Austinpreneur

“Money is kind of the easy part. In fact, if it's a purely cash, it's probably not very interesting to us.”
“For us to be successful we believe that we need to figure out how we can add value outside of the money.”
Rogue Venture Partners is an Oregon-based investment firm now on it’s 3rd fund, a $30M fund.
On this episode of Austinpreneur, Tom Sperry, Managing Partner of Rogue, explains how his company invests, what they look for, and what advice he would give to entrepreneurs.

In this episode, we caught up with Barbera Wolfensberger and Danny Frietman at SXSW. We talked about how the Netherlands is solving societal challenges by combining creativity and tech. We also learned more about the New Dutch Wave and how the relationship between the Netherlands and Texas is strengthening to service startups.

Barbera is the Director General of Culture and Media within the Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science of the Netherlands. Danny is the Managing Director of Enterprise Summit in the Netherlands.

On this episode of the Austinpreneur podcast, we sat down at SXSW to catch up with Frank Gruber, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Established. We talked about everything from The Downtown Project in Las Vegas to what his team was up to at SXSW to why founders are so important to startups.

When doing customer interviews, Jason Cohen had theories about what customers would be willing to pay for WordPress service that is safe, scalable, and fast.

From that understanding, he’s built an incredibly successful company.

Jason Cohen is the Founder and CTO of WP Engine, the largest digital experience platform for WordPress at $100M annual revenue.
On this episode, Jason joins me on Austinpreneur, to discuss how his company has grown and taken advantage of an explosive market, as well as the entrepreneur’s bootstrap vs venture funding debate.

2 things that make Austin a great city for entrepreneurs:
Talent from UT and that it’s not Silicon Valley.
By its nature, Austin is both full of talent because of UT and other regional institutions and a place where tech is not the only economic engine.

The entrepreneurs have firsthand experience with the industries they’re trying to disrupt.
On this episode of Austinpreneur, I spoke with Katherine Weinmann an investor at Norwest Venture Partners.
Her company is a multi-stage investment firm that for more than 50 years has funded over 550 companies, managing about $6B in capital.

With their many years of experience, Katherine broke down the 4 qualities they look for in a pitch, and the first one is huge.

On today’s episode of the Austinpreneur podcast, I talked with Matias Lyon, CEO of iF.

Matias talked about how iF is working to lift Chileans to a higher social and economic status through entrepreneurship. In Chile, there's a large discrepancy between those at the top of the income bracket and those at the bottom. Listen in to today's episode!

Alton McDowell is the Co-Head of Technology and Disruptive Commerce at J.P. Morgan.

In the bank, J.P. Morgan has four million business customers—Alton calls them startups. As these customers scale up, there are more and more resources available to them.

Listen in to hear Alton share how he’s able to see around every next curve of business growth—from startup all the way to a billion-dollar company. Check out the Texas Startups Roadshow in Dallas/Houston/Austin. 

“When you’re focusing so much on the distribution of your content, you lose sight of the creation.” YouTube star, comedian and author Hannah Hart visited the Capital Factory on route to SXSW.

She started a t-shirt line while making YouTube videos on the side because she never thought the ad revenue would be substantial enough. But year after year, with intentional focus on each project she tackled, her platform grew. This influencer is now so much more than just a professional YouTuber--although she still does that well.

She’s now an author of two books, television personality, podcaster and so much more. On today’s episode, we hear about her journey growing her massive platform from scratch.

AI has grown by leaps and bounds. But, there’s still a long way to go. We're continuing to ask the big question: what can AI do for us? Come join us as we chat with Tom Parish, VP of Marketing at ConverseNow.AI.

What comes to mind when you think about space travel? Do you think of it as a relic from decades past? That visiting anywhere other than the moon is unthinkable in the near future?

The space industry is concerned with much more than just making it to Mars. In this episode of Capital Factory recorded at SXSW, we spoke to Richard Garriott, Molly Cain, and special guest Bill Nye in search of the answer to this question: What will the next decade of space travel look like?