Tag: Austin (Page 13 of 37)

Austin Startup Games to Showcase Entrepreneurial Athletes

January 10, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

It’s less than a month to go until the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi kicks off.
But if you can’t wait that long and you can’t travel to Russia, there’s a solution much closer in Austin.
It’s the Austin Startup 2014 Winter Games! The event begins at 1 p.m. at the Austin Music Hall on Jan. 25th. Tickets cost $10 to attend.
The Austin Startup Games are like the Olympics for nerds. A bunch of startups will come together to compete in Ping-Pong, foosball, darts, shuffleboard, flip cup, beer pong, giant Connect4, Pop-A-Shot and trivia. And if past games are any indication, these athletes will also imbibe a lot of beer and other refreshments.
The Austin Startup Games started in 2012 by entrepreneurs from eight startup companies. The goal is to give back to the community and have fun doing it. All of the money raised gets donated to local charities.
The Austin Startup Games has since doubled in size with 16 startups competing in the winter games. Those startups are Adlucent, Adometry, Boundless Network, Build a Sign, Capital Factory, Chaotic Moon, CSID, Headspring, Living Direct, Map My Fitness, Main Street Hub, Mass Relevance, SpareFoot, Spiceworks, Spredfast and uShip.
Also, the CEOs of those startups will compete in the final event of the game, which is a surprise and it will not be revealed until the games begin. Last year, the surprise event was a mechanical bull.

CyrusOne Buys 22 Acres in Austin for Data Center Expansion

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

CyrusOne, a Houston-based data center operator, looks like it’s set to expand further in Austin.
The company has announced the purchase of 22 acres in the MetCenter business park in Austin. The company currently has a 54,000 square foot data center there.
Last year, CyrusOne bought 54 acres in San Antonio and Houston and it owns 24 acres in the Dallas area.
Overall, CyrusOne has 920,000 gross square feet of space in Texas with 560,000 square feet of data center capacity, according to Gary Wojtaszek, president and chief executive officer.
“We estimate that the property we now own in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin is capable of yielding an additional 2.5 million gross square feet and 1.6 million square feet of data center capacity, effectively tripling what we currently offer at our Texas facilities,” Wojtaszek said in a news release. “Securing the ownership of 100 acres in Texas markets where we already have a strong presence allows for construction of what we believe is the largest multi-facility interconnected data center platform in the country.”
The company connects its data centers through its CyrusOne National Internet Exchange, which lets its customers host data at more than one location for backup data.
CyrusOne reports its customers include more than 125 members of the Fortune 1000.

Yellow Cab Austin Updates Hail A Cab App

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

With all kinds of competition to give people rides around Austin from Uber and on-demand ride-sharing startups like Lyft and SideCar, Yellow Cab Austin is keeping pace with the technological changes.
The company announced last month the release of its Hail A Cab app, version 3.0., which includes a mobile payment system for Austin taxis.
Yellow Cab Austin originally launched its app in July of 2012. Since then, the app has been downloaded more than 400,000 times.
The company has reported that taxi wait times have decreased by 27 percent since it released its app.
The app now allows customers to pay with their mobile phones and it also allows them to rate their experiences with Yellow Cab Austin.
“We’re always looking for ways to improve the customer experience, and the HAIL A CAB app is a core driver of that mission,” Ed Kargbo, President of Yellow Cab Austin, said in a news release. “Allowing for mobile payments and encouraging direct feedback will help us continue to provide a safe and efficient way for Austinites and visitors to travel around our city.”
For more information, visit the Hail A Cab app website.

Innovator’s Insights: Spotlight on Scott Harmon, CEO of Noesis Energy

December 20, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By GREGORY WISE
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Scott Harmon, CEO of Noesis Energy

Noesis Energy founder and CEO Scott Harmon didn’t set-out to be a serial entrepreneur, but having now started and grown no fewer than four Austin tech companies the title seems to fit.

As part of the leadership team at Tivoli Systems, the poster-child for Austin tech-business success, Harmon helped guide the company to a 1995 IPO and $750 million acquisition by IBM. Not long after, he co-founded Motive, where as president and CEO he led another IPO and grew the company to $100 million in revenue. After leaving Motive, Harmon became CEO of AlterPoint, leading that company to a strategic acquisition.

Today, he seems completely in his element as CEO of venture-backed Noesis Energy, a position he’s held since February 2011. “We’re heavily focused on the opportunity to save $50 million in energy that’s wasted in commercial buildings every year,” Harmon says. “We want to help people reduce that waste.”

Think of Noesis as a match-making service, Harmon says. “We connect building engineers, facility managers, real estate managers, real estate portfolio owners, building owners – anyone who owns a building and pays an energy bill – to energy saving technologies.” Put another way, Harmon jokes, “we’re a dating website for energy efficiency.”

According to Harmon, about a third of Noesis’ customers are public sector institutions, primarily state agencies and municipalities, with the other two-thirds being private-sector. But in both cases the customers’ goal is the same, to reduce spending. Often customers will come to Noesis with a specific energy-saving goal in-place.

“Many businesses will set an annual energy reduction target and it’s usually about five percent,” said Harmon. “Customers look for guidance, counsel and solutions from Noesis. We want to be a trusted partner to the customer. People aren’t confident in sourcing directly from the vendors.

“There are 8,000 companies in the US that sell technology related to energy consumption or efficiency. Talk to their VP’s of Sales and they will commonly say, ‘our technology is too complicated and we’d love a better way to get our technologies into the market.’”

When it comes to acting as a partner, Noesis puts its money where its mouth is. The company makes money as a percentage of customers’ energy savings. The more successful Noesis is at helping a customer reduce energy expenses, the greater the revenue potential.

Executive Q&A with Scott Harmon

Q. What does a “typical” day look like for you?

A. As one of the founders I wanted a scenario where it was possible to work from home. We’d all seen Office Space (Mike Judge’s 1999 workplace satire) enough; we were tired of the cube race. Today I split my time almost evenly between working at the office, from home and on the road. It’s made the lifestyle of this industry better for me; much better than being in an office from 7:00AM to 7:00PM then seeing your family only after that. I embrace a more flexible and connected way of working. I think if you want to kind of keep doing it (working in the start-up/early stage environment) you have to achieve some balance.

Q. What part of your job gives you the most satisfaction?

A. I’m still a technology geek. I graduated from Iowa State, where I went on a wrestling scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I like the building process and interacting with people who build things. The whole process of building has always given me a big charge. I love to build things.

Q. What are the qualities that make someone good at your job?

A. Competitiveness. I’m competitive. I think competition brings out the best in people. It tells you what you’re good at. Tells you what you’re not good at. It’s invigorating.

Q. What the most difficult part of your job?

A. I think for me it’s always wishing you could go bigger and faster. In a perfect world you could have the scale of a larger company with the nimbleness of a start-up.

Q. What experience, or experiences, best prepared you for your job?

A. The way I grew-up in Iowa. I grew-up 50 miles from the Field of Dreams cornfield. It was a very rural, very-Midwestern upbringing. That, wrestling, and majoring in Computer Sciences all prepared me.

Q. Why do you choose to live and work in Central Texas, as opposed to other tech-centric parts of the country?

A. It has the best blend of the various lifestyles. You’ve got the tech community, it’s affordable, and it’s a good place to raise a family. Honestly, I don’t think there’s even a close second. If you want to do the “All-Tech” thing, go to Silicon Valley, but you’ll be back.

Q. Outside of your current position, what’s your dream job and why?

A. It would be another start-up.

Q. What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

A. Always know what can kill your business versus what can only hurt you. As a CEO I feel a really strong sense of personal responsibility and care for the people who work for me. It’s really heavy, in a good way, it’s a big motivation.

Q. Who is your role model?

A. Bob Metcalfe. He is about great technology first. Bob is a great example.

Q. What’s the first electronic gadget you remember owning?

A. A cell phone. The cell phone collapsed distances more than anything that came before it.

Q. What’s the one piece of technology you couldn’t live without?

A. My laptop. It’s still the most productive thing I have. The laptop crushes the tablet, iPhone, any other piece of media I have. It’s far and away my favorite.

Q. What do you think is the most important technology in-use today?

A. Search is the most important; it’s how anybody can know anything. That’s huge. The personal cost of search approaches zero, yet you can know anything. You can know the biology of your cancer if you’re a cancer patient, for example.

Q. What do you think is the most underrated technology in use today?

A. Meters, all types of meters. Meters are going everywhere. Google Traffic has individuals metering the distance they’ve traveled in a certain amount of time, establishing traffic patterns. Energy meters are measuring energy at points in time. The interval for energy metering used to be a month. A Meter Reader would come around and read total consumption and peak consumption. Now energy is read every five minutes. This is the flip side of analytics.

And I think peer-to-peer connectivity is underrated; we’re just beginning to see the power of crowds. Noesis is a strong peer-to-peer example. People in the Noesis community advise each other on energy efficiency. I was just reading about peer-to-peer funding. A cool company called LendingClub that allows people to lend to other people. There’s Airbnb and others. The power of people to deal directly with each other. That scale, that enormity, is pretty fascinating.

Q. What do you think is the most overrated technology in use today?

A. The concept of the Smart Home is the most overrated. There’s no such thing as a Smart Home! And do you really want webcams throughout your house? That’s horrifying on so many different levels!

Gregory Wise, vice president with Weber Shandwick

Gregory Wise is an Austin-based marketing and communications professional with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. He can be reached at Gregory Wise
Editor’s Note: Gregory Wise will write the Innovator’s Insights column for Silicon Hills News on accomplished technology experts in Austin. To be considered for the column, please contact him at Gregory Wise.

Randi Zuckerberg Navigates the “dot complicated” World

December 14, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Moria Forbes, publisher of Forbes Woman, interviewing Randi Zuckerberg, author of dot complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives

Randi Zuckerberg navigated the early years of social media at Facebook and remembers a pivotal moment while working on the 2008 election.
“We obviously were drinking the Kool-Aid of social media in Silicon Valley,” Zuckerberg said.
But she was shocked at how the presidential campaigns weren’t using Facebook and social media. She remembers calling the McCain staff and the Clinton staff and begging them to use Facebook and social media. But it was the Obama campaign that got onboard early and they did so without Facebook even reaching out to them. The Obama campaign’s site on Facebook contributed a significant part to that election, Zuckerberg said.
“For Facebook, people stopped thinking of it as just a college site and really starting thinking of it as a meaningful platform for political change,” she said.
From there, Zuckerberg started specializing in global politics, elections and media partnerships at Facebook.
At Dell World, Moira Forbes, publisher of ForbesWoman, interviewed Zuckerberg, now CEO of Zuckerberg Media, during a Thursday afternoon session. Zuckerberg is a former marketing executive at Facebook and author of dot complicated, a book on navigating the online world.

Zuckerberg launched her own media company

Zuckerberg got her start as a journalist working at Forbes on Fox.
Several years later, she launched her media company at Facebook, which held hack-a-thons every few months at its headquarters. People stayed up all night long and the only rule was that they had to work on a passion project outside their day jobs. And one of Zuckerberg’s passion projects was to start a television network inside Facebook. They had hundreds of millions of people using the platform at that time. She wanted to reach that audience with her own television show.
At one of the hack-a-thons, she launched her show from inside a broom closet at Facebook. She turned on a camera and began broadcasting live online. For the first show, she had six viewers and two of them were her parents.
About a week later, representatives from Singer and Songwriter Katy Perry contacted her and said Perry wanted to be on her Facebook television show.
“Then I had to pretend it was an actual television show,” Zuckerberg said.
During the next few months, she had so many celebrities and people who appeared on the television show that it showed her the power of social media and live content.
“So when President Obama asked if he could come on this Facebook television show and talk to all of America, I thought this is the moment and this is what I clearly love to do,” Zuckerberg said.
That’s when she quit her job at Facebook and launched her own media company. And she was pregnant, but she knew what she wanted to do and she wanted to take a big risk. She sold her house and put all her assets into the new company.

Navigating the dot complicated life

Forbes then asked Zuckerberg what dot complicated meant to her and why she decided to write the book.
“Ask any random person on the street if they’ve had a “dot complicated” moment recently, you don’t even have to describe what that means, and they’ll probably say yes, let me tell you about it,” Zuckerberg said.
It might be about posting something inappropriate or someone else posting something objectionable online, she said. Mobile devices have become pervasive in our lives and they have changed every aspect of it, from finding love to parenting, Zuckerberg said.
“I have a very complicated relationship with technology, if I have this very complicated relationship, surely millions of people around the world do too. They feel like their lives are a bit overwhelmed and maybe they can learn or laugh at my story and maybe we can navigate this world together,” she said.
Zuckerberg detailed many of the most dot complicated moments of her life in the book in hopes that people can learn from them.
For example, she recounted a time when she was playing with her six month old son, she was also answering emails and texting. Then she noticed her son pick up the remote control and act like he was text messaging on it.
That’s when she realized she needed to manage her relationship with technology so she wouldn’t teach her son that technology was competing for her time with him.

The quest for privacy in an increasing transparent online world

Forbes said Zuckerberg wrote a lot about privacy in her book. She asked Zuckerberg how she managed to maintain her personal privacy and keep it separate from her public persona.
Zuckerberg recounted that last Christmas she was with her family and they were all standing around the kitchen table texting on different devices and she took a picture. She posted it to her friends on Facebook. A few hours later she saw it on a bunch of tech blogs. One of her friends had leaked the photo. She was disappointed. She knew that she shouldn’t post anything online, if she wasn’t comfortable with it going viral, but she didn’t think her friends would betray her trust.
“In our real lives, we have three levels of privacy – we have things that are super private for us and our spouses, things that are super public like announcing a new career move, but most of our life, the vast majority, lives in the middle, it’s personal,” Zuckerberg said.
“But online you really only get private and public, you lose personal and we live so much of our lives in there,” she said.
In the book, she wrote about how to get that back and what happens when a person loses that.

Being a leader in a world filled with social media

Photo courtesy of Zuckerberg Media

Zuckerberg also discussed the different generations of management in the workforce. Older workers tend to be more conservative and don’t share as much and millennial workers feel comfortable sharing their lives online, Forbes said. But now more than ever, being authentic is increasingly important to building a following, to getting people inspired by your mission and to becoming an effective leader, Forbes said.
The professional and personal identities have been blended, Zuckerberg said. Companies need to provide social media training to their employees when they hire them, she said.
Millennials want to be posting all the time, Zuckerberg said
“It’s better to arm them with things that they should be posting about rather than letting their imaginations run wild,” she said.
Today, every single employee is an ambassador for your brand, Forbes said.
And every company is a media company, Zuckerberg said.
That can be quite a challenge, Zuckerberg said. She’s had some awkward conversations with people about things that they’ve posted that she never thought she would have to have.
“People have freedom of speech,” she said. “You can’t tell them don’t post things on Twitter, nor would you want to govern who they are. That’s why you hired them in the first place.”
But data does show that it makes you more likeable if you share personal things online and Facebook friend your boss, Zuckerberg said.

Etiquette lessons learned along the way

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about the toughest online social etiquette lesson she had to learn.
Zuckerberg recounted a time when she and her friends couldn’t get into a bar in New York because they didn’t look cool enough.
“I desperately wanted to be so cool even though I was a Silicon Valley geek and we got rejected from this really cool bar. It sucked,” she said.
Twitter had just launched as a platform. She took out her mobile phone and she tweeted wouldn’t it be bad if that bouncer’s Facebook profile went down.
“Wow, really bad thing to say, very irresponsible and the tech press really took me to storm about that,” Zuckerberg said. “It was ironic because I had been spending the last few years educating celebrities, politicians and business leaders about how all of our voices travel faster and farther than ever thanks to this megaphone of social media. But what I hadn’t realized, I hadn’t stepped back and thought, gosh, I have a megaphone too. All of us are sort of mini-celebrities in this world. All of us could go viral at any moment.”
Everyone needs to be very vigilant about their reputations and how they manage social media, Zuckerberg said.

Unplugging from technology

Forbes asked Zuckerberg about managing the constant flow of technology and doing “digital detoxes,” in which people disconnect from their devices.
People are connecting around the clock and people must set boundaries on their own personal time.
“Set some firm rules,” Zuckerberg said. “The more you start setting those rules, the more you’ll train the people around you to respect those times too.”
She has a rule in her house: no tech in the bedroom.
She also said studies show that people who don’t connect with technology whether it’s Facebook, their mobile phone, texts, email, voicemail, first thing in the morning, are happier. She said it’s best to manage the technology and not let it manage your life. She avoids her mobile phone for the first 40 minutes of every day.
“All devices have a curfew in our house for that reason,” she said. “You need that moment of clarity and unplugging in your day.”

The New Dell is More Entrepreneurial and Innovative

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At Dell World, Michael Dell unveiled his new, private innovative and entrepreneurial technology company.
The Round Rock-based company, which employs about 14,000 people in Central Texas, no longer has to adhere to the demands of the public stock market.
As a result, Dell said the company can invest in new startups and take a long term view on innovation.
Earlier this year, Dell took the company private in a $25 billion buyout deal which left him with a 75 percent ownership stake. Silver Lake Partners controls the rest.
And the “world’s largest startup” kicked off its new outlook by announcing a $300 million Dell Ventures fund, which will invest in early to growth stage companies. Already, Dell has invested in 14 companies. It expects to invest $60 million within the next three to five years.
Dell also announced new partnerships with Dropbox, Google, Microsoft Azure, Accenture and Red Hat OpenStack to develop new products for the Cloud.
Dell is not abandoning its hardware business, Dell said, during a press conference following his keynote talk at Dell World. This is the third year Dell has hosted Dell World, but its first time as a private company. About 6,000 people are attending the three day conference, which ends Friday at the Austin Convention Center.
During his morning keynote address, Dell outlined the company’s strategy as a private company. It’s a lot like the strategy he has outlined since 2008 when the company began acquiring software and other businesses to complement its technology and expand its services and solutions business.
“We’re disrupting and democratizing software, services and solutions, the way we did PCs and servers.” Dell said. “And we’ve seen the power of technology to enfranchise and empower people. And today the forces of cloud, mobility, social, big data, security are creating a new model for technology, in fact, a new model for society.”
“They’re the foundation of the modern infrastructure, the highways, the bridges, the telephone lines, the airports of the 21st Century,” Dell said. “Connecting and networking our world. And now we’re going to do what Dell does best. We’re going to innovate and make the technology behind these forces more accessible, more affordable, easier to own, easier to capture value from and easier to operate.”
Dell will focus on helping entrepreneurial ventures launch and expand, along with small businesses, and it also will focus on improving and supporting large enterprises. The company also plans to collaborate more and focus on the global economy.
Dell has been pursuing this vision with a consistent strategy for the last five years. It has invested $13 billion to diversify its business and to offer more software, services and cloud solutions to its customers. Dell has doubled its solutions business from $10 billion to $20 billion.
As a private company, Dell can accelerate its strategy and take a longer-term view of innovation.
Dell announced two new programs focused on innovation at Dell World.
The first program is an internal or organic innovation program through the Dell research division focused on disruptive technology, Dell said. It has a long-range focus of five to ten years out, Dell said. It will also collaborate with leading research institutions to harvest the latest technology.
The second announcement is the $300 million Dell Venture Fund focused on early to growth stage companies in core technology areas. Dell plans to make investments in its four core business groups: end user computing, enterprise solutions, software and services.
“At Dell our commitment to innovation has never been greater,” Dell said.
Despite all the changes, Dell is also still committed to its hardware business of PCs, tablets and servers.
The server is becoming the center of the data center and Dell plans to be number one in market share worldwide, Dell said.
“We’re in it to win it,” he said.
Beyond that, Dell has dramatically expanded its capabilities in storage, networking and security.
“The real innovation comes when you combine these together,” Dell said.
At the heart of Dell’s new initiatives is the cloud.
“The cloud is the new model for tech,” Dell said. “At Dell, we’re making sure you’re positioned to be in a Cloud-based world.”
Dell also announced a new partnership with Red Hat to co-engineer products for Openstack, the free cloud-based architecture.

Dell Partners to offer Dropbox for Business on Dell’s Cloud

December 12, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Wonder why Dropbox expanded to Austin and opened an office here earlier this year?
One big reason could be Dell.
Dell and Dropbox announced a partnership Thursday at Dell World to create Dropbox for Business using the Cloud. Dell, which went public earlier this year, is hosting Dell World at the Austin Convention Center through Friday. The company is moving to become more entrepreneurial.
The customers that are succeeding are taking advantage of technology, said Michael Dell, CEO of Dell.
“The combination of Dell and Dropbox provides a great solution for customers,” Dell said.
Dell’s strategic partnership with Dropbox will help its commercial customers access data anywhere at anytime. That will help customers become more productive and promote greater file sharing and collaboration among remote workers.
“Dropbox is one of the most innovative and fastest growing start-ups and the most popular solution of its kind,” said Brett Hansen, executive director, end user computing software at Dell. “Now through Dell’s global sales team, Dropbox and Dell can help organizations of all sizes embrace consumerization of IT while protecting company data.”
Dell now offers Dropbox for Business plus Dell Data Protection Cloud, part of the Dell Data Protection solutions portfolio, to let employees use their favorite cloud storage application at work.
“Dropbox has always been about giving people a simple, elegant way to access their most important digital stuff, and today Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses because it’s easy to use, easy to deploy and offers a secure, centralized location for company data,” said Marc Leibowitz, global vice president of partnerships, Dropbox. “
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.

Apptive Raises $1 Million and Expands its Partnerships

December 11, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Apptive, a mobile app maker, announced it has raised $1 million in the last year.
The Austin-based company plans to use the funds to expand its partnerships with e-commerce platforms and online merchants.
“With close to half of time spent on e-commerce sites coming from smartphones and tablets, online merchants understand the importance of taking their stores mobile,” Chris Belew, Co-Founder and CEO of Apptive said in a news release. “Prior to Apptive, developing a native m-commerce app meant spending thousands of dollars and dealing with endless complexity.”
Apptive has struck partnerships with Bigcommerce, Shopify, Volusion and 3dcart. Those deals gives the company access to almost 160,000 online merchants.
Apptive currently has hundreds of merchants using its platform which had more than 28,000 end-customer downloads. It saw a big spike in usage following its partnership with Bigcommerce in June.

Tips on Pitching Billionaire Mark Cuban

December 8, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

At Longhorn Startup Demo Day last week, Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, co-founder of 3Com and professor of innovation at UT, interviewed Billionaire Mark Cuban, co-founder of Broadcast.com and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Cuban also stars on the popular TV show Shark Tank on ABC. This is some of the advice he gave on pitching him.

1. Know Your History. “The biggest error I see in startups that pitch to me is no sense of history” – Not everything is in Google. Companies fail and their servers are no longer online, Cuban said. He gets pitched from entrepreneurs who do not know that their idea has been tried before and failed. He suggests entrepreneurs put their idea in search engines with the word “fail” after it and see what comes up. He also suggests they talk to people who have been around and find out what they know and dig deeper than Google to find out as much information as possible. Cuban said it’s OK if you pitch a deal that has failed before, but just make sure you don’t make the same mistakes and you know how to make it work.

2. Know Your Product and Market Better Than Anyone Else. Cuban looks for “someone who knows their industry cold. Knows their product cold.”

3. What’s Special About Your Startup? “I always look to see what’s the special sauce,” Cuban said. They have to have something that differentiates them from everyone else. They need a “special sauce” that sets them apart from the competition. Superlatives don’t benefit the entrepreneur, Cuban said. Anything that ends in “er” or “est” like cheaper, fastest, better – are big red flags because the competition isn’t going to go away, Cuban said. They’ll just improve on their product. “I try to find entrepreneurs that aren’t lying to themselves and that’s very difficult.”

4. Don’t Ask for too Much. He doesn’t invest in deals that require $300 million in venture capital to succeed. His shares get diluted and the founders spend too much time just looking for capital.

5. Work Hard. He likes pitches from hard-working entrepreneurs. “You’ve got to grind, grind and grind” says Cuban. Entrepreneurs only fail because of lack of effort and brains.

6. Don’t be a Copy Cat. Everyone thinks the Internet is new. But bits are bits, Cuban said. The servers that YouTube uses are no different than the servers that Comcast uses. If 10,000 people are distributing something on YouTube, why do you want to be 10,001, he said. I try to look where people aren’t looking. I try to look where people think it’s archaic or wrong, he said. That’s why he put his movies made for Magnolia, his production company, on video on demand. For example, he thinks video on demand is growing much faster than Internet viewing of video. It’s going to grow even faster as the satellite and cable companies get their user interface perfected, Cuban said.

7. What’s the best way to pitch him? Send him an email to mcuban@gmail.com. He will at least glance through the first paragraph of them all. He is very quick on the delete button. But he has invested $10 million in companies he discovered through email and at least $6 million of that are entrepreneurs he has never met.

8. Don’t pitch him directly, if you want to be on Shark Tank. If he knows anything about the financial elements of your company, he has to recuse himself from the deal on Shark Tank.

Burpy Expands to San Antonio and Houston

December 7, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 5 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Aseem Ali, co-founder of Burpy.com, an online grocery delivery service in Austin, San Antonio and Houston.

Last Longhorn Startup class, Aseem Ali and a team of undergraduate students pitched Burpy, a grocery delivery service.
Now he’s running a quickly growing startup and finishing up his degree as a senior studying mechanical engineering at the University of Texas.
Burpy, which expanded into the San Antonio market on Nov. 25th, plans to launch in Houston on Monday.
That means Burpy will provide grocery service to all major markets in Texas with plans to expand to Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station early next year.
Burpy, which used to charge a delivery fee ranging from $15 to $20, no longer charges for delivery. Since it made that move, Burpy has taken off, Ali said.
“We’ve seen amazing adoption,” he said during a recent interview.
In San Antonio, in the last few weeks, Burpy has fulfilled more than 300 orders, Ali said.
“Burpy delivers everything that you can find in a pantry or a refrigerator,” Ali said. “A lot of organic food and a lot of produce.”
The company, based in Austin, has 45 daily shoppers in San Antonio, 50 in Austin, 30 in Houston and 20 in Dallas.
In the next year, Burpy expects to do about $1 million in revenue, Ali said. He graduates in May and plans to work on the business full time.
Burpy gets its grocery items from Wal-Mart, HEB, Costco, Whole Foods. And it recently added office supplies and Office Depot.
Beyond Texas, Burpy plans to expand to Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Kansas City.
Although grocery delivery has been tried before on a large scale and flopped, Ali thinks his business will succeed where others have failed largely because the company crowdsources delivery and uses the latest technology tools to manage its workforce and orders.
Burpy doesn’t have any inventory, warehouses or expensive delivery vans. It taps into existing resources to maximize its efficiency, Ali said. The company does have a few competitors such as Greenling, but it focuses primarily on locally produced organic food.
“We can deliver Oreos and hot Cheetos,” Ali said.
Other Austin competitors include Couch Potato, Munchy Mart and Austin Grocer, but they don’t deliver an extensive inventory of items, Ali said.
Other national competitors include Peapod, Instacart, Amazon Fresh and Walmart to go, but they are not available yet in the Texas market, Ali said. He hopes to establish first mover advantage with the customer base here.
Ali attended the latest Longhorn Startup Demo Day and he said his biggest takeaway came from Billionaire Mark Cuban. It’s best to learn from history, Ali said. Webvan, one of the biggest dot com failures of all time, blew through $1 billion setting up a home grocery delivery network and then filed for bankruptcy. Amazon bought its assets in bankruptcy. It also bought out HomeGrocer, which had gone public and then its stock plummeted.
Burpy has learned from the mistakes made by others, Ali said. The company has raised some angel investment. Sai Ganesh, CTO of Audingo in Austin, is mentoring Burpy. The company is also hiring drivers.

Disclosure: Burpy is an advertiser with Silicon Hills News