Ideas to Invoices

Brandon Austin, flounder of Go Fish Cam, and Adam Kahn, Sheephead of Operations of Go Fish Cam, talk about the Austin-based startup's growing market for its underwater cameras. Unorthodox Ventures, a venture capital firm and business incubator started by Carey Smith, founder of Big Ass Fans, acquired Go Fish Cam in March of 2019. It's one of the first investments Unorthodox Ventures has done. Go F...

Carey Smith sold Big Ass Fans, the company he founded in Lexington, Kentucky, for $500 million in December of 2017 and then moved to Austin. He bought Lance Armstrong's 8,800 square foot home near downtown in 2018 and launched Unorthodox Ventures, an Austin-based business incubator and VC firm that invests in innovative companies with great products. Smith runs Unorthodox Ventures with a small gro...

Sheela Marshall and Natalie Merrick founded Tequila Sheela, a tequila company, in 2014.  And in 2016, Tequila Sheela won a double gold medal for its Sheela Reposado Tequila, and Silver Medals for its Sheela Blanco Tequila and Sheela Anejo Tequila in the San Francisco World Spirits Competition.  That is quite an accomplishment and something Tequila Sheela is proud of, Marshall said. The organic teq...

Amos Schwartzfarb is the managing director of Techstars Austin. He took over the job from Jason Seats in 2015 and has graduated three classes of startups under his direction. Before joining Techstars, Schwartzfarb served as head of customer development at Joust. Previously, he was vice president of customer development at BlackLocus, which was acquired by The Home Depot in 2012. And he was co-foun...

Ethernet's 46 th anniversary is Wednesday, May 22 nd and on this occasion, Silicon Hills News has done a special edition Ideas to Invoices podcast with Bob Metcalfe, founder of Ethernet.

Barry Mione is a Co-Founder and President of SaveDay.com, a startup that provides 401K plans to small businesses. SaveDay, with four employees, is relocating from California to Austin. Mione is currently participating in the latest SputnikATX cohort. During the podcast, Mione discusses how the company got started, the growing need to provide 401K retirement plans to individuals who work for small...

Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Founder of Zoho, just announced plans to move Zoho's corporate headquarters from Pleasanton, Calif. to Austin, Texas. Vembu discusses plans for the Austin campus and mentions he would like to create an Indian village there where employees work, play and live.  Founded in 1996, Zoho is financially bootstrapped and plans to remain that way. The company does not participate in...

David Sikora, a software industry veteran and former executive chairman at Stratfor, a global research, and intelligence platform, is the CEO of ALTR.  Sikora is noted for executing the first internet software IPO in Texas with The ForeFront Group, and previously served in key leadership roles at Digby, Motive and Pervasive Software.  ALTR launched its cybersecurity platform built with blockchain...

Adeo Ressi is the CEO of the Founder Institute, a startup launch program that operates in over 200 cities worldwide. He is also a        repeat entrepreneur who has sold two $1 billion companies, and he is a recognized mentor for fast-growing technology businesses. He spoke at SXSW in Austin on entrepreneurship. In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Ressi talks about finding and pursuing your pass...

Jeremy Rossmann is the co-founder of Make School, a computer science and software engineering school, based in San Francisco. He founded Make School in 2012 with his high school friend, Ashu Desai. Rossmann dropped out of MIT and Desai dropped out of UCLA to create Make School which now offers an accredited two-year Bachelor's Degree to its students. Make School is disrupting higher education. Mak...

Amber Gunst is the CEO of the Austin Technology Council. She took over the job in January after serving as interim CEO since last May/ She is determined to help ten Austin software companies reach $1 billion in revenue and another 100 reach $100 million in revenue in the next ten years. Austin is one of the leading technology centers in the country and it's going to continue to expand, Gunst said....

Chris Shonk is managing partner of ATX Seed Ventures, a venture capital firm launched in Austin, Texas in 2014. The firm has already raised two funds, which are committed. It will announce shortly its third fund. In this podcast, Shonk talks frankly about what it takes to land a VC investment. If you're raising capital, it's well worth the investment of your time.  In addition to being a VC, Shonk...

Mark Rolston is the founder and chief creative at argodesign in Austin, Texas. He is a renowned designer with a 25-year career of creating for the world's largest and most innovative companies. Before argodesign, he was the chief creative officer of frogdesign. He joined frog in 1994 and co-founded the software design group, quickly establishing it as the largest part of frog's business and a majo...

Five years ago, Matt Sanchez founded CognitiveScale. He serves as the fast-growing AI company's Chief Technology Officer. CognitiveScale this week held Cognite2018 in downtown Austin. Sanchez sat down with Ideas to Invoices to talk about Responsible AI and the company's core products. "Sanchez serves as the principal architect and product visionary for the company's cloud-based cognitive applicati...

John Zanni, President of Acronis, talks about the company's partnership with Williams Martini Racing Formula One team ahead of the Formula One race weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Acronis, a data protection and storage company, provides data protection software to the Williams Martini Racing team including backup, disaster recovery, software storage, and file sync and shar...

Cristal Glangchai, PhD, was the Founding Director of the Blackstone LaunchPad and the Director of the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange at the University of Texas in Austin. She's also the Founder and CEO of VentureLab, a non-profit that runs experiential learning programs in youth tech entrepreneurship. And she is the author of the bestselling book: Venture Girls. 

Eric Bear is the founder and CEO of Austin's MONKEYMedia, an award-winning, independent R&D lab. Its patent portfolio includes in-house inventions that date back to 1992 and are incorporated in more than 184 million movies distributed on DVD & Blu-ray. Bear has over 30 years experience crafting and establishing user experience strategies for major corporations and is the first-named inventor on ov...

Doreen Lorenzo is the founder of the Center for Integrated Design and the Assistant Dean of the School of Design and Creative Technology at the University of Texas at Austin.  Lorenzo is a co-founder of mobile video insights firm Vidlet. She also previously served as president of Quirky and frog.  

Cesare Fracassi is a Univerity of Texas McCombs School of Business associate professor of finance and he's the director of the newly formed Blockchain Initiative. On this podcast, Fracassi discusses blockchain technology and UT's new program. The Blockchain Initiative at Texas McCombs is focused on providing support to faculty to do research on blockchain technology, Fracassi said. It also provide...

Trust Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm has raised an initial $35 million fund, backed by Koch Disruptive Technologies, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, to invest in and support "innovative startups facing public policy barriers.  Salen Churi and Brian Tochman lead Trust Ventures. Previously, Churi worked as a law professor and founded the Innovation Clinic at the University of Chicag...

Morgan Flager, general partner of Silverton Partners, one of Austin's oldest home-grown VC firms, is an active investor in early-stage technology startups in Austin.  He currently serves on the boards of Aceable, Alert Media, Convey, Outbound Engine, Trendkite, The Zebra, Turnkey Vacation Rentals, SourceDay, and Rollick. Before joining Silverton, Flager worked with FTC Capital in San Francisco and...

Lorenzo Gomez, III is the author of the Cilantro Diaries, business lessons from the most unlikely places. He also serves as a Director at Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation, a philanthropic organization, and co-founder of Tech Bloc, and he serves as board member, advisory board member and mentor for a variety of local and national tech and entrepreneurial organizations. He has also worked at two sta...

Jean Belanger is co-founder & CEO of Cerebri Ai which helps Fortune 500 companies find their customers' voice. Jean has helped three software companies get started, the first being Metrowerks, went public on NASDAQ and was later sold to Motorola. Next came Reddwerks, a pioneer in the Internet of Things providing solutions to major retailers including Walmart, CVS, and Best Buy.   And finally, Cere...

Jose Ancer is a tech and venture capital focused corporate partner in the Startup and Emerging Technology Group of Egan Nelson and the firm's Chief Technology Officer. He received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and his Law Degree from Harvard. He represents early-stage companies across a variety of tech-focused industries and in multiple cities. Ancer is also the author of the hug...

In 1989, Bob Fabbio quit his job at IBM and launched Tivoli Systems in Austin with no money. The company created one of the largest software categories in the world – Enterprise Systems Management. The company went public in 1995. And IBM acquired it in 1996 for $743 million. Fabbio also founded electronic document delivery startup Dazel which Hewlett-Packard bought in 1999 for $180 million. Today...