Ideas to Invoices

Scott Willis is a pioneer in the Austin tequila industry. He is the president and founder of Tequila 512, Austin's first tequila brand. And in this podcast, Willis talks about his entrepreneurial journey, which wasn't an easy one from quitting his day job and going all in on his tequila venture. He created an award-winning tequila that costs less than $30 a bottle. But before that, he had to trave...

At SXSW Interactive 2018, Sarah Koch, vice president of social innovation at the Case Foundation, talks about the organization's participation in the conference, the focus on diversity and inclusion and its Faces of Founders and Be Fearless campaigns.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr is in Austin for South by Southwest and to talk about his plan to ensure that U.S. infrastructure policy is 5G ready.  5G is the next generation of broadband Internet and it promises to bring all kinds of advancements in technology including applications for the Internet of Things, autonomous cars, telemedicine and more.  In this special edition of the Ideas to Invoic...

Gabe Wilcox, CEO and Co-Founder of MineralSoft, based in Austin, a software platform that allows mineral rights holders to manage and analyze their portfolios in real time, talks about operating a startup in Austin, Texas. MineralSoft announced in February that the company raised $4 million in funding. The company has 20 employees and expects to double in size this year. MineralSoft recently enter...

Ryan Wuerch is the founder and CEO of DOSH, an app that gives consumers cash back for purchases. Dosh is quickly growing from 10 people a year ago to more than 100 by the end of the year. And already, millions of consumers have downloaded the app, which has given back more than $19 million in cash to consumers since launching in beta mode last fall.  Wuerch is a serial entrepreneur. Before Dosh, h...

Michael McGar and Chipp Walters are leading a team to create an Augmented Reality app for the Alamo. Imagine Virtua, an Austin-based company, formed to create the Alamo Reality project to bring the Alamo battle to life using Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications.  McGar and Walters, both serial entrepreneurs, say it's not the technology, but the storytelling and content that is key to...

Hugh Forrest is the chief programming officer of South by Southwest that takes place every March in Austin. SXSW Conference & Festivals is a ten-day-long convergence of tech, movies and music now entering its 32nd year. SXSW Interactive has gained an international reputation as one of the world's most influential tech events. It's been called Spring Break for Geeks among other nicknames. An Austin...

Robyn Metcalfe is the founder and director of Food+City at the University of Texas at Austin. Food+City i a platform for telling stories that inspire innovation in the food system. Dr. Metcalfe is a food historian at the University of Texas at Austin, founder and visiting research scholar and lecturer in the College of Natural Sciences. Metcalfe has written for and produced Sunset Magazine, author...

Mike Millard is the managing director of MassChallenge Texas, a nonprofit startup-friendly accelerator. In this podcast, Millard talks about the inaugural MassChallenge Texas program. The first cohort of 100 companies launches early next year. The deadline to apply to MassChallenge Texas is Dec. 5th. In this podcast, Millard gives the code MCTXIronMike to save 100 percent on the application fee. ...

Rob Hirschfeld is the founder and CEO at RackN, an Austin-based startup which makes software to automate data centers and managing servers well. Hirschfeld has 15 years of experience in the cloud and infrastructure industry. He has served four terms on the OpenStack Foundation Board and previously worked as an executive at Dell. He's also a serial entrepreneur. Hirschfeld founded RackN in October...

  Jan Ryan is a serial entrepreneur, software tech executive, and investor. She has spent 38 years building expansion stage companies, resulting in four acquisitions and one IPO. She is a mentor, advisor and angel investor in several Austin startups. She is also a partner at Capital Factory, an Austin-based accelerator, as well as Techstars. Recently, Ryan joined the University of Texas at Austin...

In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Will Mitchell, co-founder of Contract Simply, discusses how his startup pivoted from a consumer marketplace called Renovate Simply to a business to business enterprise software company for the construction and banking industry. The co-founders of Contract Simply spent last summer in Mountain View, California in the Y-Combinator program. Mitchell and his co-fou...

Stephanie Breedlove founded Breedlove & Associates in 1992. She built the nanny payroll company into a multi-million-dollar business with more than 10,000 active clients. In 2012, Care.com acquired her company for $55 million and it became Care.com Homepay, according to an article in Forbes. Today, Breedlove is an angel investor with the Central Texas Angel Network and an author of "All In: How Wo...

Adam Salamon is the first Entrepreneur in Residence at Next Coast Ventures, an Austin-based venture capital firm. Salamon most recently served as co-founder and chief operating officer of Perk Inc., a rewards and engagement platform that went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year. RhythmOne PLC acquired Perk earlier this year for more than $40 million...

This episode of Ideas to Invoices features Andrea Kalmans, a principal of Lontra Ventures. is an angel investor, She is an angel investor, mentor and technology advocate in Austin. She has worked as an executive with Dell and Salomon Smith Barney in its media investment bank in New York City. She earned her MBA from UT Austin and she has degrees in finance and economics from the University of Wisc...

Chris Saum and Teresa Evans are partners in the RealCo Seed Fund Program, based at Geekdom in San Antonio. They oversee the admissions, mentoring, training and fundraising process for business to business technology startups in the portfolio. The program accepts startups on a rolling basis through applications on its website and other sites. Saum also regularly travels to recruit new startups.  Th...

Ideas to Invoices features a discussion with Krishna Srinivasan, general partner with LiveOak Venture Partners and Ivelin Ivanov, Co-founder and CEO of Telestax, one of the firm's portfolio companies. Srinivasan is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners and has been investing in early stage Texas-based companies and entrepreneurs since 2000. Prior to founding LiveOak, Krishna was a Partner at Au...

Chris Burney is the executive director of the San Antonio Angel Network, founded in 2016.  Previously, he was a manager and senior financial analyst for Rackspace, the San Antonio-based Web hosting company. He also worked as an analyst for Thomson Reuters, J.P. Morgan and as a summer associate for Sterling Stamos, a private equity group. Burney received his MBA from the University of North Carolin...

Ben Dyer is a well-known entrepreneur in Atlanta and Austin who founded Peachtree Software in 1978.  He ran that company until 1981 when it sold to Altanta-based Management Science America, shortly before the debut of the IBM PC. Peachtree Software was one of the original software programs to run on the IBM PC.   Dyer then launched Comsell, an interactive media company, which he sold to Rupert Mur...

Chris Treadaway founded Polygraph Media in 2011. The company, based at WeWork at the Domain in Austin, has 10 employees and it focuses on Facebook advertising for large customers like McDonalds and Cheddars.  Previously, Chris worked as group product manager of Web strategy at Microsoft. And he was a founder of Startfor, a global intelligence firm, based in Austin.  In this interview, Chris talks...

Sara Brand and Kerry Rupp, are general partners of  True Wealth Ventures , a $20 million venture capital fund based in Austin and focused on investing in women led companies in the sustainable consumer and consumer health industries.

John Price is the CEO of Vast .com, and before that he worked as a marketing executive at Between Markets, which sold to Inovis. He is also a Trilogoy alumni and spent 11 years as vice president of marketing and business development there. He was critical to the company's growth from $0 to $250 million in revenue. Previously, John was a director of technical marketing at Neuron Data and an AI asso...

Michael Girdley is an entrepreneur and investor from San Antonio. He also worked as a programmer in Silicon Valley and he earned a computer science degree with honors from Lafayette College. He is also the author of several books on Java programming with a focus on web applications Michael served as the CEO of his family business Alamo Fireworks, he is also the Chairman of Codeup, a coding bootcam...

  A Native of South Africa, Clinton Phillips, is a serial entrepreneur. He recently founded Medici, a HIPAA-complaint telemedicine app, in Austin and raised more than $24 million in venture capital funding. Previously, he founded and ran Aspen-based Aspen Back & Body, physical rehab clinic, that he sold to Laser Spine Institute. And Phillips founded another medical advice company called 2 nd .MD i...

John Berkowitz is CEO & Co-Founder of OJO Labs in Austin.   Before launching OJO, John founded Yodle, a provider of local online advertising and marketing services, in 2005 with his childhood friends Ben Rubenstein and Nathaniel Stevens. They grew it to a large company with more than 1,500 employees and $200 million in revenue. In 2016, Web.com bought Yodle for $342 million.   At Yodle, John serve...