At Austin Startup Week, Scott Kupor, author of Secrets of Sand Hill Road, brought a bit of Silicon Valley big thinking to Austin.

Kupor, managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has overseen the firm’s growth to 150 employees and more than $7 billion in assets under management. Its portfolio companies include Lyft, Airbnb, Facebook, Slack, Instacart, and Magic Leap.

Kupor spoke with Joshua Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory, during a fireside chat Monday evening to a standing room only crowd. During the hour-long talk, Kupor covered some information from his book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get it, published in June.

At Andreessen Horowitz, Kupor said the firm wanted to work with product visionaries that could also be CEOs.

“When it works, it works well,” he said. Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, and Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, and SpaceX are those kinds of entrepreneurs.

“We wanted to design a firm to take a raw product strategist and help him or her become the long-term CEO for the business,” Kupor said. “That was what we tried to build.”

Andreessen Horowitz built a whole set of services to augment around the startups it invested in to hopefully increase the likelihood of them being successful, Kupor said.

Being a good investor is bringing something other than money to the entrepreneur, Baer said.

“This is a huge change in the industry,” Kupor said.

The venture capital industry really started in the 1970s, he said.

“From the 1970s to 2000s, we didn’t live in the world we live in today because capital was a scarce resource and access to capital was a differentiator,” Kupor said. “As the cost of capital came down, you went from a capital-constrained environment to capital is no longer a scarce resource which brings us back to where we started in that the VC firms have to do something other than just provide money because that effectively has become a commodity. “

In 1999, it cost a lot more to start a company,  Baer said.

In 1999, Kupor was part of a company called LoudCloud – “that was cloud before cloud was cool,” he said. What the company was trying to build was too early, he said.  That kind of company eventually became Amazon Web Services, he said.

“Unfortunately for us, our timing was not that great,” Kupor said.

The simple way to think about how the business used to work is entrepreneurs took money from venture capitalists and spent it with big tech companies on tech expenditures. Kupor joked that it was a money-laundering business.

“You couldn’t start a company with less than $5 million because you couldn’t buy Sun servers or EMC storage for anything less than that,” Kupor said. “Then two big things happened. The unit costs of all those goods started to fall precipitously and that’s kind of Moore’s Law making its way through every aspect of the tech industry. Storage costs, network costs, bandwidth costs all fell by 10X even software development and marketing costs, Kupor said.

Another big change is the idea of pay as you go, as opposed to big upfront capital expenditures, Kupor said.

“We take it for granted today, but those two things just dramatically changed the business,” he said.

There never used to be a thing called seed capital, Kupor. And now in the mid-2000, companies could raise seed capital and launch a business, he said.

It’s cheaper than ever now to start a company, but it’s more expensive to grow a company, Kupor said.

That’s the function of market size, he said.

When Netscape sold to AOL in 1998, the total available market of Internet users was 147 million globally, Kupor said.

“That was it,” he said. “No matter how great Netscape or AOL was that was it.”

Today, there are 4.3 billion Internet users and it’s still growing, Kupor said.

“Pets.com, no matter how great that service was in 1999, couldn’t survive because there wasn’t a big enough universe against which to amortize against as you’re marketing customer acquisition costs,” he said.

“The size of the prize is bigger today,” Kupor said. “The other thing that has changed is the world has gotten very flat, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Friedman.”

That means the distribution of talent and technology is very different than it was 20 years ago, he said.

“The favorite stat I like to think about is that 90 percent of all venture capital was spent in the U.S. That figure has dropped down to 50 percent,” he said.

No one should cry for the U.S. the pie has grown, Kupor said. The size of the opportunity has gotten bigger. China is a big part of that growth.

Baer then asked Kupor to define venture capital.

Venture capital is the capital source where no other capital source will work for this business, Kupor said. Most businesses get started with bank loans or friends and family funds, he said. That’s good for relatively small businesses that have relatively small capital requirements, he said.

There are many cheaper forms of capital, he said. VCs invest in companies that can scale and provide huge returns on investment.

“You have a few companies that ultimately drive all the return to the business,” he said.

The tradeoffs the Westcoast VCs have made is that 10 percent to 20 percent of investments must make  10, 20 or 50 times their return, Kupor said.

And in every case, the VC firm is betting on the entrepreneur to make it happen, he said.

One of the mistakes entrepreneurs make in pitching to Andreessen Horowitz is that the entrepreneurs sometimes say things that spook us, Kupor said.

The entrepreneur might say, if we are wrong, there are five companies out there that can acquire the company, Kupor said.

“We don’t need entrepreneurs to do risk mitigation for us,” he said. “We want everybody to try to swing for the fences. I think when entrepreneurs say things, they are trying to mitigate the risk for us, but it causes cognitive dissonance.”

Entrepreneurs need to make sure they don’t have inconsistencies in their presentation that make the VCs question what they are really trying to build, Kupor said.

“It’s a fool’s game to try to predict market size,” Kupor said. So much of the valuation at the early stage is team, he said.

“It goes to this concept of storytelling,” Kupor said. “What do you know that no one else knows, how can you articulate that vision.”

Entrepreneurs also must really understand who their VCs are.

“You are entering into a long-term relationship,” Kupor said. “The average marriage in the U.S. lasts eight years, which is less than the average venture capital relationship.”

Venture capital investment in Austin has been on the rise.

VC funding hit $1.3 billion in 2018, the highest on record since the dot-com boom in 2000, according to the MoneyTree Report from PwC and CB Insights. That’s up 70 percent from $783 million in 2017.

Yet California deals still get more than 50 percent of the $98.5 billion in VC capital invested in 2018, according to the report.

During a fundraising panel on Texas’ Growing Venture Market: What’s Changing and Ecosystem Impact during Austin Startup Week, Charlie Plauche, a partner in S3 Ventures in Austin, gave an overview of Texas’ growing venture market.

A standing-room-only crowd turned out for the discussion in a meeting room on the 16^th floor at Capital Factory Monday afternoon.

Plauche also showed a slide presentation providing an overview of the VC market here and the rise of Austin-based VC firms and those that have offices here.

Many like True Wealth Venture Partners, Next Coast Ventures, and LiveOak Venture Partners have opened in the last decade. The oldest on the panel, Silverton Partners, raised its first institutional fund in 2006. And S3 Ventures was founded in 2007.

Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and general partner of LiveOak Venture Partners, Mike Dodd, general partner, Silverton Partners, and Tom Ball, co-founder of Next Coast Ventures, all previously worked at Austin Ventures, the big VC firm that shutdown in 2015. They all served as panelists along with Kerry Rupp, general partner of True Wealth Ventures.

Silverton Partners has four managing partners, Dodd said. It closed on Fund V at $108 million last year. It focuses on early-stage companies and it has made more than 50 investments since launching. About 70 percent of its investments are in Texas, Dodd said.

Next Coast Ventures, founded in 2015 by Tom Ball and Mike Smerklo, raised an $85 million fund in 2017 and announced plans to raise a second fund this year. The firm makes about 70 percent of its investments in Texas, Ball said.

Rupp, general partner of True Wealth Ventures, runs a $20 million fund that invests in women-led startups in consumer health and sustainable products industries. Rupp founded the firm in 2015 with Sara Brand.  Only two percent of VC capital dollars go to companies with a woman CEO, Rupp said. True Wealth Ventures has invested in eight companies so far with two of those investments in Texas. It writes seed-stage checks in the $250,000 to $500,000 range, she said.

LiveOak Venture Partners, founded in 2013, earlier this year closed a $105 million fund, its second fund. The company invests in startups primarily in Austin and Texas overall, Srinivasan said.

While California has seen several $100 million rounds of investment capital into startups, Austin doesn’t really see that kind of activity, Rupp said. An entrepreneur can still raise a pre-seed to seed-stage round in the $250,000 and up range here, she said.

In the valley, there is a massive amount of capital chasing a limited number of entrepreneurs which skews pricing high, said Dodd. So, the entrepreneurs that do end up raising capital burn through it quickly, he said. So, you have these companies that have these massive burn rates, he said.

The investment round sizes and burn rates in Austin and Texas are more reasonable, Dodd said.  Austin has much better unit economics, he said. It’s kind of the way Silicon Valley used to be in a way, he said.

“There is a big difference between building a business here and out there,” he said.

Companies in California that raise those massive rounds of investment capital must be able to deliver massive returns to investors, Srinivasan with LiveOak Venture Partners said. In Austin, if an entrepreneur develops a meaningful sized business and has an exit, they are going to make themselves and investors a good size return, he said. Similarly, early employees end up with a nice return as well, he said. Companies that are capital-efficient can provide good returns to investors and the company, he said.

Plauche asked the panelists what the VC funding landscape is like now that Austin Ventures is no longer around.

“It was good when there was an 800-pound gorilla if you were the 800-pound gorilla,” Ball said.

It was bad for the entrepreneurs with only one big VC firm in town, Ball said.

“It’s obviously a lot better for the entrepreneurial ecosystem to have more options,” Ball said.

There’s talk that there is a funding gap in Austin when it comes to Series B and Series C checks, Plauche said. He asked the panelists what it is like for the entrepreneurs in their portfolios to try to raise later stage rounds.

“The early stage money is definitely the hardest,” Srinivasan said.

In 2013, when LiveOak Venture Partners started there was hardly any early-stage money in this market, he said. Since then, several VC firms have raised meaningfully sized investment rounds, he said. So, the first round of money has gotten easier, he said.

When companies get to a certain breakout revenue run rate, the money is easier to find, Srinivasan said.

“It’s getting better,” he said.

There are a lot of firms that come to Austin and Texas now prospecting for good companies to invest in, Srinivasan said.

Austin is very much on the radar for global VC firms, he said.

“It’s an exciting time for folks like us who write the checks,” Srinivasan said.

There isn’t any lack of capital, Ball said.

“They find their way to Austin,” he said.

Today, it’s cheaper than ever to start a company, but it’s more expensive to scale a company, Ball said.

“That’s why I think you see those round sizes growing and the capital coming in,” he said.

There isn’t as much later stage funding in Austin, but it comes here when needed, Ball said.

Plauche asked the panelists what they are looking for when making a seed-stage round of investment.

“It’s team,” Rupp said. “At the end of the day, we’re betting that you guys can figure it out.”

True Wealth Ventures also looks at the size of the market opportunity, and whether it is scalable, she said. To get a $100 million to $200 million exit, that’s ok, but for a venture fund, the exit must be much bigger, she said. True Wealth Ventures likes to see revenue from software companies, but with hardware companies it knows they need revenue to build out their product, so they are more forgiving if the startup doesn’t have revenue, Rupp said.

At Silverton, the company makes investments in 20 companies per fund, Dodd said. It looks at the team, market opportunity, and product-market fit, he said. It generally invests in Series A rounds, he said.

LiveOak Venture Partners invests in entrepreneurs who are serial entrepreneurs or those that have deep domain experience in the industry they are disrupting, Srinivasan said.

At the earliest stage of raising capital, Rupp advised entrepreneurs to think about the long road and to make projections on how much revenue they think they’ll generate three to five years out and what their exit strategy might be. Even though the financial projections might seem like “garbage” from the minute they are printed, it is important for entrepreneurs to go through the process, she said.

Plauche asked about entrepreneurs who post a financial project slide with hockey stick revenue growth projections and whether those are discounted or taken seriously.

In venture investing, “there is a saying – triple, triple, triple as in tripling revenues three times in a row year after year, and double, double beyond that,” Dodd said.

“In the Valley, everyone wants to see that,” he said. “Don’t even walk in the door if you can’t show that.”

But ultimately, entrepreneurs need to look at how do they get there from the bottom up, Dodd said. Going from 20 customers to 1,200 customers is kind of hard to do, he said.

Don’t look to boil the ocean but find an industry vertical market that is more specific to sell products into, Dodd said.

Plauche asked how often entrepreneurs should raise funding.

Once entrepreneurs raise VC funds, they are always fundraising, Dodd said.

And VC firms are always fundraising, Ball said.

“You are building a relationship,” Rupp said. But entrepreneurs need to reach out to the right investors, she said. Spend the upfront time to find out which investors are the right ones interested in your industry to build a relationship with, she said.

The best way to reach the Austin VCs is through a warm introduction from someone they know in the Austin technology ecosystem. But LiveOak Venture Partners Srinivasan said one of the fastest-growing companies in its portfolio, Disco, came in through a cold email into its office.

Four years ago, Google’s self-driving car expert said he hoped Austin would have autonomous vehicles commercially available for the public to ride in on the city’s streets by 2019.

That vision hasn’t exactly come to fruition.

But it’s becoming closer to reality with the testing of a driverless shuttle at the Austin Bergstrom Airport earlier this year.

And now Ford has announced plans to expand its self-driving vehicles testing to Austin. It’s only the third market for Ford to test in along with Miami-Dade County and Washington, D.C.

“As the first city to allow a self-driving test vehicle on public streets, Austin is no stranger to experimentation,” Sherif Marakby, CEO of Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC, wrote in a blog post on Medium. “And we think now is the perfect time to continue exploring how this technology can become an important part of a city’s transportation infrastructure — and make people’s lives easier.”

In 2015, Austin became the first city outside of Google’s hometown of Mountain View, California, for it to test its self-driving car technology.

The Capital Area Metropolitan Planning Organization predicts vehicle use in the Austin region could double by 2040, while highway capacity will only grow 15 percent, according to Marakby.

“Simply put, Austin has to look towards diverse and innovative ways to move people around,” he said.

And Ford thinks it can provide the solution.  Ford is expanding its self-driving vehicle services testing operations in Austin in collaboration with Argo AI. It is also working closely with city, state officials and community partners to fit into plans for the wider transportation system.

Texas passed SB 2005 in 2017, which Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law, to regulate the operation of automated motor vehicles. It also created a Connected and Autonomous Vehicle Task Force to study self-driving vehicles.

 “Austin continues to be a huge proponent of innovation, becoming the first city in the world to host a driverless vehicle on public streets and forming a Smart Mobility Office that’s focused on quickly piloting new technology,” Marakby said.

 “Almost 75 percent of Austinites commute by driving alone in personal vehicles,” according to Austin Mayor Steve Adler. “This is simply unsustainable. Our 20-year goal is for at least 50 percent of people to take advantage of other transportation options, like buses or bicycles. With our region’s population on track to double in the next 20 to 25 years, it’s clear we need to re-think how our right-of-way is used if we want people to be able to move around our city.”

Austin’s Smart Mobility Roadmap includes the use of self-driving vehicles to expand mobility options for Austin’s residents, Adler said.

Automated vehicles have the potential to increase safety and provide more accessibility options to the community, Mayor Adler said.

 In the next few months, Ford with Argo AI will be driving its vehicles manually through east Austin and downtown, mapping the roadways in preparation for its autonomous driving test, Peter Rander, president of Argo AI, said in a statement.

 “Eventually we will expand beyond these areas, but these initial mapping trips help us develop a comprehensive understanding of the environment around our vehicles,” he said. “For example, we use sensors on our vehicles to create high-resolution, 3D maps of streets, buildings and all permanent static objects in areas where we plan to operate.”

The introduction of the new Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute at the University of Texas at Austin had all the trappings of Hollywood with bright lights, lively music and dramatic backdrops.

UT Austin President Gregory L. Fenves took to the stage at the Bass Concert Hall with orange lights illuminating his way and a backdrop of the UT Tower as he introduced one of UT’s most famous alumni, Kendra Scott. She has built from scratch an Austin-based fashion brand now valued at more than $1 billion.

“Kendra is dynamic, creative, inspirational and entrepreneurial,” Fenves said.

“She started a business right here in Austin from the ground up and built it into a worldwide icon,” Fenves said. “The institute is a reflection of Kendra’s spirit and her story and it will empower women students at UT for years to come.”

Then Fenves showed a short video of Scott at UT with information about the WEL institute and definitions of what leadership means from many graduates of UT who now work at Kendra Scott’s jewelry business.

Next, amid a lot of fanfare, Scott took the stage and talked briefly about her entrepreneurial journey and how an institute like the one she is spearheading would have helped her. Scott started her business 18 years ago in a spare bedroom of her house with a newborn baby. At that time, she was thinking of so many obstacles she was facing and being told no day in and day out.

“Being told we weren’t good enough or I wasn’t smart enough or I didn’t have enough experience or that you couldn’t be a real fashion brand out of Texas,” Scott said. “Oh boy, were they wrong.”

With over 2,000 employees, Kendra Scott has over 100 standalone stores across the US and is sold in premiere retailers including Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Bloomingdale’s and 600 specialty boutiques worldwide and boasts a thriving web business.

“Here we are today, making the impossible, possible,” Scott said.

“I believe that every woman, every person, has the ability to become a leader,” Scott said.

The Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute, known as the WEL Institute, will open to all students in Spring of 2020 and will address the challenges women often face in business. It will create a bridge and allow people to have access to the things they need to be successful, Scott said. It will be based on campus of the College of Fine Arts. Dell Technologies is also a sponsor of the WEL Institute, Scott said.

A packed house of mostly UT students and Austin startup community members attended the event which included appearances from actress Freida Pinto, television personality Rachel Lindsay and country music singer Cam.

The new institute will feature a women’s leadership workshop series with industry leaders, presented by Blackstone LaunchPad at UT Austin and the College of Fine Art’s School of Design and Integrated Technologies.

The WEL will also host a women’s leadership summit featuring a pitch competition as well as entrepreneurs and other speakers.

UT’s McCombs School of Business will offer a Kendra Scott Consumer Products Entrepreneurship Practicum and UT’s College of Natural Sciences will offer an experiential accessories design and merchandising course.

UT’s College of Fine Arts will offer the Kendra Scott Studio Partnership, featuring a three-hour seminar course hosted at the Kendra Scott headquarters and centered around the Kendra Scott Design process.

The WEL Institute will also offer an internship program, leadership training and mentoring, speaker series featuring industry leaders and campus wide venture funding opportunities.

“UT’s Kendra Scott WEL Institute seeks to establish a community of diversity, inclusivity, and empowerment,” according to a news release. “By increasing engagement and support for female entrepreneurs on campus, the WEL Institute aims to boost the number of women-owned and women-led businesses.”

During a panel discussion with Freida Pinto, television personality Rachel Lindsay, Scott talked about how she learned many lessons from her failures as well as her successes. She had a hat business before she launched her jewelry business and she had dreams of expanding nationwide. But the hat business failed, and she had to shut it down.

“But what it did do is instill in me that I wanted to be in fashion,” Scott said. “ And I wanted to do something good.”

That failure led her to found Kendra Scott jewelry.

“If I hadn’t gone through that hard time, that tough time, I could never have built the business that we built today,” she said. “And I think that is such an important lesson for everyone that there will be struggles. There will be things in the road that you think I can’t go through. But that entrepreneurial mindset of perseverance, of picking yourself up and dusting your knees off, of taking a breath and saying ok I’m going to stay focused on what the future may hold. That’s the best lesson I learned.”

Scott faced a lot of obstacles along the way. She said she wasn’t taken seriously when asking for funding or investment capital. The obstacles are not going to go completely away, she said.

“But we want to do something that will allow any of these women to jump over those hurdles,” Scott said.

ZenBusiness, an online platform to help small businesses incorporate and stay compliant with regulators, announced Wednesday that it has raised $15 million in additional funding.

The Austin-based company, founded by Russ Buhrdorf, the former founding Chief Technology Officer for HomeAway, has previously raised $4.5 million in seed-stage funding last year.

ZenBusiness’ platform makes it easy and inexpensive for a company to file an LLC or Corporation with state and federal regulators. ZenBusiness also offers a wide array of business services including accounting, taxes, banking, lending and credit, website, domain, and email.

ZenBusiness, which launched in February of 2018, has since attracted thousands of small businesses to its platform. Its goal is to help launch 1 million new businesses by 2023.

“The expense, effort and knowledge required to start a business today is prohibitive, and entrepreneurs report feeling overwhelmed and isolated when it comes to making decisions about their business,” Buhrdorf, CEO of ZenBusiness, said in a news release. “ZenBusiness helps entrepreneurs realize their dreams by eliminating the many barriers associated with starting a company and running it day-to-day. We are the only online platform that leverages automation, Machine Learning and the collective power of a large community of like-minded business owners to offer unmatched business services. Together we are on a mission to revolutionize how small businesses are created and run.”

Greycroft led the Series with Lerer Hippeau, and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. New investors included Rosecliff Venture Partners, Interlock Partners, and Recruit Strategic Partners.

ZenBusiness plans to use the funds to build out its platform and features and to reach new customers.

“ZenBusiness is democratizing entrepreneurship by making it easy to start and run a small business,” Greycroft Partner and ZenBusiness board member Paul Bricault, said in a news release. “By combining a disruptive platform with a flat subscription-based pricing model, small businesses have unprecedented access to ongoing resources and essential legal protections. It’s no surprise that thousands of small business owners have signed on with ZenBusiness as a trusted partner.”

“As the ZenBusiness community of small business owners continues to grow, so does their collective power to cut costs and create efficiencies,” Eric Hippeau, Managing Partner at Lerer Hippeau, said in a news release. “Between the company’s proven management team led by Ross, its clear product focus and mission to empower the small business landscape, we’re excited about all that’s to come.”

Among the features on its platform, ZenBusiness also offers a subscription-based pricing model to maintain corporate entities so that owners never need to worry about the status of their business. ZenBusiness will “make sure business owners stay in good standing with the Secretary of State, or it will pay to fix it.”

Austin ranks number one as the hottest real estate market in the country, according to the Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2020 report.

PwC US and the Urban Land Institute released the report this week which also included another Texas city: Dallas/Fort Worth, which claimed the sixth spot.

Others in the top ten included Raleigh-Durham at number two, followed by Nashville, Charlotte, 4, Boston, 5, Orlando, 7, Atlanta, 8, Los Angeles, 9, and Seattle, 10.

“What’s interesting is over time, we’ve gone from big coastal gateway cities – and those were the cities year after year for real estate investment – and now they’ve been replaced by smaller, non-gateway cities,” said Mitch Roschelle, PwC Partner and the report’s Co-Publisher.

In the case of Austin, it’s a virtuous cycle of employment growth, population growth, and affordability from a consumer and business standpoint, Roschelle said. But over time, Austin has seen a bit of an uptick of the cost of doing business, he said.

For a long time,  Austin’s large growing talent pools in a tight labor market attracted a lot of growth, said John Cummins, partner with PwC, based in Austin.

Austin ranks first for its low taxes, skilled talent pool, economic diversity and high quality of life.

The real estate report finds niche properties “ripe for investment and development include data centers, especially with the implementation of 5G technology and the myriad uses that will go along with it, and medical space due to an aging population, increased number of people with medical insurance, technological advances and cost reduction strategies by insurance companies that favor outpatient care.”

“Multifamily and single-family housing are also highly favored, as housing needs continue to change for millennials and baby boomers,” according to the report. “Less favorable: office space, hotels, and retail, with the latter receiving the lowest ranking.”

The report reveals top trends including Millennials moving to a hipper version of the suburbs, deemed Hipsturbia – populated with art galleries, hip restaurants, and night clubs. People are also seeking out community.

“They are more eclectic than the cookie-cutter suburbs we grew up,” Roschelle said.

 And when it comes to office buildings and workplaces, people want amenities including on-site dry cleaning and dinner pick up.

Another trend is sustainability, which the report found is not an exception but an expectation.

And a resurgence of malls as hubs of activity but this time for shared office space. “The built-in amenities of unused space, parking, gym, food and beverage services make the two a natural fit and a win/win for all.”

Other trends include “experiential and entertainment: retail continues the trend of creating spaces with one-of-a-kind activities, such as art, amusements, or food, and push the boundaries supportable in shopping centers like sky diving and skiing.”

The report, now in its 41^st year, includes interviews and survey responses from more than 2,200 real estate experts, including investors, fund managers, developers, property companies, lenders, brokers, advisers and consultants.

“The cities in our top ten – several of them are experiencing growing pains because of their population growth,” Roschelle said. “A lot of that growing pain has been satisfied by cranes in the sky and apartments being added and buildings being added.”

And of the cities in the top ten in the report, the catalyst for the growth was government intervention to enable future growth, Roschelle said. For example, Boston did the big dig to connect downtown to an underdevelopment area of South Boston, he said. And Tampa re-did its waterfront area to create a Riverwalk to attract more people and businesses, Roschelle said.

In Austin, city blocks with older buildings are being replaced by 50 story buildings, Cummins said. At some point, that will tap out, he said. Austin must continue to invest in infrastructure projects to keep pace with the growth, Cummins said.

“The question is going to turn towards transportation,” Cummins said. “We really don’t have a good public transport blueprint.”

Correction: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this article misspelled John Cummins name. We regret the error.

MassChallenge Texas has named 14 companies as finalists for its second annual Austin-based accelerator program.

The companies will compete for $500,000 in equity-free cash prizes at the MassChallenge Texas Austin Awards ceremony on Thursday, Oct. 17^th at the Hilton Austin. The Awards Ceremony will include keynotes from Texas-based influencers Sara T Brand of True Wealth Ventures and William Hurley, known as whurley, cofounder of Strangeworks, Honest Dollar and Chaotic Moon.

“All of the startups in MassChallenge’s second Austin-based program are creating solutions to address some of the biggest and most important challenges facing the world,” Mike Millard, the managing director of MassChallenge Texas in Austin, said in a news release. “It’s amazing to see how much these entrepreneurs have grown in such a short amount of time.”

The 14 finalists were chosen from a group of 79 early-stage startups that participated in the accelerator. A panel of judges will select the winners.

The 14 finalists are: (descriptions provided by MassChallenge Texas)

Catalyst Education:(Austin, Texas): Catalyst Education is founded by experienced and proven STEM EdTech entrepreneurs targeting the $1.3B Higher Ed. lab course learning market.

Collective Liberty: (Washington, D.C.): Collective Liberty facilitates anti-trafficking collaboration across industries and stakeholders to create ground-breaking, data-driven approaches that work.

GotSpot, Inc: (Houston, Texas): GotSpot is short-term space for your business. We’re a marketplace where entrepreneurs borrow Main Street space to grow their businesses.

MµZ Motion, LLC: (Fort Worth, Texas): MµZ Motion is driving the Future of Robotics with the Next Generation in High-Performance Motion.

MakersValley, LLC: (New York, Texas): MakersValley is the AirBnB of small batch apparel manufacturing with the goal to democratize the manufacturing industry.

Men’s Gold Boxx: (Austin, Texas): MensGoldBoxx is a Big & Tall ecommerce revolution. Intuitive customer profiles make finding your fit and style easy. Technology built to be licensed. 

Olifant Medical: (San Antonio, Texas) Olifant Medical has developed a stylet technology that overcomes the current barriers to successful tracheal intubation.

Phylomics Diagnostics: (Coppell, Texas) Phylomics provides early detection of multiple cancers in presumably healthy individuals by analyzing blood serum.

Pocket Innovations, LLC: (Richmond, Virginia) Pocket Innovations solves the common complication of pocket hematoma associated with pacemaker implants. This new medical device is the first preventative solution.

Rhythmo: (Austin, Texas): Rhythmo aims to provide a cost-effective, fun, and educational way for teenagers to start music production and STEM learning. Rhythmo’s main product, BeatBox, is a DIY cardboard MIDI drum machine kit, with built-in speakers, battery, and a bundled mobile app, to enable music-making anywhere, anytime.

Roper: (New Mexico) Roper helps ranchers boost productivity and reduce losses with a solar-powered, GPS-enabled health wearable for beef cattle.

SolGro: (Fort Worth, Texas) SolGro increases greenhouse crop yields by converting photosynthetically inactive sunlight (O,Y,G,I,V) into photosynthetic light (R,B). 

teleCalm, Inc: (Allen, Texas) teleCalm’s phone service can be life-changing for seniors living at home and those in senior living. Keep your elderly loved ones connected longer and protected. 

TRAXyL, Inc: (Warrenton, Virginia) Traxyl is dramatically reducing the cost of broadband communications by “painting” optical fiber onto the road surface.

Smarter Sorting, an Austin-based startup that helps companies recycle chemicals, announced it has raised $17 million.

The company, founded in 2017, has raised $25 million to date.

US Ecology, a leading regulated waste treatment, and disposal company led the latest round of funding, followed by RTP Ventures and a group of independent industry experts.

Smarter Sorting and US Ecology share a goal of cutting retail regulated waste by 50 percent, according to a news release. The companies are integrating their operations to make that goal a reality.

Smarter Sorting has created a smart chemical database that works with its hardware and software to scan, identify, categorize and sort every class of chemical-containing products. That helps retailers get rid of unwanted chemicals. Smarter Sorting will then arrange to pick up those products to recycle them instead of having them be destroyed in an incinerator.

The new round of funding will help Smarter Sorting increase sales of its retail waste management and compliance platform. But it also helps the company become a top solution provider for consumer product regulatory classification.

“By understanding items down to their chemical level and building software designed to optimize and simplify the use of advanced data, we enable retailers and other stakeholders to sustainably and accountably handled products,” Chris Ripley, Smarter Sorting CEO said in a news release. “By doing so, we are creating a brand-new era of responsible commerce.”

Smarter Sorting, which has more than 30 employees, is based in a building that was once served as an auto mechanic’s garage at 2900 E. Cesar Chavez St.

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