Every year, tech startups look forward to the highly selective South by Southwest Accelerator competition at the Startup Village.
The 2014 SXSW Accelerator marks the sixth year for the competition.
The organizers are expecting more than 500 startups to apply for the 48 slots available. The deadline to apply is Friday, Nov. 8th.
“This event provides an outlet for companies to present their new technology of Entertainment and Content products, Social, Enterprise and Big Data Technologies, Innovative World, Wearable, Music, or Health technology to a panel of industry experts, early adopters, and representatives from the Angel/VC community,” said Chris Valentine, its organizer.
Past judges have included Tim Draper of DFJ, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Craig Newmark of Craiglist, Bob Metcalfe of University of Texas, Guy Kawasaki of Alltop, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, and Tom Conrad of Pandora.
The competition takes place March 9th and 9th.
Tag: Austin (Page 15 of 37)
AngelHack takes place next weekend at Capital Factory starting at 9 a.m. on Saturday.
This is the second time AngelHack has held a hackathon in Austin. The first one took place last June at Mass Relevance’s headquarters.
This hackathon is focused on mobile apps. AppHack takes place in 30 cities worldwide and focuses on building mobile apps and teaching developers Android and iOS development.
The event also features workshops. Jeff Linwood is teaching an Android development workshop, Ryan Pitylak is teaching mobile customer acquisition and there’s also a cloud app platform workshop.
Steve Guengerich, co-founder with Appconomy, Josh Kerr, co-founder and CEO of Written.io and Pitylak, CEO of Unique Influence, are the judges and mentors.
Moo.com, Lob, PayPal Develop, 99Designs and Capital Factory sponsor AngelHack.
Joshua Baer and Nicholle Jaramillo with Capital Factory are organizing the event.
The winner of the competition gets a chance to go to Angelhack’s HACKccelerator program and a trip to San Francisco.
Use the promo code, “SiliconH100” to get FREE tickets to AngelHack Austin.
Full disclosure: Silicon Hills News is a media sponsor of AngelHack.
By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
It’s not a good idea to quit a good job and launch a divorce startup while happily married, said Cotter Cunningham.
“The day you quit your job to go home and tell your wife you’re starting a divorce site is not the best day of your life,” Cunningham said.
At 46, Cunningham left his job as the COO of Bankrate in Palm Beach and wrote a $1 million check to launch Divorce360.com. He also raised $1 million from Austin Ventures. The investment was a good chunk of his net worth.
“It failed miserably,” Cunningham said.
The first year, the startup spent $400,000 and made $19, Cunningham said. The second year, it spent $1.5 million and made $300,000, he said.
“I feel like we failed because of the business model,” he said.
Cunningham recounted his entrepreneurial journey Tuesday evening during an interview with Brett Hurt, co-founder of Bazaarvoice and entrepreneur in residence at UT during a talk sponsored by the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at UT.
Today, Cunningham is the founder, president and CEO of RetailMeNot, the world’s largest online coupon and deals marketplace. The company, founded in 2009, has 300 employees with its headquarters in Austin and offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and France. The company has raised approximately $300 million from investors including Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Adams Street Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, JP Morgan and Google Ventures.
Hurt asked Cunningham how he became an entrepreneur. Cunningham and his brother grew up in Helena, Arkansas and later Memphis, after his parents divorced. His dad was speaker of the house in Arkansas and liked to debate politics around the dinner table. Cunningham liked growing up in a small town where everyone knew his name and the kids had a lot of freedom.
“I was driving at 14,” he said. “My dad threw me the keys and said have fun.”
When Hurt asked Cunningham what advice he would give to students, Cunningham advised them to be confident and persistent.
“I think to succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to have a strong amount of confidence in yourself, bordering on arrogance,” Cunningham said. “Persistence has worked for me. It was not something I was born with. I had to develop it as a skill.”
Cunningham said he didn’t have a great academic record. When he graduated from Memphis State, he landed a $14,000 a year job working for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. He then went on to get his MBA from Vanderbilt University.
“I have always persisted,” Cunningham said. “I didn’t give up.”
That’s where passion comes into play, Hurt said. It drives entrepreneurs to keep going in the face of adversity.
“You almost can’t be persistent if you don’t like what you do,” Cunningham said.
Cunningham joked that he was the antithesis of Hurt, who he joked grew up with an entrepreneurial pacifier from birth.
After Divorce360 failed, Cunningham moved to Austin with his family and worked with Austin Ventures to start something new. He met a guy at a cocktail party who was going through a divorce and he found out he owned an online coupon site. The site generated $3 million a year in revenue.
“It was insanely profitable,” Cunningham said.
That sparked him to start Whale Shark Media, later renamed RetailMeNot. With the backing of Austin Ventures, Cunningham cold-called 100 online coupon sites. He interviewed 60 of them. He ended up buying three of them. Together, they had $10 million in revenue. He hired 30 people. He found out that RetailMeNot, the biggest competitor, based in Melbourne, Australia, was for sale. He got on a plane a few days later and flew to Australia to meet with the founders.
“We pursued them for nine months,” he said.
Part of the courtship involved eating kangaroo meat, something that Cunningham did not enjoy. But it helped him close the deal.
The lesson for the students, said Hurt, is that to be successful, “you have to eat kangaroo meat.”
Through all of the acquisitions, RetailMeNot has been able to maintain its corporate culture by treating employees the right way, Cunningham said. It got 60 employees through the acquisitions.
“We believe people work hard for us, so we need to work hard for them,” he said.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Alan Knitowski calls it like he sees it, letting fly his controversial perspectives that: Austinites bootstrap too much, entrepreneurs interested in work/life balance need to “grow up” and he would happily rail on the entire group of investors at Austin Ventures to their faces.
The investor, serial entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Phunware spoke at Startup Grind Austin Monday night, giving his audience of about 30 people a fast lesson in how to reach entrepreneurial success, Knitowski-style.
When he founded Phunware in 2008, he said, he knew that peoples’ mobile devices were going to be their main screens and that the perfect convergence for future endeavors was SaaS, the Cloud and mobile. So he created a company that’s Mobile as a Service.
He wanted to help companies with apps accomplish:
• universal login and data capture
• advertising content management
• media and hosting alerts and notifications
• high margin loyalty and rewards
• location tools
• analytics and business intelligence
“Nobody wants 12 partners for procurement with 12 sets of hardware and 12 people pointing fingers when nothing works,” Knitowski said. He wants Phunware to do it all.
Knitowski grew up in Arizona to economically disadvantaged parents. Until he was 19, he said, he was 5’2 and weighed 110 pounds. So he got tired of being told what he couldn’t do because of his circumstances or his size. He admonished the budding entrepreneurs in the room “If you don’t live life as a victim and you get off your ass and work, anybody can do anything.”
He got his bachelor’s in industrial engineering from the University of Miami on an ROTC scholarship and his master’s from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He served as a ranger with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and spent part of that inspecting nuclear facilities in Korea before getting his MBA at University of California at Berkley. That launched his years in Silicon Valley.
His first business model, he said, was annihilating Nortel because the company tried to pull funding from his MBA.
“Hell hath no fury like a serial entrepreneur with a crap load of capital,” he said.
Austin entrepreneurs, he said, think in terms of building a customer base in Austin, then Central Texas, then Texas, then the world. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, on the other hand, think in terms of taking on the world with a revolutionary idea. Austin entrepreneurs love stealth mode; Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and Knitowski himself, readily share their ideas, he said, because they know that just because someone knows your business model doesn’t mean he can execute it. And Austin entrepreneurs are so wedded to bootstrapping that they miss the opportunities that well-funded companies get from influxes of cash. Gowalla, he said, not Foursquare, should have dominated that market, but they were too dedicated to bootstrapping their business and Foursquare won.
Knitowski had a whole series of points for the entrepreneurs present:
• Always be honest and always be transparent. We send reports to investors every month. Too many people never talk to their investors until they want money again. Your investors will fight to the death with you if they trust you.
• Cash flow is the only thing that matters. Make sure you know, every day, how much you have coming in and how much you have going out. What’s your burn rate? We have a current asset report every week.
• Use reputable lawyers, auditors and other professionals. If an investor asks who your auditor was and you mention a low budget firm, they’ll have to do the numbers all over again. If you say Price Waterhouse Coopers, that’s a question answered. He gave a list of recommended firms.
• Raise money before you need it.
• If you want a lifestyle business, that’s fine. But if you take a dollar from anyone, you have to let go of the idea of work/life balance or leaving every day at five to attend a kid’s sporting event. “Stop fooling yourself. Being an entrepreneur is an immense sacrifice and I can only do it because I have an amazing wife. She shoulders crazy burdens with our four kids.”
Phunware is slated to have $23 million in revenues this year and aiming for more than $100 million by 2015. It has received $20 million in several rounds of funding and is planning to take its first institutional investment soon to expand the company globally.
There will be no Startup Grind Austin event in November. The next event is Monday, Dec. 2 and features Robin Thurston, co-founder and CEO of MapMyFitness.
Simon Galpin, the director general of investment promotion at Invest Hong Kong, also known as InvestHK
But now the exotic Asian island wants to reinvent itself into a startup hub with the Startmeup.HK initiative.
And it seems to be working.
During Austin Startup Week, a lot of the focus spotlighted the local bustling startup culture.
But one international visitor managed to host a lunch at Capital Factory and attract quite a crowd.
Simon Galpin, the director general of investment promotion at Invest Hong Kong, also known as InvestHK, gave an overview of all the startup activity happening in Hong Kong. InvestHK is the government’s effort to attract foreign investment into Hong Kong.
“In the last two or three years, we’ve noticed the whole startup ecosystem has started to develop rapidly,” Galpin said.
Hong Kong now has 14 co-working sites focused on a variety of different industries, he said. The startup crowd likes to be in the center of the action and not in a high-rise building on the hillside, he said. Hong Kong also has some government run tech incubators and about 14 privately run incubators, Galpin said.
Hong Kong also has an active angel investment community, Galpin said. Some Hong Kong investors have also shifted investment from real estate into technology and startup businesses, he said. And Hong Kong officials are working on attracting more venture capital firms to the region, he said.
“Hong Kong is a springboard for companies to go global,” Galpin said.
The Austin visit was part of Galpin’s U.S. tour, which also included visits to New York City and Philadelphia, to promote the new “Startmeup.HK” initiative.
InvestHK launched “Startmeup.HK” to support startups globally to provide them with access to money as well as intellectual and social connections. The goal is also to develop Hong Kong as an entrepreneurship and innovation hub, Galpin said.
His visit to Austin is hopefully the first of many, Galpin said. He plans to come back and bring entrepreneurs with him, he said. And he would like to see some startups from Austin visit Hong Kong.
Gravitant, which makes software for companies to manage their cloud services, announced Wednesday that it has received $10 million in Series B funding.
Corsa Ventures led the round and was joined by existing investor S3 Ventures.
The Austin-based company plans to use the money to expand its sales and marketing, to fulfill customer orders and to add more features to its cloud management platform.
In addition, Alex Gruzen with Corsa Ventures will join Gravitant’s board of directors.
“Gravitant has the potential to change the way Enterprise IT is done,” Gruzen said in a news statement. “While cloud computing shows much promise in transforming IT, CIOs are struggling with cloud adoption and simply not getting the ROI they expect from their private and public cloud investments. Gravitant’s cloudMatrix brokerage and management platform optimizes agility and cost while maintaining control. The result is a vastly improved cloud ROI.”
“Customer interest in cloud brokerage and management platforms is accelerating, and this funding will help us take advantage of this rapidly growing market space,” Mohammed Farooq, co-founder and CEO of Gravitant said in a news statement. “We believe Gravitant will be the next major software company in Austin, and we are very pleased to see the support from Austin-based venture capitalists to help us realize this goal.”
Photo courtesy of TechCrunch’s Fall DEMO
Shelfbucks and Pristine received trophies as “Demo Gods” along with Skully Helmets, Hello Doctor and Sigma Guardian, recognized as outstanding.
Altogether 40 companies pitched at DEMO.
All of the Austin startups reside at Capital Factory.
3 Austin companies launched at @DEMO today! Congrats to @pictrition @PristineIO @Shelfbucks (All @CapitalFactory too)
— Joshua Baer (@JoshuaBaer) October 17, 2013
The four-minute pitches for each of the Austin startups are embedded below:
Pristine:
Shelfbucks:
Pictrition:
Boxer, an inbox management app, has landed $3 million seed stage funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures.
Boxer, formerly known as TaskBox, has integrated its platform with Box, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Facebook.
It expects to announce more strategic partnerships later on this year.
“As mobile devices have become our primary means of receiving and reading email, users have become increasingly frustrated with the primitive experiences provided by stock email apps,” Andrew Eye, CEO and Co-Founder of Boxer, said in a news statement. “Now, with the backing from Sutter Hill Ventures, Boxer can continue to execute on our strategy of extending the mobile mail experience with relevant third party information and interactions.”
Boxer is available for free from the Apple iTunes App store.
Taskbox, founded in 2012, raised $600,000 in seed stage funding from angel investors with the Central Texas Angel Network previously. The company merged with Boxer last May and has rebranded itself Boxer.
Texas had 11 percent of all angel group deals in the second quarter of this year, according to the latest Halo Report.
The deals, with a median investment round of $590,000, had pre-money valuations of $2.5 million. And 74 percent of the deals were syndicated.
“When angels co-invest with other types of investors the media deal size is $1.95 million,” according to the report, compiled by Silicon Valley Bank and its partners the Angel Resource Institute and CB Insights.
The Central Texas Angel Network was the most active angel investment group nationwide. The report doesn’t go into detail about the number of deals or dollars invested by CTAN.
Seventy percent of angel group deals in the second quarter were completed outside California and New England, although 36 percent of dollars are invested in these regions,. California led in number of deals, with 17 percent share of angel group investments.
The bulk of the deals focused on Internet, healthcare and mobile companies receiving 71 percent of the investment deals and 79 percent of the dollars, an increase from the first quarter.
By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Three Day Startup began in 2008 as a project of some University of Texas graduate students who thought entrepreneurship, like many other areas of study, really ought to have a lab where students could make experiments and—if necessary—blow things up as part of the learning process.
Since then it has evolved to 73 programs at 30 universities in the U.S., Israel, Chile, Thailand, Spain, the Netherlands, Columbia and more.
Seven teams, plus one dummy team, presented Sunday night at the Austin Technology Incubator after working on their projects since Friday night, often staying up until 4 a.m. and being sent out to get at least six hours of market validation. They presented before an audience and a panel comprised of Jason Seats of Techstars, Josh Kerr of Written, Jeff McMahon of Open Labs and Fred Schmidt of Capital Factory and Portalarium.
Biquity
Biquity is investment banking using bitcoin, an unregulated online currency. The practice is illegal in the U.S., but is being used in several Latin American companies where there’s restricted access to equity financing. Biquity would work as a kind of transaction validation escrow service between a company auctioning shares and a company or individual buying shares. Because there are no foreign capital controls on bitcoin, the transaction would not be subject to limits or federal or bank-driven fees
The problem, as Seats pointed out, is that while the lack of oversight means lower transaction costs it also means there’s no oversight to protect parties. The remedy for that is that bitcoin now has futures contracts connected to local currency to ensure that the price agreed upon stays consistent relative to other types of currency. Once the transaction is made it may be easy to convert the bitcoin into local currency that is protected.
Snip Book
Snip Book is an app for hair stylists to capture information about their customers, cataloguing images of haircuts or dye jobs they’ve given, with the specific angle of the cut or the color of dye so that if customers come back asking for the same cut or color they had before, the stylist can easily call up the information. The team’s presenter said 90 percent of the 1.6 million stylists in the U.S. rely on repeat customers for their business’s survival, so being able to recall a cut one gave a client several months ago is important. The original model would be subscription based for about $20 a month with add-on services such as client scheduling. The app could be scaled horizontally to be used at nail salons, tattoo parlors, etc.
The problem, the panel pointed out, was that a lot of this could be done on Evernote. But, Snip Book would also push the hairstyles to social media, such as Facebook, and enhance marketing.
Alza
Alza is an app designed to help users avoid losing time in distractions like getting lost for hours on Facebook or oversleeping. Alza collects data from users’ calendars, social media, and other apps, and sends you notification if it sees users playing candy crush instead of studying for the test or presentation they have to give tomorrow.
With other apps and computer tools, people have to manually track their time, pressing a start and stop button. But with Alza, it’s all done automatically. The team planned to do a monthly subscription and also work with organizations like Groupon. If someone has a productive week, they get extra discounts on restaurants and entertainment.
Fred Schmidt asked if this would help him if he was wasting time at the golf course and one team member said it would use his phone’s GPS system to see whether he was where he should be during that time.
Another problem was that iOS sandboxes apps, preventing the app from seeing whether or not a customer is wasting time on another app. But the worst liability was that audience members said they would turn the app off after one session of nagging. A lot of people don’t want to waste time but they don’t want their phones telling them what to do, either.
Parents might buy it though.
EventApps.com
EventApps.com is an app for small to medium sized conference and event planners. The simple, module-based app lets users plan and promote events without investing a lot of time in creating a short-lived app or a lot of money—though the price point was $100 for an event with fewer than 200 attendees and $1,000 for events with more than 200.
Sally Stone pitching Match Setter
The panelists also questioned the jump from $100 to $1,000.
Match Setter
Match Setter is an app for tennis players to find pickup games in their geographic area with other players who have roughly the same skill level. Presenter Sally Stone said many players can’t find games when they have the time to play them or if they do their opponents aren’t as good a player as they claim. Match Setter not only lets people rate their own playing but allows others who have played them to rate them as well. It creates a community of tennis players and also allows players to plan games around what skill sets they want to improve on.
The team planned to monetize Match Setter with a subscription, but the panel recommended having sponsors, such as tennis ball manufacturers, instead. Having the app free to users would create critical mass necessary to find other funding models.
Looksy TV
Looksy TV uses small cameras to collect analytics on crowds in restaurants, bars and other establishments that enable venues to gather useful data on their traffic and also let prospective users check in on whether a particular restaurant is too crowded, empty or otherwise lacking ambiance the customer is looking for.
Similar to Scene Tap in its function, the application differs in that, instead of identifying approximate ages and genders of patrons it uses a cartoon filter to obscure the faces and identities. It only allows a user to see a 30-second window into a particular establishment, locking the person out for 15-20 minutes after that glimpse to prevent stalking.
Chiron Health
Andrew O’Hara with Chiron Health
The company would charge a fee for the service, taking its cut after the doctor gets paid. More than 20 states require insurance to pay for medical telechats the same way they would pay for in-person visits, O’Hara said, and more states are coming on board.
The panel asked whether the platform was defensible when huge medical conglomerates could take over the market at a moment’s notice. O’Hara said Chiron sees the opportunity to partner with other healthcare technology companies in the next several years to help launch the product.
The final presentation brought three men to the stage…one a typically scruffy startup guy and the other two ridiculously pretty, ripped men in recently ironed clothing proposing a Craigslist-style site for musicians to purchase supplies. Music Matrix was a piece of Moth to Flame Productions’ movie about the startup world Funemployment.
