Tag: Austin (Page 4 of 37)

WeWork is Already Full and Looks to Expand in Austin and Texas

April 27, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By HOJUN CHOI
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

WeWork Congress, photo courtesy of the company

WeWork, a startup that offers short-term leases to businesses in need of office space, has expanded to Austin and, despite only having launched in February, is already operating at full capacity with over 500 members.

The New York-based company currently operates in cities across the globe, including major cities in the United States, Israel, U.K. and in Amsterdam. Occupying an office space in the heart of downtown Austin, on the corner of Sixth Street and Congress Avenue, WeWork Congress marks the startup’s first expansion into Texas.

Adam Neumann, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said the WeWork brand is largely about cherishing collaborative experiences, and working together to find new solutions for problems.

“It’s about being a global citizen for the world,” Neumann told Silicon Hill News during a launch party in March.

Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, who also attended the party, said signing five-year or three-year leases can be burdensome to young and small companies. By offering solutions for this problem, he believes that companies like WeWork help the city foster a better atmosphere for entrepreneurs.

“These leases are for 30 days, and it’s a very ‘hip’ space,” Metcalfe said. “They have aimed it right at the small business community, so it’s just a fantastic thing.”

Photo courtesy of WeWork

In all 30 of its locations, WeWork offers its members rates on monthly leases, which are sold as packages with various amenities, such as free wireless Internet and printing. Members can also take advantage of open lounging areas that can be used for large social events or casual networking.

WeWork also connects its members to resources that help them manage their business, including discounted rates on health insurance plans and affordable solutions for payroll services.

Rates for the Austin location currently range from $45 to $350.

“It’s this idea of allowing you to focus what you’re super passionate about, but also having a culture of openness and collaboration,” Vice President of Business Development Matt Shampine said.

Shampine said Austin’s vibrant community of entrepreneurs, as well as the city’s unique personality are, largely in part, what caught the expansion team’s attention. During its expansion to central Texas, which took a little over year, Shampine said that the team reached out to local industry leaders as well as the Austin Chamber of Commerce to get in touch with the city’s business community.

“We try to be a part of the transformation of a neighborhood, so in terms of where we could have had our first location in Austin, this is an awesome spot,” Shampine said.

Shampine, who operated his own design and development agency out of a WeWork office space before officially joining the company in 2011, now oversees the company’s business operations. He said the startup will preserve the qualities that first attracted businesses to its spaces during its infancy as it plans for further expansion.

In 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the startup was valued at about $5 billion and speculated that the company was planning to go public within the next several years.

Austin is already the home to more than a dozen different coworking office space providers, such as Tech Ranch and Capital Factory that also offer businesses short-term leases. The diversity of its membership base, Shampine said, is what makes WeWork coworking spaces unique from similar shared workspaces.

“Our membership includes tech startups as well as independent lawyer firms. We also have people in accounting, public relations and marketing,” Shampine said. “Everyone here can help each other be more successful, because they each provide a different service.”

Whurley (William Hurley), co-founder of financial technology startup Honest Dollar, was one of the first members to join WeWork Congress. The seasoned serial entrepreneur said he was reeled in by the potential of expanding his business to the other WeWork locations around the world.

“We’re already looking at offices in New York and San Francisco,” Hurley wrote in an email. “The international capabilities were a huge draw for us.”

Honest Dollar, which launched during SXSW, offers small businesses affordable and transparent retirement plans for their employees. Since its launch, the company has grown to 20 people from its original two founders.

“More important than the facilities are the quality of startups we’re around; it’s super inspirational,” Hurley said. “And since startups are our client base, we literally have an office inside a floor full of potential users.”

Photo courtesy of WeWork

Mark Lapidus, head of Real Estate at WeWork, who answered questions via email, said that the company is currently looking at potential properties for a second location in Texas. Lapidus also wrote that the company has made plans to expand the current office space in the fall.

A small team manages day-to-day operations and organizes social events for its members at each WeWork location.

“All of our community management teams use technology for supporting members, as well as for promoting collaboration in each location and across the globe,” Carly Langley, community manager of the Austin branch, wrote in an email. “Our digital team has built amazing products for us to manage our communities seamlessly.”

Hojun Choi is a student in Professor Rosental Alves’ Entrepreneurial Journalism Class at the University of Texas at Austin.

Crowds Gather in Austin to Play Ingress, a Mobile Game Aimed at World Domination

February 23, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Amanda Saunders from Houston reacts to getting a rare card in the Ingress game

Dressed in blue, the color of the Resistance, Amanda Saunders flew in from Houston to do battle against the Enlightened in Austin on Saturday.

Saunders joined more than 1,200 people who gathered Saturday at the historic American Legion Charles Johnson home for the Shonin XM Anomaly, a real life battle in the Ingress augmented reality game.

Saunders, a level 11 Agent in Ingress, is a leader in the Ingress Houston community and the game has taken her around the world. She wears pins on her dress from the other anomaly Ingress events she has attended.

“It’s given me the ability to explore and to continue to help people,” Saunders said.

Her older brother introduced her to Ingress in December of 2012, shortly after it launched. It came at a time in her life, when she needed something to fill the void left from an injury that put an end to her job as a paramedic. She began to play Ingress to get out and meet people.

Niantic Labs, a subsidiary of Google, launched Ingress as an Android only app in November of 2012. The company released an iPhone version last year. It has quickly gained in popularity. People have downloaded the app more than 8 million times and it’s played in 200 countries.

A Niantic Labs representative hands out patches to Ingress Shonin Anomaly players

So what exactly is Ingress? One player described it as a real life version of capture the flag. It’s also been described as a massively multiplayer augmented reality game. To play Ingress, people download the app onto their mobile smartphone and then they chose an agent name. Next they are told an elaborate science fiction backstory that involves physicists at CERN discovering something called “Exotic Matter” or XM. The Enlightened faction wants to help spread XM and believe it benefits mankind. The Resistance wants to save mankind from XM and wipe it out entirely. Players must decide which faction to join – the Enlightened is the green team, known as frogs. The Resistance is the blue team, known as Smurfs. The two factions battle for control of portals, which can be statues, artworks, historical markers, monuments and other important sites. A scanner in the game helps to detect the portals. The players then must walk to them to deploy resonators to capture them. They earn points playing the game and they can level up from Agent one, the lowest level, to Agent 15, the highest.

The Austin anomaly event lasted about six hours with most of the time spent hiking or biking around the city to fight for control of portals. It concluded with a happy hour on the lawn of the Johnson House. Some players wore masks to keep their identities a secret. Many of the players wore green or blue T-shirts to identify with their factions. Some carried flags. Players also received special pins and badges for attending the event.

Bill Kilday, marketing director for Niantic Labs, maker of Ingress is based in Austin

Bill Kilday, known as agent BillyK in Ingress and also marketing director for Niantic Labs, presented awards to players who walked the most kilometers in a week and other milestones. And a player from India, who travelled the farthest to attend the event, received a box containing everything he needs to put on an Ingress event back home. Another guy from Iceland claimed second place. Others flew in from Boston, Wisconsin and Canada.

Kilday also announced that the Enlightened Faction won the overall Austin Shonin Anomaly.

In addition to the Austin Anomaly, Ingress held Shonin Anomalies in Atlanta and Las Vegas in the U.S. and in Medellin, Colombia, Florence, Italy, Brno, Czech Republic, Alexandria, Egypt and Bilbao, Spain. In Egypt, authorities detained Ingress players after they mistook them for protesters, according to a Slash Gear article.

Bill Kilday announcing the winners at the end of the Austin Shonin Anomaly

Two years ago, Niantic held its first Ingress Austin event in connection with South by Southwest in March with just 35 people attending, Kilday said. Last year, 300 people attended, he said. Saturday’s event was the largest Ingress event in the U.S., he said.

Austin has an active Ingress community. Groups often meetup on the weekends to go on tours throughout the city to capture portals. Niantic also has three employees in Austin including Kilday. It has 50 overall with most of them based at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco.

The game has grown in popularity through word of mouth and organically among the players and their friends, Kilday said.

“Ultimately it comes down to people having fun,” he said. “They are making a lot of friends and exploring their city.”

The game has taken Saunders to far-flung places she would not have gone otherwise, she said. She’s travelled to Finland, Bermuda and Canada to play Ingress. In the U.S., she’s visited Atlanta, New York, Florida, California and Alaska to play the game.

“With Ingress, I see a city in a whole different way,” Saunders said.

When she gets to a new city, she opens up the app and starts to explore by discovering new portals. The app acts as a guidebook of places to visit and as a journal of places she’s been.

The app identifies things that someone might know about even if they’ve lived in a city for years, Saunders said. It also gets people walking. Video games are often associated with sedentary activity like a person sitting on a couch playing for hours. But with Ingress, the app actually instructs the player to walk to discover portals and to capture them.

“You become much more in tune with your environment and your life,” Saunders said. “Underneath what you’re really doing is exploring culture and history.”

For example, Gettysburg has more than 1,000 portals, Saunders said.

“You’re really exploring where you came from,” she said.

It’s also about meeting new friends, Saunders said. The people she has met have been very friendly and helpful and she’s never felt afraid because they’re strangers, she said. In fact, she is sharing a house in Austin with 20 people and she’s only met five of them before the weekend.

“There’s a whole different level of trust because of the game. I’m meeting friends for life,” she said. “And I get to see some incredible things that make me appreciate the world a lot more.”

The 2015 Austin Startup Games Kicks Off Jan. 24th

January 8, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

A lot has changed since the Austin Startup Games first launched in 2012.

For one thing, it’s no longer called the Startup Olympics. And it’s bigger. The first games had seven teams competing. Sixteen teams competed in the last event and 14 are signed up for this year’s event.

uShip won the first games. Since then, the event has been held three more times including a summer games. SpareFoot won last year’s startup games and earned $23,000 for Kure It, a charity focused on cancer research.

This year, the Startup Games plans to hold events nationwide in other tech centers with the goal of raising $1 million for charity, Josh Baer, co-founder of Capital Factory, told KVUE News earlier this week.

This year’s event will be held at Vintage Innovations’ Innovation Station starting at noon on Jan. 24th. The event is open to the public with a $10 donation and a canned good.

The events usually include foosball, darts, shuffleboard, Pop-a-shot, beerpong, flip cup, connect four and trivia and a special event.

So far, 14 startups have signed up to participate. Those startups include Capital Factory, SpareFoot, uShip, Boundless Network, Headspring, theChive, WPEngine, TrendKite, Buzz Points, OutboundEngine, OneSpot, HomeImprovement Leads, RideScout and Civitas Learning.

“Each company plays for the charity of their choice, and at the end of the event, every charity walks away with money for their organization, with the largest portion of the pot going to 1st, 2nd and 3rd place teams,” according to the Startup Games.

Here’s a vintage video from the first Startup Games at uShip.

Parking Panda Launches in Austin

January 2, 2015 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Finding a parking spot in downtown Austin can be a challenge especially during major events.

Now Parking Panda, a free app that lets drivers find, reserve and redeem parking in advance, seeks to make that task a lot easier. It has launched in Austin.

The service is now available statewide with service in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Fort Worth.

“What we’ve analyzed with our experience is that Texas has been a great market for parking innovation and we look forward to continue expanding our inventory, growing our partnerships, and providing the best experience for residents and visitors alike,” said Bryan Lozano, Parking Panda spokesman.

Parking Panda’s free mobile app and desktop website lets drivers search and compare all available parking options for their destination in advance. The app provides filtering for daily, monthly or event parking. The driver gets an email confirmation to access their chosen location in advance.

“Currently we have 10 locations in Austin, mostly in the downtown, live on our platform, and like many cities, we’re planning to expand rapidly,” Lozano said.

Parking Panda launched in San Antonio last year. It’s building its partnerships and available locations in that city, Lozano said.

Parking Panda, based in Baltimore and founded in 2011, has raised $4.7 million in two rounds from two investors, according to its CrunchBase profile.

FlightCar Launches into Austin’s Hipsterdom

December 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

FlightCar, the peer-to-peer car sharing service, launched in Austin on Dec. 16th.

The San Francisco-based company also launched in Oakland, Calif. In a post on Tumblr, FlightCar calls both cities havens for hipsters.

“Ranking high on every “Most Hipster City” list, Austin and Oakland are both well known for their vibrant millennial communities who squeeze into their pants, brew their own beer, and have a much more impressive music collection than you,” according to its post. “Now they’re also known for having FlightCar!”

FlightCar lets car owners park for free at the Austin International Airport at its lot. They can then rent out their cars to people visiting Austin and make money while they are travelling instead of paying parking fees. Every car is insured up to $1 million and every renter is pre-screened. And every auto also gets a free car wash and cleaning.

So far, FlightCar has launched in Boston, Dallas – Love Field, Los Angeles, Oakland, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle and Dulles, VA.

In its post on Tumblr, Flightcar recommends visitors to Austin do the hipster tour by having coffee at Epoch Coffee, buy records at Antone’s Record Shop, lunch at drink.well and drinks at Midnight Cowboy and live music at Sahara Lounge.

HomeAway’s Brian Sharples’ Entrepreneurial Journey

November 24, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Brian Sharples, courtesy photo from HomeAway

As a serial entrepreneur, Brian Sharples, co-founder of HomeAway, has learned many lessons on his entrepreneurial journey.

He recounted several of them with Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas last week. Metcalfe interviewed Sharples, CEO of HomeAway at the Longhorn Startup Demo Day.

HomeAway has 1,900 employees worldwide, including about 1,000 in Austin in five locations. The company lists more than 1 million vacation rental homes in 190 countries. It went public in 2011 and has a market capitalization of $2.8 billion and its stock, listed as AWAY on the Nasdaq Stock Exchange, currently trades for around $30.50 a share.

The Early Years

First off, Metcalfe asked Sharples if he had a lemonade stand or paper route and to talk about his early entrepreneurial roots.

Sharples said he had done all of those things. And his entrepreneurial instincts came from his dad, who was an entrepreneur, electrical engineer and a pioneer in analog to digital conversion. He invented a digital panel meter. His invention is in the Smithsonian.

“He worked for himself, he didn’t have bosses, he had employees,” Sharples said.

Sharples grew up in an entrepreneurial environment in a suburb of Boston called Braintree. His family had a vacation house in Maine. He ended up attending Colby College in Maine and later got accepted to Stanford’s business school.

Grappling with Failure

Bob Metcalfe and Brian Sharples at Longhorn Demo Day

Metcalfe asked Sharples about his biggest entrepreneurial failure.

Sharples, at 27, raised $1 million from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
Venture Capital Fund to create a marketplace for selling used autos. He rented out Candlestick Park in San Francisco and built a huge auto sales event for thousands of people.

“It was like a rock concert for buying cars,” Sharples said.

He bet all of his money on that first event. On a Saturday, they opened the doors and by 11 a.m. a freak storm with 85 mile per hour winds blew in and destroyed the place.

“It turned from a beautiful event one minute to how do we make sure no one gets killed,” Sharples said. “People got hurt but no one got seriously injured.”

Eventually, Sharples created iMotors, a derivative of that business, and ultimately raised $120 million and was doing $25 million in revenue by 1999. But when the dot com crash happened they couldn’t sustain the business. They ended up selling the assets for $85 million to AutoNation.

Moving to Austin

So Sharples decided to get out of the auto business. He moved to Austin and got involved with IntelliQuest, an 11-employee company providing Dell with market research information. Sharples got to know the founder really well. He ended up cutting a deal where Austin Ventures and Sharples each took a third of the company. They took the company public in 1996 and Sharples ran it for four years.

“One of the things I learned from that experience is it’s really nice to have a partner,” Sharples said.

In entrepreneurship, a lot of people associate that with being the lone wolf, Sharples said. But it’s a lot more powerful if you have a partner, he said. So when Sharples decided to launch HomeAway he wanted a partner and Austin Ventures introduced him to Carl Shepherd, a merger and acquisition expert who became co-founder of HomeAway.

In 2005, Sharples and Shepherd created HomeAway, then known as WVR, a global vacation home business. The idea was to create the Expedia of vacation rentals and to acquire great businesses around the world. Raised $405 million and did 22 acquisitions in total, Sharples said.

“HomeAway took a great deal of money to create,” Sharples said. And to get that kind of money, an entrepreneur has to have a track record of success and returning money to investors, he said.

The IntelliQuest Initial Public Offering and later sale to WPP Group made about a 25 times return on Austin Ventures investment, Sharples said.

“Once you’ve succeeded like that for investors, investors like to back people who have done it before,” he said.

Founding HomeAway

Austin Ventures agreed to back HomeAway for $50 million initially and they issued a press release saying they had given Sharples $50 million for a new venture. That check made people listen to them, Sharples said.

Sharples and Shepherd hired McGarrah Jessee, an Austin-based Ad Agency, to come up with the name HomeAway. The owner of the website domain name ended up being an RV park owner in the United Kingdom. They were able to negotiate with him and buy it, Sharples said.

Originally Sharples thought they would buy vacation properties around the world and rent them to club members. But through his research, he found there were 7 million homes alone in Europe for rent. It was a much bigger market. So they decided to build a platform and make the properties available to book online.

Before doing the platform, Sharples and Shepherd spent four months doing research on the project. They found out Expedia paid $73 million for a company that had the same model as HomeAway and a year later it was gone. So he met with Rich Barton, the CEO of Expedia, in Seattle and he took them through the entire deal. Expedia tried to turn the business into a hotel business. The homeowners viewed their homes as their personal property and they wanted to talk to people and they didn’t want to do everything online. The conversation was critical.

Within the next two years, everyone in the HomeAway marketplace will become online bookable, Sharples said. The marketplace has changed. It wouldn’t have worked ten years ago, or even five years ago, but it works now, he said.

Thinking About Worst Case Scenarios

Bob Metcalfe at Longhorn Startup Demo Day

Metcalfe pointed out that the Longhorn Startup class instructors teach their students to fail fast. But Sharples, he said, studies others who have failed and seeks to avoid the failure altogether.

Because of his first failure in the auto business, Sharples said he became paranoid and studied all the things that could go wrong in his next ventures.

He advised other startup entrepreneurs to study others, study worst case scenarios and think about risk.

“People spend so much time in their pitches on how everything could go right, they need to devote a little more time and scenario planning on how they could go wrong,” Sharples said.

For example, HomeAway bought Vacationhomes.com in the U.S. for $40 million just to prevent a competitor from buying it, Sharples said.

“We don’t just study failures of other companies, which we did in the early days, but we calculate all the ways we could fail and we try to prevent them,” Sharples said.

Sharples favorite recruiting question is to ask job candidates to talk about something they’ve failed about in their life. And the second question he asks is what did they learn from it.

He also looks for humility in his employees.

“I just don’t have the patience for ego,” Sharples said. “I think it sets up a horrible dynamic within a company when people are operating for personal gain or personal showboating. I’m all for being super competitive. But within a team, you can’t be super competitive. Building a company is a team sport.”

The introduction song for Sharples when he entered the stage was Rusted Root’s “Send Me on My Way,” which he says they may use in their next commercial campaign because it sounds like HomeAway.

Disappearing Messages? Unseen’s Got That

November 20, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The latest rage is to create messages that disappear into the ether – never to be seen again – at least that what the person generating the message hopes.

And Austin-based Bearch has created a new version of its mobile app, Unseen, to do just that. It’s challenging the market dominated by Snapchat.

Unseen, an anonymous social networking app for college students, lets people send direct messages that disappear. It features data encryption to protect the sender’s privacy. Unseen reports it encrypts all information so that nothing posted to the public feeds can be tracked back to an individual.

“Unseen was created to help students form meaningful connections based on real interests, and user privacy and anonymity is absolutely integral to that,” Michael Schramm, CEO of Unseen said in a news statement. “We love that students are using the app as a means to meet new people, but publically swapping Snapchat handles undermines anonymity. We knew the only way to build on this exciting dimension of the app without compromising our users’ privacy was to create our own private messaging option within Unseen.”

Unseen claims that if its messages or images are intercepted by a hacker or other application, its encryption technology makes the messages unreadable.

Initially launched at Texas A&M University in May of 2014, the app is now used on almost 150 college campuses nationwide.

Bigcommerce Snags $50 Million in Funding

November 19, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 4 Comments

Bigcommerce’s Austin offices, photo by Stacy Alexander Evans

Bigcommerce, an ecommerce platform based in Austin, announced it has raised $50 million led by Softbank Capital.

Other investors in the Series D funding included Telstra Ventures and American Express as well as existing investors General Catalyst and Revolution Growth. Steve Murray, a partner at SoftBank Capital, will join the Bigcommerce board. The company has previously raised $75 million.

Bigcommerce plans to use the money for product development, sales and marketing and to enter new markets. Ecommerce is expected to become a $2 trillion market worldwide by 2015, according to Bigcommerce. Its software handles approximately $5 billion worth of online sales.

Last month, Bigcommerce struck a partnership deal with Alibaba.com. Softbank owns one-third of Alibaba.

“Partnering with SoftBank Capital gives us access to the growing Asian market and opportunities within SoftBank Group companies, including Alibaba, while American Express and Telstra share our passion for helping businesses in the U.S and Australia respectively,” Eddie Machaalani, co-founder and CEO of Bigcommerce, said in a news release. “With this new round of funding, we will continue to level the commerce playing field so that every merchant has the opportunity to build a compelling brand and scalable business to effectively compete with the largest players in their industry.”

Bigcommerce, founded in 2009, has more than 55,000 retail customers worldwide. It has offices in San Francisco, Austin and Sydney. Silicon Hills News did this story on the company earlier this year. The company has 350 employees, including 200 in Austin.

Q&A with David Orshalick, Candidate for Mayor of Austin

October 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

This past weekend, the Austin Technology Council featured a guest post from Austin Mayoral Candidate David Orshalick in its meet the candidates for Mayor series. Silicon Hills News is asking each of the candidates a series of follow up questions. Their responses will all be posted here following their guest blog posts with ATC. This week is a Q&A with Mayoral Candidate David Orshalick.

WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

David Orshalick, courtesy photo

Q. Technology in Austin, as in all major hubs of innovation in the country, has a pipeline problem when it comes to filling jobs. There are more jobs in the Science, Technology Engineering and Math fields open than there are qualified applicants. What steps can you take, as Mayor, to ensure that the Austin workforce can meet the needs of the growing technology industry?

A. In practical terms, the City must undertake a study/survey showing the current and projected technology jobs in Austin and what their educational/skill requirements are. Second, the study must determine the current and projected inventory of workers by skillset, using reasonable assumptions including the growth and directions of the technology sector. Then a gap analysis leading to a workforce development plan can be performed. This gap analysis should be shared with training partners such as TWC, AISD, ACC, UT, and Texas State to determine the needed educational resources and ways to adequately manage workforce development.

However, innovation can lead to disruptive technologies with wildly varying skill requirements. That’s why I take a more global perspective on the societal and career changes occurring in our evolving knowledge society. Drucker described the changes we’re going through in his seminal work, Post Capitalist Society (1993). As fish are unaware of the water in which they swim, we are only dimly aware of the true transformation we are living through. Drucker’s work can help us better chart a path. The City also has a new Chief Innovation Officer who should be tapped for this work as well.

I suspect that we suffer from inadequate educational resources in Austin. For example, the Computer Science Department at UT has a new building designed for 1,500 undergraduate majors. They are currently at 2,200 majors and annually and have to turn down an additional 500 transfer requests from the rest of the student body. (How this translates to other STEM majors is not clear.) However, other educational resources that cost less are available in Austin. For example, ACC and Texas State’s campus in Round Rock offer comparable computer science degrees at a lower cost. Students may not be aware of these and other resources. The City should provide a one-stop shop for career development resources on its website.

An insidious problem was pointed out by the SCANS report of 1991. [As background, the Secretary of Labor’s Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills (SCANS) identified the competencies businesses required from every high school graduate.] The problem was the lack of available career counseling for students, which is exacerbated today as some jobs did not even exist 10 years ago. The City must identify clear STEM careers and career paths and training on the City website so students can start early enough to develop these skills while still in middle and high school.

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

Q. Studies have shown that diversity is a key to success in the technology industry and business in general. How, as Mayor, would you specifically work to nurture diversity in the tech sector to ensure more opportunities for minorities and women?

A. The City should engage in strategic planning with a 25-year planning horizon for all issues impacting the quality of life of Austinites. This will include recruiting more minority and female workers for STEM careers. The resources and approaches of my answer to question #1 above should be applied especially to minority and female students in order to encourage their participation in Tech careers.

LIFE SCIENCES

Q. Austin is getting the Dell Medical School, which will act as a catalyst in helping to develop the area’s life sciences industry. What do you think the City of Austin needs to do to support and nurture this emerging industry?

A. The City should do for life science’s the same as it should for all local businesses and startups: change the focus of the Economic Development Department away from external recruiting and subsidies and inward toward local economic resources. Studies show that this is the best way to develop an economy and jobs.

The Economic Development Department must become a world-class business consultancy plus provide an ombudsman service to represent businesses in matters before the City. In addition, those industries such as life sciences identified for special development in the City’s Strategic Plan should be supported by targeted expertise in the Economic Development Department.

INCENTIVES

Q. What is your view on providing incentives to tech companies to locate or expand in Austin?

A. I am opposed to any incentives, subsidies, or fee waivers. We need a level playing field for economic development of local business. In addition, external recruitment is inflationary and is exacerbated by the STEM worker shortage identified in question #1 above.