Austinpreneur

The move from corporate wonk to entrepreneur was not a planned one for Toby Sun, CEO/co-founder of Lime, a dockless bike-sharing company.

He simply got tired of sitting in traffic. Sun loves working on projects that can change people's daily lives. At the end of the day, following this passion simply made the most sense to him.

“I myself am a biker, I love not to drive a car,” says Sun. “So after living in many major cities in both Asia and the US, I always dreamed about alternatives to get around easier. I hate sitting in the car in traffic!” he reiterates.

Ever wondered what goes on inside the head of VCs partners that they won’t tell you? We do, too.
So we asked one.

We invited John Frankel to join us for this episode of Austinpreneur. He told us all about the issues VC firms face in their portfolio companies, such as accounting problems. He also told us who and what he looks for before investing (and, what he doesn’t want to find).

John is Partner at ff Venture Capital, which he founded in 2008. They invest primarily in US, Canadian, and Israeli-based companies, specifically in applied AI, cybersecurity, and drones.

I continue to be amazed by how Austin has truly become a global economic center.
Look no further than the recent Memorandum of Understanding economic agreement between Austin and Limerick, Ireland.

I spoke with Limerick Mayor James Collins and Eric Jones, VP Global Brand & Communications at WP Engine about how Austin and Limerick are thriving together. Limerick is now home to tech powerhouse WP Engine’s second largest office after Austin.

Ten years ago, when the global economic recession thrashed Ireland, Limerick was hit especially hard.
In a partnership with all stakeholders from the city, trade groups, education, and social enterprise groups, instead of trying to land one big employer, Limerick worked to diversify among different industries.

At the crosswalk outside Abbey Road Studios, 300,000 people a year journey to recreate the iconic Beatles album cover.
For people in Austin, Abbey Road Studios is coming to you.

Not only has the studio come to South by Southwest twice, but the studio’s music and tech incubator Abbey Road Red is exploring ways to connect with Austin’s music and tech scene with Capital Factory.

Recently I spoke with Isabel Garvey, Managing Director of the world famous Abbey Road Studios. She is taking an entrepreneurial approach to the studio (“shaping the future of music since 1931”) to ensure it's relevant in the next 87 years.

Our guest on today’s episode of the Austinpreneur podcast is Stephen Wolfram. Stephen is a mathematician, a physicist, an entrepreneur, and author of a best-selling book. He’s also the creator of the Wolfram Language, one of the only true, symbolic programming languages in everyday use today trying to describe the real world.

Wolfram language is the smarts behind Siri and Alexa.

On today’s podcast we talked about Wolfram Language and how you could be using it in your own businesses.

If Texas were a country, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world. Despite that, there's only 2% of the venture capital firms invested here.

Things are changing and there is no reason Texas couldn’t become the next tier one market for venture capital in the country.
On the latest Austinpreneur, we spoke with Kevin King, Managing Director of Texas Halo Fund about, the stage Texas Halo Fund looks typically invests in, the industries Texas Halo Fund looks for, and the state of the Texas startup ecosystem.

Texas is very welcoming to early-stage companies and very encouraging to entrepreneurs. It is a great location for companies that are looking to start up.

“Real businesses create their own source of funding and don’t have to ask anyone for permission to exist.” That’s the philosophy of Bryce Roberts, co-founder of Indie.vc.

They’re introducing us to the world of permissionless entrepreneurship. Because when you’re seeking funding every 12-18 months, you’re living at the mercy of venture just to exist.

They’re saying it doesn’t have to be this way. Indie.vc wants to be a part of the last, or even the only, round of funding founders take to launch into profitability. Because believe it not, there are many big, successful businesses that didn’t start with a seed round.

In fact, if you talk to a lot of these successful bootstrapped companies, they would argue the best thing that ever happened to them was that they didn’t take that seed round early on. On today’s episode, Bryce explains why it’s time to shift your focus and determine whether or venture is a fit for you.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely used and growing more popular each day. But are they secure?

According to Adam Perschke, absolutely not. Luckily, he and the team at NOVAM are doing something about that.
NOVAM is a distributed IoT security company. They’re using a blockchain security fabric for monitoring, mitigation and compliance in the IoT space.

In this episode, Adam Perschke, CEO at NOVAM, explains why IoT security is so lax right now, and how NOVAM is trying to strengthen security and protect these vulnerable IoT devices from harm.

“I’m an open source software developer for Microsoft.”

“That’s not what you think of from the Windows Monolith.”

Ben ran a successful software design company for many years, but when he saw the opportunity to be a first mover in early Slack, he shut his whole company down.

He had clients, products in progress, staff, everything. He switched completely and rebuilt his team to create Howdy.ai, a slack plugin that makes customizable standup activities simple.

On this episode of Austinpreneur, I talk with Ben Brown about Howdy, how it works and why it’s groundbreaking, why Austin and not San Francisco, and his thoughts on running his company alongside his wife. I love his take on mixing marriage and business.

On this episode of Austinpreneur we are joined by Evan Burfield, CEO and Founder of Union. Evan talked about Union — what it is, what it does, and why you should be a part of this network of startup communities.