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Top Workplaces AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN, 2011, 2012, 2013
Rockets launching are a symbol of Texas’ rich history in the space industry. Although innovation has become a buzzword in many circles it still rings true in Texas and the neighboring states of Louisiana and Mississippi, which all have NASA facilities. Space exploration is at that heart of innovation. First, the nation raced to put astronauts on the Moon. Mission accomplished. Next, NASA built Skylab and then took 10 years and 30 missions to complete the International Space Station. In September, NASA announced a $6.2 billion contact with private companies SpaceX, a startup, and Boeing to shuttle astronauts to the ISS.
Talk about big ideas. Texas has ideas as big as the state. And that’s evident when you look at the tech startups coming out of Central Texas. They aim to tackle big problems and deliver clever solutions. The ecosystem of investors, law firms, accountants, public relations firms, accelerators and incubators, banks, universities, government departments, chambers and support agencies all help to make this a strong region for technology and innovation. But it’s the people who make things happen. And in this issue, you’ll meet one of them, Jacqueline Hughes, creator of the Austin Startup Week. And we’ll introduce you to even more people who make up the great tech scene in our next issue. For now, enjoy these stories of entrepreneurs creating something from nothing and pushing the envelope of innovation.
And now NASA has sets its sights on taking humans to Mars. Without a doubt, the tech industry is white-hot and taking off in Austin and San Antonio. The sky is the limit.
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Silicon Hills News Tech Startups Index 1 3 to 5 6&7 9 & 10 12
–Overview of Central Texas’ Thriving Tech Startups – Cratejoy Builds a Better Box Subscription Service – Battle of the Bands – Promoter.io – Able’s New Approach to Collaborative Lending
20 21 22 23 24
14 & 15 – Massage.com Wants to Take the
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16 to18– Spotlight on Jacqueline Hughes,
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Stress Out of Getting a Massage
Creator of Austin Startup Week
– Texas’ New Equity-Based Crowdfunding Rules – A Roundup of Investment Firms – Top Tech Policy to Watch in Texas – YupiCall Wants to Connect People Internationally for Less Money – OneSpot Brings Relevance to Internet Ads – Five Tech Startups to Watch in San Antonio – Five Tech Startups to Watch in Austin
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Contact Cari Robinson today. ï EDQN61% FRP _ .DQVDV ï 2NODKRPD ï 7H[DV
By Leslie Anne Jones, Reporter with Silicon Hills News
In our era of multitudinous, fragmented e-commerce, there’s a box subscription service for just about anything – baby clothes, lingerie, gluten-free food, gourmet candy. But until Cratejoy, there was no one-stop platform where box curators could get their businesses off the ground. Cratejoy founder Amir Elaguizy sold his Internet poker datamining startup to gaming company Zynga in 2011. He continued to work at Zynga for a couple years. After that, the next thing he wanted to do was make a company that could help small businesses and put people on track to becoming their own bosses. “I thought honestly I was going to be starting a little hobby,” says Cratejoy user Amber Golightly who is the founder of The Austin BatBox, which curates local products. She started in May, and thanks in part to the host of services she receives through Cratejoy, box curation is now her full-time endeavor. Back in 2012, Elaguizy started a new venture with his long-
Photos courtesy of Devaki Knowles
time business partner Alex Morse. They went through several iterations before honing in on the idea that would spur Cratejoy. In summer of 2013, they were accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program with an idea for a “push-button” solution that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to start small businesses. At the program, Elaguizy met another entrepreneur who was selling women’s clothing through a box subscription service. Elaguizy and Morse started doing research, calling about 200 people who were in the box-subscription business. Quickly they realized just about everyone was facing similar basic business problems. “We were on a hack of a bunch of e-commerce platforms – a little bit on shopify, another recurring billing system,” recalls entrepreneur Dan Scudder who runs Root Bizzle, a necktie subscription company. Scudder was one of the people Elaguizy initially talked to for research purposes and is now a Cratejoy client. 3
guy with a lawn maintenance business: He has the same clients all the time, but wants to streamline his business process online. Within the next year, Elaguizy has plans to build a marketplace where people can shop for different kinds of box subscriptions. To date, Cratejoy has facilitated 22,000 shipments and deliveries in 52 countries. Elaguizy subscribes to every merchant who is using his platform, so his office has plenty of goodies lying about – vitamins, tea, paintbrushes, and a high-quality plush child’s toy. He likes working with box curators: They tend to be people who are passionate about their product and committed to delivering quality since every month they must continue to impress their customers. He says his engineers like receiving immediate feedback from their merchant community and the boxes themselves are fun, but what keeps Elaguizy most excited about Cratejoy? Subscription box curators are often people who are passionate about a particular area of commerce. For instance, one entrepreneur in Elaguizy’s beta test is a former art student who curates boxes full of sample supplies so that artists can more affordably try out new products. In other words, box subscription providers aren’t necessarily e-commerce masters or people who are equipped to code. If you run a box subscription service, you can either pay someone to build out your website and e-commerce functions, or you can cobble together existing services – one for payment, another for subscription collection, another for analytics – that don’t work quite optimally and are not integrated. The first solution can be expensive, the latter is cumbersome. With what they’d learned, Elaguizy and Morse began coding in fall of 2013. They kept their heads down through the end of the year and by January they had a prototype of Cratejoy, a onestop service that would make it easy to begin a box subscription. Cratejoy’s offerings include, web hosting and page templates with mobile integration, a subscription billing management system and business analytics. By the time they were ready to start their private beta test, Elaguizy says they already had a waitlist of 800 merchants, despite not having done any advertising. What happened was during the research phase Elaguizy had told box subscriptioners what he planned on creating, whom then in turn told others box entrepreneurs. They quickly collected $50,000 in pre-payments from merchants eager enough to pay to enroll in the private beta. At the moment, Cratejoy has 120 companies enrolled and its waitlist has climbed into the thousands. Elaguizy says they’ll be ready for public beta within the next six months. He says that he and Morse bucked the “fast and crappy,” get-it-out-as-fast-as-possible startup model. He wants the service to be near perfect before it’s fully unveiled. One of the most rewarding developments so far, Elaguizy says, is that since the private beta began he’s seen three of his users quit their day jobs to be full-time box subscriptions business people. One surprising development has been that 30 percent of demand for Cratejoy has been for subscriptions services rather than boxes. One user is The Fox Society, an Austin-based service that plans date nights for couples. Elaguizy said he’s fielded interest from a 4
“I’m interested because of the people who quit their jobs.” In our era of multitudinous, fragmented e-commerce, there’s a box subscription service for just about anything –baby clothes, lingerie, gluten-free food, gourmet candy. But until Cratejoy, there was no one-stop platform where box curators could get their businesses off the ground. Cratejoy founder Amir Elaguizy sold his Internet poker datamining startup to gaming company Zynga in 2011. He continued to work at Zynga for a couple years.After that, the next thing
someone to build out your website and e-commerce functions, or you can cobble together existing services – one for payment, another for subscription collection, another for analytics – that don’t work quite optimally and are not integrated. The first solution can be expensive, the latter is cumbersome. With what they’d learned, Elaguizy and Morse began coding in fall of 2013. They kept their heads down through the end of the year and by January they had a prototype of Cratejoy, a onestop service that would make it easy to begin a box subscription. Cratejoy’s offerings include, web hosting and page templates with mobile integration, a subscription billing management system and business analytics. By the time they were ready to start their private beta test, Elaguizy says they already had a waitlist of 800 merchants, despite not having done any advertising.
he wanted to do was make a company that could help small businesses and put people on track to becoming their own bosses. “I thought honestly I was going to be starting a little hobby,” says Cratejoy user Amber Golightly who is the founder of The Austin BatBox, which curates local products. She started in May, and thanks in part to the host of services she receives through Cratejoy, box curation is now her full-time endeavor. Back in 2012, Elaguizy started a new venture with his long-time business partner Alex Morse. They went through several iterations before honing in on the idea that would spur Cratejoy. In summer of 2013, they were accepted into the Y Combinator accelerator program with an idea for a “push-button” solution that would make it easier for entrepreneurs to start small businesses. At the program, Elaguizy met another entrepreneur who was selling women’s clothing through a box subscription service. Elaguizy and Morse started doing research, calling about 200 people who were in the box-subscription business. Quickly they realized just about everyone was facing similar basic business problems. “We were on a hack of a bunch of e-commerce platforms – a little bit on shopify, another recurring billing system,” recalls entrepreneur Dan Scudder who runs Root Bizzle, a necktie subscription company. Scudder was one of the people Elaguizy initially talked to for research purposes and is now a Cratejoy client. Subscription box curators are often people who are passionate about a particular area of commerce. For instance, one entrepreneur in Elaguizy’s beta test is a former art student who curates boxes full of sample supplies so that artists can more affordably try out new products. In other words, box subscription providersaren’t necessarily e-commerce masters or people who are equipped to code.
What happened was during the research phase Elaguizy had told box subscriptioners what he planned on creating, whom then in turn told others box entrepreneurs. They quickly collected $50,000 in pre-payments from merchants eager enough to pay to enroll in the private beta. At the moment, Cratejoy has 120 companies enrolled and its waitlist has climbed into the thousands. Elaguizy says they’ll be ready for public beta within the next six months. He says that he and Morse bucked the “fast and crappy,” get-it-out-as-fast-as-possible startup model. He wants the service to be near perfect before it’s fully unveiled. One of the most rewarding developments so far, Elaguizy says, is that since the private beta began he’s seen three of his users quit their day jobs to be full-time box subscriptions business people. One surprising development has been that 30 percent of demand for Cratejoy has been for subscriptions services rather than boxes. One user is The Fox Society, an Austin-based service that plans date nights for couples. Elaguizy said he’s fielded interest from a guy with a lawn maintenance business: He has the same clients all the time, but wants to streamline his business process online. Within the next year, Elaguizy has plans to build a marketplace where people can shop for different kinds of box subscriptions. To date, Cratejoy has facilitated 22,000 shipments and deliveries in 52 countries. Elaguizy subscribes to every merchant who is using his platform, so his office has plenty of goodies lying about – vitamins, tea, paintbrushes, and a high-quality plush child’s toy. He likes working with box curators: They tend to be people who are passionate about their product and committed to delivering quality since every month they must continue to impress their customers. He says his engineers like receiving immediate feedback from their merchant community and the boxes themselves are fun, but what keeps Elaguizy most excited about Cratejoy? “I’m interested because of the people who quit their jobs.”
If you run a box subscription service, you can either pay 5
Austin Technology Council Battle of the Bands By Susan Lahey, Reporter with Silicon Hills News
There are moments in a person’s life when the stars line up and they are—at least for that moment—totally cool. Take geeks. Geeks used to be completely uncool, juxtaposed against people who played in a band who were inherently cool. But now, geeks are just about the coolest, and geeks who play in a band? Wow. Which brings us to the Austin Technology Council’s Battle of the Bands that will kick off Austin Startup Week October 6 at Mohawk. Battle of the Bands was a notion ATC came up with last year and frankly, said ATC president and CEO Julie Huls, they didn’t know whether it would fly. “We were looking for a fun activity to do and a way to showcase our member companies,” she said. “We had been hearing about the crossover between music and tech, a lot of people in tech play music. We wanted to showcase their talents in a way that was a unique, different, fun way for companies to compete with one another.” But they didn’t know if anyone would show up. As it turned out, 1,000 people attended last year. Battle of the Bands, Huls said, is a great chance for Austin to shine in front of companies that might 6
be in town for Startup Week trying to decide whether to locate here, as well as for companies that are recruiting, to demonstrate some of their internal culture for people interested in relocating.
The Contenders This year, about 20 bands applied and 11 will play, largely chosen on a first-come-first-served basis. The bands are: DevDigital— Mitch and the Texas Jam Band SailPoint— Him and Her Crew & Justin Big and Black Heart SpareFoot— Boogaloo Grove HP— HP Austin Rocks MapMyFitness— Digital Tiger Spredfast— Golden Solid BazaarVoice— Feedback Reachforce— Vorcha WPEngine— The L4s Securenet— $$ Athenahealth— P1 Each band gets two songs in a time span of 15 minutes.
Musicians Who Code In order to play, bands had to be tech people employed by Austin tech companies, though they didn’t all have to be employed by the same tech company. Golden Solid from Spredfast, for example, includes drummer Chad Gowan and bassist Zac Kloepping, both software engineers at Spredfast. But it also includes vocalist and guitarist Sam Berniard, storage marketing manager at Dell, and guitarist and keyboardist Ian White, who is a software engineer at T3. Gowan and Kloepping have played with the others in prior bands. “I think Austin is the big correlation (between music and tech),” Gowan said. “A giant percent of people you meet are musicians or at least have an appreciation for music. And the tech world is really hot in Austin, there are a lot of companies moving in and a lot of good developers…. Being in a band is kind of a do-it-yourself thing and staying up with latest technology is do-it-yourself too.” Previously Gowan and Kloepping said, they played in bands that focused on complex music, syncopated rhythms, similar to the Police. Their current band is more “melodically driven,” more like a cross between the Beach Boys and the Foo Fighters. Something people can sing along to. It’s less about showing off and more about entertaining people, they said. SpareFoot’s Boogaloo Grove, on the other hand, leans toward funk. “We gravitated toward a funk jam thing,” said “let’s just get together and see what happens,” said Ari Dvorin, saxophonist, base guitarist, and chef for SpareFoot. Their music might incorporate a variety of flavors, including hip hop, he said. “Around the office one of our extracurricular activities is jam sessions,” said SpareFoot developer Alan Nguyen, who plays multiple instruments and hopes to be a professional musician some day. “We thought, ‘We play music recreationally, why not form into
something solid for battle of the tech bands?” They also hope to perform at SpareFoot’s SXSW party. In fact, a lot of tech organizations have loosely organized musical jams and bands, as do Capital Factory and Techstars. That makes sense since, besides the fact that these companies are located in the self-proclaimed Music Capital of the World, research shows a direct correlation in the brain between math and music. Also, Dvorin and Nguyen said, playing music with co-workers builds rapport. “It helps us feel more open and confident around each other,” Nguyen said. Prizes for the winner include a day of recording at Arlyn Studios, two tickets for SXSW Interactive and two VIP passes for Fun FunFun Fest. Judges include Hugh Forrest, director of SXSW Interactive, AdiAnand, national program manager for DoStuff Media, Gillian Wilson, president of Austin Startup Games and Will Bridges, co-owner of Arlyn Studios. “Ultimately,” Dvorin said, “it would nice to win. But it’s just awesome to get together and play music with people you work with.”
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By Laura Lorek, Founder of Silicon Hills News
How likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague? That’s the key question behind San Antonio-based Promoter.io, founded by Chad Keck and Ricardo Reyna. “Our core goal is to help other companies consistently drive new profitable growth,” Keck said. Promoter.io, a customer analytics and insights platform, helps a company measure its “Net Promoter Score,” a metric for determining customer loyalty. Fred Reichheld, author of The Ultimate Question 2.0, came up with the Net Promoter Score® (also known as NPS), which rates companies on a scale of zero to ten in response to the single question of how likely they are to recommend the company to someone. Customers who score a nine or ten are a company’s promoters. Those who score between zero to six are known as detractors. A company’s NPS score is the percentage of its promoters minus the percentage of its detractors. Promoter.io, founded in 2013, recently closed on a $850,000 seed stage round and launched into general availability. Its investors include Lew Moorman, Pat Condon, Pat Matthews, all former Rackspace executives, the new Geekdom Fund, John Long, an angel investor, NetDNA and Reichheld, the creator of the Net Promoter System. Its strategic advisors include Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston and AppFog Founder and CEO Lucas Carlson.
“I invested in Promoter for a number of reasons,” said Matthews. “First, I know Chad from our days at Rackspace. He has a really good product sense and good product people make the best entrepreneurs.” “I also like the partnership he has with Ricardo,” Matthews said. “Building a business is too hard to do alone and they are solid cofounders who are long time friends and complement each other.” Matthews said he also believes in the Net Promoter concept. “The Net Promoter Score was the main customer metric we used at both Webmail.us and Rackspace and I think every business in the world can use it to measure and influence customer loyalty,” he said. Promoter.io helps companies identify and engage their loyal customers to drive organic growth, Keck said. It also gives them meaningful intelligence on why they feel so strong about the brand, he said. Promoter.io also puts companies in touch with their detractors so they can address their needs proactively, he said. “Not only do we help companies drive growth, we can help them drastically cut churn,” Keck said. Before launching the company, Keck headed up customer experience at AppFog, which had more than 100,000 developers using the service. He managed the company’s NPS and the experience prompted him to think of the idea for Promoter.io. CenturyLink acquired AppFog in early 2013. That led Keck to join with
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Reyna to start Promoter.io. Reyna and Andrew Velis, an engineer, moved from San Francisco to join Keck in San Antonio. The company now has five employees and is hiring for several positions.
Measuring and subsequently engaging customers using Promoter. io and the Net Promoter System® will have a measurable return for a company every month, Keck said.
Promoter.io is the first self-service web platform that takes the Net Promoter System and builds an end-to-end product around it for companies, Keck said.
The average score for U.S. companies in 2013 was in the mid to high 20s on a scale from negative 100 to positive 100, Keck said. “It takes a lot of loyal promoters to offset the detractors,” he said.
Based on your NPS you can reliably predict a company’s future growth along with several other bottom-line metrics. Leading Net Promoter companies have also been shown to outgrow their competitors by two or three times, Keck said. “Promoters are important because they are the most profitable customers themselves,” Keck said. “They stay longer and they spend more money. They are also willing to recommend the product or service to others. They are loyal. When you have a loyal customer and they refer someone else in – it’s like compounded interest. People who are referred to a brand are less price sensitive. They stay longer and they recommend the service to others. It becomes a snowball effect.” Some people will battle for a brand just because their customer experience was so strong, Keck said. The prime example is Apple, which has customers camped out in front of stores every time they introduce a new version of the iPhone. Practically every Fortune 1000 company measures NPS, but many small and medium businesses don’t for a multitude of reasons. Promoter. io seeks to bring the NPS concept to the masses, Keck said.
Scores up to 50 are good. Scores from 50 to 75 are excellent. Companies scoring above 75 are world-class. USAA has a worldclass score along with brands such as Zappos and Nordstrom, Keck said. “An excellent or world-class score can be hard to achieve, but the focus on taking care of the customer over the long-term will have an extremely beneficial impact on a business,” he said. TeamSnap started using Promoter.io in mid-2013, said H. Wade Minter, its CTO. Promoter.io has an easy to use interface that has made it simple for the company to integrate Net Promoter Score into its business metrics, he said.” “I’m quite impressed with it - the dashboard is very clear, the data breakdown is solid, and you can get access to the raw data set in a CSV file for more advanced or specialized analytics,” Minter said. “We’ve seen scores and feedback that let us know what we’re doing well, as well as areas where we’re lacking. We take the NPS results very seriously as a company, and they have provided valuable insight.” Minter highly recommends Promter.io.
“We want to make this available and affordable to every business,” he said. So far, Promoter.io customers’ include Rackspace, TeamSnap, ZenPayroll, SmugMug, MaxCDN, Greenling, Groove, LiveChat, Baremetrics, and dozens more. “What we help companies do has a direct revenue impact,” Keck said.
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“Ultimately, if your customers are out there singing your praises, you’ll be successful,” he said. “Promoter.io gives us the data we need to understand customer sentiment and act on it.”
ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES TODAY for a Healthier Tomorrow Thanks to the Austin Chamber’s Innovate Austin initiative, we are creating a region of both established and emerging companies that are changing the face of healthcare today for a healthier tomorrow. To learn more about how Innovate Austin is supporting the growth of Austin’s life science cluster and to get involved in this game changing innovation evolution, go to austinchamber.com/innovation and sign up for our innovation & entrepreneurship newsletter.
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Able’s New Approach to Collaborative Lending With nearly a decade of experience as a hairstylist, Hayley Groll has a loyal clientele and proven styling chops.
Evan Baehr
between start up and those that need a million-dollar loan,” Davis said. “There are all kinds of companies in that gray area.”
But she just turned 27 and her credit score is just okay. Securing a small business loan to open her own shop looked like a no-go until a friend pointed her toward Able.
And they’ve retained their big-picture thinking from the Outbox days: Baehr says that they’d like to change the culture of secrecy around debt raising.
Launched in July, Able’s mission is to “empower main street entrepreneurs” like Hayley,to get a loan to build their businesses when traditional lenders have prohibitively high borrowing standards or sky-high interest rates.
It’s easy to find entrepreneurs on Twitter trumpeting the equity they’ve raised, but Baehr questions whether that should really be such a cause of celebration. “It should have Will Davis a frownie-face hashtag,” he joked. “Kudos to venture capitals for tricking people into celebrating losing part of their company.”
Able offers a lower-cost loan by sharing the risk with backers that are sourced by the entrepreneur. In essence, Able amplifies what small business people are capable of doing with loans from friends and family: Applicants must source 25 percent of the loan amount themselves, and then Able provides the other three-quarters and manages the interest and repayment. Annual percentage rates for Able loans start at 8 to 16 percent, where other private lenders might charge 30 percent or more to the same borrower. With the loan Groll received from Able, combined with contributions from two family members, a friend and two clients, she was able to purchase Shag Salon on South Lamar Boulevard in Austin when it went up for sale. ‘The whole process is really simple. I don’t have to deal with my clients or friends or family calling me every month wondering,’Where’s my money?’” Groll said. Able’s founders are Will Davis and Evan Baehr, formerly of the high profile though unsuccessful “mail disruptor” Outbox. Outbox collected mail from its users’ mailboxes, scanned and digitized it, trading in the perceived annoyance of physical mail in favor of digital convenience. Ultimately, Outbox ran afoul of the USPS and proved prohibitively expensive. Davis and Baehr had raised $5 million for Outbox. Some of their investors, which include Pay Pal cofounder Peter Thiel and Mike Maples of Floodgate, told them to reinvest the remaining funds to build something new. The partners set their sights on the finance sector, which as they saw it, had yet to be transformed by the ethos of collaborative consumption in the way that companies like Uber and AirBnB have changed their respective sectors. Their loan product is designed for growth financing. So entrepreneurs who have yet to generate revenue do not qualify. “We sit in the middle zone
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By Leslie Anne Jones, Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Baehr and Davis see the backers who participate in their loans as people to be celebrated for helping build businesses in their communities. There’s a social media component to Able’s lending approval process as well. Applicants share their business’ social media profiles with Able so that it can get a sense of the loyalty base and enthusiasm the prospective borrower possesses. Over time, Able’s algorithms will predict the likelihood of business success based on their social presence. Baehr equates this to the pre-Internet era when a small-town banker would go and eat in a restaurant several times, and also at its nearby competitors, in order to determine if the borrower had a good chance of success. If there are two hair salons, for instance, and one has way more reviews and five stars on Yelp and the other has fewer reviews and three stars, betting that the first one will be successful is, in Baehr’s words, “not that crazy of a hypothesis.” Presently, Able has 15 people on staff but is looking to expand. Their offices are located on the back side of the McGarrah Jessee building in downtown Austin, and the setup is not your standard, drab lender’s office. It’s open-plan with high office chairs and a hammock and there’s a “creative” meeting room with brick façade and a funky shag rug. So far, Able has made 50 loans, most of them to Austin-based businesses and with an average loan amount of $100,000. To date, a majority of their customers have been women, and loans have gone to supporting a whole variety of businesses. They have a handful of clients in the consumer goods space, whose businesses revolve around packaged food, clothing or cleaning products. They also have restaurants and retail spaces and, in keeping with Able’s Austin’s roots, several food trucks.
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Massage.com Wants To Take The Stress Out Of Getting A Massage 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, 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
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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.
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.
Payment of $89 plus tip for an hour session is made online through Massage.com. The company takes a percentage of the fee.
And, he’s looking to repeat BuildASign’s experience in dealing with growing competition in outperforming competitors.
Ron Shirley, an Austin logistics executive, used Massage.com to book a session and said “it worked extremely well.”
“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.”
The therapist arrived at the appointed hour, he said, “and the massage was great.”
As a name Massage.com is direct and comprehensive. And Graham found in right in his backyard.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
“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 massagerelated 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.
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Jacqueline Hughes
Startup Week Founder
By Susan Lahey, Reporter with Silicon Hills News Jacqueline Hughes seems the antithesis of a typical event coordinator—what Austin Technology Council’s Grover Bynum calls “whistle and clipboard” people. Event coordinators have reputations for being frenetic, type A, wearing frozen, stressed smiles. Hughes, curled up in an easy chair at Techstars Austin, seems relaxed, chill, though she’s in the midst of putting final touches on several major events including her own creation: Austin Startup Week. She’d worked all night until 7 a.m. and was back in the early afternoon to do more. “It’s kind of exciting to email someone at three a.m. asking for something you need and getting an answer back immediately,” she laughs. “It’s like ‘You are crazy too! What’s wrong with you? Who stays up working until three in the morning?’” Hughes does. Regularly. Ever since she got introduced to the Austin tech community with her job as community manager for an Austin
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co-working site, she’s become a fixture at nearly every tech event, many of which she planned and executed. She not only created Austin Startup Week, she’s been either chief planner or involved to her elbows in numerous other events including several major events for Techstars, Made in Austin Career Fair, Rise Week and many SXSW events. The sociology major from Texas State University has become an expert in the sociology of Austin tech. It lets her exercise two of her favorite things: Getting to know interesting people and creating fun events.
The Person Behind the Community “Sometimes, there are people out front and when you dig a little bit deeper, you find the person behind the person,” said Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars Austin. “I feel like Jacqueline’s the person behind the community. Almost anything that’s happening here, she’s really just one hop away from it, even the things she’s not directly involved in.
She knows how all these things plug together, what’s involved, what kinds of things people like to do and don’t like to do. I feel like calling her a connector is underplaying it...I would be hard pressed to pull someone out of the startup community that she hasn’t done something for.” In a town with more events than calendar days, planning something unique and fun is a huge challenge. Hughes’ take on it is: “I like to see people have fun. I like to see them happy.” “What I observe her doing is she gets a rough plan and then she walks through it over and over in her mind,” Seats said. “Every time, she thinks up 15 more small details. Maybe this isn’t the right door for people to go in, because traffic clogs here. ..she likes people to have fun and enjoy themselves and that’s the mindset she has on. ‘Okay, I’m Joe Schmo, what will I think when I walk in? What am I going to see? Will be the music be too loud in this area? Will I be able to meet people? Will I feel awkward?’” At the same time, Seats said, “She lets things happen the way they’re going to happen.” Bynum, ATC senior advisor, said Hughes is not only incredibly laid back, but also transparent and eager to collaborate, let events evolve organically, give other people a voice in what the event will eventually become. “She’s an excellent national ambassador for the city,” he said. “She recognizes that the value of Startup Week is still being determined and instead of trying to figure out what it is, she understands the community, lets different approaches be heard…she introduces the value and lets people chew on it.” One Startup Week, he said, he wanted to bring his policy and advocacy background into the mix and offer a serious discussion on Internet policy led by a national advocacy group at City Hall. “We really didn’t know what the uptake was going to be,” he said. Though they had some concerns that the event—being less sexy and festive than other sessions—might not draw participants, Hughes encouraged Bynum to go for it. “It turned out we had a full house at City Hall when it might have just been me. That’s been a successful piece of Startup Week ever since.”
Falling Into the Startup World In many ways, Hughes fell into the startup world and the world of event creation. A product of the Houston suburbs and its traditions—like Cotillion—she discovered a whole new world of interesting, passionate people when she went to Texas State for College. “I had these amazing teachers,” she said. One class, A People’s History of the United States, gave her a completely new view on the world. “It was the first time I kind of learned that Christopher Columbus wasn’t the nicest guy in the world….I was interested in studying values and norms and it opened my eyes to the fact that I don’t have to fit into a square or a circle.” She was living in Austin, a year into her master’s in sociology, when she decided tolook for a program where she could get a Ph.D on environmental sociology and she and her boyfriend at the time planned a road trip to schools in Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington to find the right programs. Then they broke up. On the one hand, her plan had now disappeared and she was a little lost. But around the same time, her grandparents left her $20,000. She took off for London, then returned to the U.S. and spent the rest of the year making the money stretch, taking roadtrips all over the U.S. and spending tons of time alone. “I loved it,” Hughes said. “I felt very free. I had this couch on the porch
Julie Huls, President of the Austin Technology Council with Jacqueline Hughes, creator of Austin Startup Week at ATC’s Battle of the Bands event.
and I would lay on it and read (Harry Potter among others), then fall asleep, wake up, read some more. I napped during the day and only slept three or four hours at night. At one point I went to get a massage and the massage therapist said ‘You don’t have any stress…at all.’ I’m really glad I had that time. I don’t think a lot of people get to have that.” But eventually the money was running out and it was time to get a job. She was living in Austin and knew networking was key. She got a Twitter account and started connecting with people and going to events. “Someone on Twitter told me about TabbedOut, Foursquare, I started thinking about what else you could do with apps.”This was another whole new world. When she started meeting techies and geeks, she didn’t even know there was code behind websites. But once again, she was surrounded by interesting people tackling cool projects. After sending out 100 resumes, Hughes was hired to build membership at a co-working space. That year she attended 300 events, going from a life of near total solitude to one surrounded by people.
Bridging the City “I spent time just meeting people for about six months,” she said. “I was that person who showed up at everything. That was what I was known for, just knowing people. I didn’t think that was really admirable. It came sort of naturally to me to meet people. I have a really good memory. I don’t remember movie quotes or actors but I’ll remember when I first met someone, where it was, what we talked about. People started putting me on a pedestal because I knew so many people. I felt like a phony, like that’s the only skill I have? So I decided to start working on my own startup.” Hughes wanted to create a platform that would have all the city’s events listed in one place, without having to input the data. It was called
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“I wouldn’t say I’m a very good event planner but I’m a very good event creator. I’m really good at figuring out what’s fun. I like to create fun experiences for people…. I’ve worked with some event planners who were amazing. They make my life so much easier. They go through everything I’ve done to make sure I’m not leaving anything out.”
Jacqueline Hughes at Startup Crawl during Austin Startup Week
The first Austin Startup Week was in 2011 and those early budgets were meager. One good thing about that was that they had to ferret out interesting locations, like GSDM’s entryway, that could accommodate both their budget and their crowds. Sponsors covered specific events, usually to the tune of a few hundred dollars. But this year the organization decided to take on one big sponsor for each day of the event. Some of the early sponsors included Indeed and AT&T. Meanwhile, Hughes has been responsible for more than 50 events—everything from dinner parties to Startup Week. She’s become to go-to events person for Austin Techstars.
Bridge the City and it was to be similar to Foursquare’s new Swarm app. “One thing I think Foursquare is not as good at is, if I was going to Refresh Austin and it was at Buffalo Billiards, I wasn’t headed to Buffalo Billiards—I was headed to Refresh Austin.” Bridge the City would focus on the events and make it easy to find the people you wanted to meet at those events, something she said no app does well, even still. She and her cofounders spent three months working on it, then they split up. “We came together wanting to solve the same problem, but couldn’t align on how to get there. After we released a MVP – an events calendar – we began struggling with direction. Half of the team wanted to build something simple similar to what Swarm looks like, the other half envisioned something closer to what Do512 looks like today. In the end, neither side was willing to compromise and we split up. I think the team was looking to me to steer us in the right direction, and I didn’t step up.”
The Birth of Startup Week Hughes still had the co-working job and started working with startup Qrank, but neither was full time. One day, when she was planning a trip to San Francisco, she created a pitch to ask the CEO of Plancast whether he was interested in hiring her to do community management for that company as well. He hired her. The idea for Austin Startup Week came after Hughes realized that people in Boulder were using the app in a really “interesting way.” Plancast sent her to Boulder where she was introduced to Boulder’s Startup Week. The organizer gave her permission to borrow as many of their ideas as she liked. The consummate event attender, Hughes wanted to put a lot of the area’s startup activities in the same week and anchor them with something like a UT or Capital Factory demo day. Josh Baer was the first person she approached.
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“I love working for Techstars,” she said. “I have never worked with a group of people who work so hard. Everyone on the team is just so good at the things they’re good at and they trust me to own and be good at the things I’m good at.” One of the most recent events she threw for Techstars was a retreat at Marfa. She remembered the last night, when they hadn’t brought a cooler so she lined a grocery cart with trash bags and filled it with ice for beer and Seats and a couple others pulled out their guitars and played under the starlight. “Things that are easy to do in other places are not easy to do in Marfa,” Seats said. “Just finding seating for 40 people at once and catering—we had to have four or five different restaurants cater together when we were on that trip…I think she surprised herself at how well that worked out. It could have been horrible but every part of it was so over-the-top perfect.” Hughes knows she’s the kind of person who could work herself into the ground. Her four-year-relationship with her boyfriend, Scott Gress, helps her to stay balanced. Gress, who is also working on a startup is an intense worker too. But he helps her know when it’s time to turn off the computer and say she’s done for now. One day, Hughes wants to be an investor. Starting a business is so hard, she said, she wants to be able to support people’s entrepreneurial ventures. Meanwhile, she’s still more comfortable being the person in the background, making things happen. “I would love for her to become more comfortable owning the recognition for the stuff she does at this level,” said Seats. “She does so many things for so many people and they get the credit, which is noble and nice and we all are the beneficiaries of it.”
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By Laura Lorek, Founder of Silicon Hills News
For startups, access to cash is often crucial to their survival. And soon, Texas may provide another way for entrepreneurs to raise money for their companies. Earlier this year, the Texas State Securities Board proposed its own equity-based crowdfunding rules. It published those rules in May and put them out for public comment for 30 days. Now Texas regulators are set to discuss the rules in October that would allow startups to raise money from “average” investors. The board may then vote to enact them by November. If Texas approves the new rules, entrepreneurs will be able to use equity-based crowdfunding to tap into investments from the general public. The proposed Texas regulations let a company raise a maximum of $1 million every 12 months. An accredited investor can invest any amount. But a non-accredited investor can only invest $5,000. They can only invest through a Texas-owned website, known as a crowdfunding portal, which holds the funds in a bank account until the company meets its funding goals. And all investors must prove they are Texas, The regulations also require companies looking to raise money to post a detailed business plan, financial statements and other documents including a list of risk factors. 20
Texas is one of several states that have proposed their own equity-based crowdfunding rules. Some states have already adopted laws. The U.S. Jobs Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2012, set to establish equity-based crowdfunding nationwide. But the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission have not yet issued its final rules governing the practice. So far, the SEC has missed several deadlines to enact the rules. The SEC has 175 pages of rules being proposed to govern equity-based crowdfunding, said John Morgan with the Texas State Securities Board. Texas’ rules would not supersede the SEC rules, but when Texas passes its own crowdfunding rules, the state would allow equity-based crowdfunding before the federal government. Several types of crowdfunding exist including reward-based crowdfunding on platforms like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. And individuals can crowdfund for donations on platforms like GoFundMe.com. Some crowdfunding sites like Kiva.org allow people to provide loans to small businesses worldwide. And sites like AngelList.com allow companies to raise funds from accredited investors or individuals who make more than $200,000 annually and have a net worth in excess of $1 million, not including their house.
A Roundup of Austin Investors
By Susan Lahey, Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Central Texas Angel Network
Silverton Partners
Central Texas Angel Network is one of the top five most active angel investment groups in the U.S. CTAN angels come from numerous industry backgrounds and invest in companies from tech startups to consumer packaged goods. Many of them work with startups at the local incubators as mentors as well as investors.
Silverton Partners is an Austin based company that mostly invests in tech companies. It recently announced a partnership with Capital Factory whereby every Capital Factory accelerator startup with an initial $50,000 from two angel investors would receive another $25,000 from Silverton. This is on top of a $50,000 match from Capital Factory. Generally, Silverton’s initial investments range between $200,000 and $2 million.
Austin Ventures Austin Ventures, the largest firm with a $3.9 billion fund, invests in early stage and middle market companies. The firm prefers to meet startups interested in pitching them through an introduction from a trusted source. Early stage investments range from $500,000 proof-of-concept projects and seed financings to $40 million or more. Austin Ventures is a hands-on investor. Its portfolio companies include Bazaarvoice, RetailMeNot, Spiceworks and Spredfast.
Triton Ventures Laura Kilcrease, one of the managing partners of Triton Ventures, helped found Austin Technology Incubator and formerly served as Entrepreneur in Residence for the University of Texas Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship.
Mercury Fund LiveOak Venture Partners A relatively new venture firm, LiveOak Venture Partners, an early stage investor, doesn’t require an introduction and is interested in talking to seed stage startups. Live Oak recently announced a $100 million fund for early stage companies. Its minimum investment is usually $250,000.
Mercury invests in lean, early stage startups with small scientific teams and software based businesses. Initially the fund invests between $50,000 to $1.5 million and usually invests between $4 million and $6 million over the life of the company.
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TOP TECH POLICY TO WATCH IN TEXAS When we discuss emerging technologies and tech startups, it’s usually in excited terms. That makes sense: Technology is exciting. Innovation moves fast,technology brings us new solutions and capabilities, and people are usually enthusiastic about this. But most folks can’t seem to muster much excitement for public policy issues. These may seem dull in comparison to the latest cutting-edge innovations, but policy matters because the right ones can pave the way forward for new technologies, job growth, and startups. And conversely, the wrong policies can discourage investment in a particular area and even hinder growth. Not only that, but when companies buckle under the burden of excessive federal and state taxes, inversion has emerged as a new trend, in which an American company buys an overseas company and then moves their headquarters abroad, to a land with lower taxes. Taxes are a big deal for businesses of any size—nothing new about that. So given that, Texas policy makers and legislators adopted policies that incentivized and encouraged the results they wanted, like increased job creation, business growth, and private investment. If you’re skeptical about what the right policies can achieve, well, just take a look at Texas. Once again, Texas was recently named the top state for business. Not only are we leading the nation in job growth, but Texas is also adding tech jobs at a faster rate than any other state, and is now home to the second-largest technology workforce in the nation. Our location, lower cost of living, and pro-business climate all work together make the Lone Star State an attractive place to do business—and businesses are flocking here. Tech-savvy Texans are excited about these smart policies, because the results are undeniable and indeed, far from boring. Take, for example, Clarify. Originally named Op3nVoice, founder Paul Murphy relocated his company to Austin after being in the city
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By Chelsea McCullough, Texans For Economic Progress Chelsea@TexasProgress.com
just one time. He rallied his international workforce from around the world to move to Austin and then started on a steady hiring spree. Clarify’s technology platform enables developers to add audio and video search to any application. They have continued to grow, attract investors and are soon to be a fast-track darling in the Austin tech landscape. So how did we get here? It was certainly no accident. Smart, pro-investment tax policies have played a key role in our success here in Texas, making it easier for us to attract and retain businesses of all sizes. Also, our state is lucky to have forwardthinking lawmakers, who have embraced smart tech policies, including the Texas Emerging Technology Fund and R&D tax incentives, and who continue to work to encourage innovation in Texas. During the last legislative session, TEP was proud to stand alongside other tech organizations like TechNet and Tech America in support of a tax proposal that encouraged broadband infrastructure investment—since, after all, the widespread availability of high-speed connectivity is essential to innovation. Technology moves at lightning-fast speeds; policies take a little longer to get off the ground. While other states enact policies and collect taxes that restrict businesses and hinder innovation, Texas has chosen to welcome tech businesses—and to benefit from the resulting job creation and growth. Right now is the time for our lawmakers to act, eliminating any remaining tax barriers that could obstruct investment. We’re proud to be on top, and we need to remain focused on staying here.
YupiCall Wants to Connect People Internationally for Less Money By Jonathan Gutierrez, Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Much like social media sites Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, YupiCall aims to connect consumers with one another no matter where they are in the world. YupiCall’s international calling services work with or without a smartphone and don’t require an Internet connection. Julian Flores, a successful Mexican entrepreneur who founded SMS Gate, is the founder and CEO of YupiCall, a startup based at Geekdom in San Antonio. “It’s about bringing people together, allowing friends and families to talk to each other without worrying about a huge phone bill and Internet connectivity,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re calling from a big metropolis like New York or San Francisco. Even calling from New Delhi to La Paz, you are able to connect. The only thing you need is a regular cell phone.” Since incoming calls are free almost everywhere in the world, YupiCall is able to help people stay connected by simply having them text the phone number they want to call to YupiCall’s local number in any country. YupiCall then calls that person to initiate the call and connect him or her with the person in the country they are trying to contact. It sounds like it could potentially be a long process, but the task is seamless and happens just as fast as a regular call. YupiCall has put a lot of effort into helping the world use its service without being a huge financial burden. The first 30 minutes of YupiCall’s service is free, but after that, YupiCall charges its customers a competitive rate. Any mobile phone can use YupiCall via its texting capabilities, so users are not forced to search for Wi-Fi or buy expensive international calling plans with their service providers. To improve YupiCall, Flores sought advice from James Brehm, a
telecommunications and IT consultant. And although Brehm was skeptical about YupiCall initially, after giving it a test run, he realized how intuitive and useful it could potentially be for people around the world. “I’ve been doing this since 2002 and I’ve worked with over 100 different UIP services that are trying to differentiate themselves,” Brehm said. “It’s very rare that one catches my attention because many of them are similar. This is different, and I can see that this can be almost viral to people outside the U.S..” Gloria Cecilia Morales-Fusco, a YupiCall customer, who also helped with product testing in the company’s early developmental stages, is a big fan of YupiCall’s service. “First of all, YupiCall is really cheap,” Morales-Fusco said. “That’s what caught my attention first. It’s inexpensive and it’s really easy to use. I actually live in Spain. Right now, I’m visiting family in Mexico. I use it all the time to call my family back here in Mexico and it’s really great.” Morales-Fusco had one word to describe her experiences with international calling prior to subscribing to YupiCall. “Expensive,” she said. “I used to get with my mom, and I would tell her, ‘Mom, let’s Skype or FaceTime.’ We didn’t use international calling services because it was too expensive. Now, I can call her any time I want. That’s why I’m such a fan. My friends in Spain, I tell them all the time to use this because they have other friends in Europe. They use it all the time now, so I recommend it, 100 percent.” YupiCall, with 8,000 customers, has recently released an application for Android users, available on Google Play now. An iOS version of the application is soon to be released and can be downloaded in the iPhoneApp Store. 23
By Leslie Anne Jones, Reporter with Silicon Hills
sites might see a link to a cooking article produced by Whole Foods (one of OneSpot’s clients) in the recipe site’s ad space. “A lot of money goes into content creation,” Cohen said. “What we have is a value proposition: take a fraction of that budget to drive a multiple of the results companies are already seeing. ” It’s a way to make the whole online publishing ecosystem work better, he says: Consumers get content that’s relevant to them, advertisers reach the right people, and publishers get money for ads that are more than just a necessary annoyance. Matt Cohen is an old-school content guy. Two decades ago he built the Houston Chronicle’s first website and developed the paper’s digital strategy. At the paper, Cohen noted that whenever they did reader surveys, subscribers always ranked the paperedition advertisements among the top three things they most appreciated. Those ads were useful. They let people know when sales were happening. But somehow the utility and appeal of print ads doesn’t translate easily into the digital space. And what works on a highway billboard can seem annoying and irrelevant when directly translated to a website masthead. “There’s no reason at all I shouldn’t be seeing things that are interesting to me,” Cohen said of web ads. “I buy things all the time. ” With the rise of social media, companies are placing more emphasis on delivering substantive value in their digital communication. This is happening alongside a long-term trend toward greater authenticity and ‘real’ interaction between brand and customer. The result of these two trends is that businesses are creating more articles, blogs and videos that are entertaining and/or informational, often entirely sans sales pitch. “It’s not, ‘Buy, buy, buy right now. ’ It’s about creating a relationship with the brand. ” Cohen said. But there’s a pipeline problem. Once that corporate content is created – how to get it to people beyond those visiting the company’s website? That’s where Matt Cohen’s idea for OneSpot comes into play: Put ads for corporate content into traditional web ad spaces, but make the placement decision based on an advanced understanding of the intended individual. OneSpot’s proprietary technology helps companies build their brand’s audience by using advanced, multi-level audience targeting to improve media placement decisions. OneSpot’s system has access to about 94 percent of the American Internet audience, chief marketing officer Adam Weinroth explained. The company analyzes a wide range of user behavior and leverages that data using its technology, which is based on machine learning and predictive modeling, to determine when a certain person should see a certain ad. So someone who is perusing recipe
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Programmatic advertising and real-time bidding on digital ad space has built up over the last five years. Once that infrastructure was cemented, Cohen’s idea coalesced and he founded OneSpot in early 2012. Previously, he’d been a partner at Austin venture capital firm G-51 Capital. The first year was mainly spent building the software and enrolling a few beta customers. It was clear to Cohen he needed to bring on someone with marketing experience and connections to the advertising world. In February 2013, Steve Sachs came on as CEO. Formerly an executive vice president at Time Inc., Sachs used to oversee the Real Simple, Cooking Light and Southern Living brands. Since he became CEO, OneSpot has worked to expand its offerings and clients. Many of its current clients come from the food, health and beauty sectors. Since all of these categories routinely roll out new products,they also tend to produce a lot of brand-related content for their markets. Companies that produce a lot of branded content have the most to potentially gain from using OneSpot. In November 2013, OneSpot held a series A and raised $5 million led by Mohr Davidow Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley VC firm investing in the digital marketing space. Adtech is a nascent addition to the Texas startup scene. “We’re bringing a piece of New York to Austin,” Sachs said. Cohen and Sachs are excited to be leading local development of the sector. The company has a sales presence in Chicago and New York. Engineering and customer care is based in Austin. Over the next year, Sachs and Cohen plan to continue building their client roster and improving the capabilities of their software. In late August, OneSpot unveiled its new Facebook sequencing capabilities. The company can now use Facebook’s real-time ad exchange to place its clients’ content into Facebook users’ news feeds.
By Laura Lorek, Founder of Silicon Hills News
Storific – the company, originally founded in Paris in 2009, has relocated to San Antonio and is based at Geekdom, the downtown coworking and tech incubator. Its app, which is available for download on both iPhone and Android devices, lets people order and pay for food and drinks on their mobile phone. CodeUp – Founded in 2012, Codeup, based at Geekdom, offers 12-week boot camps to teach technical skills to people. It also offers free teen workshops. The startup, founded by Michael Girdley, Chris Turner and Jason Straughn, won the 2014 InnoTech Beta Summit. WellAware.us – This startup provides a remote monitoring and production management platform for the oilfield. It recently raised $37 million in funding from Billionaire Carlos Slim, Ed Whitacre Jr., former
CEO of AT&T and Former Vice President Dick Cheney. TrueAbility – A cloud-based technical assessment tool for Linux professionals. It’s also a job board for technical positions. The startup, founded in 2012 and based at Geekdom, participated in the Techstars Cloud program and has attracted more than $2 million in venture capital. Soloshot – This startup, founded in 2012, has created a self-tracking robotic camera on a tripod that allows peopleto film themselves surfing, skateboarding, skiing, motor bikingand more. Soloshot won the InnoTech Beta Summit in 2013. The company has 15 employees and its products are available in more than 200 stores.
All rights reserved. ©2014 Greater San Marcos Partnership
November 5, 2014
Register today for the event that celebrates big ideas. Greater San Marcos is fast becoming the hub of innovation for the Austin-San Antonio Corridor. Join the Greater San Marcos Partnership and Texas State University as industry experts to look to what’s next. Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Development Jay Williams delivers this year’s keynote address. To reserve your seats now, contact us at: 512.393.3400.
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By Laura Lorek, Founder of Silicon Hills News
Makexyz – a 3-D printing marketplace that links people who need something made with 3-D printers to people who have 3-D printers in their neighborhoods. Received an undisclosed amount in an investment from Intel Ventures this year.
in Austin, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix and Denver.
Clarify – has created an API media search platform. Its technology allows people to search through video and audio ďŹ les easily using keywords. The startup is backed by Projector Capital and angel investment. It was formerly named OP3NVoice , an alumnus of the Techstars London program, Fintech Innovation lab and the BBC Media Lab.
The Daily Dot – Aims to be the newspaper of the Internet. The startup media publication launched in 2011 with a $600,000 angel investment and has grown steadily. Earlier this year, the Daily Dot acquired The Kernel, a U.K.-based online publication covering the culture of the Internet.
Trust Radius – Founded in 2012, the startup has raised $5 million and has created a platform for software users to review business software products. TrustRadius is used by 100,000 software buyers each month to make more informed decisions. Its directory includes more than 6000 indepth reviews across 1,635 software products.�’
Silvercar – Founded in 2013, this startup created an App that lets business travellers rent a car – an Audi 4 – without any hassle at the airport. The company has raised $31 million since launch. The service is available
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1
Founded in 2011, Geekdom moved into its own headquarters in the historic Rand building at 110 Houston St. this year. It occupies the seventh and sixth floors with plans to eventually take over the entire building. The new offices have bike racks, showers, lockers, and mailboxes, changing rooms, a nap room, kitchen and more.
2
The Techstars Cloud program returns to Geekdom in early 2015 headed up by Blake Yeager. The program will begin accepting applications this fall.
3
WiseWear featured in this issue operates out of Geekdom. Other startups at Geekdom include WP Engine, Pressable, Promoter.io, Storific, CodeUp, TrueAbility, Remote Garage, Monk’s Toolbox, VentureLab and Health eDesigns.
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Geekdom membership costs $50 per month or $200 monthly for a dedicated “tech startup desk” in an office.
Geekdom hosts events daily, weekly and monthly including San Antonio Startup Grind, 3Day Startup, SA New Tech, Startup Weekend, hackathons, Health 2.0, OpenStack meetups, Ruby Rebels, Agile Meetup, CodeUp Teens, Geekdom Game Night, the Crowning Moment and more.
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Geekdom last year opened another Geekdom location in San Francisco.
The first HeroX Challenge, an offshoot of the X-Prize, officially launched in San Antonio earlier this year. The two-year San Antonio MX Challenge is headed up by Jesus Salas at Geekdom and funded by Graham Weston and his 80/20 Foundation. The organization will award $500,000 to the person or group that bests fosters entrepreneurship between San Antonio and Mexico.
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Lorenzo Gomez is the director of Geekdom. Nick Longo and Graham Weston founded Geekdom.
The Geekdom Fund provides capital to early-stage entrepreneurs based at Geekdom.
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Geekdom members are required to give back one hour of their time every week to help someone else.
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break down your innovation barriers power your business to its full potential When you’re presented with new opportunities, you want to focus on turning them into successes, not whether your IT solution can support them.
Peer 1 Hosting powers your business with our wholly owned FastFiber NetworkTM, global footprint, and offers professionally managed public and private cloud solutions that are secure, scalable, and customized for your business. Unsurpassed performance and reliability help build your business foundation to be rock-solid, ready for high growth, and deliver the fast user experience your customers expect.
Want more on cloud? Check out our latest cloud webinar recording. Call: 844.477.3289 | go.peer1.com/silicon-hills | Find out more:
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