Austinpreneur

Austin is becoming a hotbed for innovative technologies, which includes the emerging utilization of drones. From recreational usage to package delivery, drones are becoming increasingly involved in our daily lives. We sat down with industry expert Colin Guinn from Guinn Partners to talk about why Austin is becoming a hot spot for drone technology. Before starting his own consulting firm for technology products, Colin was the CEO and driving force behind DJI Innovations headquarters in Austin.

When asked what his business’ headline was, Co-founder and Managing Director of Moonshots Capital, Kelly Perdew had the perfect answer, “investing in extraordinary leadership.” No stranger to hard work and what extraordinary leadership looks like, Kelly Perdew is a military Veteran, successful entrepreneur, author, and winner of season 2 of NBC’s The Apprentice. Kelly sat down with us during Capital Factory’s annual Veterans in Tech Summit to talk about his career, what he sees as good leadership, and how he is helping other military veteran entrepreneurs.

In the new digital age, it seems nearly impossible to successfully bring a product to market. “Back in the day, we’d watch commercials but now we're not a spoon-fed audience. We like to interact with our content.” Amber Allen, the CEO and Founder of Double A Labs, came by the podcast to chat about creating massive, large scale experiences where audiences and fans can create their own content, share and be their own celebrity, and provide a way for the digital audience to participate. She stated, “It’s no longer about the thousands of people [at the arena]... it's about the million that will watch it.”

“I think we're getting to an interesting inflection point, with many different fields of technology, where we’re able to take disparate pieces that are mature enough for us to reasonably combine and make really impactful things.” That’s Abe Carryl, Booz Allen Hamilton’s Product Strategist, who focuses his time on rapid prototyping and product development. Abe stopped by the studio during Austin Startup Week to chat about his endeavors with Booz Allen Hamilton, working with startups, and cutting edge tech that's currently being built.

Yes, she’s a brand new entrepreneur and yes, she's brand new to the tech scene, but that doesn’t stop Abigail Rose from owning it and running a successful business. Abigail is the Co-founder & CEO of Blended Sense, a team of creatives who saw a disconnect between two industries that needed to be in sync. Abigail and her team at Blended Sense are working to enable the local small business owners to create engaging digital content by giving them access to creative freelancers in their local community. Listen in to the latest episode of Austinpreneur to find out how your business can work with an incredible team of creatives!

If companies want to grow and evolve, they need to think about what lies ahead in the future. Ari Popper is taking that one step further with SciFutures by tapping into the insights that Sci-fi authors have to envision what the future of a company looks like. “The problem is, when you're dealing with these nascent emergent technologies, that we don’t even know how to talk about them yet; we don’t have the right language to describe them. So, how can you build a disruptive solution when you can't even agree on what to call it? Science Fiction does that very well from what we’ve seen...sci-fi paved the way.”

It’s no secret that less than 10% of venture capital investing for tech startups are women investors, and only one-fifth of all U.S. VC investments go to startups where at least one founder is female. For Sara Brand, her career has “...been very technical in lots of roles and industries where [she has] often been the only woman.” Receiving both her Master’s and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley, Sara is no stranger to male-dominated fields. From founding (512) brewing company to starting her own VC firm, Sara is working to help other female founders and business leaders to take back control of male-dominated industries.

With the rise of video game streaming platforms like Twitch and Mixer, the way people discover games has changed drastically and is now driven by individual creators and streamers. However, there are 2 major problems that Chrono.GG Co-Founder and CEO Justin Sacks sees: “There’s no attribution for the game publishers... and the actual content creators themselves don’t get any recognition or monetization for making all of that discovery.” Justin has been in the gaming industry for 13 years and is using his experience to both solve the discovery issue in gaming and connect game publishers directly to content creators.

If you haven’t noticed the amount of traffic happening, there are hundreds of people flocking to Austin every day. It’s not just people, big companies are coming here as well to tap into the talented ecosystem that Austin has to offer. “Austin I think is an incredible community. We came here because we saw a lot of innovation happening in Austin, a lot of great companies coming out of Austin, and we said you know let's try to get to know that local community... I think it’s one of the most vibrant communities in the world for entrepreneurs, for innovation, for technology. There’s something of a magic, a secret sauce of Austin.”

His background involves creating video games, space travel, global exploration, and collecting unusual things. Known online as Lord British of the Ultima Series, Richard Garriott has seen and experienced a lot in his extraordinary career. “Gaming over the last few decades has gone from non-existent to larger in the economic and social impact of all movies combined, all tv combined, and all print combined... It really is a dominant big business.” Richard stopped by the podcast and chatted with us about his long and historied gaming career and his love for space with Fred Schmidt, Capital Factory’s Director of International Affairs.