Tag: entrepreneurs (Page 2 of 4)

Apply to Participate in the first FounderDating in Austin

BY DAMON CLINKSCALES

FounderDating (and no, it’s not romantic) has just launched in Austin.
The online network allows you to connect with other talented folks who are ready to found a company in your area. The first live event for Austin will be held on May 23rd (apply by May 15th).

About the network:

High Quality – members are carefully screened for quality and readiness. Applications and members’ identities are confidential, but a few of the folks who are part of the network are former founders or early employees of: StackMob, Snapfish, Asana, Soundtracking, and hi5 just to name a few.

Balanced – 50% engineering & 50% non-engineering

Online Network – The event is just the beginning. FD is an invite-only online network of entrepreneurs looking for co-founders around the country that you become a part of.

You can apply at here (you don’t need to have an idea, just ready to work on a serious side project).

Here’s some more background: in a TechCrunch article.

Blending Entrepreneurial Life with Family: The Stonyfield Farm story

In March of 2007, I attended a fellowship in New York at Columbia University on Covering Globalization: Food, Trade, Agriculture and the Environment.
Gary Hirshberg, co-founder, CEO and president at the time of Stonyfield Farm, spoke to our group about the rise of the organic food market.
Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen started Stonyfield Farm in 1983 as an organic farming school with seven cows in Wilton, New Hampshire. The farm sold all natural yogurt as a byproduct. But Hirshberg eventually ditched the school in favor of making yogurt full time. Today, Stonyfield is the largest manufacturer of organic yogurt in the world with $356 million in sales last year.
What I didn’t know when I met Hirshberg was how much he and his family sacrificed and how they almost went bankrupt bringing Stonyfield organic yogurt to a mass market.
In fact, the road to the farm, a mile long muddy dirt road that often washed out and in which trucks often got stuck, served as a metaphor for the business, said Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, Gary’s wife. She writes a column for Inc Magazine and recently wrote a book “For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families” on blending the entrepreneurial life with a fulfilling family life. Meg Hirshberg recently led a Webinar session for Startup America in which she offered advice on how to blend the family and startup life.
Hirshberg recounted the difficulty of raising three young children in a home-based business and how troubling it was to keep asking her mother for money to keep the business afloat.
Hirshberg interviewed 250 successful entrepreneurs and their spouses to share their experiences so other entrepreneurs can learn from them.
“Building a business and a family at the same time is a huge challenge,” Hirshberg said.
When her husband would come home excited about some new venture, Hirshberg would cringe.
“My least favorite words were I have an idea,” she said.
She also dispels the myths of overnight success in entrepreneurship.
“It took us nine years to create this overnight success and we almost didn’t make it,” Hirshberg said. “We were on the verge of bankruptcy the entire time.”
The road to success contained many potholes.
They met at an organic gardening conference in 1984 and married shortly after that. They raised their family in a 19th century farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
“I hadn’t just married a man,” she said. “I married a business as well.”
The business was not romantic, Hirshberg said. It was demanding and stressful and they were constantly digging themselves out of holes and living on the brink of bankruptcy.
“Stonyfield survived and went on to thrive because Gary and our partner were determined” Hirshberg said. “We had a great business just no supply and no demand.”
Physically, the home-based business was quite uncomfortable. The smells from the farm permeated the house, which was drafty and had a mud floor basement where Meg would do the laundry. The family had to deal with a lack of privacy and a revolving door of employees.
“Things got a lot worse, before they got worse,” Hirshberg said. Stonyfield had a constant stream of creditors screaming at them and shareholders threatening lawsuits. The business gobbled up money including a $30,000 inheritance Hirshberg had from her father that she gave to Gary so he could buy fruit for the yogurt when the supplier refused to grant any more credit.
Stonyfield had 300 shareholders and most of them were friends and family. That added a “constant gnawing stress to our lives,” Hirshberg said.
Yet Hirshberg’s mother believed in the product and believed in Gary. She kept financing him when others would not.
“Frankly there were times I wanted to go bankrupt or do anything to be put out of misery,” Hirshberg said. “I really grew to hate the business. The financial risks Gary took were beyond my comfort level.’’
Entrepreneurialism is not a solo activity, Hirshberg said.
The entrepreneur’s spouse is put in a delicate position, she said. Both spouses need to believe in the entrepreneurial venture.
“The term work life balance doesn’t really apply to an entrepreneur,” Hirshberg said. “When you own a business it’s just life.”
The traits of an entrepreneur can make for a bumpy home life because entrepreneurs are obsessed and driven, Hirshberg said. They tend towards workaholism. They are highly distracted.
“Entrepreneurs believe in the impossible,” she said. “They will not be defeated and they will not give up.’
But the traits to building a successful business are the same ones in building a successful family life too, Hirshberg said. It takes perseverance and an intense commitment.
At Stonyfield, just about everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, Hirshberg said.
“If he and I could make it in business and in home than anyone can,” Hirshberg said. “It’s messy. It’s not perfect. But you’re doing the best you can.’’

Storytelling for Entrepreneurs

BY L.A. LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

“Those who tell stories rule the world” – Plato

Lyn Graft at SXSW Storytelling for Entrepreneurs

From humble beginnings, Howard Schultz struggled for years to launch Starbucks into a global brand.
He risked everything and his hard work paid off.
And Schultz, by all accounts, is a great storyteller who can articulate and share the passion of his vision.
That’s an essential part of storytelling for entrepreneurs, says Lyn Graft, chief storyteller and founder of LG Pictures in Austin. He has produced more than 450 videos for companies like CNBC, Microsoft, Dell, SXSW, Sweet Leaf Tea and RISE Global. He has filmed 300 entrepreneurs including founders of Starbucks, Whole Foods, Paul Mitchell, Playboy, Baby Einstein, Clear Channel, Craigslist, BET Television, The Knot and Tom’s Shoes.
Graft shared his knowledge of storytelling recently at a panel at SXSW in Austin.
“It’s about leaving an impression with the person you are talking to,” Graft said. “That’s the art and core of storytelling.”
Graft, who has founded eight companies, has pitched more than 200 people on his ideas and he’s been turned down 95 percent of the time, he said. The competition for startups is stiff, he said. What sets a company apart from the crowd is its story.
“We are all unique,” Graft said. “Your story should be unique. We’re all competing against deep-pocketed companies, what do you have that differentiates yourself?”
A good story has a beginning, middle and an end, Graft said. He recommended everyone listen to author Nancy Duarte’s TedX Talk on “common structure of greatest communicators.”
“You want to transport people to where your vision is,” Graft said.
Another great way to tell a story is to set up the problem, present the opportunity and provide the solution, he said.
A great story leaves the audience with a physical reaction like goosebumps, Graft said. He looks for the “GBM” or Goose Bump Moment in a story. How do you create that? You’ve got to reach down deep into your passion and tell why you do what you do, he said.
“Bottom line: speak from the heart,” he said.
It’s also important to know your audience and figure out how can you reach them.
And avoid ugly babies, Graft said. That means find the beauty in every story that you tell.
Learn from great storytelling entrepreneurs, Graft said. For example, Austin’s Clayton Christopher, founder of Sweet Leaf Tea and Deep Eddy Vodka, has the amazing ability to turn everything into a story, Graft said.
Stories don’t have to be complex, Graft said. “Fred Smith’s story: I can get your package there overnight. That’s the story of FedEx.”
Graft recommended other great sources to find entrepreneur storytellers: TED, TEDx, Entrepreneur Magazine, Inc. and Fast Company.
If you have a good story to tell, tell it, but you can’t fake it, Graft said.
“You can only put so much lip gloss on a pig.” Graft said.

TechStar’s Nicole Glaros helps startups succeed

Nicole Glaros showing off her TechStars Cloud belt buckle in San Antonio

The only woman in the TechStars Cloud program, Nicole Glaros relocated from Boulder, Colorado to San Antonio with her husband, two-year-old daughter and one month old baby boy.
“It’s not a hard sell for me,” Glaros said. “To pick up and move for four months is not a big deal for us.”
Her husband Mark loves adventure and discovering new places too, she said.
“From our perspective it was an adventure,” Glaros said.
Adventurous is the perfect adjective to describe the outgoing Glaros, who is accomplished, smart, athletic and pretty and a powerful force in the technology startup world.
“TechStars is such a great environment,” Glaros said. “It doesn’t feel like work. I love what I do. “
Glaros moved into a house near Basse Road and San Pedro in January. She had just given birth to her son, Jackson, in December. Her mother also moved in, relocating for four months from Florida to help out with the kids.
“She put her life on hold,” Glaros said.
Family members are the unsung heroes of TechStars, Glaros said. While the entrepreneurs toil away 12 hour or longer days, seven days a week, spouses, kids, other family members and friends often have to adjust their lives.
Glaros knows their pain. She has worked with more than 100 startup tech entrepreneurs. Before joining TechStars, she founded three startups and worked at a technology business incubator, CTEK and other incubation programs in Colorado.
One day, Dave Cohen, a successful entrepreneur, angel investor and cofounder of TechStars, came to CTEK to pitch his idea for a new kind of technology incubator. CTEK’s leaders didn’t care for the idea much, but Glaros did. She sent an email to Cohen asking if he had time to meet her for a beer. He agreed to meet her for 30 minutes.
When Cohen arrived, he asked Glaros what her startup idea was. She said she didn’t have one. She just liked his TechStars idea and wanted to chat.
“That 30 minutes turned into three hours,” Glaros said.
Glaros ended up joining TechStars in 2007 and now serves as the managing director of the TechStars program in Boulder. She agreed to relocate to San Antonio to help Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud with its inaugural program.
TechStars is a highly selective startup accelerator that takes about ten companies per program and provides seed funding from more than 75 different venture capital firms and angel investors. It has five TechStars programs in Boston, Boulder, New York City, Seattle and San Antonio.
The TechStars Cloud was the first accelerator program exclusively focused on cloud-based computing startups. The first class ran from January through April 11th. Each of the companies received $18,000 and access to $100,000 credit line along with thousands of dollars worth of perks including free website hosting, marketing and other services.
“The goal for me to be here was just to give Jason the resources he needed to launch the TechStars Cloud program,” Glaros said. “Working with Jason has been pure joy. He did a wonderful job.”
Seats enjoyed working with Glaros too.
“I will miss working with Nicole immensely,” Seats said. “We had very different styles that gelled quite well together. She is demanding, tough, detailed, insightful and almost always right. I tried to internalize as much of her thought processes as I could to make myself better.”
Glaros said the TechStars Cloud program was the smoothest launch of a new program in TechStars history and she credits Seats, an accomplished entrepreneur who founded Slicehost and sold it to Rackspace, with that.
Glaros was also impressed with the 11 companies to graduate from the TechStars program.
“It was really cool watching them develop,” she said. “I think the highlight is always seeing the progress of the companies. You literally see them evolve from raw potential to a real thing.”
And they appreciated her.
“She’s brilliant,” said Matt Gershoff, founder of Conductrics, in the TechStars Cloud program. “She’s super smart, confident and incredible at being able to distill complexity into a simple narrative.”
Glaros played a key role in helping the companies hone their eight minute pitch to investors.
“She’s not a pushover,” Gershoff said. “She’s definitely respected. She will tell you the truth even if it’s hard to hear. She’s honest.”
Colin Loretz, founder of Cloudsnap in the TechStars Cloud program, also had high praise for Glaros.
“She was awesome to have around,” Loretz said. “She’s seen more pitches and more startups all the way through to Demo Day than anyone.”
“She sees all the problems you can possibly see,” Loretz said.
Glaros has watched entrepreneurs launch a company, exit the company through sale or acquisition and then come back to serve as a mentor in the TechStars program. She calls the mentors – successful technology entrepreneurs who volunteer their time to help the startups – the secret sauce of TechStars.
“It creates a sort of unified cycle of giving back,” Glaros said.
The startup movement gives Glaros hope that these bright entrepreneurs will go on to create jobs and innovative products that will revive the economy.
“The one thing you cannot outsource is brains, talent and creativity,” she said.
The TechStars program has a 92 percent success rate, Glaros said. TechStars latest stats show that 109 companies still operate, nine have failed and eight have been acquired.
The competition is really stiff to get into TechStars. Glaros had just finished selecting the latest companies for TechStars Boulder. She reviewed 1,172 applications for 10 spots.
“The idea is really quality over quantity,” Glaros said.
So how does an entrepreneur make the cut?
“When we’re looking at a company we’re going to take the best team,” Glaros said. “We want a really great team that is super passionate about what they do,” Glaros said. “The idea doesn’t matter much. Ideas aren’t worth anything. It’s the execution of the idea that is important.”
That means the background of the founders count the most even more than the idea they are pitching, she said. And a lot of those founders have a background in engineering, she said.
And few female engineers apply, she said.
Glaros said women also tend to be more risk-averse than men and not as likely to risk everything to startup a company. And they don’t have huge egos and ego plays a big role in being entrepreneur, Glaros said.
“You have to believe you are the only one on the planet that can solve the problem you’re trying to tackle,” she said.
But women make some of the best entrepreneurs, Glaros said.
“Women tend to underestimate how much they can do,” Glaros said. “They outperform their objectives.”
Women also tend to be very open and they ask for help when they encounter a problem, Glaros said.
Now that the first TechStars Cloud program has wrapped up in San Antonio, Glaros has packed up and returned home. But she remembers her time fondly in the city. She enjoyed visiting local restaurants with her family. She thinks San Antonio is a great place to raise kids.
And although TechStars Cloud enters it quiet period, Glaros thinks San Antonio’s startup scene is heating up under the leadership of Seats and Nick Longo at the Geekdom and others.
In Boulder, TechStars has been able to create a technology startup community. How can San Antonio replicate that?
“Community matters,” Glaros said. “When a community comes together and rallies all kinds of entrepreneurial magic happens.”
The community can help by becoming a customer of a startup, volunteering time and expertise and money.
“Embrace them – open up your address book and wallets,” Glaros said “That’s the best thing you can do.”
When successful entrepreneurs mentor and help startups a vibrant startup community can thrive, Glaros said.
“In Boulder, you can get a meeting with just about anyone,” Glaros said. “Accessibility to leadership is huge.”

At Longhorn Startup Camp, UT Students found Clay.io, a platform for games


Austin Hallock and Joe Vennix, both juniors at the University of Texas majoring in computer science, have founded Clay.io, a platform for HTML5 games.
Their startup is based at the Longhorn Startup Camp, a 30,000 square foot building at 1616 Guadalupe St., which has housed 27 student run companies during the Spring Semester. Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at UT, secured the space, which also served as an incubator for ten 1 Semester Startup companies. Its goal is to foster student entrepreneurship and collaboration among startups.
Clay.io is a marketplace for HTML5 games.
“The beauty of HTML5 games is they’re completely cross-platform, meaning they’ll work on mobile, as well as desktop, without having to port the game,” Hallock said. “We want to take advantage of that, and act as the app store for those games.”
Clay.io also offers an Application Programming Interface, a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications known as an API, for developers to add game features. “With just a few lines of code, developers can add leaderboards, achievements, payment processing, user login, social integration with Facebook and Twitter, screenshots, and a few more features,” Hallock said.
Clay.io has released three games so far including Word Wars, which is like the popular game Boggle. People compete against others in real time.
“Since it’s an HTML5 game, it will work on your phone or tablet just as well as on your desktop,” Hallock said. “It’s gotten a great reception so far, and even made it to the front page of Hacker News.”
The other two games are Slime Volley and Falldown.
Clay.io differentiates itself from competitors like GameSalad, another game platform developer which sprung out of UT, because they’re more focused on enhancing games that can use any engine.
“There are dozens of HTML5 game engines out there so we plugin to all of the open ones and add in our extra features,” Hallock said. “If they were to open their marketplace up to other game engines then we would be competitors.”

Pursue Your Passion, says Bijoy Goswami, Austin’s Bootstrapping Guru


BY SUSAN LAHEY
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News
Bijoy Goswami has a strange role in Austin startups.
With his wild mop of hair and ubiquitous jeans and t-shirt, the bootstrapping guru has a rock star quality to him. He’s written a book used by Leadership Austin and made a movie. He’s known for his mental models of how the universe works. He incorporates his spiritual journey into everything he does and has officiated at the weddings of four of his friends as a member of the Universal Life Church.
People are usually inspired by his message and dazzling intellectual display, though some are disgruntled that among all the talk of journeys and anecdotes of successful bootstrapping was no concrete, five-point plan.
But Goswami isn’t about the five-point plan. He’s passionate about the bootstrap method of starting a business as a road to enlightenment. Greatly condensed, his bootstrap message is:
“I don’t know what your resources are. I don’t know what your idea is or who your customers are. I don’t know what obstacles you’re facing. But if you want to be an entrepreneur, you don’t have to wait for somebody to give you a lot of money. You can look for the right person to embark on the entrepreneurial adventure with you, build something with the resources you have, tweak it until customers are willing to buy it and begin the sometimes painful, arduous but exciting journey of birthing a business. Along the way, you will find answers, work out problems, experience emotions, grow immensely and discover yourself.”
Of course, when he says it, there’s a fugue involved, and Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, James Madison the fourth President of the United States, Apple’s Steve Wozniak and Southwest Airlines, just for starters. When he says it, many people leave feeling as if their struggles and fears are just part of the progression of something brave and exciting.
At the same time, Goswami doesn’t just pump people up with empty expectations. These days, he says, we’re moving into a period of “Entrepreneur Porn.”
“It’s like ‘I’m so cool, I’m an entrepreneur,’” he says, sucking in his cheeks and raising an eyebrow for effect. “But the truth is it’s hard fucking work. It’s a lifelong thing. And it’s even harder because most of the stories that are told are wrong. People are seduced by the story of entrepreneurship but entrepreneurship will destroy you. It will break you down. It will get you in touch with your false ego. You’re going to be transformed.”
Goswami was formally introduced to bootstrapping in the 1990s while a student at Stanford. But he was informally introduced to it long before.
He was born in Bangalore, Southern India, to a Hindu father and a Catholic mother, a duality he said set up a theme for his life. When he was in 4th grade, his parents moved to Taipei, Taiwan. He attended Catholic schools, then American schools–his mother’s idea. To afford it, she became a teacher at the school. His parents, he said, have always embraced the idea of adventure and possibility—from their intermarriage, to leaving India for Taipei, then Taipei for Hong Kong International School.
“My parents are fellow travelers on a journey… they travel all the time. Their life has been about an opening up of possibility rather than a closing down. That’s a great gift they gave us. From (my mother’s) perspective, Taiwanese schools were more rigid. They were about a stifling of creativity. She wanted her boys to get an American education. “
Goswami attended high school in Hong Kong where he met his “partner in crime” Desmond Chu, with whom he began bootstrapping. They’d get a shipment of Korean shoes and sell it to friends.
“Des was a total entrepreneur and we were living in the most free market in the world,” Goswami said. “I think that’s when I got the first inkling of the ‘Power of Two’” another model that explains the exponential growth in potential when you have two people working on the same goal. In school, Goswami served as president of the class, then president of the school, always with Chu as vice president.
From Hong Kong, he went to Stanford in the Silicon Valley when it was just emerging as the Silicon Valley.
That’s where he fell in love with bootstrapping as a path. By the time he’d arrived, venture capital had become the dominant story. But he would go out of his way to hear Scott Cook talk about the Valley’s bootstrapping history, including his own company, Intuit.
“They couldn’t get funding, so they didn’t get funding. They had to figure out how to make it work. For a while they sold printing paper for checks to survive. There was just something about that that resonated with me.”
When he finished school, he needed a sponsor to stay in the U.S. and found one with Trilogy, a company that had been bootstrapped by some people from Stanford. But they needed to send him to a town he’d never heard of called Austin, Texas.
“Austin is the city of self discovery,” he said. “It’s all about letting go of what you were holding on to before and picking up new things. No one judges you here. It’s like, ‘I can love yoga and do two-stepping?’”
The rest of his story is a merging of many things. First, his spirituality.
By the time he was 20, he was an agnostic if not an atheist, which meant “a separation from my mother on the one issue that mattered to her.” This was the beginning of a model he constructed about the way people live. First, they receive ideas about the world from the external—parents, school, a mentor, an employer. Some people stop there.
Others wind up releasing everything they’ve been taught. Laying it all down, deconstructing it. That’s the next phase.
Finally you begin to build a new idea for yourself and of yourself, incorporating as you choose, bits from your past. This could go on forever.
Bootstrapping, especially in Austin, is the same process, Bijoy said. You separate from the security of someone else’s ideas and funds and build something based on your passion, using your own ability to navigate the questions and the issues.
Austin is the best place to do that because it invites people to create not for money or power—both of which are iffy when you start a business—but for the joy of creating a business. For the journey and what you learn from it.
When you’re looking for venture capital, he said, the question is “are you going to build the next big thing?” But in bootstrapping, especially in Austin, it’s “Did you express the thing you wanted to express?”
“It’s not about getting rich…. for bootstraps, getting rich is incidental to getting to do what you’re passionate about.”
Goswami left Trilogy and started his own company, Aviri, but it didn’t take off. A half a million dollars was spent and his cofounder left. So he carried on for awhile on his own, bootstrapping, in that phase of spiritual development like Gotama Buddha when he goes to the forest. No money, no food. The hard part of enlightenment.
He kept it going for awhile and found that other people who were bootstrapping companies kept asking him to have coffee, lunch, breakfast, to talk about their challenges, discoveries and anxieties about bootstrapping. It was then that he started Bootstrap Austin. He thought it would be one meeting. It turned into a regular meetup group.
And he met…everyone.
“He is so well networked,” said Bjorn Billhardt, CEO of Enspire which was a new company with three or four people when Billhardt met Goswami. The two became fast friends and Goswami officiated at Billhardt’s wedding. “He is like the glue that pulls people together. I would say a vast network of my professional friends came through connections initially made by Bijoy. Professional recruiters charge an arm and a leg for just one connection….”
But it wasn’t only his connections that made a difference. It was the bootstrap mental model.
“I was thinking about seeking funding when I met Bijoy and he changed the way I thought about it,” said Billhardt, whose company has grown to more than 50 employees with an office in Berlin and global fortune 500 companies as clients. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Bijoy,” he said. “He lets you just talk it out and that is what a lot of entrepreneurs need. That’s one thing a lot of VC companies provide and professional coaches charge $400 an hour for. Bijoy does a lot of that work for free. He gave me advice to release a product even if it has bugs in it. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas…a lot of entrepreneurs are terribly afraid to do that. But then, Bijoy points out, if you keep a product under wraps, people don’t know about it and they don’t join your company.”
A lot of the work Goswami does—such as helping with RISE—he does for free. He does have a few clients, including Leadership Austin who use his book “The Human Fabric” with each new class of Austin leaders. The book, written with David Wolpert, focuses on identifying your ‘core energy’ and how you can use it to build something—a business or a community. Goswami also leads groups with Leadership Austin and is a cofounder with the organization’s CEO Heather McKissick, of the Austin Equation Initiative which was created to answer the question “What Makes Austin, Austin?”
“Running a small nonprofit is often like bootstrapping a startup,” McKissick said. “Bijoy’s expertise helps us understand how to do that well. In a down fundraising environment, it’s very helpful to have his unique skills and advice.”
He is everywhere. And he knows everyone. But if you ask him what his goal in life is, he’ll tell you, “It’s learning to Be Joy.”
And that’s a whole other story.

Startup Weekend Austin sells out but wannabe attendees vie for a ticket

Startup Weekend Austin kicks off Friday and runs through Sunday.
The event features a group of people who come up with business ideas and then spend 54 hours together hammering out the details and launching the companies.
The event, which takes places at HubAustin Coworking at 4930 S. Congress Ave, is so popular that it has a huge wait list. So the organizers are giving away a ticket to the person who creates the best 60 second pitch video. The tickets aren’t cheap either. They range from $75 for a designer to $99 for nontechnical participants and developers. Caleb Smith created a rap video to compete for a ticket. Brian Curliss created an online matchmaking dating video pairing himself up with Startup Weekend Austin. You can find all of the videos here.
And even though the event is sold out, the public can still attend the final Startup Weekend Austin pitch session on Sunday, where the newly formed ventures will present their ventures to a panel of judges. To attend the demo pitches, make sure to RSVP here.

Tech Ranch Austin’s 3rd anniversary in three words

Tech Ranch Austin, an early stage accelerator and incubator for entrepreneurs and their ventures, celebrated its third anniversary Thursday night at its new headquarters in North Austin at 9111 Jollyville Road. About 300 people turned out for the event which featured live music, a short speech by Kevin Koym, founder of Tech Ranch Austin, and lots of food, wine, beer and socializing.
During the event, which lasted from 6:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., we pulled people aside to find out their thoughts on Tech Ranch Austin in three words and recorded them with the trusty Flip camera. We’ll post a story later on along with a slideshow from the party. (Full disclosure: I’m in Tech Ranch Austin’s Venture Forth program, which helps early stage entrepreneurs.)

Hoover’s “Art of Enterprise” at Tech Ranch

Tech Ranch Austin is working with serial entrepreneur Gary Hoover to deliver his “Art of Enterprise” course
It’s the fourth time he has delivered the course with TechRanch.
The first class is free. He’s offering it at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 11 or Saturday, Jan. 14th at 1 p.m. at Tech Ranch’s offices at 9111 Jollyville Road. You can RSVP for the first class at Eventbrite.
Hoover has run four startups and a is a former entrepreneur in residence at University of Texas McCombs School of Business.
During the 11-week course, Hoover covers all kinds of skills needed to run your own business.

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2024 SiliconHills

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑