Tag: startups (Page 2 of 10)

Massage.com Wants to Take the Stress Out of Getting a Massage

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

BY TIM GREEN
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Dan Graham wants Massage.com to work like a good massage, relieving stress for massage therapists and their customers.

Instead of kneading muscles, however, the online massage booking service does it by helping therapists find work and customers get a massage where it’s most convenient for them.

“Essentially, we want to be the live inventory of massage therapists and spa offerings for anyone, anywhere,” Graham said.

Massage.com is Graham’s first venture beyond Austin-based BuildASign, which he founded in 2005.

That venture is now a 260-employee company, operating in four countries with $57 million in revenue in 2013. Graham’s business and civic endeavors have earned accolades including being named Austinite of the Year by the Austin Under 40 group in 2012 and Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013.

BuildASign attacked a market dominated by mom-and-pop operations with the concept that people would buy signs – from yard sale placards to big banners and more – over the Internet with no hands on experience.

Graham’s new business, in its first months of operation, is definitely hands on, at least for the therapists and their clients, but it seeks a similar result in a market that’s fragmented and sizable.

There are as many as 350,000 massage therapists in the U.S., according to the American Massage Therapy Association. Most are solo practitioners working at the client’s location or in a spa, health club, a healthcare setting or a massage-therapy franchise. In 2013, the massage industry generated $6 billion to $11 billion.

Massage.com’s initial play is to help individual massage therapists book appointments with clients in the location preferred by the clients such as home or office.

Graham said that Massage.com conducts background checks on therapists and customers so that both sides are comfortable with the arrangement.

Payment of $89 plus tip for an hour session is made online through Massage.com. The company takes a percentage of the fee.

Ron Shirley, an Austin logistics executive, used Massage.com to book a session and said “it worked extremely well.”

The therapist arrived at the appointed hour, he said, “and the massage was great.”

Graham said massage therapists can list with Massage.com whether they want to book 40 hours or two hours a month. “We just add their availability into our network,” he said.

Massage therapist Tony Castro used the site after hearing about it from colleague.

He said the process was easy and helped with bookings. He especially likes that he can stay close to home by specifying an area in which he’ll work.

So far, the service is available in Austin, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio.

But Graham, who continues as BuildASign CEO, has more in mind.

He plans to expand Massage.com’s services to about 6,000 spas across the country. He said the service would help spas with online marketing and fill empty slots in the appointment books of therapists who work in the spas.

“We offer a tool to say, “Hey, you don’t need become an expert in online marketing. We’ll do that for you. And we’ll just fill your vacancies and we’ll just take a small percentage of the booking fee,’ ” Graham said. “Nobody says no to that.”

Graham said Massage.com will offer more features as it builds out.

A feature he’s enthused about is a rating system in which customers can review and rate their massage therapists and the spas in which they work. He said this should be a boon for massage therapists because those who earn high ratings should be able to draw higher fees for their services.

Massage.com’s sources of revenue include a percentage of the fee for the massage, fees for membership and subscriptions and gift card sales. Graham added that the site will offer massage-related services and products.

Massage.com is one of several companies around the country offering scheduling services for the massage business.

While most operate only in their metro areas, Zeel.com, based in New York City, has expanded to Miami, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, according to an article in TechCrunch.

Graham said that Massage.com’s nationwide spa network will set it apart from companies that book at-home massages. He’s also looking to work with hotels, corporations and nonprofit events.

And, he’s looking to repeat BuildASign’s experience in dealing with growing competition in outperforming competitors.

“I think that being first mover is great and having a great brand name is really helpful,” he said. “But ultimately we’ve got to be able to execute in the idea.”

As a name Massage.com is direct and comprehensive. And Graham found in right in his backyard.

An Austin massage therapist had owned the domain name since 1995. Screen shots of a Massage.com website from the late 1990s (viewed via the web.archive.org), show a landing page that proposes to be a one-stop shop for massages and massage products. But apparently that’s as far as the website went.

“I talked to him over the course of many months, describing where I saw the vision for Massage.com,” Graham said.

After eight months, the owner bought Graham’s vision and sold the domain name to Graham outright. But, Graham said, the previous owner has ongoing incentives as the company progresses.

So far, Graham and three others have funded the company. He said he’s not ready to disclose the amount or who the investors are.

Besides building out the website, Graham, who remains BuildASign CEO, is hiring the Massage.com management team and looking for office space.

Once ensconced, he said, “We’ll probably need to hire a full-time massage therapist to make sure everybody’s relaxed.”

Innovative Startups Should Apply to the SXSW Accelerator

September 3, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

At South by Southwest Interactive for the past six years, innovative tech startups have clamored to get into the SXSW Accelerator to showcase their company before a tech-savvy audience.

This year, the deadline to apply to participate in the SXSW Accelerator is Nov. 7th.

But don’t procrastinate. This is a highly selective accelerator that only takes the best of the best.

The event is open to early stage companies in six categories: entertainment and content technologies, social technologies, enterprise and big data technologies, innovative world technologies, wearable technologies, digital health & life technologies. The startup get to pitch before a panel of industry experts, early adopters and those people with money in the Venture Capital and Angel investment community.

“Past judges have included Tim Draper of DFJ, John Sculley of Apple/Pepsi, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Paul Graham of Y Combinator, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Guy Kawasaki of Alltop, Chris Sacca of Lowercase Capital, Chris Hughes of New Republic/Facebook, Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures, Albert Wenger of Union Square Venture, Scott Weiss of Andreessen Horowitz, and Bob Metcalfe of Ethernet/3Com to name a few,” according to Chris Valentine, organizer of the event.

The event will be held March 14th and 15th at SXSW in Austin. Apply now at SXSW.

Showcasing New Programmers at CodeUp’s Demo Day

August 1, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Greg McCabe, Michael Jaime and Caitlin Daily, creators of Pro-Sifter at CodeUp Demo Day

Michael Jaime sold his car and bought a bike so he could pay his tuition and participate in CodeUp, a 12-week bootcamp that teaches non-programmers how to code.

Each day Jaime would bike three miles to Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio to learn a hodgepodge of programming languages including JavaScript, SQL, HTML and PHP.

On Wednesday, Jaime and his team showed off their newly acquired skills during a presentation of their capstone project, Pro-Sifter, a web app that allows users to find professional hairstylists, makeup artists and more and to rate and review them.

“I’ve always wanted to do this,” Jaime said. “I’ve always been interested in web development.”

Jaime was one of 23 students in the latest CodeUp program. They graduated on Wednesday and presented their projects at the Pearl Studio to a standing-room only crowd of more than 70 potential employers.

This is the second CodeUp class to graduate. The first class graduated in April. Out of that class, 25 of the 27 students have found employment or have made money as programmers, said Michael Girdley, co-founder of CodeUp. They’ve gotten jobs with Labatt Foods, Parlevel, Heavy-Heavy and various web development shops, he said.

Passion and determination are the qualities that make good CodeUp students, he said.

“These people have all had to make life sacrifices to be here,” he said. “They self-select. Those are the traits of being a good employee. They are the type of people you want to hire.”

CodeUp costs $9,875 for a 12-week program. Some of the students use a Crowdfunding portal to raise the money for tuition. CodeUp refunds half of the tuition if a student is able to find a job within six months.

“It’s a way to get behind someone when they’re changing their life,” Girdley said.

Kyle Cornelius, co-founder of Storific, a mobile application for ordering food from restaurants, attended the CodeUp Demo Day to scope out the talent.

“Codeup is a terrific bootcamp because they come in prepared and ready,” he said. “The skills that they learned are all things we use.“

Storific is looking to hire two backend developers, Cornelius said.

“Most of the people here do fit the bill,” he said. “We’re just trying to find people who share the same passion with us.”

Chad Keck, CEO and founder of Promoter.io, a company feedback system based on the Net Promoter Score, planned to interview some of the jobs candidates in the next few days. He’s hiring a full stack engineer, a front-end engineer and a junior developer.

Andre Dempsey, Nicole Sumrall and Andrew Samaniego with Tweets for Charity project at CodeUp Demo Day.

Nicole Sumrall worked on the Tweets for Charity program, a Web application that allows Twitter users to donate to selected charities by tracking the number of tweets they post in a month and a per-tweet donation tied to that number.

She joined CodeUp to change the direction of her life. She previously worked at Best Buy in the cell phone department while pursuing her graduate degree. She has a B.S. from UTSA and a M.S. in English literature from Texas A&M in San Antonio.

“When I realized I wasn’t going to be able to get into a Ph.D. program, technology was the next best thing.,” Sumrall said. “ I really enjoy creating things. It gives me a creative outlet in programming. I learned about CodeUp from a friend and then I applied.”

And she’s glad she did. The program opened her up to new ideas. And now she’s eager to pursue a job as a web developer.

One of Cole Reveal’s roommates had previously enrolled in the last CodeUp class.

“I saw the culture that was at Geekdom and it just blew my mind. It was something I had to gear my life toward,” Reveal said.

His team’s capstone project was Diversity Thread, a “resource for potential employees looking to get noticed specifically designed for minorities and women.”

Reveal has a math degree but he was working at a New Balance store, selling shoes. He wanted a more challenging career.

“This gave me new skills,” Reveal said. The program helped Reveal sharpen his problem solving skills and broadened his ability to acquire information, he said.

“CodeUp has opened our eyes,” he said. “The instruction here is unmatched.”

Justin Mason also worked on the Diversity Thread project also, which he calls a “diversity” LinkedIn.

“For the past few three years I ran a tech company without any technical skills myself. I paid a lot of contractors,” Mason said.

He worked on his startup, Vela, out of Geekdom for the past year and half. He started it in Southern California.

The CodeUp program gave him the skills he needed to program his own site. He no longer needs to hire programmers. He’s now looking for a job as a web developer.

“This was empowering,” Mason said.

Caitlin Daily earned a degree in nuclear medicine from Incarnate Word, but she couldn’t find a job. She decided to enroll in CodeUp and she found her passion.

“I wanted to stay in San Antonio,” Daily said. “I needed something quick to get me into new fields. “

She worked on the Pro-Sifter project. Now she’s looking for a job as a web developer specializing in back end development. She feels like CodeUp prepared her for a career in coding.

“I have no fear going into any interview,” she said.

Frank Pigeon retired from the military in 2003 as a computer operator and analyst and works at Fort Sam Houston as a civilian project engineer. But he always wanted to learn how to code.

“I came to the last Demo day and I was blown away by the projects I saw and I said I’ve got to do this,” Pigeon said.

So he enrolled in CodeUp. His team’s capstone project, Community-Helpers, is “a web application that connects seniors with odd-jobs done around their house to the youth in their community who are ready to earn some money.”

“A few months ago I would never have the tools to accomplish this,” he said.

Ashley Webb, Greg Vallejo and Daniel Jimenez, with the ChartBabe team at CodeUp Demo Day

Ashley Webb got introduced to coding through her WordPress blog, LeonaLovely.

At CodeUp, she worked on a capstone project, ChartBabe, a way for new moms to track all of their babies’ activities electronically including feedings, diaper changes and naps.

Webb plans to continue working on the project and adding new features, including creating a mobile phone app. Webb’s son, Jasper, is 18 months old. Her second child is due in November. Coding provides her with flexibility.

“It seemed like a big price tag at first,” she said. “I don’t even have a job yet and I already know it was worth it. I can’t believe the knowledge I’ve gained in 12 weeks.”

Zach Dell’s Startup Thread is a Dating Site Just for College Students

July 23, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By SUSAN LAHEY
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Lander Coronado-Garcia – CEO , Zachary Dell – Founder and Chairman,
Patrick Adiaheno – Head of Product

Michael Dell never pushed entrepreneurship on his son, Zach, which may be the reason Zach started asking about business, reading tomes by people like Warren Buffet and playing stock simulators by the age of 12.

“My dad and I are extremely close,” Dell said. “When I started asking him about starting his business and what it meant to be an entrepreneur, he started telling me more and more. He would give me little lessons every time we were in the car and use real world examples, like the Bernie Madoff scandal, to teach me about insider trading. We’d talk during car rides, dinners…we spend a lot of good time together.”

At 17, Dell is founder of a new online dating service for college students called Thread—not the same as a former Facebook effort to get into online dating by the same name. The idea, according to CEO Lander Coronado-Garcia, is that college students are safer and more likely to find good matches dating other college students, rather than being on sites like Tinder where anyone can view their profiles. The company intends to launch this fall with University of Texas organizations—like fraternities and sororities—and restrict membership to people with utexas.edu email addresses. In the future the company hopes to expand by adding other area colleges, and spreading from there.

To test the market, Thread created a fictional profile of an attractive UT student on Tinder. Of those who responded, 13 percent were UT students, 17 percent students of other schools and 70 percent “who knows?” Coronado-Garcia said. Moreover, some of the comments left by prospective “suitors” were obscene, bordering on threatening.

“Thread is about classy dating,” Coronado-Garcia said. “We’re going to be very explicit about the kind of behavior we deem acceptable.” In other words, a dating website even Mom would like.

Thread will tackle some of the other weird issues that crop up in online dating, too. With “hookup” sites, people can make 100 matches in an hour—clearly not the behavior of somebody looking for a substantive dating relationship. Thread will limit the number of potential matches presented each day to 10. If both parties say yes to the match, they can keep that match among 12 on a list. If someone adds another match, one falls off.

“That way,” Coronado-Garcia said, “You have to be a little more judicious in who you choose to match with. Each match is a little more important than if you just keep everybody in a bucket and keep storing them.”

A Junior Entrepreneur

Dell’s first business venture was hatched when he was playing golf on vacation in Hawaii at the age of 10. He had a friend along and they realized that golfers who hit balls into the lava fields never went to retrieve them. This was a high-end course. The abandoned balls were expensive. So Dell and his friend began collecting them to sell.

“We built up this huge inventory,” Dell said. “I had just finished reading about leveraged buyouts and selling your business and I thought ‘I want to sell my business.’ My business was the inventory so I decided to find someone to buy all my golf balls.” A friend of his dad’s, who was less than a stellar golfer, routinely lost golf balls. Dell offered to sell the golfer his entire inventory for a reduced price. It was the sale of his first business.

Another opportunity came along when his cousins started a summer camp in Dallas, Camp Spark. Initially, it was held at the cousins’ home. Then, as it grew, expanded to a local school. In recent years, the company has expanded to Austin, San Francisco, Boulder and Boston. By and large, it’s a camp where kids do all kinds of sports.

“If you’re a middle school kid, you’re happy to hang out all day with high school kids,” Dell observed.

Dell started Thread on his own. He had the advice of his dad’s network, but he refused to take money from his parents. Longtime family friend Brett Hurt introduced him to Coronado-Garcia who had been part of the founding team of Meritful—the winner of Capital Factory’s first annual “Move your Company to Austin” competition during SXSW Interactive. Thread is also in Capital Factory’s Incubator and Capital Factory is an investor in the company.

Getting Thread Up and Running

Coronado-Garcia, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, said he suffers from “career ADD.” He worked as a consultant for Accenture IT Systems but decided to go back to school for his MBA. He graduated from Wharton in 2011. He moved to Austin as part of Meritful but when that company folded, Coronado-Garcia was almost immediately tapped for Thread.

Eric Simone, CEO of ClearBlade had been a mentor of Meritful and also serves as a Thread mentor. Initially, Dell hired some developers to build the product and wound up with an unusable app. So he had to raise more money and Thread hired ClearBlade to build a software solution at a flat fee that could add functionality and scale.

“We said ‘Tell us how many hours it’s going to take and how long it’s going to take and we’ll hold you to that deadline,” Simone said. “That way we can control the scope of work and effort and not shove too many features in. So far the team has worked incredibly well together.” ClearBlade will also, for an additional fee, serve as Thread’s CTO until the company is ready to hire one.

“At first I thought, ‘Another dating app? Is that really what we need?’” said Simone. But the team convinced him that the absence of sleaze and protection of college students were huge differentiators. Also advisor Sam Decker has encouraged the team to involve Thread is women’s empowerment and safety programs as part of its brand, Coronado-Garcia said.

Max McKamy with the Tau Deauteron Chapter of Phi Gamma Delta at UT, otherwise known as FIJI, will be coordinating its first part of the year with Thread to make it a launch party. The main point of the app, he said, is to make dating sites safer for girls and if the girls are signing up, that’s where the boys will be.

Thread is close to completing its seed round of around half a million dollars, Dell said.

“My dad has been a huge help on the advice side,” Dell said. “What he understands is that for me to learn I’m going to have to make a lot of mistakes. If I make a decision, he’ll tell me what he thinks but he will never tell me I have to change it. He’s never invested a dime in my company and he never will. My mom is a very smart woman. She is an entrepreneur herself and she wanted to invest immediately but I knew I wouldn’t be learning as much if she did. And it’s been such a learning experience.”

3 Day Startup at Geekdom Nurtures New Entrepreneurs

July 14, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Stephanie King with the rest of the Spotduct team at 3 Day Startup

Stephanie King attended a 3 Day Startup program at Geekdom in San Antonio last weekend with an idea for a company.

“I quickly realized I needed more focus,” she said.

Instead of pitching her idea, King joined Spotduct, a startup focused on creating short videos for brands tied to a prize for consumers who watch them.

Spotduct, a four-person team led by Will Shipley, produced a 30 second video promoting Hint water. At the end, viewers were asked how many bottles of Hint appeared in the video. Those who got the correct answer, 11, won a prize. The Spotduct team plans to build an online interactive video platform by earning revenue from pay per click video quizzes tied to the videos they create.

“It was a good experience because it taught me what it takes to pitch our idea to investors,” King said. “We also worked on an idea under pressure and we had to create a viable product in a weekend. That’s a skill set you can’t get anywhere else.”

Spotduct was one of seven startups that spun out of 3 Day Startup on Film, Music and Fashion last weekend. The 80/20 Foundation funded the program. It’s one in a series of thematic 3DS programs held at Geekdom, the coworking and technology incubator downtown.

More than 40 people participated in the weekend bootcamp to create a company. The other teams included Jukebox, a subscription music box, Dreamland, family friendly events focused on the arts, Syndicated Video Network Television, branded Internet-based TV channels, Noiiz, a marketplace for musicians to sell their creations, Puro Pinche, a mobile events calendar focused on San Antonio, and Campfire, a video storytelling site.

On Sunday, the teams pitched before a panel of judges who asked questions and provided feedback on their ventures.

The Jukebox team at 3 Day Startup

The Jukebox team wants to provide a monthly subscription based box that gives people a novel way to experience music. The box would contain a promotional CD from an independent musician along with band swag such as T-shirts, guitar picks and more.

The idea is similar to Barkbox and Birchbox and other subscription-based models. The team included Tim Slusher, Candyce Slusher, Cynthia Marshall, Hannah Zhoa and Sean Mcleod. The box is aimed at the 16 to 30 year old age group. Each box is estimated to cost $15.

Jukebox expects to send out its first boxes by August, said Candyce Slusher.

The Puro Pinche team built an entertainment events calendar site optimized for mobile viewing.

Stephanie Guerra, founder of Puro Pinche

Stephanie Guerra launched the blog Puro Pinche in June of 2010 and now she’s looking to expand the site and monetize it.

Nic Jones, Greg Vallejo and Miles Terracina worked with Guerra to create the mobile events site.

“I’m a Geekdom member,” Guerra said. “I’ve seen startups come and go out of Geekdom. I wanted to be a part of it and see how my company could grow.”
Vallejo is a student at CodeUp at Geekdom.

“I came to this wanting to plug into the entrepreneurial community in San Antonio,” he said.

The team behind Syndicated Video Network Television wants to tap into the city’s rich broadcasting history to create streaming online TV channels, said Luke Horgan, its founder. He created an example of a San Antonio channel at Purosa.snvtv.com.

“The next generation of TV could be created here,” Horgan said.

Got Lunch? Cater2.Me Wants to Feed the Bellies of Austin’s Startup Community

July 10, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Zach Yungst and Alex Lorton, co-founders of Cater2.me

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Countless workers face the same problem every day when they get to their office.

What’s for lunch?

Cater2.me aims to solve that problem for companies and their employees in Austin.

The San Francisco-based startup launched last month in Austin and now has nine employees in its local office. The bootstrapped startup with 60 employees nationwide also has operations in New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

Cater2.me expects to have between ten and 15 employees in Austin by the end of the year including sales staff, operations team and managers.

While some large companies have personal chefs and built out kitchens, many startups do not have those kinds of facilities. That’s where Cater2.me comes in. It caters lunch for startups and small to medium sized businesses.

The company, founded in 2010, built an order management system that helps gather and hold preferences for clients including budgets, menus and other attributes but its “secret sauce” is in how all of that gets mashed together.

The startup was born out of a hunger for diverse food at lunchtime.

“My business partner Zach and I were working for financial services companies,” said Alex Lorton, co-founder of Cater2.me. The company brought in lunch daily, but the food was kind of bland and boring like turkey sandwiches and mixed green salads, he said.

“I didn’t like to complain about a free lunch,” Lorton said.

But Lorton and Co-Founder Zach Yungst thought they could do a better job. They found local vendors and assessed whether they could handle a large catering order and handle the service side. They worked a lot with local mom and pop restaurants and food trucks.

“Startups and tech companies are a large segment of our customer base,” Lorton said.

Providing lunch to employees can help a company build its corporate culture by encouraging employees to bond over a good meal and it can positively impact productivity, Lorton said.

“That shared table is kind of the modern day fire pit,” Lorton said. “It’s where people gather and share stories.”

Cater2.me’s role is to help companies manage the whole process of having a food program. Its only requirement is a minimum of ten people.

For example, if a 75 person company wants to get lunch on Monday, Wednesday and Friday and offer different types of food along with vegetarian and gluten-free options, Cater2.me takes the hassle out of all of that. Its current Austin-based clients include Dropbox, Atlassian and Indeed. A few of the local eateries they are working with are Regal Ravioli, Hot Mamas Café, Austin Daily Press and Roll On.

“Whenever we move to a new city we look for a couple of things – a lot of growth and an active tech community,” Lorton said. “That’s something Austin has in spades. We also look for a really great food community – a lot of food trucks and food festivals. We don’t want to go to a city with all they have is chain restaurants.”

Cater2.me also has its eyes on Houston, Dallas and San Antonio for future expansion.

Dell Selects ihiji and Open Labs of Austin for its Founders Club 50

May 17, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The Dell Center for Entrepreneurs last week announced its first Founders Club 50, an exclusive group of high growth tech startups, including two from Austin.
Dell selected ihiji, which makes remote diagnostic tools for computer networks and Open Labs, a stage lighting and technology company focused on the music industry.
Dell plans to announced its new Founders Club 50 class twice a year and it’s currently accepting application for its fall class.
“The Founders Club 50 is a great opportunity for these start-ups, all of whom are on the verge of reaching the next level of innovation,” Ingrid Vanderveldt, Dell Entrepreneur in Residence, said in a news release. “The program creates a win-win; by serving as a trusted advisor to these companies at this crucial early stage, we hope they will continue to grow with Dell in the future. Dell has always seen the value in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship, and the Founders Club 50 is the natural next step in continuing to help high-growth start-ups expand their networks, find valuable resources and use technology to transform their businesses.”
During the two-year term as Founders Club 50 companies, they receive help from Dell in the areas of sales, technology, access to capital, networking and marketing. When they complete the program, they become Club Alumni. Dell has more than 115 alumni companies including Skyera, CloudFlare, Everloop and Mass Relevance.
Members of Dell’s first class are from 17 states and various industries including analytics, healthcare, enterprise solutions, entertainment, IT and mobile computing.

Austin Startup Games to Showcase Entrepreneurial Athletes

January 10, 2014 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

It’s less than a month to go until the 2014 Olympic Winter Games in Sochi kicks off.
But if you can’t wait that long and you can’t travel to Russia, there’s a solution much closer in Austin.
It’s the Austin Startup 2014 Winter Games! The event begins at 1 p.m. at the Austin Music Hall on Jan. 25th. Tickets cost $10 to attend.
The Austin Startup Games are like the Olympics for nerds. A bunch of startups will come together to compete in Ping-Pong, foosball, darts, shuffleboard, flip cup, beer pong, giant Connect4, Pop-A-Shot and trivia. And if past games are any indication, these athletes will also imbibe a lot of beer and other refreshments.
The Austin Startup Games started in 2012 by entrepreneurs from eight startup companies. The goal is to give back to the community and have fun doing it. All of the money raised gets donated to local charities.
The Austin Startup Games has since doubled in size with 16 startups competing in the winter games. Those startups are Adlucent, Adometry, Boundless Network, Build a Sign, Capital Factory, Chaotic Moon, CSID, Headspring, Living Direct, Map My Fitness, Main Street Hub, Mass Relevance, SpareFoot, Spiceworks, Spredfast and uShip.
Also, the CEOs of those startups will compete in the final event of the game, which is a surprise and it will not be revealed until the games begin. Last year, the surprise event was a mechanical bull.

Innovator’s Insights: Spotlight on Scott Harmon, CEO of Noesis Energy

December 20, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By GREGORY WISE
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Scott Harmon, CEO of Noesis Energy

Noesis Energy founder and CEO Scott Harmon didn’t set-out to be a serial entrepreneur, but having now started and grown no fewer than four Austin tech companies the title seems to fit.

As part of the leadership team at Tivoli Systems, the poster-child for Austin tech-business success, Harmon helped guide the company to a 1995 IPO and $750 million acquisition by IBM. Not long after, he co-founded Motive, where as president and CEO he led another IPO and grew the company to $100 million in revenue. After leaving Motive, Harmon became CEO of AlterPoint, leading that company to a strategic acquisition.

Today, he seems completely in his element as CEO of venture-backed Noesis Energy, a position he’s held since February 2011. “We’re heavily focused on the opportunity to save $50 million in energy that’s wasted in commercial buildings every year,” Harmon says. “We want to help people reduce that waste.”

Think of Noesis as a match-making service, Harmon says. “We connect building engineers, facility managers, real estate managers, real estate portfolio owners, building owners – anyone who owns a building and pays an energy bill – to energy saving technologies.” Put another way, Harmon jokes, “we’re a dating website for energy efficiency.”

According to Harmon, about a third of Noesis’ customers are public sector institutions, primarily state agencies and municipalities, with the other two-thirds being private-sector. But in both cases the customers’ goal is the same, to reduce spending. Often customers will come to Noesis with a specific energy-saving goal in-place.

“Many businesses will set an annual energy reduction target and it’s usually about five percent,” said Harmon. “Customers look for guidance, counsel and solutions from Noesis. We want to be a trusted partner to the customer. People aren’t confident in sourcing directly from the vendors.

“There are 8,000 companies in the US that sell technology related to energy consumption or efficiency. Talk to their VP’s of Sales and they will commonly say, ‘our technology is too complicated and we’d love a better way to get our technologies into the market.’”

When it comes to acting as a partner, Noesis puts its money where its mouth is. The company makes money as a percentage of customers’ energy savings. The more successful Noesis is at helping a customer reduce energy expenses, the greater the revenue potential.

Executive Q&A with Scott Harmon

Q. What does a “typical” day look like for you?

A. As one of the founders I wanted a scenario where it was possible to work from home. We’d all seen Office Space (Mike Judge’s 1999 workplace satire) enough; we were tired of the cube race. Today I split my time almost evenly between working at the office, from home and on the road. It’s made the lifestyle of this industry better for me; much better than being in an office from 7:00AM to 7:00PM then seeing your family only after that. I embrace a more flexible and connected way of working. I think if you want to kind of keep doing it (working in the start-up/early stage environment) you have to achieve some balance.

Q. What part of your job gives you the most satisfaction?

A. I’m still a technology geek. I graduated from Iowa State, where I went on a wrestling scholarship, earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science. I like the building process and interacting with people who build things. The whole process of building has always given me a big charge. I love to build things.

Q. What are the qualities that make someone good at your job?

A. Competitiveness. I’m competitive. I think competition brings out the best in people. It tells you what you’re good at. Tells you what you’re not good at. It’s invigorating.

Q. What the most difficult part of your job?

A. I think for me it’s always wishing you could go bigger and faster. In a perfect world you could have the scale of a larger company with the nimbleness of a start-up.

Q. What experience, or experiences, best prepared you for your job?

A. The way I grew-up in Iowa. I grew-up 50 miles from the Field of Dreams cornfield. It was a very rural, very-Midwestern upbringing. That, wrestling, and majoring in Computer Sciences all prepared me.

Q. Why do you choose to live and work in Central Texas, as opposed to other tech-centric parts of the country?

A. It has the best blend of the various lifestyles. You’ve got the tech community, it’s affordable, and it’s a good place to raise a family. Honestly, I don’t think there’s even a close second. If you want to do the “All-Tech” thing, go to Silicon Valley, but you’ll be back.

Q. Outside of your current position, what’s your dream job and why?

A. It would be another start-up.

Q. What’s the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

A. Always know what can kill your business versus what can only hurt you. As a CEO I feel a really strong sense of personal responsibility and care for the people who work for me. It’s really heavy, in a good way, it’s a big motivation.

Q. Who is your role model?

A. Bob Metcalfe. He is about great technology first. Bob is a great example.

Q. What’s the first electronic gadget you remember owning?

A. A cell phone. The cell phone collapsed distances more than anything that came before it.

Q. What’s the one piece of technology you couldn’t live without?

A. My laptop. It’s still the most productive thing I have. The laptop crushes the tablet, iPhone, any other piece of media I have. It’s far and away my favorite.

Q. What do you think is the most important technology in-use today?

A. Search is the most important; it’s how anybody can know anything. That’s huge. The personal cost of search approaches zero, yet you can know anything. You can know the biology of your cancer if you’re a cancer patient, for example.

Q. What do you think is the most underrated technology in use today?

A. Meters, all types of meters. Meters are going everywhere. Google Traffic has individuals metering the distance they’ve traveled in a certain amount of time, establishing traffic patterns. Energy meters are measuring energy at points in time. The interval for energy metering used to be a month. A Meter Reader would come around and read total consumption and peak consumption. Now energy is read every five minutes. This is the flip side of analytics.

And I think peer-to-peer connectivity is underrated; we’re just beginning to see the power of crowds. Noesis is a strong peer-to-peer example. People in the Noesis community advise each other on energy efficiency. I was just reading about peer-to-peer funding. A cool company called LendingClub that allows people to lend to other people. There’s Airbnb and others. The power of people to deal directly with each other. That scale, that enormity, is pretty fascinating.

Q. What do you think is the most overrated technology in use today?

A. The concept of the Smart Home is the most overrated. There’s no such thing as a Smart Home! And do you really want webcams throughout your house? That’s horrifying on so many different levels!

Gregory Wise, vice president with Weber Shandwick

Gregory Wise is an Austin-based marketing and communications professional with the PR firm Weber Shandwick. He can be reached at Gregory Wise
Editor’s Note: Gregory Wise will write the Innovator’s Insights column for Silicon Hills News on accomplished technology experts in Austin. To be considered for the column, please contact him at Gregory Wise.

TrueAbility’s IT Job Prediction Trends for 2014

December 9, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

TrueAbility Monday released its predictions for hiring trends for technology workers in 2014.
The San Antonio-based startup, founded in 2012, has analyzed data on more than 5,000 IT workers in the past year. It makes a cloud-based platform that evaluates the technical aptitude of IT employees by testing their skills online for job openings.

Team photo of TrueAbility, courtesy of the company.

TrueAbility, based at Geekdom, foresees an increase in demand for workers with configuration management skills and cloud computing skills.
In addition, companies will focus more on hiring the right people, than buying the right hardware, according to TrueAbility.
Workers who can demonstrate their skills and knowledge will trump those who might have years of experience.
For more predictions, visit TrueAbility’s blog.

Introducing AbilityScreen by TrueAbility from TrueAbility on Vimeo.

TrueAbility is an advertiser with SiliconHillsNews.com

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