Austin Startup Week kicks off Monday and runs through Friday and it’s the biggest one yet.
Along with all the festivities celebrating startups, the Captivate Conference kicked off Sunday and South by Southwest Eco begins on Monday. Both have sessions and talks geared to technology startups.
Jacqueline Hughes and Josh Baer created the first Austin Startup Week in 2011 and it has grown steadily every year with new events like the Battle of the Bands and old favorites like the Austin Startup Crawl and Austin Startup Bazaar.
On Monday night, Ricardo Sanchez will host the largest Co-founders Meetup ever. He has more than 130 signed up to watch 12 pitches from The TechMap, Radvocacy, TeleCog, Freedom Family Ranches, Musiqmatrix, Zaplink, Taplet, Kindery, TaskTrak, Culture Booster, Aland Decision and Scribe Sense.
The Austin Technology Council hosts the first ever Battle of the Bands Monday night at Mohawk starting at 7 p.m. featuring bands from local startups.
For a full list of events, check out the Austin Startup Week website.
Tag: Austin Startup Week (Page 2 of 2)
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Brian Sharples, CEO of HomeAway
Those are just a few of the secrets of being a successful entrepreneur, according to Brian Sharples, CEO of Austin-based HomeAway. He gave an insightful speech recalling some of the lessons of his life at Capital Factory’s Demo Day recently.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur all of my life,” Sharples said. “I’ve had some that haven’t worked out at all and some that have worked out OK.”
For some reason, from the beginning, HomeAway has just exceeded expectations, Sharples said.
“A lot of that is because we do have a very seasoned group of people,” he said.
Sharples founded HomeAway in 2005. It is a vacation rental marketplace that matches homeowners with property managers and travelers interested in renting a home.
“HomeAway was a very big idea to take a huge market and try to consolidate it on a worldwide basis,” Sharples said.
The idea came to Sharples on a vacation. He had just finished with another startup IntelliQuest Information Group, a supplier of marketing data and research to Fortune 500 technology companies. He decided to take a few years off and travel around the world with his wife and three kids.
“We like to stay in houses more than hotels,” he said. “It gives us a lot of space to run around.” But finding properties in Southern France and Italy to lease was not easy. He had to find property managers and make arrangements with each individual.
“As an entrepreneur, I’m always trying to figure out what’s the next thing,” Sharples said. That’s generally a problem he encounters daily or something that irks him. The vacation rental marketplace was a problem that needed a better solution, he said.
“It just kept nagging at me why wasn’t there an Expedia for vacation homes?” So he decided to create one.
But he drew from his experience and his failures at other entrepreneurial ventures. Like the time he borrowed $1 million from some venture capitalists to corner the used car market by creating massive events at football stadiums around the country. He built an enormous structure in San Francisco.
“The day we opened a freak storm and tornado blew in with 75 miles an hour winds,” Sharples said. “It just completely leveled the place. No one died. But a lot of cars got destroyed.”
“And long story short, I lost the first $1 million I ever took in about three hours,” he said. “I learned very quickly that you not only have to have a good idea but one that can be executed. You have to have a good plan.”
Investors are looking for a great idea combined with a terrific plan for execution, he said.
Since then, he’s had incredible paranoia about managing risk.
“I learned that day that I didn’t spend enough time thinking about risk,” he said. “I didn’t buy the right insurance policy.”
So when he started Homeaway, he thought a lot about managing risk. He wanted to find out who tried and failed at creating a home rental marketplace.
“Looking at competition is such an important thing,” he said.
Before putting the HomeAway business plan together, Carl Shephard and Sharples spent five months talking to everyone they could find about the vacation rental market. They knew nothing.
“We talked to customers. We talked to suppliers. We learned a lot of cool stuff,” Sharples said.
They also discovered that in 1999, Expedia bought the VacationSpot and paid a ton of money for it around $75 million. A year later it went out of business. So they hunted down Rich Barton, ex-CEO of Expedia, to find out why VacationSpot failed. They flew out to Seattle and met at a café with Barton and two members of his former management team. They told how they tried to turn the business into a hotel business. Within a year, the company was gone. None of the customers wanted to deal with that kind of a model.
“Customers in this business preferred a marketplace model because they were dealing with their personal homes and personal possessions,” Sharples said. “They wanted to talk to the people they were renting their houses out to. Travelers wanted to talk to the owners too.”
“It was a business where the conversation was really, really important,” Sharples said.
“The best model for our business was a super, super boring model. It wasn’t sexy technology. It was a marketplace model bringing together buyers and sellers.”
Since launching, HomeAway has raised $405 million in private funding and acquired 17 websites. The company recently went public and has a market valuation of $3 billion.
Business is about game theory and planning for the future, Sharples said.
“When you introduce your company, five competitors may react to it. Some may over react to it. Venture capitalists may react to it,” Sharples said. ““This is a great time to be an entrepreneur. There’s a lot of money out there. But I’ve never seen such a fast follow market.”
For example, about 18 months after Groupon launched, it saw 100 competitors spring up, Sharples said.
Sharples started HomeAway when he was 44.
“There is no way if I started the company in my 20s or 30s, the company would be as successful,” he said.
Age and experience play a big part in creating a successful venture, he said.
“The stuff that you messed up makes you good,” he said. “The lessons you learned in life.”
Sharples advised new entrepreneurs to surround themselves with as much experience as possible.
“It’s really critical when you’re a young company,” he said.
Also, it’s important to hire people to complement your skill set, he said. Also, investors want to see humble entrepreneurs.
“It’s OK to say you don’t know everything,” he said.
At the same time, you have to be a little cocky. You have to show your passion. You have to answer the question “What’s your higher purpose?”
“One thing I love about our company is it’s a travel business. It makes memories. It’s about happiness. It’s about making people money,” Sharples said. About 600,000 people transact between $7 billion to $10 billion in revenue on HomeAway, he said.
“What is that higher purpose? What are you aiming for long term,” he said. “If you don’t have that passion, you won’t attract investors. It’s not just about the exit strategy and how are you going to make money.
There are a handful of high profile companies that get funded with lots of money and they haven’t figured out how to make money. That isn’t the real world.
“You have to know how your business is going to make money,” he said.
Video courtesy of Capital Factory:
Dave Michaels with Tech Ranch Austin promotes the Austin Startup Bazaar during Austin Startup Week.
The day-long event Thursday at Austin City Hall downtwon featured speed-mentoring sessions, pitch sessions, city hall tours, company demonstrations and a marketing talk.
At the Austin Startup Bazaar, Mark Philip, founder of Are You Watching This, talks about his sports startup aimed at fans who don’t want to miss any important plays.
Ariane Fisher, founder of Storymix, presents at Demo Day 2011
Like a hungry mob at an all you can eat buffet, people gorged themselves on entrepreneurship information Wednesday at the third annual Capital Factory Demo Day 2011.
The day-long event at the AT&T Conference Center in downtown Austin kicked off with a keynote speech by Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com and now a professor of electrical engineering and director of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.
Metcalfe offered great advice to the entrepreneurs in the crowd. He said a lot of young entrepreneurs appeared to be “on the verge of dying.” But, instead of pulling all nighters and eating ramen noodles, he told them to get in shape, sleep at least 8 hours and eat healthy meals. The crowd seemed skeptical.
Metcalfe also advised the entrepreneurs to write all the time, give speeches and learn about selling to pitch the company’s products.
“Some entrepreneurs think sales people are lower than whale shit,” Metcalfe said. “Sales people are a different species but they’re carbon-based like you.”
And sales people are essential to the success of a startup, he said.
Metcalfe praised Austin’s entrepreneurial spirit and innovators like Michael Dell of Dell and John Mackey of Whole Foods.
To further foster young entrepreneurs, Metcalfe also launched the one-semester start-up at the University of Texas. Joshua Baer, co-founder of the Capital Factory, is also an instructor.
Following Metcalfe, the five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists pitched their companies in eight-minute presentations with slides. At the end, SwimTopia won the applause meter reading as the audience favorite.
Brian Sharples, co-founder of HomeAway talking entrepreneurship at Demo Day 2011
At noon, Brian Sharples, founder of HomeAway, talked about pursuing his passions and launching his company at the age of 44 after making a lot of other mistakes.
“Surround yourself with as much experience as possible,” Sharples said.
Also, do your homework, Sharples advised. Before he and his co-founder Carl Shepherd started HomeAway, they spent more than six months researching the vacation rental market. They knew very little about the market. They soon discovered Expedia bought VacationSpot in 1999, but the business failed within a year. They found the former CEO of Expedia to find out what went wrong. Turns out Expedia tried to turn the business into a hotel business and get rid of the subscription fee model that customers liked. Owners also liked to interact with renters before leasing their properties. Expedia took away that conversation. HomeAway brought it back.
HomeAway, which recently went public, acquired more than 70 companies to create a business to make it as easy for consumers to find, book and stay in a vacation rental home, as it is to book a hotel.
“If you have a good idea be quiet about it until you’re ready,” Sharples said. For three or four years while HomeAway built its business and acquired competitors, the company didn’t talk to the press, Sharples said.
Sharples told entrepreneurs to be humble, to worry about competitors, to be passionate and to remain flexible. Also, entrepreneurs must have a profit model. The days of starting a business with no clear idea of how to make money, like Twitter, don’t work, he said.
“Never settle, always try to make things better,” Sharples said.
During lunch, investors mingled with entrepreneurs at an actual all you can eat buffet of veggies, chicken, beef, mashed potatoes, salad and desserts.
Silicon Valley Bank, Silverton Partners, AustinVentures, RedHouse Associates, Clearstone Venture Partners, Wildbasin Investments and Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas sponsored the event.
Following lunch, 17 entrepreneurs gave three minutes pitches on their companies. They included Apptive, CopperEgg, The Daily Dot, Forecast, Greenling, Hoot.me, ihiji, Infochimps, Loku, OwnLocal, NightRaft, Ravel, Ricochet Labs, Rockify, Spanning, Stormpulse, VolunteerSpot and WPEngine.
Next, Auren Hoffman, CEO and co-founder of Rapleaf, talked about recruiting and hiring tech talent. He seemed to contrast sharply with Metcalfe’s advice from the morning. Hoffman advised entrepreneurs to work long hours and hire others who work long hours six days a week. He also advised them to return calls and e-mails in a timely fashion.
The day-long Demo Day ended with a call to action. Baer advised everyone to go to the closest bar to talk and then to take the shuttle bus to join the Startup Crawl, a series of stops at various high-tech businesses around town to meet the companies, drink and mingle.
Emil Hajric, CEO of HelpJuice, gave a demonstration to investors at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011. His company was one the five Capital Factory 2011 Demo Day Finalists. HelpJuice makes an application that makes updating knowledgebases like Frequently Asked Questions or FAQs for companies easy.
Jack McGary, co-founder of SpeakerMix, gave a presentation to investors and others at the Capital Factory’s Demo Day 2011 Wednesday morning. SpeakerMix was one of five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists.
Speakermix is a one-stop shop for finding a speaker for an event. The company’s website is like an online match making service for event planners and speakers.
The market for speakers is $10 billion annually, McGary said. SpeakerMix already has 6,500 speakers on its site and has booked $1 million in speaking engagements, he said.
“We’ve got to work with everyone from Michael Phelps to Glenn Beck,” McGary said.
“There’s a ton of really great speakers that meeting planners are not going to find on Google.”
Kirtus Dixon, co-founder and CEO of GroupCharger was selected as one of the five Capital Factory 2011 Finalists. He pitched his company to investors during Austin Startup Week at the Capital Factory’s sold-out event Demo Day 2011.
Dixon’s company, GroupCharger, seeks to get alumni more actively involved and donating to their Alma Maters through its first web application called AlumniCharger. But that’s not an easy task.
For example, Oklahoma University has an alumni base of roughly 300,000, but only 8 percent give back every year, Dixon said. The university is using GroupCharger’s app to increase engagement with its alumni, Dixon said. The app finds alumni on social networks and then sends event information, invitations and introductions to other area alumni.
“Alumni who stay in touch with their schools after graduation are three times more likely to give back,” Dixon said.
Higher education institutions receive $30 billion in contributions annually and universities spend $2.4 billion on technology to engage alumni, Dixon said. The market is huge with 1.5 million alumni clubs, 55,000 alumni associations and each university spending, on average, $125,000 a year to market to alumni.
GroupCharger launched its beta version in July and it has 20 customers including the University of Oklahoma, the University of Texas and Texas A&M University. They pay $500 for the service, Dixon said.
GroupCharger is seeking to raise $200,000 in venture capital and already has $75,000 committed, Dixon said. It needs the money to expand to 40 universities which will be its break even mark to profitability, Dixon said.