Ideas To Invoices

Hugh Forrest is the chief programming officer of South by Southwest that takes place every March in Austin. SXSW Conference & Festivals is a ten-day-long convergence of tech, movies and music now entering its 32nd year. SXSW Interactive has gained an international reputation as one of the world’s most influential tech events. It’s been called Spring Break for Geeks among other nicknames. An Austin native, Forrest graduated from Austin High School and majored in English at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Before SXSW, Forrest held several jobs in the newspaper industry and he started an alternative newspaper in town, The Austin Challenger, a rival to The Austin Chronicle, which runs SXSW. In 1988, Forrest joined SXSW to head up the Interactive operations.

Robyn Metcalfe is the founder and director of Food+City at the University of Texas at Austin. Food+City i a platform for telling stories that inspire innovation in the food system. Dr. Metcalfe is a food historian at the University of Texas at Austin, founder and visiting research scholar and lecturer in the College of Natural Sciences. Metcalfe has written for and produced Sunset Magazine, authored two non-fiction books, served as a visiting research scholar at Boston University and founded a non-profit educational farm in Maine. She has a Cordon Bleu certificate for culinary skills, a Cheese Certificate and is an ultra-marathoner. In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Metcalfe talks about the need for innovation in the food system, food startups and Food+City's mission and Food Challenge Prize at SXSW in 2018. 

Mike Millard is the managing director of MassChallenge Texas, a nonprofit startup-friendly accelerator. In this podcast, Millard talks about the inaugural MassChallenge Texas program. The first cohort of 100 companies launches early next year. The deadline to apply to MassChallenge Texas is Dec. 5th. In this podcast, Millard gives the code MCTXIronMike to save 100 percent on the application fee.  The accelerator doesn't take any equity and at the end, it gives away $500,000 in cash awards. MassChallenge Texas is part of a global network of accelerators in Boston, London, Mexico City, Geneva and Jerusalem.

Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO at RackN, an Austin-based startup which makes software to automate data centers and managing servers well. Hirschfeld has 15 years of experience in the cloud and infrastructure industry. He has served four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and previously worked as an executive at Dell. He’s also a serial entrepreneur. Hirschfeld founded RackN in October of 2014, the company has received some angel investment, earns money and is currently raising money. He founded ProTier in 1999, which Surgient founded in 2004. He also founded Zehicle and has worked for several other technology companies and startups. RackN graduated from the TechRanch Venture Forth program led by Kevin Koym. That helped the company launch, Hirschfeld said. Today, the company is active in the meetup scene and Capital Factory, he said. Andrea Kalmans with Lontra Ventures, is an advisor to the company too, he said.            

  Jan Ryan is a serial entrepreneur, software tech executive, and investor. She has spent 38 years building expansion stage companies, resulting in four acquisitions and one IPO. She is a mentor, advisor and angel investor in several Austin startups. She is also a partner at Capital Factory, an Austin-based accelerator, as well as Techstars. Recently, Ryan joined the University of Texas at Austin in the newly created position of Director of Creative Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the College of Fine Arts.      Ryan also founded in 2013, Women@Austin, an organization that helps women founders succeed.  

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Will Mitchell, co-founder of Contract Simply, discusses how his startup pivoted from a consumer marketplace called Renovate Simply to a business to business enterprise software company for the construction and banking industry. The co-founders of Contract Simply spent last summer in Mountain View, California in the Y-Combinator program. Mitchell and his co-founder, Andrew Latimer, moved to California, rented an apartment and furniture and spent three months in the accelerator program. The company initially got rejected when applying to the Y-Combinator program as Renovate Simply. So they re-examined their business and decided to focus directly on the construction contracting market. With the new concept, they got into the program. Y-Combinator invests $120,000 in the startups for a seven percent equity stake. The program was worth it, Mitchell said.

Stephanie Breedlove founded Breedlove & Associates in 1992. She built the nanny payroll company into a multi-million-dollar business with more than 10,000 active clients. In 2012, Care.com acquired her company for $55 million and it became Care.com Homepay, according to an article in Forbes. Today, Breedlove is an angel investor with the Central Texas Angel Network and an author of "All In: How Women Entrepreneurs Can Think Bigger, Build Sustainable Businesses, and Change the World," published in 2017.

Adam Salamon is the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Next Coast Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm. Salamon most recently served as co-founder and chief operating officer of Perk Inc., a rewards and engagement platform that went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year for more than $40 million in a stock deal.  In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Salamon talks about how Perk initially built a web-based browser that rewarded users with Perk points. But they quickly learned that there were too many hurdles to getting consumers to switch their Internet browsers. So they pivoted and created a mobile-based rewards app that rewarded people with Perk points for watching videos, playing games and doing other tasks. They built up their user base to more than one million users. They also raised $60,000 in a seed stage investment initially from an Austin angel investor. They later raised $1 million from a family of

This episode of Ideas to Invoices features Andrea Kalmans, a principal of Lontra Ventures. is an angel investor, She is an angel investor, mentor and technology advocate in Austin. She has worked as an executive with Dell and Salomon Smith Barney in its media investment bank in New York City. She earned her MBA from UT Austin and she has degrees in finance and economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At Lontra Ventures, Kalmans focuses on the firm's technology portfolio with investments in artificial intelligence, analytics, audio and video, big data, database technologies, developer tools, high-performance computing, IT infrastructure and Internet of Things and Web optimization. Andrea is a mentor at Techstars Austin, Capital Factory, The Dell Medical Catalyst Program in Austin and the RealCo Accelerator/Geekdom Fund in San Antonio.     

Chris Saum and Teresa Evans are partners in the RealCo Seed Fund Program, based at Geekdom in San Antonio. They oversee the admissions, mentoring, training and fundraising process for business to business technology startups in the portfolio. The program accepts startups on a rolling basis through applications on its website and other sites. Saum also regularly travels to recruit new startups.  The 15-month long program focuses on providing networking, capital, mentors and other resources to early stage startups. The program is currently accepting applications. Startups in the program have the ability to receive up to $125,000 in funding, co-working space at Geekdom, access to investors, mentorship and other training. Michael Girdley, co-founder of Codeup and co-founder of Geekdom Fund, is heading up the RealCo team along with Evans, co-founder of San Antonio Science and associate director of the San Antonio Angel Network and Saum, co-founder and director of business development of MUD Geochemical. In this ep

Ideas to Invoices features a discussion with Krishna Srinivasan, general partner with LiveOak Venture Partners and Ivelin Ivanov, Co-founder and CEO of Telestax, one of the firm’s portfolio companies. Srinivasan is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners and has been investing in early stage Texas-based companies and entrepreneurs since 2000. Prior to founding LiveOak, Krishna was a Partner at Austin Ventures. Before joining Austin Ventures, Krishna was with Motorola where he wrote large scale optimization software for supply chain planning and worked with a variety of business units on strategic and operational issues. He started his professional career at SEMATECH. Ivanov is a technology entrepreneur who founded Mobicents, an Open Source VoIP Platform, to help create, deploy, and manage applications integrating voice, video and data. He is the co-founder of TeleStax, the company behind Restcomm – the #1 Communications Middleware Platform. An early investor in multiple start-ups, he still finds time to cont

Chris Burney is the executive director of the San Antonio Angel Network, founded in 2016.  Previously, he was a manager and senior financial analyst for Rackspace, the San Antonio-based Web hosting company. He also worked as an analyst for Thomson Reuters, J.P. Morgan and as a summer associate for Sterling Stamos, a private equity group. Burney received his MBA from the University of North Carolina and his Bachelor's degree from Duke University.  He also grew up in San Antonio and graduated from Alamo Heights High School.  As the head of the San Antonio Angel Network, Burney evaluates deals, recruits new members and runs the organization, which is based in the RealCo Seed Fund Program offices at Geekdom in downtown San Antonio. 

Ben Dyer is a well-known entrepreneur in Atlanta and Austin who founded Peachtree Software in 1978.  He ran that company until 1981 when it sold to Altanta-based Management Science America, shortly before the debut of the IBM PC. Peachtree Software was one of the original software programs to run on the IBM PC.   Dyer then launched Comsell, an interactive media company, which he sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Next, he founded Intellimedia, which created CD-ROMs focused on sports education. In 2015, he was a founder of a Georgia-based life sciences corporation. In addition to being a technology startup founder and executive, Dyer has also been a bank president, a venture capitalist and he has served as a mentor to numerous startups. Today, Dyer is an entrepreneurial advisor at the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also an advisor to Polygraph Media, a data-science driver Facebook Marketing Partner, based in Austin.  He is also the author of TechDrawl, a blog about

Chris Treadaway founded Polygraph Media in 2011. The company, based at WeWork at the Domain in Austin, has 10 employees and it focuses on Facebook advertising for large customers like McDonalds and Cheddars.  Previously, Chris worked as group product manager of Web strategy at Microsoft. And he was a founder of Startfor, a global intelligence firm, based in Austin.  In this interview, Chris talks about how Polygraph Media has created Internet advertising technology that drives traffic and revenue via Facebook advertising for customers like McDonald's, Fox TV and Six Flags. The company, which started out at the Austin Technology Incubator, is bootstrapped and raised a seed round of funding from friends and family. It is profitable, according to Treadaway and plans for dramatic growth in Austin. It is hiring, particularly software developers focused on advertising technology. 

Sara Brand and Kerry Rupp, are general partners of True Wealth Ventures, a $20 million venture capital fund based in Austin and focused on investing in women led companies in the sustainable consumer and consumer health industries.

John Price is the CEO of Vast.com, and before that he worked as a marketing executive at Between Markets, which sold to Inovis. He is also a Trilogoy alumni and spent 11 years as vice president of marketing and business development there. He was critical to the company’s growth from $0 to $250 million in revenue. Previously, John was a director of technical marketing at Neuron Data and an AI associate at Shell Oil. John holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

Michael Girdley is an entrepreneur and investor from San Antonio. He also worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley and he earned a computer science degree with honors from Lafayette College. He is also the author of several books on Java programming with a focus on web applications Michael served as the CEO of his family business Alamo Fireworks, he is also the Chairman of Codeup, a coding bootcamp company he cofounded. And Michael is a venture capitalist and the managing director of the $20 million Geekdom Fund and a partner at RealCo, a seed fund program.

  A Native of South Africa, Clinton Phillips, is a serial entrepreneur. He recently founded Medici, a HIPAA-complaint telemedicine app, in Austin and raised more than $24 million in venture capital funding. Previously, he founded and ran Aspen-based Aspen Back & Body, physical rehab clinic, that he sold to Laser Spine Institute. And Phillips founded another medical advice company called 2nd.MD in 2011 in Houston. Phillips is also a former chiropractor, sports therapist, and rugby player.  

John Berkowitz is CEO & Co-Founder of OJO Labs in Austin.   Before launching OJO, John founded Yodle, a provider of local online advertising and marketing services, in 2005 with his childhood friends Ben Rubenstein and Nathaniel Stevens. They grew it to a large company with more than 1,500 employees and $200 million in revenue. In 2016, Web.com bought Yodle for $342 million.   At Yodle, John served many roles including launching and managing the 50m enterprise division of Yodle and most recently managing all strategic relationships for Yodle as Vice President of Business Development.   In Austin, John also serves on the board of CASA of Travis County, a children's advocacy organization and sits on the board of several young companies as an entrepreneurial advisor. Berkowitz has a B.A. in International Business from George Washington University.