Austinpreneur

When your employees see you achieve goals that you've set for yourself, they know you're going to expect them to achieve the goals that you've set for them— as well as those that they've set for themselves.

There are different dimensions of goal setting. There's goal setting for yourself, your employees and the organization. They sort of philosophically weave together.

Mark Lundstrom, founder and CEO of Radia, dropped by our podcast to chat about how setting personal goals correlates to entrepreneurial success.

The way that he keeps grounded in his goal setting is with athletic activity. Lundstrom sets a yearly quota for himself, and it all started when he said he'd run 1,000 miles in a year.

Joel Fontenot has been around the Dallas startup scene for quite some time. In fact, he was one of the original Dallas VCs— and he's still at it today. He's also been an entrepreneur and an executive. As someone who has been on all sides of the table, Joel has plenty of industry knowledge; we believe his unique perspective is important to share on Austinpreneur.

Joel came on the show to talk us through his career and share some great insights about revenue, people, and diversity and inclusion.

If you think roboticists have some sort of mystical genius calling to the field, think again. For Vivian Chu, at least, it took hard work and great mentors.

She and her Ph.D. advisor founded Diligent Robotics so that their robot, Moxie, could become a team member at a hospital. Vivian’s interest in robotics started with haptics, teaching robots about touch, and launched into creating a robot who could share some of the non-patient-facing duties of nurses. A robot who is a member of a mostly human team.

Vivian came on Austinpreneur to talk about inventing Moxie, what it’s like to be one of a two-woman roboticist team, and what she hopes to inspire in young people who are interested in STEM.

Sarah Ortiz Shields wants everyone to register to vote. The Executive Director of Austin Tech Alliance is all about voter registration (and pushing for an online process) as well as voter education in Travis County.

We interviewed Sarah on Austinpreneur about civics, the LGBTQ community and how she discovered her purpose— using her skills to build stuff for her community.

The change from LaCroix to nonprofit was big. “One day I had mountains of sparkling water and the next I was paying a quarter every day for my coffee,” she said.

If you haven’t heard about the Dumb Money craze, you’re missing out. Chris Camillo, Dave Hanson, and Jordan Mclain are the masterminds behind the uber successful YouTube channel.

Dumb money is a term that means a lot to this group. Because they consider themselves to be dumb money. With little experience in the investor space they’ve experienced more success than any hedge fund in the past 10-15 years. And they believe most of the world is “dumb money.”

Just average folks without any education or professional experience on Wall Street. But the good news is, this team is out squash the lie that you have to be “smart money” to play in this space. Their mission is to inspire and educate ANYONE who is interested in investing in startups or early stage investing to just get started. Right now. You don’t have to be qualified to do really well when it comes to startup investing or investing in public markets. It’s just a matter of getting started and learning slowly…

So you need to get from Austin to Houston.

But you don’t want to fly, Uber won’t work, and the Megabus option doesn’t sound too appealing either.

Enter Kush Singh and his team at Hitch.

They’re out to solve the intercity transportation problem that exists between some of the larger towns in Texas.

We love Aunt Bertha. Why? Well, they’re basically the Amazon of social services.

Founded by Erine Gray, Aunt Bertha is a search and referral platform for social services. Anyone in the US can enter their zip code and find available health and social service programs if they’re going through a difficult period of time.

Erine came on this episode of the Austinpreneur podcast to talk about issues like: his startup journey, how he raised funding, why he decided to go the for-profit route, and what it’s been like bringing technology to non-profit organizations.

Shane Adams is an entrepreneur, angel investor and startup mentor. When he couldn’t get hired as a substitute teacher, he didn’t give up on his passion to mentor students from low income communities across Austin. Instead, he asked what else he could do to help these students achieve a brighter future. And that’s when the SLA Foundation was born.

Shane and his wife are on a mission to help these children achieve greatness. They’re pioneering youth engagement in schools in so many different ways. Like bringing young professionals into high school classrooms so that students can hear real life stories of success.
By introducing everyday role models who have jobs many of these kids don’t even know exist, Shane is opening up a world of new possibilities. 

This is the magic that happens when an angel investor and startup mentor decides to pursue social impact.

Government innovation… is that really a thing?

Sean Singleton, broker dealer at Franklin Templeton Investments, had a lot to share around this on this episode.

He told us that Secretary Carter was the first sitting Secretary of Defense to make his way into Silicon Valley in over a generation. Carter quickly noticed the private sector was doing a lot more innovation than the government ever will. In fact, if you look from 1953 to 2017, there was parity between the private sector and the government up until the late 80s. But now there’s a delta of $250 billion in terms of what each sector is doing in research and development.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Sean touches on his time at DIU, the Defense Innovation Unit. There he worked with men and women in uniform to learn about the priority problems that impact their mission. Once he knew that, he would find the entities that could solve their problems with already established products. An incredible collaboration.

Imagine having to redact sensitive personal information in 52,000 documents…

Manually. Every single month.

This is just one example of a customer that Lisa McComb and Melissa Unsell-Smith, founders of Rectify, have been able to help since they started their business.

Rectify is a document cleansing company that leverages machine learning to automate the process.

No more all-nighters. Just automated tech that helps make humans more effective at their job.