Tag: University of Texas (Page 2 of 2)

10 Companies Shine at UT’s 1 Semester Startup Demo Day

April 27, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 8 Comments

All of the entrepreneurs presenting at the University of Texas’ 1 Semester Startup Spring Demo Day Thursday night appeared polished and professional.
The 10 company teams had solid ideas and at least one, PhotoWhoa is already turning a profit.
Josh Baer, one of the instructors and founder of Capital Factory and with UT’s Department of Computer Science, said he’s already recruiting for the next class and is looking for more mentors and motivated students.
The class teaches entrepreneurs how to write a business plan, market their products, network with other business professionals and pitch their ideas to potential investors. They also must write one single page paper a week along with two ten page papers. Baer along with Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation in the University of Texas Cockrell School of Engineering and Johnny Butler of the IC2 Institute and the McCombs School of Business, also tells them to look out for their health.
“Doing a startup is not about staying up all night and eating bad food,” Baer said.
No one has failed the 1 Semester Startup class yet, but a couple of students dropped out, said Metcalfe. He doesn’t’ have a favorite company, because “I’m not allowed to have such things.”
He likes the smaller size of the class, but if they received an overwhelming number of applications from good companies they might expand it, he said.
For the Spring, 1 Semester Startup got dedicated space for its companies at Longhorn Camp, a 30,000 square foot building. It housed about 25 companies altogether. The others are from student entrepreneurs not enrolled in the class. But the space is going away at the end of the semester so 1 Semester Startup is looking for a new home.
“We failed to create the critical mass I was looking for,” Metcalfe said. He’s a general partner with Polaris Venture Partners in Boston. Polaris runs four incubators around the world. Whenever he visits them they are seething with energy and ideas and people running around, he said. The difference is they are all out of school and they dedicate most of their time to their startups. At UT, students have other courses and social lives, Metcalfe said. The kind of physical interactions and esprit de corps that exists in outside incubators is tough to replicate in a campus environment, he said.
Overall, UT has made a big commitment to fostering startups by students, said Thor Lund, student government president at UT-Austin.
Lund and Wills Brown, student government vice president, plan to write legislation creating a student run accelerator on campus aimed at helping students start and fund businesses. They spoke briefly to the crowd of about 300 people attending the Demo Day event at the LBJ Library and Museum.
“The student accelerator is aimed at getting students connected and empowered,” said Lund.
Nick Spiller, a junior and chairman of the UT entrepreneurship council, runs UThinkTank at the Longhorn Camp along with three other founders.
“What we really want to do next year is to reinvent Longhorn Camp to be for the students by the students,” Spiller said.
Eventually he has hopes to create a Big 12 Startup Team to collaborate with other universities.
“We want to create jobs, create wealth and clear up our national debt,” Spiller said. “We need to get the cash flowing in the right direction.”
The latest crop of entrepreneurs at UT showed Thursday night that they are serious about business. All of the companies planned to continue operating beyond the end of class. All of them are bootstrapped with some friends and family money backing them.

Photos courtesy of 1 Semester Startup

The first team to present, Agreeon created a mobile phone accounting and payment system to track and pay small debts.
Its primary revenue stream comes from a fee on all transactions and secondary streams come from a coupon portal for restaurants, leads to financial institutions and app purchases for advanced features. The company is offering a special to people who pre-register for the AgreeOn app by Friday midnight, they will waive the transaction fees. The app is in beta and is expected to launch within two months.

Next up, Simeon Duong introduced beDJ in which “You are the DJ.”
Duong and four other engineering friends didn’t like the music in a coffee shop in which they were studying. They decided to do something about it. They wrote code. They created an app that lets people control the music in a coffee shop, nightclub, store and other places.
“We’re using music as an icebreaker to promote conversation on a micro specific level,” Duong said.
The beDJ app just launched Thursday in three app stores. Austin is the test market to understand how the app functions in the ecosystem, Duong said. Then, the app will expand to New York and Los Angeles.
“We’re developing a communications platform that has never been done before,” Duong said.
A veteran from the first 1 Semester Startup course, Power Smart Labs aims to reduce electrical costs for data center operators. The company’s software works to maximize efficiency at the data center by turning off servers when they are not needed.
Its competition is Vmware, MiserWare, HP, Dell and Google. But Power Smart Labs targets a data center with

Photo courtesy of 1 Semester Startup

annual revenue of $12 million. It predicts it can save that customer $115,000 a year on a $750,000 electric bill. By the end of the summer, Power Smart Labs will be installed for a data center customer.
“Put your checkbooks down, because we’re not looking for an investment today,” said Michael May. The company will most likely seek a $50,000 investment in August, May said.
Another veteran of the first class, Predictable Data seeks to fix and filter data for companies.
“People aren’t predictable but your data can be,” Smurdon said.
Every day, 230,000 people move, change jobs, get married or die, he said. “Businesses are never done cleaning their data,” Smurdon said.
Poor quality data costs U.S. business more than $600 billion each year, Smurdon said. For example, Overstock.com had errors in 25 percent of its order forms, which cost the companies millions.
Predictable Data has built a software program that is scalable and secure and relies on proprietary algorithms to clean data, Smurdon said. Its aiming its product at small and medium sized businesses.

David Isquick and Dan Driscoll, founders of ReQwip along with Jay Combs, Matt Wedgwood and Saaket Dubey.

On the consumer side, ReQwip wants to help families sell sporting goods gear that they no longer need through its niche marketplace, said Dan Driscoll, cofounder.
A recent New York Times article showed that parents spend about $500 for sports gear every year just for little league baseball, he said
ReQwip’s peer to peer marketplace first plans to sell bikes and accessories and then move into team sports. The company makes money by taking 10 percent on each sale or rental.
ReQwip has created a mobile app. Dealing with a locally based trusted source is less risky than selling on Craigslist or eBay, Driscoll said.
“We are ReQwip and we are changing the game by making it easy to buy, sell and rent sports gear affordably” Driscoll said.
In addition to Driscoll, the team behind ReQwip includes Jay Combs, an MBA student, David Isquick, MBA student, Matt Wedgwood and Saaket Dubey. The team members met each other last Fall during a 3 Day Startup weekend. They came up with the idea and then decided to apply to the class, Combs said.
“The class was inspirational,” Isquick said. Mentors like Carol Thompson, Ben Dyer, Ryan Pitylak and others helped the company tackle business problems and deal with technical issues, he said.
“The mentors were phenomenal,” Isquick said. “They gave us lots of key insights.”

Matthew Amme, Agee Springer and Pranav Desai, founders of Solspot Systems

Another veteran from the first class, Solspot Systems is creating solar charging stations for electric vehicles. It is working with Reva, an electric car manufacturer in India. By 2020, India is projected to have 7 million electric vehicles.
Solspot Systems is building a prototype at the JJ Pickle Research campus and expects to have it finished soon.
“We would like to be in production by the beginning of next year,” Springer said.
Stache Studios is also a repeat in the class.
“We make games like gentlemen” is their tag line. The company is making a game, Teknedia for PC, Mac and Linux users and another one for the IOS mobile platform.
Two of the companies zeroed in on the college market for their products.
Nowoncampus.com is an online events directory and aggregator that pulls information from Facebook to compile a weekly list of events at a college campus. The idea is to let students see the events they have not been invited to in case they might want to attend.
Personab.ly is an online registry of who like who, said Jimoh Ovbiagele, cofounder. The product is aimed at making dating simple and easy through online matchmaking. Its competition is DatemySchool.com, which has 100,000 users. It expects to release a beta version in the fall. The site is free. It makes it revenue by charging food and entertainment sites to advertise in its recommendation site for dates.
The site is even on Angellist.

Eric Yang and Kevin Tang, founders of PhotoWhoa

Lastly, Eric Yang and Kevin Tang founded PhotoWhoa. Yang had already founded a photography software business with $3 million in revenue in two years.
The market for photography gear was $68.4 billion in 2011, Yang said. PhotoWhoa sells photography software and other products at a discount on its site.
After five months, PhotoWhoa has 15,000 subscribers and all of them are photographers, Yang said.
This month, PhotoWhoa will have revenue of $40,000, Yang said.
“That’s a small drop in the bucket,” Yang said. “The photography industry is growing at 8 percent a year.”
And PhotoWhoa wants to change the way photography products are sold, Yang said.
Getting the first 1,000 customers was the hardest, Yang said. But the class helped accelerate their business, he said. They learned from mentors how to maximize their use of Google Ad words to reduce their customer acquisition costs from $5 to 75 cents. They also learned how to build a network.
“Through Josh Baer we’ve been able to connect with people to do deals with,” Yang said.
PhotoWhoa is completely bootstrapped. Each founder put in $250 to startup the company. Five months later, PhotoWhoa is profitable and growing, Yang said.
Damon Clinkscales, an Austin software developer, volunteers with the 1 Semester Startup class as a mentor. He generally spends two to four hours a week helping Personab.ly, the company he helped out.
“I guess you could put as much time into it as you choose to,” Clinkscales said. He also served as a mentor for the first 1 Semester Startup Class last fall. This class is smaller and more focused, Clinkscales said. They chose companies that were beyond the idea phase, he said.
“It is really awesome that they are getting this experience now,” Clinkscales said. “Just imagine them in a few years.”

UT's Spring 1 Semester Startup

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eyeQ wins the Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition Finals

February 16, 2012 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The startup eyeQ won the 2012 Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition Finals last night at the University of Texas’s McCombs School of Business.
The founders, Michael Garel, CEO, and Harish Jayakumar, CTO, beat 15 other teams during the semifinals held earlier in February and three teams in the finals. The students will receive their MBAs this year. As winner of the competition, eyeQ receives a one-year membership and an office in the Austin Technology Incubator. eyeQ will also go on to compete in the 2012 Global Venture Labs Investment Competition that will be held in Austin in early May.

eyeQ's founders Michael Garel and Harish Jayakumar pitch their company

The judges thought eyeQ had the best idea, strongest management team and the clearest and most persuasive business plan and oral presentation.
eyeQ has a system to monitor consumer purchasing behavior which includes in-store cameras, analytical software and a smart screen. The system is designed to encourage consumers to buy products in the store instead of going online to make a purchase.
Every month, people use Amazon’s smart phone price scanning app to do about 20 million product searches, Garel said. That means the consumers go to the store to evaluate the product they want to buy and then they scan it with their phones and buy it online.
“Something needs to be done to prevent these online retailers from hijacking sales from brick and mortar stores,” Garel said.
A $17 billion market exists for analyzing and influencing consumer behavior, he said.
“Retail stores have a compelling need to understand and influence consumer purchasing behavior and provide an “online” experience in store,” Garel said.
That’s where eyeQ comes in. It monitors consumer purchase behavior at the shelf level with eyeQ’s dedicated camera, software and server. The system can then offer the consumer product information on a smart screen at the shelf and display a special price if the consumer buys in the next 60 minutes.
eyeQ has entered into a beta test at Golfsmith’s stores. It then plans to approach Home Depot, Costco Wholesale and other retailers like Target, Lowe’s and Best Buy
eyeQ is seeking to raise $450,000 to finish development and do the initial deployment of its system this year. Next year, eyeQ plans to raise another $850,000 to expand to 30 stores. Its goal is to be in 220 stores by 2014. The founders have already invested $44,000 in the project.
eyeQ competed against Embarkly, Athena Laboratories and Simple Invest.

Rob Adams, director of the Venture Labs Investment Competition, announcing eyeQ as the winner

For the first time in the competition’s history, the judges did not declare a second, third and fourth place finisher, said Rob Adams, director of the Venture Labs Investment Competition. He made the announcement at a gathering at Gabriel’s at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center following the competition.
“The rest of the competitors were too evenly matched,” he said.

One of the competitors was Embarkly, a pet boarding service, seeking to become the “Expedia” of the $2 billion industry.
The service helps pet owners make reservations at pet boarding facilities, said Travis Skelly, one of its founders. Nicole Dimetman is the cofounder and CEO.
“The problem is that finding a place to board my pet sucks,” Skelly said. “It’s time consuming, inconvenient and just dropping a dog off at some random location is not ideal.”
The Embarkly online marketplace allows users to log on and make a reservation at a boarding facility with little hassle, Skelly said.
Skelly estimates the company could achieve potential annual revenue of $72.5 million with a 10 percent market stake. It faces competition from Findpetcare.com, Petbookings.com, Dogboarding.com and others. The company makes money by generating leads for pet boarding facilities.
Embarkly is seeking $400,000 financing.
Simple Invest showed off its cloud-based automated platform that enables investors to diversify and rebalance their portfolio and improve their long-term investment results.

Texas Longhorn Network interviews Rohit Sharma, CEO of Simple Invest

Rohit Sharma, CEO, said diversification leads to investment success.
His product is aimed at the 96 million people in the U.S. with portfolios of $100,000 to $1 million.
Those investors have to chose among 7581 mutual funds and more than 4,500 broker dealers.
“The market is large,” Sharma said. “There is a genuine pain point.”
Next year, Simple Invest launches with five beta users. It plans to expand to 187,500 users by 2021 and revenue of $34 million.
Its competitors include spreadsheets, financial advisors, product providers and financial software.
Sharma is seeking $550,000 preferred equity for 17 percent stake in Simple Invest.
Athena Laboratories pitched its patented laser treatment for cellulite called FemtoSmooth.
FemtoSmooth is a pain-free, effective, cellulite removal involving a cool laser technology, which is high intensity laser treatment for a very short duration. It effectively treats the cause of cellulite and it’s minimally invasive. It only requires one treatment, which takes 20 to 30 minutes.
Athena Laboratories had the largest management team of all the competitors. The team is comprised of Albert Alvarez, Alex Garcia, Dr. Wendell Craig Johnson, Wayne P. Whitmore, Ravine Woods and Yewen (Wendy) Wu.
The cellulite treatment industry is a $6 billion market in the U.S. with 85 percent of women and 25 percent of men affected by cellulite, said Woods.
“There’s a market demand for an effective treatment for cellulite,” Woods said. “Over the last 10 years – cosmetic minimally invasive procedures are up 110 percent and cellulite treatments are up 30 percent.’’
So far, FemtoSmooth’s inventors have invested $1.4 million and they have 14 patents on the technology. The team is seeking another $7.5 million to take the product to market.
The company projects $45 million in revenue by 2017.

Silicon Hills Technology Weekly Round-Up

December 11, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

The shortage of technology workers in the Silicon Hills region continues. The Austin American-Statesman today reported that the recent trip technology CEOs from Austin took to California didn’t result in any new employees moving to Texas. Perhaps that’s why San Antonio-based Rackspace recently opened an office in San Francisco. The technology companies have to go where the talent resides. Also on Saturday, Rackspace held a recruiting event called Rackerpalooza at its Austin office. Rackspace also recently expanded its San Antonio headquarters.

On Friday, Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace, gave a talk at San Antonio’s Startup Ignite’s third monthly Hack-a-thon at the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio.

On Wednesday, Austin-based Portalarium, which makes games for social networks and mobile platforms, announced its first social network game, Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale. Gaming Legend Richard Garriott is developing the game, which will be available for a beta release later this year.

Also on Tuesday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that a group of investors including San Antonio Billionaire Red McCombs has invested $1.75 million in an Austin-startup called Bypass Lane, which has created an app that lets people order food and drinks from their seats in a stadium while watching an event.

On Tuesday, the University of Texas honored 40 inventors including Professor John Goodenough and Professor Adam Heller, pioneers of lithium batteries, according to this post from University President Bill Powers.

On Monday, Gowalla’s founder Josh Williams officially announced that Facebook had acquired the Austin-based start-up, but it didn’t acquire the company’s data. It mainly wanted their development team. The Austin American Statesman had a story on the acquisition and didn’t mention anything about the $10 million Gowalla raised in venture capital. But Michael Arrington at Uncrunched reported that the deal might be a liquidation and it was uncertain if investors would get their money back.

On Monday, Globalscape of San Antonio bought Tappin of Seattle in “a deal worth up to $17 million,” according to this story in TechFlash.

Bob Metcalfe’s pitch for 3Com

December 3, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Bob Metcalfe, photo courtesy of the University of Texas

At the Demo Day for One Semester Startup, one of the best pitches came from Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe.
Metcalfe, who moved to Austin in January, serves as professor of electrical engineering and director of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin.
This fall, Metcalfe, who also serves as general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, created a new class, One Semester Startup, along with Joshua Baer, entrepreneur and computer science specialist and John Butler, director of H.K. Entrepreneurship. On Thursday, 75 students pitched 20 startups.
But one of the most interesting ones came from Metcalfe, who halfway through the event, shared his 1980 pitch for 3Com, which sold Ethernet products. Just a few days earlier, Metcalfe had been in Japan receiving an award for his groundbreaking work at 3Com, according to this story in The Daily Texan, the UT newspaper.

A powerpoint slide form One Semester Startup

Metcalfe said he didn’t have any Powerpoint slides, because his company was founded eight years before Powerpoint. In fact, Metcalfe served on the board of directors of Forethought Inc. that invented Powerpoint, which Microsoft bought in 1987 for $14 million.
“3Com’s business plan is in my hand,” Metcalfe said. “It’s about 25 pages of text that was typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter.”
3Com stood for computers, communications and compatibility.
“Three standards and compatibility was our goal” Metcalfe said. “These three standards I’m about to mention were not standards at the time For example, UNIX (operating system), TCP-IP (networking technology) that was quite new. It would take 10 more years for it to be installed on the Internet.”
The last new standard they sought to establish was Ethernet, local area networking technology that allowed computer systems to share information.
“We were going to implement those three standards and sell them to other companies,” Metcalfe said.
But 3Com’s first product was a book. Metcalfe wrote a book outlining his vision for networked computers. Then he got a directory of venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley area and called them one by one and invited them to 3Com’s offices to listen to his pitch about the company. He talked to more than 100 venture capitalists during a two-year period, he said.
“They hated the pitch you are now hearing,” Metcalfe said. “But before I let them out, we got them to buy a copy of the book at $250 a copy. I would sell a book every single time.”
3Com’s second product was the implementation of TCP-IP networking technology on a 10 megabit per second modem. The company made Ethernet adapters for mini-computers and the Fax machines.
“Ethernet had been developed for PCs of which there weren’t any,” Metcalfe said.
The first Ethernet adapter cost $5,000, Metcalfe said.
“We anticipated there would be some price erosion,” Metcalfe said. “Ethernet adapters are now virtually free.”
Sun Microsystem was just getting started and bought 3Com’s multi-bus Ethernet.
“Very soon we were selling hundreds every month – hundreds of them,” Metcalfe said.
Then 3Com created an Ethernet product designed for a new computer called the IBM personal computer.
“Very soon we were shipping millions per month,” Metcalfe said. “This is what they call being in the vortex of the tornado and I recommend it highly.”
3Com decided to sell its product directly to consumers. But that was a really bad idea because the company didn’t have a way to reach those consumers.
“The next day we lucked out and they invented computer stores,” Metcalfe said. “We put our product in computer stores and the business took off.”
3Com had $5.7 billion in revenue in 1999.
“But everyone had $5.7 billion in revenue in 1999,” Metcalfe said.
Last year, 3Com became part of Hewlett Packard.
An audience member asked Metcalfe what would he do differently if he could change anything.
“Not one single thing” Metcalfe said. “It’s very dangerous to mess with the past. I would not change one thing about that outcome. It has all worked out perfectly and let’s not mess with it.”

UT’s One Semester Startup Demo Day

December 2, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

During the first One Semester Startup at the University of Texas, 75 students formed 20 companies.
Thursday night, the students behind those newly formed ventures pitched their startups to about 200 people, some students, university faculty, press, investors and entrepreneurs, gathered at the University of Texas stadium’s Red McCombs End Zone Club.
The pitches ranged from game apps to financial software to a solar powered car docking station to a new car company that wants to make 100 mile per gallon cars. The ideas centered around social networking, mobile and clean energy industries.
Professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise Bob Metcalfe led the class along with Joshua Baer, entrepreneur and computer science specialist and John Butler, director of H.K. Entrepreneurship Center.
The class focused on fostering entrepreneurship among undergraduates.
Throughout the semester, about 50 mentors volunteered their time to help the students. They also got to listen to advice from successful entrepreneurs like Michael Dell.
Dell, who founded his computer company in his UT dorm room and then dropped out, spoke to the class a few weeks ago and shared his entrepreneurial experiences during a question and answer session with Metcalfe.
Out of the 20 companies, two admitted Thursday night that they would not continue beyond the end of the semester.
Elben Shira with VisualKite, a social media dashboard for businesses to display tweets, check-ins and promotions, told the crowd that the team of three built and then tested the concept and then decided that it would not work.
“We couldn’t figure out a way to scale,” Shira said. “The value we could produce was not worth the cost.”
All three of the founders are graduating soon and they’re going to work for local startups. Shira, a senior in computer science, graduates in a few days and will go to work for Mass Relevance.
He hasn’t given up entirely on entrepreneurship.
“It’s always in my head,” he said. “I feel like it’s inevitable that it will happen.”
Shira wrote a blog post a long time ago blasting UT for doing a poor job of fostering student entrepreneurship. So when he heard about the class, he signed up right away.
Magis Isotopes, which involves the magnetic separation of isotopes, also bit the dust.
Mariel Bolhouse, a senior in biomedical engineering, worked with a physics professor on the idea, which she brought to One Semester Startup.
“We’re working hard today to solve yesterday’s problems tomorrow,” Bolhouse said during her pitch.
The university funded the venture with $400,000 in research money, but it will take three years before the technology is ready for commercialization. Bolhouse will graduate soon and move to San Francisco.
“I’m going to find another startup,” Bolhouse said. “It’s something that I enjoy doing.”
The experience she gained in class has ignited her entrepreneurial spirit.
“It was a really good learning experience,” Bolhouse said. “You get to learn the business by doing it.”
Solspot plans to continue on and is already working on a prototype of its electric vehicle solar car charging station.
“We believe the future is in solar energy,” Agee Springer, chief engineer for Solspot said. “We also believe the electric vehicle is part of that future.”
Solspot is working with an electric vehicle manufacturer in India to create its canopy car charging stations.
Solspot breaks ground Jan. 4th on its first prototype at the J.J. Pickle Research campus. The structure will be complete by the end of February, Springer said. He expects to have the final model in production by fall of 2012.
One Semester Startup gave Solspot connections to further its product.
“We had already been incorporated when we joined the class,” Springer said. “We were struggling to find our way and now we are way further along.”
To date, Solspot has bootstrapped its venture, but now the company is looking for angel funding, Springer said. One member of his team will participate in the next One Semester Startup, he said.
“It’s been a really fantastic experience,” he said.
Solspot also worked with mentor Julie Haugh, who runs a solar power monitoring systems company Greenhouse Computers. Her solar technology helped Solspot develop its product, Haugh said.

Laura Beck talks with Raj Mistry, CEO & Co-founder of MowGoo

Laura Beck, chief shortie at StripedShirt, a T-shirt company and a technology public relations expert, served as a mentor to five companies. Beck met all 20 companies during a speed-dating event at the beginning of the semester. She watched them evolve and mature. “To see these companies more than four months later and what they have done, I’m just so impressed with our next generation of business people.”
Predictable Data, which corrects, standardizes and appends missing database information for marketers, also plans to continue. The idea began when Dwayne Smurdon and Tye Harrison entered a hacking competition and came in second. They decided to take their idea into

The team behind Predictable Data

One Semester Startup. Smurdon, a senior majoring in psychology and computer science and Harrison, a senior in computer science, already have customers. When they graduate, they’ll work on the business full time. The class has helped them immensely through mentorships and building a network, Smurdon said.
“It’s helped us to meet the right people at the right time,” Smurdon said.
Ben Dyer, chairman of TechDrawl and a mentor, applauded the class overall.
“I thought this was an extraordinarily well done course,” Dyer said. “I think there will be several real companies that come out of this venture.”
Zilker Motors was one that Dyer helped mentor that he thinks has a bright future. The company headed up by Mark Wise, a senior in finance and Chinese, already has $50,000 in angel funding and its first customer. It’s building the Z-100, a car that can go 100 miles on one gallon of gasoline.
“They have a lot of momentum,” Dyer said. “They’re hell bent on making a successful business out of it.”
Zilker Motors needs $9 million to take its car to market. It’s currently raising stage one funding of $500,000 and another $500,000 during stage two, in which it plans to complete a prototype within 9 months. The cars will sell for about $55,000 to $60,000, Wise said. He needs to sell 1,080 to break even.
“What One Semester Startup has helped us do is get us involved in the local investment community,” Wise said. “Also, the wealth of knowledge and experience the mentors bring is just phenomenal.”
The next One Semester Startup begins in January and Baer, one of its creators, plans to change a few things. He wants to attract students who already have a company underway. He wants people who are passionately committed to their project.
“I think this class really exceeded my expectations in some ways. The university made it easy for us to work. Overall, I was impressed with the students” Baer said.
Some of the companies will get angel and venture funding to continue on, Baer said. A number of venture capitalists and angel investors attended the pitch session.

The UT band practiced while the companies pitched.

“A lot of these students were going to do this with or without the class,” Baer said. “The class didn’t make them do this.”
Next semester’s class will have fewer students and fewer companies, Metcalfe said. He’s looking for well formed teams to work on companies together. Some of the students in this class had varying levels of commitment to the project, he said.
Russell Hinds, an angel investor, mentor and managing director of RSH Ventures, thought a lot of the companies were too early in their development for funding, but he planned to follow a few.
“It’s like a rock band, you don’t know it’s going to last,” Hinds said.
But Hinds praised the students’ innovative ideas.
“It’s nice to be on the cutting edge of new ideas that are coming into this world,” Hinds said. “This is the birthing place for new ideas.”

Made In Austin career fair matches technology start-ups with students

November 30, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Local tech start-ups want to keep as much homegrown talent in town as possible.
So they created Made In Austin, a job fair that matches area students with start-ups looking for technology talent.
The first event, featuring 100 tech companies and more than 500 registered students, took place Tuesday night at the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center downtown.
The 3-hour job fair, which started at 6 p.m., drew a big crowd of students, some guys dressed in suits and ties, others wearing hoodies, jeans and polo shirts and some women in sweater dresses and knee-high boots.
The event organizers banned swag like free T-shirts, stickers and other giveaways. The crowd munched on pizza bagels and brownies and drank ice tea.
Jacqueline Hughes, founder of Austin Start-up Week, organized the event along with Joshua Baer, head of the Capital Factory and OtherInbox. Other organizers included Campus2Careers and other start-up companies. Large companies like American Express, Dell and Rackspace sponsored the tech meet-up.
At the OtherInBox table, Baer, CEO, had already collected several resumes and talked with lots of people. Baer has hired from local universities to fill openings at his start-up in the past. In fact, OtherInBox’s lead product developer started out as an intern when he was a student at St. Edward’s University.
“It’s worked really well for us,” Baer said. “ I love hiring really great experienced people. I also like hiring inexperienced passionate people who I can teach.”
Luke Carriere, who just founded Approachab.ly a few weeks ago at 3 Day Start-up Weekend San Antonio, had a place at a table recruiting Android and iPhone developers, Bluetooth and Near Field Communication specialists. He was also looking for marketers and sales staff.
“I’m looking for business majors who might be able to help me with market research,” Carriere said.
Events like Made In Austin help Carriere network and make connections that eventually help to further his business, he said. At a mobile conference a few weeks ago, he met a guy who has joined him to become technical co-founder of his start-up.
“What’s been amazing is meeting people who want to help you by opening up their rolodexes,” he said.
The event provided an opportunity to recruit young talent, said Ramin Jahedi, CEO and founder of CaniSolutions, restaurant consultants. He runs the start-up FindWaiters.com.
“Our market is just exploding,” Jahedi said. Early on during the evening, he had already collected a few resumes and talked with several people.
Patrick Mizer at SpareFoot also talked to a lot of students and planned to follow up with a few of them following the fair.
“We are looking to hire some young engineering talent,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of success hiring engineers in their last year of college.”
Kevin Chu, a junior majoring in management information systems at the University of Texas, attended the fair to find a Spring internship.
“Start-ups give you the opportunity to learn more,” he said. “They’re small so you can do a variety of jobs.”
Linda Ye, a junior majoring in management information systems, was also looking for a Spring internship with a start-up. She already has a summer internship set up with a large company.
“Austin is a start-up city,” Ye said. “Start-ups tend to be more flexible with hours. They are also able to teach you a lot. Start-ups fit me the best right now.”

Ethernet inventor wants to network startups to solve the world’s energy crisis

September 29, 2011 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

Bob Metcalfe, left, talks with audience members at the Clean Energy Venture Summit 2011 in Austin, following his speech

A network of entrepreneurs will solve the energy crisis.
That’s the belief of Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, founder of 3Com and co-inventor of Ethernet, a networking standard which links computers.
“The biggest lesson of the Internet that applies to energy is it was not built by incumbents but by startups fiercely competing,” Metcalfe told 400 people attending the Clean Energy Venture Summit 2011 Thursday afternoon.
“We have an ecology in which startups live,” Metcalfe said.
He dubs the current environment, the Doriot ecology, after the late George F. Doriot, a Harvard business school professor and one the first American venture capitalists.
The startup Doriot ecology contains six “major species,” including research professors, students, scaling entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, strategic partners and early adopters, Metcalfe said.
This semester, Metcalfe started a new program at the University of Texas called One-Semester Startup with 70 undergraduate students launching 20 companies. He is teaching them “how to use the machinery of free enterprise.” Out of the 20 companies, three of them are energy companies. One is Zilkermotors, which wants to create a 100 mile per gallon automobile.
“We’re not going to change venture capital to suit the requirements of energy,” Metcalfe said. “But we can change energy to meet the requirements of venture capital.”
Startup companies need to play within “this Doriot ecology,” he said.
One of the problems is that the energy startups are at the mercy of the turbulent energy marketplace.
“These poor startups in energy get slaughtered when the price of oil or solar goes down,” Metcalfe said. “In the last five years, the energy market has been disrupted by the discovery of vast amounts of natural gas. It’s cheap. It continues the de-carbonization of energy. So gas could damage startup innovation in energy.”
Also, the collapse and bankruptcy of Solyndra is a catastrophe for the “taxpayers and the government officers and the solar companies that are getting guilt by association,” Metcalfe said. In 2009, Solyndra received a $535 million loan guarantee from the Federal government to build a plant to make its solar photovoltaic panels. The company received millions more from venture capitalists and other investors.
“But it’s an inevitable catastrophe,” Metcalfe said. “I’m afraid we are learning the wrong lessons from Solyndra.”
Some people are saying that it is a really bad idea to manufacture anything in the U.S. in the wake of the Solyndra collapse. But that is “a bad lesson for us to learn from Solyndra,” Metcalfe said. The U.S. should be manufacturing solar panels, he said. Unfortunately, Solyndra’s bankruptcy has led to “the criminalization of entrepreneurial failure,” Metcalfe said. “That is a blow to our innovation system.”

The core lesson from Solyndra is “premature scaling,” Metcalfe said. The company faced enormous pressure to expand quickly and solve the environmental crisis and create jobs, he said. So it expanded its operations too quickly.

“Startups face lots of pressures to scale,” Metcalfe said. “You need to resist those pressures.”
Metcalfe has put his money in several clean tech companies. He has invested in five energy startups including Zigbee, which makes software for smart meters for the home. He also invested in Infinite Power Solutions, which makes the world’s smallest batteries and Sun Catalytix, an energy storage and renewable fuels technology company. Silicon wafer manufacturer, 1366 Technologies, another of his investments, has also received a $150 million loan guarantee from the Federal government. It is building a 10 megawatt plant to make sure the company’s technology can scale properly, Metcalfe said. The company has been damaged by the failure of Solyndra, he said. He also invests in SiOnyx, which makes black silicon used to enhance the response of photovoltaic cells.