Austin Tech Connect: The Podcast For The Austin Technology Ecosystem, Business Leaders, and Tech Entrepreneurs!

In this episode we talk to Hugh Forrest, the Co-President and Chief Programming Officer at SXSW. Hugh joined SXSW in 1989 (you gotta hear his story of how he got there and the early years of the organization). SXSW has clearly had an impact on the growth on Austin's global tech footprint, and this interview we talk about our past, present, and future. About Hugh Forrest Hugh Forrest serves as Co-President and Chief Programming Officer for South by Southwest (SXSW). For his role of Chief Programming Officer, he oversees content for the SXSW Conference, as well as the SXSW Music Festival, the SXSW Film Festival, the SXSW Comedy Festival and SXSW EDU. Forrest was named "Austinite of the Year" in 2012 by the Austin Chamber of Commerce (along with fellow SXSW Directors Roland Swenson, Louis Black and Nick Barbaro). In 2014, Forrest and these other SXSW Directors were named Austin Entrepreneurs of the Year by Ernst & Young. He was awarded a Key to the City in January 2023 by Austin Mayor Steve Adler. He received an honorary doctorate of humane letters in 2018 from Kenyon College, his alma matter. In 2021, he was awarded Diversity Champion of the Year by the Austin Black Business Journal. In addition to his work at SXSW, he has previously served on of the National Advisory Board for the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. He has also served on the Board of Directors for Austin Habitat for Humanity. He currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Austin-based accessibility company Knowbility. Via his decades of work with the Austin Reggae Festival, he has helped to raise more than $1 million in funding for the Central Texas Food Bank. Before joining the SXSW team in the dark ages of 1989, he founded a small monthly alternative publication called The Austin Challenger. He also wrote for several other newspapers and publications, including the Austin Chronicle, the Texas Sports Chronicle, the West Austin News, Willamette Week and the Seattle Weekly. For 2024, SXSW is scheduled March 8-16.

About Austin Technology Council

Austin Tech Connect is the official podcast of the Austin Technology Council. ATC was founded in 1992 to help promote the growth of Austin technology companies and to help create more community in the growth tech ecosystem. Today the organization is a leading organization and a major voice for the continued growth of tech in Central Texas.

This week we are hosting a special "Crossover Episode" with the "Austin Next Podcast". Do you remember the excitement when two of your favorite TV Shows had a "Crossover" (when characters from one appeared on the other show and vice versa). Depending you age you might recall the 6 Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman.... or When the cast of Mad About You walked into Central Perk on Friends, or when Hanna Montana was on the Suite Life with Zach and Cody? This episode involves the hosts of both shows, Thom Singer from Austin Tech Connect, and Michael and Jason Scharf from Austin Next conducting one interview. In this crossover episode of Austin Next and Austin Tech Connect, we welcome Lou Senko, the Chief Availability Officer at Q2 Software. Lou, an industry veteran with over two decades of experience in spearheading enterprise-wide solutions, enlightens us about Q2's mission-driven approach. We explore Q2's dynamic role in innovation, its extensive engagement with the vibrant Austin community, and its strategic focus on fostering a sustainable future for digital banking. Check out this episode and be sure to learn more about Austin Next if this is your first exposure to the show.

About Austin Technology Council

Austin Tech Connect is the official podcast of the Austin Technology Council. ATC was founded in 1992 to help promote the growth of Austin technology companies and to help create more community in the growth tech ecosystem. Today the organization is a leading organization and a major voice for the continued growth of tech in Central Texas.

Collaboration for the success of Austin means all the different non-profits working together for the common good of the community. The team at Austin Women in Technology has been a great friend to the Austin Technology Council, and we work together to help promote both organizations. In this week's episode, Thom Singer sits down with Heather Trumpfheller and Emily Gupton from AWT to hear about all they do to serve the Austin community.

AWT: Austin Women in Technology (awtaustin.org) is a 501c3 non-profit organization that empowers women in the technology industry in Austin. AWT was founded in 1992 with the goal of helping women in tech advance their careers, build professional networks, and develop leadership skills. AWT hosts regular events and workshops, as well as a mentorship program, to connect women in the technology industry with resources and opportunities to help them succeed in their careers. Additionally, AWT promotes diversity and inclusion in the tech industry and works to increase the representation of women in leadership positions.

Heather: Heather Trumpfheller, President of Austin Women in Technology, is connector and advocate of women. In her day job, she works as a Delivery Manager at TEKsystems, a tech consulting company, where she supports the growth of TEKsystems' state government work.

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathertrumpfheller/

Emily: Emily Gupton, Community Partnerships Director of Austin Women in Technology, is passionate about driving collaboration and connection in the Austin community. In her day job, she works as COO of a local tech startup, FOLIO, where she manages day-to-day operations, product, development, and customer experience.

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-gupton/

About Austin Technology Council

Austin Tech Connect is the official podcast of the Austin Technology Council. ATC was founded in 1992 to help promote the growth of Austin technology companies and to help create more community in the growth tech ecosystem. Today the organization is a leading organization and a major voice for the continued growth of tech in Central Texas.

James Beecham is a Founder and the Chief Executive Officer at ALTR, an innovator of automated data access control and security solutions. He has over a decade of experience leading technology and engineering teams in computer architecture design, database and operating system drivers, database security and data governance and privacy system design. James holds multiple software patents and a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.

About ALTR ALTR is the only automated data access control and security solution that allows organizations to easily govern and protect sensitive data wherever it lives – to get more data to more users more securely in less time. Hundreds of companies and thousands of users leverage ALTR's SaaS platform to gain unparalleled visibility into data usage, automate data access controls and policy enforcement, and secure data with patented rate-limiting, real-time alerting and tokenization-as-a-service, all in minutes instead of months. ALTR's data ecosystem integrations with leading databases, data catalogs, ETL/ELTS and more enable scalable on-premises-to-cloud data governance and security for a single source of data access truth. To learn more, visit http://ALTR.com. To get the ALTR Free plan for Snowflake, https://get.altr.com/free.

About Austin Technology Council

Austin Tech Connect is the official podcast of the Austin Technology Council. ATC was founded in 1992 to help promote the growth of Austin technology companies and to help create more community in the growth tech ecosystem. Today the organization is a leading organization and a major voice for the continued growth of tech in Central Texas.

Mike Staples has over 15 years of experience in operations, stemming from his time in the Army as a Blackhawk pilot. Prior to Cruise, he brought two early stage tech startups to market, launched a non-sortable facility for Amazon, and launched remote markets for Uber. Mike is passionate about empowering people through tech and super pumped to scale the future of transportation, starting in Austin. Mike has a BS in Systems Engineering from West Point and an MBA from Duke (Fuqua).

About Cruise Founded in 2013 in San Francisco, CA, and in partnership with General Motors and Honda, Cruise is building the world's most advanced self-driving vehicles to safely connect people with the places, things, and experiences they care about.

Suzi Sosa is the co-founder and CEO of Verb, a social enterprise dedicated to unlocking human potential. Verb's breakthrough platform supports employees in their journey of human-centered leadership development through online practice-based learning. The capabilities employees develop on Verb include self-awareness, empathy, supporting others, collaboration, inclusive leadership, having difficult conversations and building trust. Suzi is a serial social entrepreneur and loves to build businesses with the goal of creating positive social impact. She is the recipient of the 2014 Ernst & Young Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award and the co-author of Social Impact: Adventures in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Prior to Verb she built the social entrepreneurship program at the University of Texas at Austin. Suzi has a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.A. in the Plan II Honors Program from UT Austin.

About Verb Verb is a people development platform that empowers L&D teams to quickly design, launch and track their soft skills training programs. Through expertly built, ready-to-go programs and flexibility to adapt and customize, it's easy for customers to address the various learning needs across their company. With the support of Verb's customer success team, customers also get L&D expertise throughout program strategy, design, and implementation. Verb measures the results that matter, giving a deeper understanding of learners' behavioral data and personalized recommendations to ensure they are giving the best learning possible to their learners.

Austin Tech Connect is the official podcast of the Austin Technology Council. ATC was founded in 1992 to help promote the growth of Austin technology companies and to help create more community in the growth tech ecosystem. Today the organization is a leading organization and a major voice for the continued growth of tech in Central Texas.

Razat Gaurav is chief executive officer of Planview, joining the company in 2021. Razat has over 20 years of experience in the enterprise software space, with a proven track record of driving innovation-based growth and scaling up technology businesses. He is a trusted advisor to leading executives, boards and investors on topics related to digital transformation initiatives.

Prior to joining Planview, Razat was the CEO of LLamasoft, the leader in AI-based supply chain design and decisioning software. At LLamasoft, he drove an expanded product vision combined with a purpose-driven culture enabling the company to more than double its revenue in three years and resulted in a successful $1.5 billion acquisition by Coupa in November 2020. Prior to LLamasoft, Razat held leadership positions at Blue Yonder, i2 Technologies and Ernst & Young's management consulting practice. He also served on the Board of Directors of Sparta Systems and LLamasoft. Razat was recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of the 100 Most Intriguing Entrepreneurs of 2020.

About Planview

Planview helps leading enterprises transform strategy to delivery with market-leading portfolio and work management solutions for connected work.

Joyce Durst is the CEO and co-founder of Growth Acceleration Partners, a strategic technology solutions partner headquartered in Austin, TX. An engineer by trade and visionary leader by nature — leveraging 30+ years of experience in the software and technology industry — Joyce started GAP in 2007 as a values-based company built on strategic, long-term client partnerships.

Joyce received a degree in computer science from Texas A&M University as a first-generation student and became one of few women to rise to executive ranks at a $1B enterprise software company. She later pivoted to the role of CEO of a venture-backed startup, where her passion for building teams flourished.

She's a member of the Austin Chamber of Commerce, the Women Presidents' Organization and Springboard Enterprises. Joyce has won several prestigious awards, including the Greater Austin Business Awards Top CEO in 2022, the Profiles in Power award from the Austin Business Journal, and the Stevie Award for Achievement in Developing and Promoting Women.

GAP is a strategic technology solutions partner providing an exceptional experience in Digital Transformation and the Delivery of Software and Data Solutions via world-class consulting and engineering teams. By building strategic, long-term partnerships with clients, we develop extensive domain knowledge combined with deep technical expertise. We have the architectural skills to design next-generation solutions utilizing the latest cloud-based technologies. Our talented engineering teams are agile, transparent, accountable and focused on customer success, with one of the highest satisfaction scores in the industry. GAP helps you scale smarter, transforming your objectives into data, and delivering software solutions that drive business outcomes.

Brent Wistrom is senior editor at Austin Inno and a reporter at the Austin Business Journal. He covers startup news and tech trends through Inno's daily newsletter, The Beat, and news stories on the Inno and ABJ websites. Prior to joining Inno in 2015, he covered state politics, city hall and crime at The Wichita Eagle, Kansas City Star and Wichita Falls Times Record News. He graduated from the University of Texas in 2003, and he grew up in Minnesota.

Austin Inno is the metro area's leading source of startup and tech news. Launched in Austin in 2015, it is part of the broader American Inno network that covers emerging trends across local markets in the U.S. Inno is also a sister publication of the Austin Business Journal and part of the American City Business Journals network. Inno also publishes a daily newsletter called The Beat, which goes out to more than 14,000 subscribers each afternoon. Sign up here.

Krishna Srinivasan is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners and has been investing in early-stage Texas based companies and entrepreneurs since 2000. His active board involvements at LiveOak include DISCO (NYSE: LAW), Eventus Systems, Homeward, Iris Plans, Imandra, Ojo Labs, Rollick, SchooLinks, Talent Guard, and Virdee. His notable past investments include Digital Pharmacist (acquired by K1), Hive9 (acquired by BrandMaker), Mavenir Systems (NYSE: MVNR), Opcity (acquired by Newscorp), StackEngine (acquired by Oracle), Telestax (acquired by Mavenir)

Prior to co-founding LiveOak, Krishna was a Partner at Austin Ventures and previously he 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.

Krishna received his MBA from Wharton where he graduated with highest academic honors as a Palmer Scholar. He also has an MS in Operations Research from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, where he graduated with high all-round honors.

About LiveOak Venture Partners:

LiveOak Venture Partners is a venture capital fund based in Austin, Texas. With over 20 years of successful venture investing in Texas, the founders of LiveOak have helped create nearly $5 billion of enterprise value. While almost all LiveOak's investments begin in the early stages, LiveOak is a complete life cycle investor focused on technology and technology-enabled service companies based in Texas. With close to $500M under management, LiveOak Venture Partners has been the lead investor in over 50 exciting high-growth Texas-based companies in the last decade, including DISCO (NYSE: LAW), Digital Pharmacist, Eventus, OJO Labs, Opcity, Homeward, and TrustRadius. The firm was recognized as the Venture Capital Firm of the year in Austin in the 2022 inaugural A-List awards by the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce.