Ideas to Invoices

Matt Wursta is CEO and Founder of Wursta, a Cloud advisory business that helps organizations of all sizes compete. He is a former Googler. His experience in the Google ecosystem has allowed Wursta to identify opportunities to help organizations large and small take advantage of the operational efficiencies of Google's Cloud. Wursta was listed as No. 440 on this year's Inc5000 list, ranking in the...

Henry Yoshida is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rocket Dollar, the fastest-growing self-directed IRA platform. Henry Yoshida is a Certified Financial Planner™ and second-time founder. In the past, Henry was the founder of venture capital-backed Robo-advisor Honest Dollar, acquired by Goldman Sachs, was the founder of MY Group LLC, a $2.6 billion assets under management retirement plan advisory firm, an...

Gillan Taddune is the Chief Executive Officer of Banyan Water, the makers of data-driven water conservation software. Previously, she served in leadership positions at Recyclebank, EnerNoc and Green Mountain Energy. She also served as chief economist for the Public Utility Commission of Texas. She currently sits on the Austin Technology Incubator's water Advisory Board where she advises startups i...

Benish Shah is a go-to-market strategist who specializes in growing companies via brand, revenue, and product. She's worked across tech, media, and consumer packaged goods. A licensed lawyer, she's been published in Forbes, Refinery29, and more. She is also the author of two children's books. Shah co-founded and served as CEO of a fashion tech startup. She also served as director of marketing stra...

Andrew Eye is a serial entrepreneur based in Austin, Texas. His most recent startup is ClosedLoop.ai, which he co-founded a couple of years ago and he serves as its CEO. ClosedLoop.ai recently closed on $34 million in Series B funding to expand the reach of its data science platform for the healthcare industry.  Earlier this year, the company won the healthcare AI contest: $1.6M CMS AI Health Outc...

Ingrid Vanderveldt is an American businesswoman, media personality, and investor. She was the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Dell and is the founder and current CEO of the Empowering a Billion Women. Vanderveldt was the creator and manager of the Dell $100 million credit fund, and a member of the 2013  United Nation 's Global Entrepreneurship Council  

Joe Lonsdale wants to build an experimental tech Beta City on the outskirts of Austin with transportation tunnels, autonomous vehicles, robots, flying drones, smart buildings, and all the latest technology applications. Lonsdale is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who recently moved 8VC, his investment firm, and The Cicero Institute, a public policy think tank, to Austin from San Fra...

Pat Matthews is the Founder and CEO of Active Capital, based in San Antonio. The firm recently announced it has closed on its second fund worth $25 million. Matthews knows what it's like to build a company from idea to exit. While a college student at Virginia Tech, he co-founded Webmail.us. He helped build Webmail.us into a $10 million business which sold to Rackspace in 2007. Then he spent six-y...

Lanham Napier is the Co-founder and CEO of BuildGroup, an Austin-based venture capital firm, founded in 2015. Previously, he served as CEO of San Antonio-based Rackspace where he led the company from $1.5 million in revenue to more than $1.5 billion in revenue during his 13-years there. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Rice University. He is also the author of Billion or Bu...

A native of Austin, Leigh Christie has seen the city change from a sleepy college town to a high tech boomtown. Today, she serves as senior vice president of global technology and innovation at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. She's also a lawyer who previously served as executive director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas and served as director of Lemonade Day Austin, which...

Jess Gaffney, CEO and Executive Director of Women@Austin, discusses the new angel network the organization just launched called Beam Angel Network. Its focus is on funding female-founded startups in a variety of industries. Applications open up on Sept. 1. Notley Ventures has pledged $250,000 in initial funding for the network. 

Brian White is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mashup Foods, maker of Picklesmash, salsa made from pickles. He founded the company a few years ago with his wife, Liz, in Waco, Texas. Last year, Picklesmash participated in the consumer packaged goods accelerator SKU in Austin. During SKU, the company went through a rebranding and grew its distribution channels. Soon the product will b...

Ben Lamm is a serial technology entrepreneur and the founder/CEO of Hypergiant. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Conversable acquired by LivePerson, founder/CEO of Chaotic Moon Studios acquired by Accenture and Team Chaos, acquired by Zynga.

Carla Piñeyro Sublett is the Chief Marketing Officer at NI, an Austin-based tech company that is publicly traded with revenues of more than $1 billion annually and more than 7,700 employees. She is the former Chief Marketing Officer at Rackspace where she helped define the corporate strategy, pioneered a new visual identity, and doubled the company's brand awareness. Prior to her role at Rackspace...

Christy Cardenas is the managing partner of Austin-based Ecliptic Capital, LLC, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups. Cardenas joined the firm a year and a half ago after working in private equity and investment banking focused on the energy industry. Cardenas recently published a new report on "The Silver Linings" of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  "The Silver Lining is a deep dive into...

Steve Cody is the co-founder of Ruckify, which it bills as the world's largest peer to peer rental platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold six different rental companies and a software company. And in March, at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Ruckify moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas.

Brian is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and is currently the CEO of AlertMedia, a company he founded in 2013. AlertMedia is now the world's leading provider of emergency communication software, used by over 2000 enterprise companies in 100 countries to keep employees safe from threats to their health and safety. Before AlertMedia, Brian co-founded Xenex in 2008, where he and his team developed...

Morris Miller is the Chief Executive Officer at  Xenex Disinfection Services , based in San Antonio. Morris co-founded and provided the initial funding for Xenex, which produces a robot used to disinfect healthcare facilities, nursing homes, schools and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and other environments. Previously he co-founded Rackspace Managed Hosting. Morris also founded Curtis Hil...

David Perez launched Lumen Insurance Technologies in 2016. He saw a need in the marketplace for someone to provide insurance policies to funded technology startups. Lumen's clients have included Opcity , Strangeworks , Vault, previously known Student Loan Genius, Rocket Dollar , Valkyrie Intelligence , Kronologic , Living Security and others. Lumen provides policies for startups with products like...

Sean Foley co-founded Nine Banded Whiskey in 2014 in Austin and launched the product two years later. In 2018, he became CEO of the company and is leading the company's growth phase. It is available in 12 states and recently inked a deal with the Los Angeles Rams to be the featured whiskey in the Rams' football stadium. Foley has a background in sports and entertainment. He previously served as ve...

Lloyd Armbrust, the co-founder and CEO of Own Local, an automated digital ad platform for local media, talks about the changes in the newspaper industry and journalism in the latest edition of Ideas to Invoices. Own Local, founded in 2010, has gone through the Y-Combinator Accelerator and has raised $3.4 million in venture capital and another $3 million in debt financing. The Austin-based company...

Will Young is the Co-Founder and CEO of Austin-based SANA Benefits, a healthcare insurance technology startup. Young founded the company with Nathan Hackley in 2017. The two formerly worked together at Justworks, a benefit and payroll company in New York. They moved SANA Benefits to Austin a year ago and since then they have grown dramatically from less than 10 employees to almost 40. The company...

Joyce Durst is co-founder and CEO of Growth Acceleration Partners, a software company in Austin, Texas. GAP offers analytics, cloud, mobile and QA services. Before co-founding GAP, Durst served as CEO of venture-backed startup Pinion Software, a security software company. She also served as a senior executive at BMC Software where she oversaw a $200 million division. And she began her career at IB...

Jay Hallberg, founder, and chairman of Spiceworks founded the Austin-based company with three friends in 2006. They built Spiceworks into a giant social network for information technology system administrators and tech professionals. Recently, Ziff Davis bought the company for an undisclosed price. At SpiceWorld, an annual convention held at the Austin Convention Center, Hallberg talked about the...

Jay Hallberg, founder, and chairman of Spiceworks founded the Austin-based company with three friends in 2006. They built Spiceworks in a giant social network for information technology system administrators and tech professionals. Recently, Ziff Davis bought the company for an undisclosed price. At SpiceWorld, an annual convention held at the Austin Convention Center, Hallberg talked about the co...