The first TechStars Cloud program kicked off in San Antonio on Jan. 19 with 11 companies that all moved to the city from outside the state.
Jason Seats and Nicole Glaros, managing directors, run the TechStars Cloud program at the Geekdom, a collaborative workplace in downtown San Antonio on the 11th floor of the Weston Centre. The three-month incubator and mentoring program ends with a demo day in April. TechStars are’t revealing the names of the companies involved in the program until Demo Day.
Meanwhile, the folks at Rackspace Hosting did this hilarious video with Seats and Glaros recently.
The video starts off serious, but you have to hang with it until the end.
Glaros has some great comments.
“We do a lot of hazing here at TechStars cloud,” says Glaros. “You have to be top of mind and of body.”
“Somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of these companies are just elaborate money laundering schemes,” Glaros said.
She gives the companies “diapers and wipes” when they walk in the door because they are so young.
Meanwhile, Seats says the companies are like “little soft baby chicks” and that they just want to cuddle them.
Tag: Rackspace (Page 6 of 7)
By now you’ve probably heard of SOPA, the Stop Online Privacy Act introduced by San Antonio Congressman Lamar Smith.
The jist of it is that media and entertainment companies want to protect the copyright on their content from pirates. Not too many people would take issue with that.
But the legislation would effectively give content producers the ability to censor the web.
On Wednesday, dozens of websites including Wikipedia, Reddit, WordPress, Craigslist and others blacked out their content in protest over the legislation. Google, which also opposes SOPA, blacked out its logo.
PIPA, the Protect IP ACT, introduced by Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont is already losing support.
But when Congress reconvenes work will begin on SOPA again, according to this article from Engadget.
San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting has been working with lawmakers to fix the bills to effectively fight online piracy and avoid Internet disruption or “imposing unreasonable costs on Internet users and service providers,” Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier wrote in a blog post.
He said the existing bills, SOPA and PIPA, are “well-intentioned, but would do more harm than good. Their enforcement provisions could be easily evaded, and they would undermine the security and stability of the Internet.
Meanwhile, Congressman Smith contends that SOPA is vastly misunderstood. He also blasted Wikipedia for what he called a publicity stunt.
“It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing information is spreading misinformation about the Stop Online Piracy Act. The bill will not harm Wikipedia, domestic blogs or social networking sites,” according to Lamar. “This publicity stunt does a disservice to its users by promoting fear instead of facts. Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy.”
Smith says the “Stop Online Piracy Act only targets foreign websites that are primarily dedicated to illegal activity. It does not grant the Justice Department the authority to seek a court order to shut down any website operated in the U.S.”
Sopa and PIPA Protest Sites
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View more presentations from Laura Lorek
The shortage of technology workers in the Silicon Hills region continues. The Austin American-Statesman today reported that the recent trip technology CEOs from Austin took to California didn’t result in any new employees moving to Texas. Perhaps that’s why San Antonio-based Rackspace recently opened an office in San Francisco. The technology companies have to go where the talent resides. Also on Saturday, Rackspace held a recruiting event called Rackerpalooza at its Austin office. Rackspace also recently expanded its San Antonio headquarters.
On Friday, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, gave a talk at San Antonio’s Startup Ignite’s third monthly Hack-a-thon at the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.
On Wednesday, Austin-based Portalarium, which makes games for social networks and mobile platforms, announced its first social network game, Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. Gaming Legend Richard Garriott is developing the game, which will be available for a beta release later this year.
Also on Tuesday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that a group of investors including San Antonio Billionaire Red McCombs has invested $1.75 million in an Austin-startup called Bypass Lane, which has created an app that lets people order food and drinks from their seats in a stadium while watching an event.
On Tuesday, the University of Texas honored 40 inventors including Professor John Goodenough and Professor Adam Heller, pioneers of lithium batteries, according to this post from University President Bill Powers.
On Monday, Gowalla’s founder Josh Williams officially announced that Facebook had acquired the Austin-based start-up, but it didn’t acquire the company’s data. It mainly wanted their development team. The Austin American Statesman had a story on the acquisition and didn’t mention anything about the $10 million Gowalla raised in venture capital. But Michael Arrington at Uncrunched reported that the deal might be a liquidation and it was uncertain if investors would get their money back.
On Monday, Globalscape of San Antonio bought Tappin of Seattle in “a deal worth up to $17 million,” according to this story in TechFlash.
Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, talks at Startup Ignite's Hack-a-thon
To start, Elmendorf went to the white board and asked the crowd of about 100 what they wanted to know. People shouted out about a dozen questions including “what was your first entrepreneurial experience, what didn’t you like about school” and “what was your biggest failure?” He wrote down their questions and then spent the next hour answering them and telling stories.
Elmendorf’s first entrepreneurial experience was with his brother selling Xeroxed space invader game sheets for a quarter.
He came from an entrepreneurial family with a lawyer dad and a mom who ran her own catering business. So he thought that was the way of the world.
Elmendorf also worked a whole summer for a company and didn’t get paid. He learned early on about the importance of contracts.
“Lesson number one write shit down and get it signed” Elmendorf said.
When he met Richard Yoo, another co-founder of Rackspace, he presented him with a four-page contract outlining the duties Elmendorf would perform.
In 1998, Yoo, Elmendorf and Pat Condon, all students at Trinity University, formed a web hosting company that became Rackspace. Graham Weston and Morris Miller met with the three later on at a burger joint and they agreed to invest in the company.
Today, Rackspace is a publicly traded company with more than 4,000 employees. Its stock, traded under the symbol RAX, closed at $44.02 share Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.
Back to his crowd-sourced talk, the thing Elmendorf didn’t like about school was it’s linear instruction.
“I can learn non-directionally all the time,” he said. “I’m a pathological learner.”
He loves Reddit and the Internet.
Someone asked him what he does when he is bored. He cooks. He once took a three-day class in meat fabrication.
What is his most important startup advice?
“It’s a team sport. It’s never just one person,” he said. “Even at the most primitive level it’s a team sport.”
It’s important to like the team you work with at a startup, Elmendorf said.
“If you don’t like them now, it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s like parachuting into a bad marriage.”
Elmendorf got along with Rackspace’s core team so well that he still likes them after 13 years of working together.
Also, it’s important to know what you’re good at, Elmendorf said.
“I’m not a good manager,” he said. He likes coding. “The code doesn’t get mad.”
Today, Elmendorf has a new startup, r26D, which created TruckingOffice.com, a small fleet management system. The company has 1,000 customers.
“I like projects that are targeted at small businesses,” Elmendorf said.
He advised the crowd to find a startup that customers like and are willing to pay for its products.
“You do know you can’t buy your own products,” Elmendorf said. “You need to ask yourself who is the customer and how do I serve them?”
In 2007, Rackspace Hosting moved into the former Windsor Park Mall in Windcrest, a suburb of San Antonio.
Rackspace set up its main headquarters in the old Mervyn’s department store.
Now the global web hosting company has expanded further into the former mall’s food court and the Rackspace culture of fun continues to permeate the new space. Rackspace has added a two-story sleek steel tubular slide, along with colorful Gondolas, repurposed from the old and now defunct skyline ride at Brackenridge Park downtown.
Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace, says the company has nearly 3,000 employees in San Antonio now. It’s also moving its employees from its former headquarters on Datapoint Drive. The mall headquarters is dubbed “The Castle” after the Britsh monarchy’s Windsor Castle.
Eventually Rackspace plans to convert the entire 1.2 million square foot mall into “Tech Town,” a vibrant technology campus complete with a park for outdoor recreation.
The video posted below was shot by a Racker a few days ago and posted on Youtube.
Rackspace Hosting, which started out as a small venture in San Antonio in 1998 has since developed into a global corporation with nearly 4,000 employees.
I’ve covered the company since its early days. So it’s really thrilling to watch it launch a San Francisco office near the heart of Silicon Valley. Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace, is in San Francisco today to celebrate the official opening. Here’s the list of today’s activities and I’ve posted a video from Rackspace that provides insight into what Rackspace does.
Are you wonder struck over the amount of money, deals and companies flowing into the Austin area?
It’s exciting times in the Silicon Hills, the high-tech region of Austin and San Antonio.
Not only is Austin, which is known for its start-up culture and high-technology ventures, taking off like a shotgun blast, but San Antonio’s tech entrepreneurial scene has begun to bubble up to the surface like Texas crude.
So much has happened in just the past week that it’s difficult to keep on top of all the activity. So we’ve rounded up the best deals below and if we’ve left anything off, please add to it in the comments section.
San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting Inc. has opened up satellite offices in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote a nice story about their new offices. The official opening is Dec. 1, but already employees, including Uber-blogger Robert Scobel, who runs Building 43, a technology site that specializes in video interviews with technology entrepreneurs, have moved in.
Meanwhile, Geekdom, a new collaborative workspace at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, continues to host events including 3 Day Startup San Antonio and Start-up Ignite’s Hack-a-thon.
In Austin, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin flew in to open the company’s first U.S. satellite office in the Bridgepoint Parkway Office Complex. It’s hiring a bunch of people for the Austin operations too.
Speaking of moving to town, the Austin American Statesman reported that SceneTap, a social media app for bar patrons, announced plans to relocate its operations from Chicago to Austin.
And BlackLocus, an e-commerce pricing analysis company, announced Austin as the headquarters of its company, which recently graduated from the LaunchPad program at the Austin Technology Incubator.
Meanwhile, Rapid 7, an online security firm, just landed $50 million in funding and will use the proceeds, in part, to expand its Austin operations
And ServiceMesh, a Santa Monica-based cloud platform maker, has raised $15 million and plans to expand its Austin operations, according to this story by Lori Hawkins of the Austin American Statesman.
Capital Factory graduate, WPEngine closed $1.2 million in series A financing, according to this post from Bryan Mennel at Austin Startup.
Last, but not least, SXSW continues to release a bunch of news about next year’s Interactive conference. The deadline for entering your start-up into its SXSW Accelerator is today. It was actually Friday, but SXSW, which often extends deadlines at the last minute, pushed it until today. So if you’re a totally procrastinator, get your application in now.
Tech Ranch Austin’s next Venture Forth program begins Nov. 29, and full disclosure SiliconHillsNews is going to be participating in the program. Tech Ranch still has a few openings left, but it’s limited to 15 entrepreneurs.
In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”
Nicholas Longo, director of Geekdom
But now a new place, smack dab in the middle of downtown at the Weston Centre, might be able to do that with a collaborative workspace called Geekdom.
Geekdom is a nonprofit organization that will host technology workshops, lectures and events. It also provides office space to startups and desks to other technology workers through an application process. The center has an outreach effort to local high school and college students. Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston has put up the money to get the center established.
The desks will cost about $125 a month to rent and will come with a parking space. The community membership will cost around $50 and does not come with a dedicated space, Longo said. The offices will be open around the clock and members will have access codes and keys to get in to the building after hours.
“It’s like a gym membership for geeks,” he said.
Some people want to hang out all the time and write code, while others will want to just pop in and out from time to time, Longo said. The space hasn’t officially opened yet but one guy comes there every night after his regular job to code until midnight, he said.
Longo plans to have a strategic layout for assigning desks by putting “coders” next to “creatives” so that different groups get to network. And all residents (people who have desks) must give one hour of their time a week to help others, Longo said. Or they can put on a workshop once a month on programming languages, design or marketing. The idea is to create a collaborative environment, Longo said.
“Mentorship is the new classroom,” Longo said.
The Geekdom is nice. The 11th floor of the Weston Centre formerly housed a law firm. Large windows provide a panoramic view of downtown. Red, black and white decor pay homage to Rackspace, which is a sponsor of the site. The 15,000 square foot space includes a pool table, some arcade video game machines, a kitchen area with a couple of refrigerators stocked with beer and soda.In addition to the offices, Longo wants to set up rooms for people to make things, ranging from painting to soldering metal to sculpture, robotics, Legos and more. It’s all about the Maker’s movement, Longo said, fashioned after Maker Faire and Make Magazine, which encourages people to build stuff from scratch.
Two weeks ago, the Geekdom hosted its first big event Startup Ignite’s all night Hack-a-thon, which garnered praise from its participants. It plans do another Hack-a-Thon on Nov. 18th at Geekdom.
Starting this Friday, San Antonio’s latest three day startup weekend takes place there.
