In the technology startup world, lean is a way of life.
Being lean is not just a mantra, to many technology startups it’s how they operate day to day.
“Running lean is a systematic process for innovating from Plan A to one that works before you run out of money,” said Ash Maurya, founder of Spark59 and author of Running Lean.
Most startups fail just like most products fail, Maurya told about 50 people gathered Thursday afternoon for a Lean Startup meeting at Geekdom, a San Antonio collaborative workspace at the Weston Centre downtown. Many of the entrepreneurs in attendance belong to the TechStars Cloud, which kicked off on Jan. 9 and is based at the Geekdom.
“The odds of success are really stacked against new products,” Maurya said. “I would suggest not focusing on the failure rate but focusing on this statistic: 66 percent change their product along the way. What separates a successful company is not finding that perfect plan but perfecting that plan along the way.”
Eric Ries coined the term Lean Startup and trademarked it. His 2011 bestselling book has a similar theme of Running Lean. Ries teaches about how to use build, measure and learn cycles to identify what customers really want.
Lean comes from lean manufacturing or lean thinking, Maurya said. The key there is eliminating waste.
Companies fail because they fail to find markets for their products and they fail to find the right customers, he said.
First, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves if they have a problem worth solving. They can do this by interviewing potential customers. Next, they must create a demo to put in front of a customer as quickly as possible. It’s also important to stay focused.
“We have this myth of the visionary entrepreneur,” Maurya said. “The most visionary of our times is Steve Jobs who recently passed away.”
But Apple has a string of innovation behind its successful products like the iPod, iPhone and iPad that goes back to the first Newton, a tablet computer that Apple built that failed twice.
But Maurya said that product development actually gets in the way of learning. The best way to learn is from customers and markets in the earliest stage.
“We get some learning at that point, but the real learning occurs when we release the product into the market,” Maurya said. “Lots of companies build something hoping there will be a market for it. That’s where they go astray.”
The Running Lean process shortens the time from idea to product release. The key to success is building a product people want and knowing how to listen to customers to adjust the product.
For example, if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted for transportation they would have said faster horses, Maurya said. But Ford was able to identify the hidden problem embedded in there. People wanted faster transportation and he was able to create an alternative.
“All the customers can do is tell you what their problems are,” Maurya said. “Define what that ideal solution is for them. That’s what running lean can be boiled down to.”
One of the most important parts of Running Lean focuses on the activities entrepreneurs do to engage with customers.
“You need to get out of the building and engage with customers throughout that development process,” Maurya said. “The answers don’t lie on your computer or in the lab. You have to engage with customers and talk with them.”
Startups need to run small experiments and find ways to do 10 to 20 releases in six months to refine the product and path to one that works.
“Business plans fall short,” Maurya said. “It goes from critical thinking to fiction writing. You start making up stuff. The format for a business plan is a bad one. We call it a form of waste in the lean terminology.”
So Maurya created a shorter version to distill down the most important concepts behind a startup. He calls it the Lean Canvas format. It’s a one-page adaptation of the original business model plans. To date, more than 8,000 startups have filled out a Lean Canvas format on his site. He’s also sold 15,000 copies of his book in a combination of PDF formats and traditional publishing. The second edition will be released in March.
“Because it’s a single page it gets conversation going whether it’s good or bad,” Maurya said. “ If you put it in front of someone they can’t help but read it.”
Startups are about risk mitigation initially. If an entrepreneur is trying to raise funding, it’s not about solutions yet, Maurya said. Investors look at your business model from a completely different lens.
“What we are doing here is taking a very complex product like building a company and breaking it down to its components in manageable sizes,” Maurya said.
Tag: Geekdom (Page 9 of 10)
Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud, says hundreds of companies applied to the program. In the end, TechStars choose 11 companies. All of them are from outside of San Antonio. Seats is not revealing the company names until April 6th at TechStars Cloud Demo Day.
Nicole Glaros, one of the founders of TechStars in Boulder, will also move to San Antonio for the 13-week program with her family. Seats says the program will serve as the catalyst San Antonio needs to ignite its high-tech startup community. All of the companies will be located at Geekdom, a collaborative workspace at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Nick Longo, head of Geekdom, a co-working and collaboration space at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, created this video to provide insight into the mission of the nonprofit organization.
Geekdom opened a few months ago and has held three Startup Ignite Hackathon events along with a 3 Day Startup San Antonio Weekend and TechStars Cloud for a day. It will also host the companies selected to participate in the inaugural TechStars Cloud program. Already companies like Zippy Kid and Alan Weinkrantz Public Relations have offices there.
Geekdom from The IMG Studio on Vimeo.
Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, talks at Startup Ignite's Hack-a-thon
To start, Elmendorf went to the white board and asked the crowd of about 100 what they wanted to know. People shouted out about a dozen questions including “what was your first entrepreneurial experience, what didn’t you like about school” and “what was your biggest failure?” He wrote down their questions and then spent the next hour answering them and telling stories.
Elmendorf’s first entrepreneurial experience was with his brother selling Xeroxed space invader game sheets for a quarter.
He came from an entrepreneurial family with a lawyer dad and a mom who ran her own catering business. So he thought that was the way of the world.
Elmendorf also worked a whole summer for a company and didn’t get paid. He learned early on about the importance of contracts.
“Lesson number one write shit down and get it signed” Elmendorf said.
When he met Richard Yoo, another co-founder of Rackspace, he presented him with a four-page contract outlining the duties Elmendorf would perform.
In 1998, Yoo, Elmendorf and Pat Condon, all students at Trinity University, formed a web hosting company that became Rackspace. Graham Weston and Morris Miller met with the three later on at a burger joint and they agreed to invest in the company.
Today, Rackspace is a publicly traded company with more than 4,000 employees. Its stock, traded under the symbol RAX, closed at $44.02 share Friday on the New York Stock Exchange.
Back to his crowd-sourced talk, the thing Elmendorf didn’t like about school was it’s linear instruction.
“I can learn non-directionally all the time,” he said. “I’m a pathological learner.”
He loves Reddit and the Internet.
Someone asked him what he does when he is bored. He cooks. He once took a three-day class in meat fabrication.
What is his most important startup advice?
“It’s a team sport. It’s never just one person,” he said. “Even at the most primitive level it’s a team sport.”
It’s important to like the team you work with at a startup, Elmendorf said.
“If you don’t like them now, it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s like parachuting into a bad marriage.”
Elmendorf got along with Rackspace’s core team so well that he still likes them after 13 years of working together.
Also, it’s important to know what you’re good at, Elmendorf said.
“I’m not a good manager,” he said. He likes coding. “The code doesn’t get mad.”
Today, Elmendorf has a new startup, r26D, which created TruckingOffice.com, a small fleet management system. The company has 1,000 customers.
“I like projects that are targeted at small businesses,” Elmendorf said.
He advised the crowd to find a startup that customers like and are willing to pay for its products.
“You do know you can’t buy your own products,” Elmendorf said. “You need to ask yourself who is the customer and how do I serve them?”
Are you wonder struck over the amount of money, deals and companies flowing into the Austin area?
It’s exciting times in the Silicon Hills, the high-tech region of Austin and San Antonio.
Not only is Austin, which is known for its start-up culture and high-technology ventures, taking off like a shotgun blast, but San Antonio’s tech entrepreneurial scene has begun to bubble up to the surface like Texas crude.
So much has happened in just the past week that it’s difficult to keep on top of all the activity. So we’ve rounded up the best deals below and if we’ve left anything off, please add to it in the comments section.
San Antonio-based Rackspace Hosting Inc. has opened up satellite offices in Silicon Valley. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote a nice story about their new offices. The official opening is Dec. 1, but already employees, including Uber-blogger Robert Scobel, who runs Building 43, a technology site that specializes in video interviews with technology entrepreneurs, have moved in.
Meanwhile, Geekdom, a new collaborative workspace at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio, continues to host events including 3 Day Startup San Antonio and Start-up Ignite’s Hack-a-thon.
In Austin, Evernote’s CEO Phil Libin flew in to open the company’s first U.S. satellite office in the Bridgepoint Parkway Office Complex. It’s hiring a bunch of people for the Austin operations too.
Speaking of moving to town, the Austin American Statesman reported that SceneTap, a social media app for bar patrons, announced plans to relocate its operations from Chicago to Austin.
And BlackLocus, an e-commerce pricing analysis company, announced Austin as the headquarters of its company, which recently graduated from the LaunchPad program at the Austin Technology Incubator.
Meanwhile, Rapid 7, an online security firm, just landed $50 million in funding and will use the proceeds, in part, to expand its Austin operations
And ServiceMesh, a Santa Monica-based cloud platform maker, has raised $15 million and plans to expand its Austin operations, according to this story by Lori Hawkins of the Austin American Statesman.
Capital Factory graduate, WPEngine closed $1.2 million in series A financing, according to this post from Bryan Mennel at Austin Startup.
Last, but not least, SXSW continues to release a bunch of news about next year’s Interactive conference. The deadline for entering your start-up into its SXSW Accelerator is today. It was actually Friday, but SXSW, which often extends deadlines at the last minute, pushed it until today. So if you’re a totally procrastinator, get your application in now.
Tech Ranch Austin’s next Venture Forth program begins Nov. 29, and full disclosure SiliconHillsNews is going to be participating in the program. Tech Ranch still has a few openings left, but it’s limited to 15 entrepreneurs.
Hackers gathered at Geekdom Friday night to socialize, listen to a speaker and build stuff.
About 50 people attended Start-up Ignite’s second all night Hack-a-thon in downtown San Antonio.
The event kicked off at 7 p.m. with pizza and soda and socializing, followed by a candid presentation from start-up entrepreneur Vid Luther, CEO of ZippyKid.
Luther launched ZippyKid, a wordpress hosting site, in May of 2010, with three customers. He received his first round of angel funding this past April. ZippyKid now has more than 1,000 customers and Luther’s hired four employees.
ZippyKid just turned profitable, Luther said.
Luther told the crowd that he didn’t have a clue what he was doing when he started the company. In fact, he just did it as a hobby at first. He helped people with their WordPress sites during his spare time, while working a full time job for Pear Analytics. But he soon realized the value in providing personalized service to people who have WordPress blogs.
“I could charge $100 to fix a problem that took me five minutes to fix,” Luther said.
Some larger hosting sites didn’t always have time to provide the best help to non-technical WordPress bloggers, and that’s where Luther found his opportunity.
Luther encouraged the crowd to try their own ventures. He tried several other ventures and had some great ideas that didn’t pan out before he found success with ZippyKid. He attracted his angel funding through a blog post he did explaining his vision for the site.
ZippyKid competes with other WordPress specialization sites like WPEngine in Austin. But ZippyKid focuses on non-technical customers, Luther said. Since launching, ZippyKid has lost only 11 customers and half of those went out of business, Luther said.
Following Luther’s talk, the crowd dispersed and began working on their laptops in small groups.
Stephen Young, Igor Gregorio and Daniel Semmens created Start-up Ignite because they wanted to work with other like-minded people.
San Antonio lacked a catalyst to bring together its technology community, Gregorio said.
“We heard that there were more and more people in San Antonio doing start-ups but none of them were connected,” Young said.
A few people came from Houston and Austin to attend the event, Semmens said
“The focus is on getting things done and helping people,” Semmens said.
Building a strong community of people working on start-ups only helps make the existing start-ups stronger, said Young.
Young and Gregorio travelled to San Francisco earlier this year and when they hopped in a cab, the cab driver asked them if they ran a start-up and asked them for their pitch. Then he gave them his pitch. They want to see that pervasive entrepreneurial spirit in San Antonio, Young said.
“It’s possible,” he said
The next Start-up Ignite Hack-a-thon is Dec. 9th and features Dirk Elmendorf, co-founder of Rackspace, as its guest speaker. They have 100 people on the Start-up Ignite mailing list and they’re hoping to attract even more as word of mouth about the events spread, Semmens said.
“Bring what you have and come and work around like minded people,” he said.
Niyolab CEO Toyin Akinmusuru travelled from Austin for the event. He’s also co-founder of HubAustin, a co-working space on South Congress Avenue. He was seeking feedback on his new venture, Niyobooks, an online customized children’s book site for families.
“This is the perfect environment for people to come and get feedback,” said Gregorio.
Dan Stuckey attended 3 Day Startup last weekend and learned about Startup Ignite’s Hack-a-thon there. So he showed up Friday night to work on a new idea.
“This is the perfect place to meet people who code,” Stuckey said. “Coders are like the golden Unicorns. They’re hard to find.”
Tim Peters, president of MartFlash.com, an e-commerce site, that he plans to launch within 18 months, attended the event to look for talent for his new venture.
“The next step is putting together a team,” he said. He’s looking for 5 people and he found some potential employees at the event.
In 72 hours, a group of strangers met, brainstormed ideas and then built working prototypes for six companies.
The companies included Spear Guard, an e-mail security firm, Renew Couture, a recycled clothing line, Stride Sync, a music sharing app, Golf Average, a statistical analysis app to improve golf performance, SimpLingo, a browser plug-in to learn a foreign language and Approachab.ly, a professional networking app made for conference attendees.
The newfound entrepreneurs took part in 3 Day Startup weekend in San Antonio at Geekdom, a downtown co-working and collaborative workspace.
“This is the best one we’ve had in San Antonio by far,” said Cam Houser, one of the founders of 3DS. “The crop of ideas were really strong. The execution was just great.”
That’s impressive praise considering the last two 3DS weekends in San Antonio created at least two companies that are still running and that have received venture funding. One of those is FanDash, a site for band promotion and Console.FM, formerly known as HelloWorld.Im. Console.FM, created in the Spring of 2011, is now part of Dave McClure’s 500Startups incubator.
The 3DS weekend teaches students and young professionals about entrepreneurship and creates real ventures that go on to further develop their products and services, said Cristal Glangchai, a professor of entrepreneurship at Trinity and one of the organizers. Trinity, Rackspace, TechStars and Geekdom sponsored the event.
Successful entrepreneurs also lent their expertise to the various groups throughout the weekend. The mentors included Pat Condon, one of the founders of Rackspace, Ryan Kelly, founder of Pear Analytics, Jason Seats, founder of SliceHost, Nick Longo, founder of CoffeCup Software, Todd Morey, founder of Mosso, a cloud company within Rackspace and Alan Weinkrantz, a public relations expert who runs his own firm.
In addition, several members of 3DS, a nonprofit organization which puts on the events worldwide, helped. The next 3DS is next weekend in the Netherlands.
Throughout the weekend, participants experienced “a lot of extremes,” Houser said. Some entrepreneurs got their ideas extinguished early on. Others discovered, after a lot of work, that their idea wouldn’t work. One guy stayed up for 27 hours straight to work on programming a new site. Some people never left the building except to interview potential customers.
On Friday, the groups voted on the best ideas and decided who they wanted to work with to develop the idea into a company. But on Sunday, some of the original groups no longer existed like Hole in the Wall, a local restaurant review app. After doing some research, they decided the market was too saturated with similar apps so those team members went to work on other projects, Houser said.
And a new company emerged on Saturday.
Vyjayanthi Vadreavu originally pitched the idea for a documentary on homeless people and a recycled clothing line. Her idea did not get enough votes to make the final projects.
But Saturday morning, she found some people who wanted to work on it. She talked to Glangchai, one of the organizers of 3DS San Antonio, who encouraged her to pursue the idea, but with a different focus.
On Sunday, Vadreavu pitched Renew Couture with a new team. The group collects gently used clothing, delivers the items to student clothing designers at local universities and then sells the clothes made from recycled material.
An estimated four million tons of clothes get discarded every year, Vadreavu said. The opportunity to take some of the clothes and make them into new garments is huge, she said. The company would work with five local fashion schools to create the clothes.
“The clothes get a second life and the customer gets a one of a kind item,” she said.
This was the first time Vadreavu, 26, who works at Rackspace, participated in a 3DS. She plans to continue to work with her group to get the company launched and funded.
“I think it’s such a fantastic experience,” she said. “I wish I knew about it earlier in my career.”
Another woman-led venture, SimpLingo, started out as Babbling on Friday, but changed its name and refined its focus after doing a lot of research and talking with mentors, said Amando Wolf, a junior majoring in Chinese language studies at Trinity.
SimpLingo is a simple way to learn a foreign language, particularly Spanish. It’s a browser-based plug-in to translate portions of text online based on a person’s level of proficiency.
“You don’t have to deviate from your daily routine to learn the lingo,” Wolf said during her pitch.
SimpLingo was the only company to ask for money outright.
“I did the last 3 Day Startup,” said Cassie Robinson, a sophomore at Trinity studying religion, entrepreneurship and business and a team member of SimpLingo. “One of the ideas that did really well, they asked for money.”
So Robinson put up a slide requesting $10,000 and provided a bank account and routing number.
The panel of judges liked the idea and the fact they asked for funding. The panel included Jay Campion, a venture capitalist, Sheridan Chambers, one of the founders of The Denim Group, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, Suizo Mendler, a former Rackspace executive and now TechStars mentor and George Karutz, an investment banker.
SimLingo has a lot of potential, said Alex Butler, a senior majoring in engineering at Trinity and one of the team members. “It’s really scalable.”
After the pitches, the various groups worked the crowd to talk to potential investors.
Luke Carriere, head of Approachab.ly, started out pitching the app as a dating app and then switched to a professional networking app after researching the market.
“The problem was adoptability,” Carriere said. “Partnering with events organizers was a way to ensure there was a critical mass of users.”
Approachab.ly is planning a beta launch of its product in the Spring of 2012, said Carriere, a graduate business student at Fordham University who is doing a internship at the Austin Technology Incubator. He says he has $10,000 in funding from an angel investor to pursue the idea.
“It’s a way to reach out and meet new people at the same events,” Carriere said. “We think there is a market for that. And this is just the beginning.”
About 40 aspiring entrepreneurs gathered Friday afternoon at Geekdom downtown for 3 Day Startup San Antonio.
They brought sleeping bags, backpacks, computers and tents.
They had plenty of fuel to get them through the weekend with two refrigerators filled with Red Bull, sodas, gatorade, juice boxes, water, beer and fruit. An entire shelf held dozens of different kinds of snacks including Cheez-Its, Oreo cookies, Snickers bars and granola bars.
They spent an hour getting to know one another before breaking into eight color-coded groups to brainstorm ideas to create a new company. From 3:30 p.m. until 7:30 p.m. they worked in different offices hashing out their ideas on white boards. More than a dozen mentors and organizers also helped the participants formulate their ideas.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program.
Nick Longo, who founded Coffeecup Software, and now heads up the Geekdom, and Todd Morey, who helped create Rackspace’s cloud business, would pop in and out of the offices, offering advice.
Longo told the green team to keep in mind “what problem am I trying to solve? How large is my market? And can I execute it?”
He told them that there are a lot of sites like Prezi, Woofoo forms and Chargify that already exist that could help them mock up a website.
Morey told them to keep in mind the cost of acquiring customers.
“Going viral is not a strategy,” Longo said. “Google Ad words is not a strategy.”
The green group came up with an idea for putting a friendly face on a computer repair service targeted at the elderly and people with learning disabilities.
Longo recommended googling “The Pirate Metrics” on acquiring and retaining customers and to follow advice articulated by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup.
“If it takes too much money upfront it’s non-executable,” Longo said.
The yellow group listed a bunch of problems on a white board and then brainstormed solutions for them. They included a parking app to reserve a parking space, a grocery list helper app and a language app to help learn a foreign language.
Ryan Kelly, owner of Pear Analytics and a mentor, suggested the group gamify the language app.
“Make learning a language more fun,” he said.
Around 6 p.m., the groups broke for a catered dinner of Dicky’s barbecue brisket sandwiches, potato salad and beans. And then they went back to their offices to create powerpoint presentations and solidify their ideas.
At the pitch session, the groups presented their ideas on a giant screen. The pitches ranged from a dating app to cloud computing platform. The first pitch was for GolfAverage.com, an in-depth statistics site for golfers, which keeps track of a current game and past performance, followed by Penny for Your Thoughts, a documentary on homeless people and a sustainable clothing line.
Other ideas included BookZingo.com, a marketplace for college students to sell their textbooks, Transparent Mortgages, a site for first time homebuyers and those with credit issues, Clan, an app for music sharing, Spear Phishing, a virus and malware prevention platform, Hole in the wall, a local restaurant review site, Approachab.ly, a dating app, Kudotree, a personal recommendation site and Babbling, a program to learn a foreign language intuitively.
In the end, the group voted by putting their heads down with closed eyes and raising their hands for the idea with the greatest chance of success and the idea that they most wanted to work on. Each member had two votes.
Ideas around the hot trends of mobile, social and location garnered the most interest. The final five ideas with the most votes included GolfAverage.com, Approachab.ly, Babbling, Clan and Spear Phishing. The group leader stood before the crowd and told them what kinds of skills were needed to build out the company and then people decided whether they wanted to work for them. The largest groups formed around Approachab.ly and Babbling. Around 10 p.m. they headed for offices to get back to work. Meanwhile, Clan bit the dust. And Hole in the Wall re-emerged as a company with five people wanting to work for the idea.
“That’s going to happen,” said Rachit Shah, one of the original founders of 3DS.
“Another company will probably fail before the night’s over,” said Cam Houser, another original founder of 3DS. Four University of Texas graduate students in business, computer science, engineering and law started 3 Day Startup in 2008 and now they run it full time as a nonprofit organization.
“It’s an entrepreneurship education program for university students,” Houser said. “We were grad students and didn’t feel like the student potential for entrepreneurship was being met. More could be done to help students start ventures.”
The idea is a popular one. 3DS has put on programs around the world including China and Germany.
“You have to apply, submit a resume, pitch an idea and get interviewed,” Houser said. “Most of the people who want to participate in a 3DS are pretty passionate.”
The San Antonio program was the 17th 3DS.
“It’s free to participants,” Houser said. “We’re giving them a scholarship.” It costs around $500 per person which includes catered meals, snacks and drinks and place to hold the event. Corporate sponsors contribute the bulk of the money.
“The only time they leave the building is to talk to customers,” Houser said. “On Sunday, their eyes are bloodshot and they smell bad but they’re really fired up.”
The 3DS organizers do have rules. They don’t let pre-existing companies pitch and they don’t allow anyone to pitch porn sites.
“It ranges from an idea on a napkin, up to they’ve done a lot of market research and they have a site in mind,” Houser said. “We provide an exciting and high energy environment that resembles a startup with long hours and overlaying order onto chaos.
So far, 16 companies have spun out of 3Ds that have raised $4 million, Houser said. They include Hoot.me, FanDash, Console.FM and Famigo.
FanDash, formerly BandDemand.com, is one of the startups to spin out of the San Antonio 3DS program.
The founder of Hurricane Party pitched his idea but no one wanted to do it, Houser said. But he did meet five of his six members of his team at 3DS, he said. The company is now called Foreca.st and is doing well.
Christian Salmagne from Aachen, Germany, brought 3DS startup to his hometown last summer. Forty students met at the RWTH Aachen University and at least one of the companies is still up and running, Salmagne said. The company is Tamyca.de, which stands for Take My Car. It’s a peer to peer personal car sharing site.
Salmagne attended the San Antonio 3DS. He’s currently doing a three month fellowship at the Austin Technology Incubator to learn about entrepreneurship so he can take his knowledge back to his hometown to help with Germay’s startup community.
“I’m helping people and observing,” Salmagne said. “I like to experience this energy. You get addicted to it.”
For three days, 40 people will meet, brainstorm and create companies during San Antonio’s Three Day Startup Weekend.
The action takes place this Friday at the Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program. She held a bootcamp last night at Trinity for the participants to brief them on what to expect during the weekend and what to bring with them.
The weekend kicks off at 2:30 p.m. on Friday and concludes with the newly-formed companies pitching their ventures to funders and others on Sunday. That portion is open to the public, but the rest is closed.
About half the participants are students from Trinity, the University of Texas at Austin and at San Antonio, St. Mary’s and even as far away as Rice and Iowa State.
“It’s really about education,” Glangchai said. “It’s kind of a really intense hands on lesson in entrepreneurship.”
This is the third Three Day Startup Weekend in San Antonio. The first took place at the Molina Healthcare building last November, followed by another one at Rackspace in May, Glangchai said.
Three Day Startup Weekend, fashioned after the original Startup Weekend, took place in Austin. Some University of Texas students held the first one in 2008. Since then, companies spin out of the Austin startup weekends have raised $4 million. Some of them include Famigo and Forecast.
The biggest success story in San Antonio is BandDemand, Glangchai said.