationships. Bigcommerce makes client relationships abroad as important as those closer to home. To this end, mixing business with pleasure becomes much more than a game of ping-pong in the office.

As Brad Feld, managing director at the Foundry Group famously said, “You can’t motivate people, you can only create a context in which people are motivated.”

WP Engine Revs Up on WordPress

March 4, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By TIM GREEN
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Photo courtesy of WPEngine

It’s Ticketpalooza Day at WP Engine, the Austin-based company that offers managed hosting services for WordPress-based websites.

About 30 members of the company’s support staff are gathered around two long tables fielding calls from customers having problems with their websites.

The support reps tap on their laptops, lean over to look at a neighbor’s computer screen and offer words of advice. They score prizes, devour company-provided lunch and seriously reduce the number of calls.

The idea of Ticketpalooza is to close out service tickets to customers’ satisfaction as quickly as possible, said Austin Gunter, part of the company’s marketing department.

He said WP Engine’s customers appreciate the draw down on the service queue and the staff likes the collaborative yet competitive process. “We’re all just having a lot of fun with this.”

Customer service is an essential part of what WP Engine offers. Its services help its customers’ websites run faster, more reliably, more securely and with the capability to grow.

Heather Brunner, CEO of WP Engine

In 2013, WP Engine experienced what CEO Heather Brunner called hyper growth of its own, saying that revenue and the number of customers and employees all tripled.

Now, with a $15 million venture investment and a complete executive team in place, the company, which has offices in Austin and San Francisco, is geared to keep growing.

The investment, announced in January, came from North Bridge Venture Partners, which has offices in Waltham, Mass., and Palo Alto, Calif. A previous round of $1.2 million in 2011 came from Silverton Partners and several angel investors.

The WordPress universe offers rooms for growth.

WordPress started as an open source blogging tool and has grown into a content management system that powers about 20 percent of websites and 20 percent of the biggest websites.

Brunner said WP Engine has 14,000 customers, ranging from individuals and small businesses to bigger clients such as the Country Music Association, HTC, Williams-Sonoma and the Bonnaroo music festival. The company’s customers run more than 120,000 different sites with about 40 million unique visitors a day.

Entrepreneur Jason Cohen was responding to the frustrating performance of his WordPress blog when he developed the technology on which WP Engine is based in 2010.

The foundation of WP Engine’s technology is the cloud-based infrastructure that started with Cohen’s coding.

“Now with 3 ½ years under our belt we’ve been able to architect our cloud infrastructure for massive scale and traffic and the ability to scale up and scale down,” Brunner said. “We have unique IP that runs the cloud infrastructure for our business and WordPress.”

Next is a layer of software that provides security, speed and other functions. “We’ve created a whole caching technology that is unique to the market,” she said. “There are specific innovations that are unique to us.”

A third layer includes the customer interface, user tools and a dashboard that allows the customer to make websites change and updates easily and quickly.

The top layer is WP Engine’s support team, which Brunner said is drawn from the WordPress ecosystem, developers and consultants. The support team interacts with customers over the phone, through Twitter and chat.

“We have a tremendous amount of expertise in our support customer-facing operation to help whether they have a proactive question or have an issue they need help with,” she said.

In its interactions with customers, WP Engine can track what’s working and what’s not and make changes.

“We’ve seen a lot of changes to their service over the years,” said Brandon Dove at Pixel Jar, a WordPress development company that uses WP Engine. “They’ve added developer-facing things like git integration for deployment, backup postings with an instant restore feature and built-in staging servers for active development cycles.”

Dove said he appreciates WP Engine’s honesty and transparency when there’s a problem.

“No host can offer you 100 percent up time,” he said. “Knowing that you can trust your host to have your best interests in mind when something goes wrong is crucial. They have an SLA (service-level agreement) in place that keeps them accountable for downtime and other support-related issues.”

Brunner said the company will use part of the $15 million investment to continue to improve and expand its technology and services. That includes adding self-service functions to make it easier for the customers to help themselves, she said.

“That’s a big, big part of our focus for 2014, extending the market leadership we have and continue to invest in things that mean an even better experience for our customers,” she said.

Brunner became affiliated with WP Engine in early 2013 as a board member. She became COO in the spring and CEO in October, all of which were planned moves. She had been COO of BazaarVoice before joining WP Engine.

Other members of the executive staff who came aboard in 2013 are April Downing, chief financial officer; Matt Schatz, vice president of sales; and Tina Dobie, vice president of customer experience. Cohen, who founded the company with Ben Metcalfe, shifted from CEO to chief technology officer.

The company has three basic pricing plans, from $29 per month to $249 per month. Beyond that is a premium level, in which pricing is based on factors including the number of sites, the amount of traffic and number of functions.

“We want to have a really fair exchange for value,” Brunner said. “So we’re delivering this innovation, we’re delivering fantastic expertise, we’re creating an incredible experience. That’s our aspiration for our customers for them to say, “This just works.” And for that we want to give a fair exchange. That’s what we’re looking to create.”

WP Engine is one of several companies providing managed hosting for WordPress websites. Competitors include San Antonio-based Pressable.

WP Engine does well in several comparisons online. Cohen and Pressable founder Vid Luther noted similarities and differences on Quora.

“We definitely have competition, it’s a dynamic space,” Brunner said. “But there’s no one single company we’re going head to head against.”

Brunner said the company practices what it preachers and uses WordPress for its website. It refreshed its brand and rolled out a new website in October.

“It’s all built on WordPress and shows you the best of how you would use WordPress to build a corporate website, get your message out as well as use thought leadership within your website such as blogs for content.”

For WP Engine, that’s the ticket.

AT&T Plans to Open Innovation Center in Austin

February 26, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

AT&T announced plans Wednesday to open a new center for technology innovation and collaboration in Austin.

The Dallas-based company did not provide details on how many people the center will employ or its cost. It did report its making a multi-million dollar investment. Currently, AT&T employs about 2,600 people in the Austin area.

In addition, AT&T is awarding a series of technology grants to local technology organizations and is sponsoring the 10th anniversary of Austin Fusebox Festival.

The innovation center will focus on education, data analytics, video and mobile applications and solutions. It will also include a studio open to community members to create unique content for AT&T’s TV, online and mobile platforms.

“The new AT&T center is being designed to help connect Austin in new and rewarding ways based on community member input,” Dahna Hull, vice president and general manager, Austin, AT&T Services, said in a news release.

AT&T is also rolling out an all-fiber AT&T U-Verse with GigaPowerSM service, which the company announced last year.
AT&T’s new innovation center will serve as a catalyst for collaboration among community leaders, residents, educators, technologies and entrepreneurs.

“Opening a center for innovation in the heart of the city will create even greater opportunities for Austin’s entrepreneurs, technology developers, and students,” Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell said. “AT&T will have an opportunity to work closely with the many talents in our city, and the community stands to benefit from the exciting collaboration that will take place in this facility. We are fortunate to have companies like AT&T that appreciate our culture and invest in our future.”

In addition, AT&T announced plans to award endowments to the Austin Technology Council, the Austin Technology Incubator, Capital Factory, Entrepreneurs Foundation and Tech Ranch.

“The community investment initiative will also support the 10-year anniversary of the Austin Fusebox Festival, a 12-day hybrid arts festival promoting local culture, arts and technology, planned for April 2014,” according to a news release.

Dropbox to Expand in Austin and Hire 170 Employees

February 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 13 Comments

Dropbox plans to expand its office by 170 employees adding to its existing Austin workforce of 30.

Dropbox, based in San Francisco, provides an online storage box that allows people and businesses to exchange files including documents, photos and videos from anywhere.

More than 200 million people and 4 million businesses including BCBG, Kayak, National Geographic and Rockstar Energy use Dropbox and 1 billion files are uploaded to Dropbox every 24 hours. Last December, Dropbox struck a deal with Dell to create Dropbox for Business using Dell’s Cloud software and services.

“We are honored that Dropbox has decided to further its growth and investment in Austin,” Pete Winstead, Shareholder at Winstead PC and Chairman of Austin Chamber of Commerce’s Opportunity Austin, said in a news release. “Investments like Dropbox’s continue to facilitate the creation of good jobs and future prosperity for the Austin region.”

Austin’s central location, vibrant tech community and culture drew Dropbox to expand here, Sujay Jaswa, vice president of business at Dropbox, said in a news release.

“The city has been a welcoming home for us, with a great bunch of Austinites joining the Dropbox team,” he said. “We’re excited to expand our presence in the area as we continue to bring exceptional products and user experience to our customers.”

The Austin Chamber of Commerce through its initiative Opportunity Austin helped Dropbox expand here. The City of Austin also approved an incentive package worth $244,500 during the next 10 years. Earlier, the state announced Dropbox would receive a $1.5 million Texas Enterprise Fund grant.

“Not only does Dropbox bring with it international name recognition, this incentive provides quality job creation in the ever growing technology industry,” Mayor Lee Leffingwell said in a news release. “The competition to attract quality companies is stiff and I’m pleased that Austin is now one of the new homes to Dropbox, along with San Francisco and Dublin, Ireland.”

SpareFoot Raises $10 Million More in Funding

February 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The fun loving startup, SpareFoot that has created the nation’s largest online storage marketplace, has just raised $10 million in venture capital from Insight Venture Partners.
Austin-based SpareFoot has raised $26 million since its founding in 2008. New York-based Insight Venture Partners provided $22 million of those funds. Its other major investors include Capital Factory, Floodgate and Silverton Partners.
“SpareFoot will use this latest investment to double down on engineering and product development,” Chuck Gordon, co-founder and CEO, said in a news release. “We believe there is a big opportunity to expand our offerings in the market, and that’s what we’re going to do. Our goal is to make renting a storage unit easier than booking a hotel room, and this new investment will help us make that happen.”
SpareFoot has 120 employees at its downtown headquarters and plans to add more than 40 this year in the customer service, engineering and product development areas, according to the news release.
“SpareFoot has done a great job of bringing together a highly fragmented market of small self-storage operators and is doing an even better job helping them compete with the large players,” Richard Wells, managing director of Insight Venture Partners said in a news release.
SpareFoot operates a free marketplace that lets customers find and reserve storage units online. It has the largest inventory of storage units in the U.S. with more than 7,000 facilities in its network.