TechStars, a Boulder, Co.-based technology accelerator, is expanding to Austin with a new program that will start in August.
“Forbes and Bloomberg have been calling Austin the No. 1 Boomtown and the best place for your startup for years now, and Google recently chose it as the second city to receive the fastest Internet on the planet,” David Cohen, founder of TechStars, wrote in this blog post. “TechStars exists to put the best mentors and the best entrepreneurs together in the best startup communities so Austin is a natural next stop for us.”
Applications open today and Jason Seats, who has served as managing director of the TechStars Cloud program for the past two years, is moving from San Antonio to Austin to run the new program. Seats co-founded Slicehost, a cloud computing business which Rackspace acquired in 2008. He is also an active angel investor. He has run two TechStars Cloud programs, graduating a total of 24 companies in San Antonio.
“I’ll be heavily involved in the future cloud programs but we are in the process of selecting someone else to manage the day to day operations,” Seats said. “This is great for TechStars because with a program running in Austin in the fall and the cloud program continuing to run in San Antonio in the spring, we’ll have basically year round activity for TechStars.”
Seats hopes and expects that the two programs will continue to strength the relationship and opportunities for collaboration in the technology industry between Austin and San Antonio.
The TechStars program will be housed at Capital Factory, a technology accelerator and incubator in downtown Austin. The TechStars Cloud program takes place every January at Geekdom, a technology accelerator and coworking site in downtown San Antonio.
“As I mentioned at the RISE panel, we think it’s a pretty natural progression when it’s not uncommon to hear the word “Geekdom” at Capital Factory in downtown Austin,” Seats said.
TechStars offers programs in Boston, Boulder, Chicago, New York City, Seattle, London and a specialized “Cloud TechStars” in San Antonio.
The TechStars program invests $118,000 in each company accepted into its program through $18,000 in seed funding and an optional $100,000 convertible debt note. More than 75 venture capital firms and angel investors back the program. The program last three months and provides mentorship and other perks and the chance to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end. Its companies average $1.6 million in additional financing upon leaving the program.
The deadline to apply for the TechStars Austin program is June 30th.
The TechStars Austin program kicks off August 5th and runs through November 1st.
“We have received enthusiastic support from the local tech groups in Austin and there are already many fantastic mentors and investors involved including Brett Hurt (Bazaarvoice), Tom Ball and Mike Dodd (Austin Ventures), Sam Decker (Mass Relevance), Jeff Dachis (Dachis Group), Kip McClanahan and Morgan Flager (Silverton), Josh Baer and Bill Boebel (Capital Factory), Ned Hill and Aziz Gilani (Mercury Fund), Rony Kahan (Indeed), Rob Taylor (Black Locus) Lori Knowlton (HomeAway), and many more,” according to Cohen.
Tag: Austin (Page 19 of 37)
By LAURA LOREK
Founder Silicon Hills News
Startup founders can learn a lot from entrepreneurs who have been there and done that.
And on Monday, three serial entrepreneurs in Austin shared some of the challenges they faced in building their companies and some tips on how others can succeed.
Sam Decker, co-founder of Mass Relevance, Carl Shepherd, co-founder of HomeAway and Susan Strausberg, co-founder of 9WSearch participated in a RISE lunch and learn entrepreneurship super panel moderated by Ellie Brett, founder of Media Bombshell. About 120 people attended the event held at Mass Relevance’s downtown headquarters and sponsored by Turnstone.
Decker’s entrepreneurial roots go back to fourth grade when he ran a go-kart repair business and that got him into fixing engines.
He started working for Apple out of college. Then he ran three failed startups in the Bay area before Dell called.
“Even at Dell I always sought out the entrepreneurial jobs,” Decker said.
He worked at turning Dell.com into a big business. But after seven years, he wanted to launch a startup again.
Decker left to work at Bazaarvoice, founded in 2005. After five years, Bazaarvoice had $50 million in revenue and 500 people.
“Any time you are making that move to the next journey you are stepping off a cliff,” Decker said.
He left Bazaarvoice to co-found Mass Relevance, a social media company focused on handling Twitter campaigns for TV, sports and media companies.
Today, Mass Relevance has 85 people and does half its work for brands and half for media and sports teams.
Strausberg grew up in an entrepreneurial family.
“One needed to be in control of one’s own life,” she said.
Over time, she became obsessed with computers. She worked in publishing and film. She founded a publishing company and co-produced 
“It Came from Hollywood,” a Paramount Pictures film.
She earned the title of “Dot Com Diva” for launching EDGAR Online, a financial data company, in 1995 with her husband Marc Strausberg. They left the company in 2007 to pursue other interests. They moved to Austin a few years ago to launch 9W Search Inc., an advanced financial search engine aimed at mobile users.
Shepherd, co-founder of HomeAway, was not a born entrepreneur.
“I did not come to be an entrepreneur overnight,” he said. “I was a late bloomer.”
At first he worked as a consultant for what is now Accenture and he also worked for magazine publishers.
He cut his entrepreneurial teeth at Hoover’s Online, where he worked as chief operating officer. Hoover’s Online was an information research business and was one of the first successful subscription based companies on the Web. He took the company public in 1999 and stayed on for a few years and then he joined Austin Ventures. That’s where he met Brian Sharples. They had coffee at Starbucks, the one that’s across the street from what’s now HomeAway’s headquarters. At that Starbucks, they started brainstorming ideas for businesses. They came up with one for selling information on outsourcing. But they both settled on addressing the pain in the vacation rental market. They both had families who liked to stay in rental homes instead of hotels when they travelled.
“Renting a vacation home really sucked,” he said.
They set about to fix that problem and came up with HomeAway as a solution.
Today, HomeAway has 1,300 employees on six continents including 600 employees in Austin, Shepherd said.
Next, Brett with Media Bombshell asked the entrepreneurs a series of questions including what was their biggest surprise about being an entrepreneur.
“The biggest surprise is that really great ideas and wonderful people and the best possible teams fail,” said Shepherd.
“So few people understand and embrace innovation,” said Strausberg.
“The highs are higher and the lows are lower,” said Decker. “Every rejection is like a rejection. And every win is like we’re going to be huge.”
But over time, the volatility starts to shrink, Decker said.
The next question Brett asked was what was the toughest challenge the entrepreneurs faced and how did they get through it.
Strausberg said in 2003 Market Watch wanted to buy EDGAR Online but that fell through. They had to pivot the business and find another way to exit the business, she said.
At Hoover’s Online, Shepherd bought a company called Power Rise in August of 2001 and after September of 2001 they had to completely revamp the business and eventually close down Power Rise. They had to pivot Hoover’s Online to go back to a subscription model.
Coming up with a company name is one of the biggest challenges a startup faces, Decker said.
One of the big challenges Mass Relevance faced when it launched was securing an official partnership with Twitter, Decker said. He personally negotiated the rights to use Twitter’s data, which was a critical aspect of their platform.
The panel also discussed how they handled risk. Decker said a good entrepreneur does his best or her best to mitigate risk.
And Shepherd said he has gotten more tolerant of risk during the past five to seven years.
“I feel like I’ve been far more in control as an entrepreneur than I was as an employee,” he said. “And I’m far more aggressive today than I was five or six years ago.”
The panel also gave advice to entrepreneurs.
Don’t lie to the IRS, said Shepherd. He has a 28-year-old son who is running a startup in the Bay Area and that’s the advice he gave him.
“Surround yourself with people and advisors who know what they’re doing,” he said.
“I would say first of all, think twice, then think three times,” Strausberg said. Thoroughly investigate the market, the competition and the validity of the idea, she said. And make sure you’re ready to cope emotionally with the risk and uncertainty of running a startup, she said.
“Think bigger,” said Decker. Whatever you’re thinking about add a zero to it, he said.
“Push yourself,” he said.
Are you ready for a rumble?
Tonight in Austin, some local startups will throw down their best pitches in a contest sponsored by Tech Cocktail.
Tech Cocktail, a tech media company based in Chicago, throws parties at SXSW every year but it also holds a few Austin mixers every year.
Tonight, Tech Cocktail will be hosting 12 startups and other local technology industry members for cocktails and more at The Stage on Sixth. The event kicks off at 6:30 and runs until 9.
And you can register for the mixer here. If you’re a member of Austin Startups group on Facebook, you can get an additional 15 percent discount with a link through that site.
Tech Cocktail is also canvassing people’s opinions beforehand through an online survey to find out which company is Austin’s Hottest Showcasing Startup. So far, MakerSquare with 2,408 votes is in the lead, followed by GoodyBag with 2230 and UMeTime with 1010. The poll ends at 6:00 p.m. There will also be a live voting component to the competition. The winner will be announced at the event.
Here’s the list of tonight’s startups, with descriptions provided by Tech Cocktail:
AuManil.com – AuManil assists the $40B (2015) online games market to reduce whale churn, increase whale conversion, improve whale acquisition and manage whales across a portfolio of games. Our team of data scientists analyze an individual player’s financial and game play behavior to profile each player in order to predict lifetime value, churn risk and life-cycle patterns.
Campus Slice – Campus Slice is a crowdfunding site that helps students raise money for tuition.
Engine Inc. – Engine helps you reclaim your data with the world’s most powerful personal search engine.
Food by People – Food by People makes selling home baked goods as simple as sharing a checkout link.
Goodybag – Goodybag is a mobile app that lets you explore the food near you, view full menus of Austin area restaurants, and create personalized collections of your favorite dishes. TapIn with your keycard at our in-restaurant tablets and earn rewards that will automatically transfer to your app profile so everything is stored and easily redeemable. Goodybag is innovating the eating experience.
Jellifi – Jellifi matches both professional and casual event planners to the best and most unique local talent for flawless and fun events without the stress. Brands and businesses can find immediate access to local caterers, photographers, models and more with Jellifi’s intuitive platform.
Locotext – Locotext is a geo-marketing platform for brands, businesses, and organizations to create location-based campaigns targeting smartphone users. At Tech Cocktail, for the first time, Locotext will be demonstrating how easy and fast it is to create a geofence-based texting campaign which smartphone users can subscribe to. Additionally, Locotext will offer attendees exclusive access to create their own campaigns (in private beta) which anyone can then experience immediately through the Locotext mobile app.
MakerSquare – MakerSquare is a school system based in Austin Texas in which students with no technical backgrounds learn to develop software. Within 10 weeks, our program will have our students ready to apply to entry-level positions for startups within Austin.
ManagerComplete – ManagerComplete is a cloud-based application that helps organizations manage multiple locations. We are a fully-hosted solution priced at $39/location. We make it easy, just login and start managing your locations.
Rockify – Rockify let’s you experience music videos anytime, anywhere, on any device. It’s like Pandora for music videos (only better).
Spot On Sciences – Spot on Sciences has created HemaSpot, an easy to use device that uses a finger stick to collect and dry two drops of blood within a protective cartridge, enabling selfsampling from a remote location.
Tabbedout – Tabbedout is the only only software-based mobile payment solution that lets consumers open, view and pay tabs from their smartphone without the need of a scanner or reader. We integrate directly with most major hospitality point-of-sale systems and require no additional hardware for the merchant.
UMeTime – UMeTime is a real-time, mobile marketing platform that connects local businesses with their immediate surroundings.
BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Great tech startups need great developers – especially developers that are fluent in the latest coding languages used on the web. Unfortunately, the only way for companies to get such developers is to train them in house, or hope to find someone who has learned them on their own.
This week we talk to MakerSquare – a company created to address this problem by providing a 10-week training course that covers languages and skills that today’s tech companies need.
Based in Austin, MakerSquare has been working with several Austin companies to create a custom developer course. Students that graduate will have all the skills needed to be hired by these companies.
“The point of the course is two sided”, says Education Architect Harsh Patel. “One: To get people who want to get into web development into programming.. ..and Two: It helps companies in Austin find a lot of tech talent that they need. Because a lot of companies need web developer talent right now, but there’s just not enough.”
The intensive 10-week course is largely project based with students working alone, in groups, and with mentors from Austin tech companies. The training includes Ruby on Rails, JavaScript frameworks like jQuery and backbone.js, HTML5, and CSS3.
The first course will start on June 10 and can hold 24 – 28 students. The application process is still open. Applicants who do not make the first course may be placed in subsequent courses. MakerSquare plans to hold the first few courses back to back and hopes to be able to offer them more frequently this fall.
In order to be chosen for the program, applicants must demonstrate both a record of accomplishment and a drive to succeed.
“We look for people who have shown success in something else previously, whether it is technical-related or not,” says Patel.
Upon completion of the course, MakerSquare will help the graduates get internships, apprenticeships, or full time positions in tech companies across the nation. The current list of hiring partners includes uShip, Crushpath, PeopleAdmin, and others.
To apply for the developer training course, join as a hiring partner, or participate as a mentor in the program; go to Makersquare.
Startup Grind, based in Mountain View, Calif. seeks to foster entrepreneurship through storytelling.
Derek Anderson founded Startup Grind, which now has chapters in 40 cities and 20 countries around the world.
One of the latest chapters is Startup Grind San Antonio.
The values of Startup Grind are important ones to foster an entrepreneurial environment.
“We believe in making friends, not contacts. We believe in giving, not taking. We believe in helping others before helping yourself. We are truly passionate about helping founders, entrepreneurs and startups succeed. We intend to make their startup journey less lonely, more connected and more memorable.”
The first Startup Grind San Antonio event takes place on April 23 at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio and features a one on one interview with Jason Seats, cofounder of SliceHost and managing director of the TechStars Cloud. The TechStars Demo Day for its second class of 12 companies is Thursday in San Antonio. Seats has helped to launch 23 TechStars Cloud companies. He is also an active angel investor.
Startup Grind also has a chapter in Austin, headed up by Andi Gillentine, co-founder of Whit.li. She launched that chapter last year and has held several successful events at Capital Factory. The next one is April 29th at Capital Factory featuring an interview with Mellie Price, founder of Source Spring and Front Gate Tickets. Startup Grind also has a Dallas chapter.
Geekdom is sponsoring Startup Grind San Antonio and Vid Luther with ZippyKid, a WordPress hosting site, is also sponsoring the event.
Startup Grind San Antonio will kick off at 6 p.m. with pizza and beer. The interview with Seats will take place from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. and will feature an interactive question and answer session with the audience. So please sign up now and get your tickets, which are limited.
Startup Grind San Antonio’s May speaker is David Spencer, founder of Onboard Systems and Startup Grind San Antonio’s speaker for June is Pat Condon, cofounder of Rackspace.
In February, I was lucky to attend Startup Grind’s annual conference at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The speakers were fabulous. Here’s a video that shows some highlights from that event.
BY ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
This week, we talked with Circle Media founder and CEO Mark Piening about his new startup. Incorporated just last January, Circle Media officially launched at SXSW and was one of the five finalists in the Startup Austin Fast Pitch Competition. The Austin based company does data analysis for both event promoters and sponsors to help them better understand, and interact with, customers at their events.
“How do you help these sponsors and these producers of live events make the best live event experiences possible? The only way to do that is to know the audience.” says Piening.
Piening says that the value in knowing the audience comes from sponsors being able to specially target certain demographics. In some cases, sponsors could even connect with and interact with event attendees — offering them coupons or spontaneous opportunities which make the event a more personal and memorable experience.
To do this, the company collects data from event ticket sales, registration, drinks sales, tweets that reference the event, Facebook posts, Foursquare check-ins, consumer data sources and more. They then analyze the data and present it to clients to help them make informed marketing decisions.
The company presents the information through an online dashboard that gives clients everything from who came to their event to what those people said about the event afterwards — helping the clients make better decisions about programming, merchandise, concessions and anything else that was part of the experience. Piening believes this approach can create a fundamental shift in how marketing works.
“We think that the 21st century is the era of authenticity,” says Piening. “It’s an opportunity [for marketing] to really connect with people like friends, be treated like friends, and be respectful like friends in how they communicate with people.
Circe Media has already secured a fortune 50 software company and is in the process of process of implementing a solution for that client. They are currently recruiting marketing agencies and seeking other fortune 500 clients.
Circle media is now hiring developers with experience in Node.js, REAK, Redis, and user experience.
This week Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore interviews StoryPress founder Michael Davis about his new iPad app for creating and saving family history through audio stories.
“StoryPress is trying to change the way that family history is preserved and passed down from generation to generation by making it fun and easy to record stories with you own voice,” Davis said.
Davis got the idea from his grandmother. A year and a half ago she had just received an iPad, and was looking for a recording application to record personal stories. None of the available applications were satisfactory – simply providing her with a big MP3 file which she had no idea how incorporate into something bigger. Davis created StoryPress to fill this need.
“Not only do we have the right interface to make it fun and easy, but we came up with the prompts so it’s not intimidating,” Davis said.
The StoryPress app can essentially interview its users by giving them a series of prompts grouped together in topic modules. After choosing one of the modules, users simply respond to each prompt given. When they are done, StoryPress automatically ties all the narration segments together into one audio book. If users feel the prompts are too constricting, they may also do a simple self recorded narration.
The current version app – launched last December — allows users to create audio books with custom book covers images, but future versions will allow users to add pictures and other media.
“The goal is to make it a real multimedia experience where the user can add pictures, background music, videos, and have the story live on one permanent URL,” Davis said.
Future versions of the app will also provide stock photos of iconic American imagines through several eras, as well as musical accompaniments, which users can purchase and add to their audio books.
Users will be able to create their first five stories for free, but will have to pay a yearly cloud storage cost of $49 of they want to create more. If users want a more tangible copy of their audio books, they can also order CD versions from StoryPress for a fee.
StoryPress has seen 4000 downloads so far, and they will be kickstarter April 1 to access more funding. StoryPress will be releasing an Android tablet in mid April.
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
The Austin Startup session on Why Austin skewed aspirational Saturday morning as Bijoy Goswami of Bootstrap Austin and Kevin Koym of Tech Ranch explained that Austin is the city where you can “be yourself,” where people “look you in the eye and smile at you” and where the culture invites diversity of ideas and interests.
To make that last point, Koym discussed different technologies being explored in Austin from Arduino to Wiki Weapon to E-nose which detects and analyzes the chemical makeup of an odor to self monitoring devices.
“There are so many ideas that you wouldn’t see in Silicon Valley because it’s so expensive there you can’t take the risk,” Koym said. “Someone comes up with great idea and you have five teams doing the same thing. What a waste of effort.”
Goswami pointed out that, in Austin, there are myriad experiences to sample and, “if you like it, you hold onto it. If you go to the Continental Club and try two-stepping and you like it, the next time you go back you have a community.”
The session wasn’t entirely aspirational. Susan Davenport of the Chamber of Commerce and Jim Butler, manager at the City of Austin shared all the statistics so often quoted about the strength of the local economy and the growing resources for the entrepreneurial community.
One attendee expressed interest in moving his 12-person company to Austin and asked what first steps would be. Davenport explained that the Chamber can walk new businesses through all the steps from getting registered with the state, looking for office space and real estate for employees as well as introducing business owners to the community, which includes 75 organizations to support entrepreneurship.
“We find out what your needs are and come up with a strategy to meet those needs,” she said. Butler added that part of the city’s job was to help entrepreneurs with information about mentoring and financial resources.
Another question was posed by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur inspired to possibly move to Austin but wondering about VC opportunities and recruiting of talent. Davenport talked about the chamber’s effort to recruit talent and the fact that 72 countries attend SXSW and “we’re taking resumes all through the conference.”
Koym pointed out that Austin is six hours from Monterrey Mexico where development help can be found for $10 an hour and, from his experience, “Mexican developers kick ass.”
The VC question received a more fudged answer.
“We don’t have as strong a picture in the VC class,” Koym said. “I do believe we have more millionaires here per capita than almost anyplace else…if you’re looking for angel investment you can find that. It’s not necessarily in a formalized group…but you can find the guys who say ‘I’m going to take the risk with you.’”
BY SUSAN LAHEY
Silicon Hills News Reporter
The pitch was: Move your company to Austin for free. Five companies in other parts of the country or the world competed for a $100,000 package that included:
• A $35,000 investment from CTAN.
• Three months rent in a 3 bedroom house from HomeAway.
• Six months of co-working at Capital Factory , server hosting from Rackspace and local groceries from Greenling.
• Moving services from uShip
• Two badges for SXSW 2014
The winner, and welcome to Austin, was a company called Meritful. Meritful is like LinkedIn for college students. Students load their information on the site for free and companies—who are finding the cost of recruiting increasingly prohibitive–can find candidates on the site. Meritful allows students to interact with professionals, share their projects, build a resume and seek advice and direction and allows companies to check out prospective future employees. For companies, the cost is related to their size. A business of up to 100 employees would pay $5,000 annually, which founder and CEO Azarias Reda pointed out is roughly the cost of an intern and significantly less than companies spend recruiting currently.
Meritful will be moving from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Reda met his cofounders in graduate school. They learned about the competition from Josh Baer of Capital Factory and AngelList and the team drove 20 hours to get to SXSW.
The competition’s runner up was Pictrition, an app that lets consumers keep track of their nutrition just by taking photos of their food and submitting the photo to the Pictrition community rather than logging food items, calories or nutrition points. Pictrition includes competitions, leaderboards and reward coupons from health-oriented companies including Whole Foods. The company takes a percentage of each reward based purchase. The company is also working on corporate wellness programs. Pictrition currently is in Dallas.
Other competitors included Paceable, a CRM and project management tool that works with Gmail, Rock Your Paper, a company from Bangalore, India that wants to be the iTunes store for scholarly papers, saving researchers and institutions such as universities, from having to purchase whole journals, and Inaika.com which provides services to find instructors of all stripes through videos published by the instructors but also allows fans to subscribe to the videos of instructors all over the world they find inspirational.
Judges for the competition include Jason Cohen of WPEngine: Bril Flint, chairman and Rick Timmins, Director of CTAN; and Bill Boebel, formerly of RackSpace and now an angel investor and managing director of Capital Factory.
Matt Peterson, founder and CEO of Dejaset, a music technology company in Austin, dropped into the Silver Fox Studios today to chat with Slice of Silicon Hills News Host Andrew Moore.
Dejaset allows bands to capture recordings of live performances and sell them immediately to fans. Peterson has created an application for the bands to record their content and another one for consumers to buy the songs.
The company, based at the Austin Technology Incubator, raised $750,000 in seed stage capital last year. They’re preparing for a big rollout of its service at South by Southwest next week.
