Ideas To Invoices

Steve Cody is the co-founder of Ruckify, which it bills as the world’s largest peer to peer rental platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold six different rental companies and a software company. And in March, at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Ruckify moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas.

Brian is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and is currently the CEO of AlertMedia, a company he founded in 2013. AlertMedia is now the world’s leading provider of emergency communication software, used by over 2000 enterprise companies in 100 countries to keep employees safe from threats to their health and safety. Before AlertMedia, Brian co-founded Xenex in 2008, where he and his team developed a germ-killing robot, now used in over 500 hospitals around the world, preventing infections and saving thousands of lives each year. He is also an investor and adviser to dozens of early-stage startups through his investment firm, Marketdriver Ventures. Brian’s focus on starting companies with a positive impact stems, in part, from his experience working at Enron, where he was part of mass layoffs when the energy giant went bankrupt in 2001. He turned his Enron experience and the lessons learned into a best-selling book, Anatomy of Greed, and later a movie.

Morris Miller is the Chief Executive Officer at Xenex Disinfection Services, based in San Antonio. Morris co-founded and provided the initial funding for Xenex, which produces a robot used to disinfect healthcare facilities, nursing homes, schools and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and other environments. Previously he co-founded Rackspace Managed Hosting. Morris also founded Curtis Hill Publishing, the first company to publish Texas case law on CD-ROM, which sold to Thomson Legal Publishing. On this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Miller discusses how Xenex robots are being used to clean environments that have come into contact with the Coronavirus. Its robots have been highly effective in reducing infections in hospital environments. Xenex is also in talks to provide up to 2,000 robots to the committee hosting the summer Olympics in Japan. 

David Perez launched Lumen Insurance Technologies in 2016. He saw a need in the marketplace for someone to provide insurance policies to funded technology startups. Lumen’s clients have included Opcity, Strangeworks, Vault, previously known Student Loan Genius, Rocket Dollar, Valkyrie Intelligence, Kronologic, Living Security and others. Lumen provides policies for startups with products like directors and officers’ liability insurance, general liability, and commercial property insurance. Lumen is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Perez talks about the maturation of Austin's technology industry, greater access to funding, the InsureTech boom in Austin and opportunities for further growth. 

Sean Foley co-founded Nine Banded Whiskey in 2014 in Austin and launched the product two years later. In 2018, he became CEO of the company and is leading the company's growth phase. It is available in 12 states and recently inked a deal with the Los Angeles Rams to be the featured whiskey in the Rams' football stadium. Foley has a background in sports and entertainment. He previously served as venture capital and media executive for Raptor Group. He is also a partner in Austin Sports & Entertainment.  And he is a three-time national swimming champion for the University of Texas at Austin.  

Lloyd Armbrust, the co-founder and CEO of Own Local, an automated digital ad platform for local media, talks about the changes in the newspaper industry and journalism in the latest edition of Ideas to Invoices. Own Local, founded in 2010, has gone through the Y-Combinator Accelerator and has raised $3.4 million in venture capital and another $3 million in debt financing. The Austin-based company works with more than 4,000 publications worldwide on creating digital ads. 

Will Young is the Co-Founder and CEO of Austin-based SANA Benefits, a healthcare insurance technology startup. Young founded the company with Nathan Hackley in 2017. The two formerly worked together at Justworks, a benefit and payroll company in New York. They moved SANA Benefits to Austin a year ago and since then they have grown dramatically from less than 10 employees to almost 40. The company also recently closed on $ 3.6 million in seed-stage venture funding. And it moved into larger headquarters at Manchaca and Slaughter Lane in South Austin. 

Joyce Durst is co-founder and CEO of Growth Acceleration Partners, a software company in Austin, Texas. GAP offers analytics, cloud, mobile and QA services. Before co-founding GAP, Durst served as CEO of venture-backed startup Pinion Software, a security software company. She also served as a senior executive at BMC Software where she oversaw a $200 million division. And she began her career at IBM. In this podcast, she talks about bootstrapping GAP to more than $20 million in revenue and 300 employees. 

Jay Hallberg, founder, and chairman of Spiceworks founded the Austin-based company with three friends in 2006. They built Spiceworks into a giant social network for information technology system administrators and tech professionals. Recently, Ziff Davis bought the company for an undisclosed price. At SpiceWorld, an annual convention held at the Austin Convention Center, Hallberg talked about the company's evolution and plans for future growth. 

Brandon Austin, flounder of Go Fish Cam, and Adam Kahn, Sheephead of Operations of Go Fish Cam, talk about the Austin-based startup's growing market for its underwater cameras. Unorthodox Ventures, a venture capital firm and business incubator started by Carey Smith, founder of Big Ass Fans, acquired Go Fish Cam in March of 2019. It's one of the first investments Unorthodox Ventures has done. Go Fish Cam is now working out of the same offices as Unorthodox Ventures and working to expand its market.  Meanwhile, the cameras are not only being used by anglers worldwide to help them catch big fish, but the U.S. Navy Seals are using the cameras to detect underwater mines. 

Carey Smith sold Big Ass Fans, the company he founded in Lexington, Kentucky, for $500 million in December of 2017 and then moved to Austin. He bought Lance Armstrong’s 8,800 square foot home near downtown in 2018 and launched Unorthodox Ventures, an Austin-based business incubator and VC firm that invests in innovative companies with great products. Smith runs Unorthodox Ventures with a small group of former employees, known as the Kitchen. They are headquartered in an office park off Friedrich Lane in South Austin.     To date, Unorthodox Ventures has invested in Tushy Bidets and it acquired Austin-based Go Fish Cam earlier this year. good market and customer demand, and the right founders, Smith said.

Sheela Marshall and Natalie Merrick founded Tequila Sheela, a tequila company, in 2014.  And in 2016, Tequila Sheela won a double gold medal for its Sheela Reposado Tequila, and Silver Medals for its Sheela Blanco Tequila and Sheela Anejo Tequila in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.  That is quite an accomplishment and something Tequila Sheela is proud of, Marshall said. The organic tequila products are made on an organic blue agave small family farm in Jalisco, Mexico.

Amos Schwartzfarb is the managing director of Techstars Austin. He took over the job from Jason Seats in 2015 and has graduated three classes of startups under his direction. Before joining Techstars, Schwartzfarb served as head of customer development at Joust. Previously, he was vice president of customer development at BlackLocus, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2012. And he was co-founder and served as Chief Operating Officer of mySpoonful, which was acquired in 2011. He also served as an executive with Business.com, which was acquired by RH Donnelly in 2007. And he spent five years at HotJobs.com. In this podcast, Schwartzfarb talks about his new book, Sell More, Faster, which is being released in early September. It's based on his experience in as sales at various startups and from his experience working with startups in the Techstars program. He also talks about what he looks for in selecting startups for the Techstars Austin program. Applications are due August 26th for the next cohort. And Sc

Ethernet’s 46th anniversary is Wednesday, May 22nd and on this occasion, Silicon Hills News has done a special edition Ideas to Invoices podcast with Bob Metcalfe, founder of Ethernet.

Barry Mione is a Co-Founder and President of SaveDay.com, a startup that provides 401K plans to small businesses. SaveDay, with four employees, is relocating from California to Austin. Mione is currently participating in the latest SputnikATX cohort. During the podcast, Mione discusses how the company got started, the growing need to provide 401K retirement plans to individuals who work for small companies and plans for its future growth. SaveDay has about 2,000 participants currently and manages more than $20 million.  Before launching SaveDay, Mione served as vice president at BNY Mellon and he previously served as senior director of customer service at E*trade Financial. The startup Mione co-founded, DLJdirect, a division of Donaldson Lufkin & Jenrette Securities Corp. sold to E*trade.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Founder of Zoho, just announced plans to move Zoho's corporate headquarters from Pleasanton, Calif. to Austin, Texas. Vembu discusses plans for the Austin campus and mentions he would like to create an Indian village there where employees work, play and live.  Founded in 1996, Zoho is financially bootstrapped and plans to remain that way. The company does not participate in merger and acquisition activities largely because of the negative impact on customers associated with these transactions. Its extensive software repertoire, which includes 48 applications, is created exclusively and meticulously in house.

David Sikora, a software industry veteran and former executive chairman at Stratfor, a global research, and intelligence platform, is the CEO of ALTR.  Sikora is noted for executing the first internet software IPO in Texas with The ForeFront Group, and previously served in key leadership roles at Digby, Motive and Pervasive Software.  ALTR launched its cybersecurity platform built with blockchain technology last June with $15 million in venture capital and after being in stealth mode for almost four years.

Adeo Ressi is the CEO of the Founder Institute, a startup launch program that operates in over 200 cities worldwide. He is also a        repeat entrepreneur who has sold two $1 billion companies, and he is a recognized mentor for fast-growing technology businesses. He spoke at SXSW in Austin on entrepreneurship. In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Ressi talks about finding and pursuing your passion, traits for entrepreneurs, emerging global tech hubs and more.  

Jeremy Rossmann is the co-founder of Make School, a computer science and software engineering school, based in San Francisco. He founded Make School in 2012 with his high school friend, Ashu Desai. Rossmann dropped out of MIT and Desai dropped out of UCLA to create Make School which now offers an accredited two-year Bachelor's Degree to its students. Make School is disrupting higher education. Make School only gets paid when its students land a job after graduation making $60,000 a year or more. Many of its students make far more than that. They have landed jobs at Facebook, Google, Tesla, Amazon and more. Rossman was in Austin to speak at SXSWEdu about "Rethinking College to Diversify the Tech Workforce."

Amber Gunst is the CEO of the Austin Technology Council. She took over the job in January after serving as interim CEO since last May/ She is determined to help ten Austin software companies reach $1 billion in revenue and another 100 reach $100 million in revenue in the next ten years. Austin is one of the leading technology centers in the country and it’s going to continue to expand, Gunst said. And the Austin Technology Council, founded in 1992, is one of the most instrumental organizations for established companies that are earning at least $1 million per year in revenue, she said.