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San Antonio Based Rackspace Aquires Slicehost

October 22, 2008

Hosting behemoth Rackspace continues its aquisition streak by snapping up Slicehost, a two year old company that focuses on low-cost, highly reliable virutal private servers.

The announcement came today at the Rackspace Cloud Event and was subsequently followed up with a post by Slicehost on their blog.

I haven’t been able to dig up any financial terms on the deal but will update this post if I do.

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

You Know You’re an Entrepreneur When…

October 20, 2008

… You can turn down $300,000 from Microsoft to build something you really believe in.

This is the story for GitHub founder Tom Preston-Werner. He posted his experience on making the decision to leave Powerset (and Microsoft) to go full-time on his creation.

Such an experience would test the chops of any entrepreneur and I have to say, I admire Tom’s spirit in really going after his vision. These are the kind of entrepreneurs the country needs to push innovation, create jobs at their companies and move the world forward.

What’s YOUR story? Post it in the comments… you know you’re an entrepreneur when:

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Startup Profile: Mixng - Bringing it All Together

October 20, 2008

I caught up with Justin Coleman, founder of local startup Mixng for a quick Q&A over email:

What’s the one sentence pitch for Mixng?

Mixng is an all-in-one social experience for those people who are tired of having numerous accounts for numerous activities and for those who are just getting into the social internet.

Elaborate a little bit on that and give us some details

Basically, Mixng is social networking, social news, social messaging and an aggregation tool. You can manage and keep in touch with friends, upload and view photos, chat with friends, share and discuss cool news items, message publicly with friends and strangers and follow your other online profiles in one spot.

I see it as a tool for two different groups of people: social internet veterans and newcomers. Veterans who are fatigued by the immense number of varying social websites and utilities can come to Mixng to simplify that. You can tell your friends to join Mixng with the promise that they won’t have to join 6 other sites to see EVERYTHING your doing online. They can see what you think is cool online, see your pictures and talk with you under one roof.

As for newcomers, this is a great way to experience what the social internet has to offer. Want to test of social networking and online photo storage without having to sign up for multiple profiles? Cool, we can help you there.

Our name Mixng, is short for Mixing, means that we are not only mixing people, but mixing these different technologies and tools into one simple to use utility.
Some of Mixng’s primary features are:

  • profiles for every user
  • photo albums
  • an aggregator to pull in information from websites like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Digg
  • a messaging tool that enables you to have public or private conversations with friends and strangers
  • a feed that monitors all your friends activity on the site and keeps you updated
  • a content sharing tool that enables you to submit, vote on and discuss cool online content with your friends and peers
  • emailing your friends
  • groups for people of similar interests to come together and discuss and share cool content

We have many more features in the oven that will help to make Mixng that much more of a comprehensive experience. We just felt that our intial feature set were the essential elements to what could be considered the online social experience.

Are you funded? If so how?

Mixng is privately funded by a family member of mine. I approached my uncle with the concept of Mixng and did a simple pitch and he agreed to help us out. We took only $10,000 to cover basic development, hosting and domain costs. Obviously, we will need to approach Angel/VC investors in the near future to keep growing Mixng to where we want it to be. $10,000 got us a working concept. Something we can let people use, work on and show to potential investors so they can see what we are really thinking.

What’s your business model?

As of right now, our main business model is to offer paid ‘Pro’ Mixng accounts. We will supplement these paid accounts advertising throughout the site. The ‘Pro’ accounts will offer users a number of exclusive features and benefits such as: early access to upcoming features, customizable profile pages, no advertisements and a few other things I can’t get too into at the moment. We are also working on a few other features that could lead to more and varied monetization opportunities. We want to avoid advertising as much as possible, because we feel it detracts from the sites design and the experience users have. Our main goal is to provide a free product that people love and use and then give them the opportunity to add other features to it if they feel the need to.

Have you officially launched your beta… how many users to you have?

Mixng Beta will be launching within the next 1 - 2 weeks. It will be a private beta for around a month or so we can monitor things on our end to make sure the code and databases hold up to an increased load. Once we are comfortable with everything, we will open the beta up and run with that for a while. As of now, the only people using Mixng are me, my team and a few close friends who are bug testing for us.

You’re 19 right? Give us a little background on yourself and what prompted you to launch a startup… what about the rest of your team?

I was 19 when I came up with the concept and first started the planning of Mixng. At the moment I am 20 years old. I am originally from a small west Texas town called San Angelo. I was a military kid growing up (lived in Italy and Maryland to go with Texas). I’m now a Junior at the University of Texas at Arlington majoring in Communication Technology with a minor in Information Systems. I decided to start Mixng almost a year ago after working with some high school friends on a website called Tekshout.com (no longer running) when I realized that I wanted an all-in-one experience.

I think the thing that sparked the idea was that I had had a bad day and when I came home to check all my online profiles, Firefox had lost all my saved passwords and I had to enter about 10 username/password combos into all of those websites. So I said then and there that I would try to solve my problem by creating something that offered what all of those websites offered in one simple location.

I actually put my team together through Facebook because I was visiting home in San Angelo at the time. My main partner is a guy name Sushil Raghav who did all of the development of Mixng. I handled all the design aspects of it. And then the other partner is Graham Michaels who is handling advertising/marketing matters.

We are all first time startupers so it has been a fun and exciting experience for all of us.

Want to profile your startup? Send an email to startup-profile[at]blj.otherinbox.com

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startup Profiles, Startups |  

How to Pitch to VCs, How to Pitch to Angels and How to Pitch to Reporters

October 18, 2008

These were the guiding questions for today’s Dallas Pitch Camp, an event organized by Alex Muse and Christopher St. John (Sponsored by SpringStage, I contributed donuts..yay) to help entrepreneurs and startups wrap their heads around about what it takes to reach out to each of these groups.

It was a good event and I know I learned a lot from the discussions and conversations. Hopefully the rest of the entrepreneurs were able to take something away and put it to use as they develop their pitches to each respective group. 

Here are some of my takeaways from the speakers:

How to Pitch to Angels

Chuck McCoy - Director, North Texas Angel Network

  • Is taking outside money from strangers (who will most likely want to influence your business in some way) the right move for you right now? Are you sure?
  • Make it a Good Deal
    • less than $500k for positive cash flow
    • 10x-20x ROI in 3-5 years
    • Have a management team that knows & has experience in the industry
  • Lower the perception of risk
  • Have hard data to back up your product and projections
  • Make stuff and Sell it
  • If you’re still at your day job, then you’re probably at the ‘friends and family’ stage of investing

How to Pitch to VCs

Dan Own, H02 Partners

  • with VCs your business WILL go public or get sold… only two options
  • have experience and relationships in your industry segment
  • be selective about the VCs you talk to
  • expect the process to take about 6 months
  • besides your team and idea, what makes your startup real? Know that.

Tom Hedrick & Chris Paddison, HP Growth Parners

  • for early stage companies, you need less than $5M
  • be able to explain what you do so simply that Grandma can understand it, even if your business is highly technical
  • make sure your product is VERY, VERY useful and is better than 50% better than the competition.
  • have something that’s difficult to replicate and gives you a clear competitive edge
  • eliminate/minimize sales friction
  • have a thoughtful list of competitors/replacements to what you do
  • show your entrepreneurial DNA
  • find out if the VC you’re pitching to has heard pitches from other companies in similar spaces. You don’t want to waste time telling VCs stuff they’ve already heard before.

How to Pitch to the Media

Angela Shaw, Dallas Morning News

  • Know who writes about what topics
  • Take the time to build a relationship with reporters who cover your space.
  • Know how to simplify what you do so the average reader can understand it
  • Think local
  • Bring newsworthy information to the table that relates your company to the broader events happening at the time.
  • Be ready to share information (ie, revenues etc)

After these presentations and a lunch break, we had three startups volunteer to have the group work on their pitches, give them feedback, refine the pitch and then they pitched to the group and our three expert panelists, Alex Muse, Ralph Muse and Eric Engineer (of Dallas VC firm Sevin Rosen Funds).

This part of the event was especially constructive, in my opinion, as it gave all of us a hands-on opportunity to give people our ideas and feedback, and then hear what people had to say from an investor perspective.

All in all, I definitely chalk Pitch Camp up as a success and hope SpringStage can put on more events like this in the DFW area in the near future.

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

What Startups Can Learn From Superheroes

October 17, 2008

Came across this today via a tweet by @marcand and thought it was humorous… and somewhat insightful, especially in light of the recent post made by Paul Graham on why a bad economy is a good time to start a startup.


10 Lessons Startups Can Learn From Superheroes - Get more Business Plans

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog |  

Reminder: Dallas Startup HH Tonight!

October 13, 2008

From the TSB:

Just a quick reminder that Startup Happy Hour is on Monday (10/13) between 5PM and 8PM (feel free to show up anytime). I [Alex :-)] am buying the drinks, just doing my part for the economy! Love to see you there, please feel free to bring your friends (some of you brought your girlfriends last time, that is fine too). PLEASE RSVP on the Upcoming.org site here.

The Dallas Startup Happy Hour is the talk of the startup community in Dallas. Check out the coverage in the Dallas Morning News: http://tinyurl.com/sshhdfw As a result of the events, several startups have found a) employees, b) co-founders, c) angel investors and d) had a few free drinks.

Are you interested in connecting with the local startup community? We are working to build a vibrant startup community here in Dallas every bit as interesting and dynamic as San Francisco, Boulder, Boston or Austin. The first step is engagement.

Sponsored by SpringStage - you are invited to attend. Please RSVP.

What: Startup Happy Hour
When: Monday, 10/13, 5PM-7PM
Where: High Tech bar at the INFOMART (corner of Oak Lawn and I35)
Why: To meet entrepreneurs like you
Cost: FREE

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

Sequoia Capital Partners Reiterate Value of Cash

October 9, 2008

Apparently, TheFunded.com managed to procure meeting notes of a CEO of a Sequoia Capital portfolio company, made their mandatory gathering to discuss what their companies should be doing in the current economic climate. TheFunded published the full text in their members only section, but Lance Weatherby, a ‘Venture Catalyst’ at Georgia Tech, republished it on his blog.

The speakers at the meeting seem to echo my sentiments yesterday about CASH being king, and there is A LOT mentioned about cashflow and cutting expenses… cutting DEEP. Whether it mean cutting unnecessary features from your product, cutting employees, cutting salaries; the most drastic the better in order to PRESERVE cash and you cash flow.

(I had a whole list of my favorites here before wordpress decided to eat my post for lunch and I had to start from scratch. Read the full text over at Lance’s blog for all the good stuff.)

This is pretty serious stuff from one of the country’s premier venture capital firms. However, when you really sit and think about what they had to say, really, it’s just sound, LEAN business practices that you should probably be following anyway. Right?

As a startup, you HAVE to know that cashflow is going to be very important to your (ultimate) success and you should ALWAYS keep expenses as trim as you can. Don’t we learn that in Business 101?

I love the last sentence in the text of the meeting notes:

Get Real or Go Home

Good advice for all of us!

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

People Considering Bankruptcy Leaning Towards Obama

October 8, 2008

BankruptcyHome.com (disclosure: website owned by company I work for) recently conducted a poll amongst those who were considering bankruptcy.

I’m not particularly shocked by the results; most of them are leaning towards Obama.

Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama was the choice when respondents were asked which of the major-party candidates they felt would be the better choice to handle the economy. He received 48.17 percent of the support voiced by respondents compared to 21.39 percent for Republican candidate John McCain.

The full article and poll results can be read HERE

Hopefully, as a startup founder/ceo or small business owner bankruptcy is the last thing on your mind and you’re focused on building business even in this economic downturn.

Personally, I’m not convinced either candidate is really well equipped to “lead” us back to enconomic growth. However, you can be sure that if either candidate somehow manages to raise taxes on small business owners and their employees/customers, the American economy will suffer further and we may see more businesses in bankruptcy.

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Politics, Startups |  

Now is the time to bootstrap your new business!

October 8, 2008

Are you starting a new business? Or maybe you have already? Well, here is my advice to you…

Forget VCs, forget the SBA, forget the bank loans, forget Visa/Mastercard/AmEx… You don’t need them.

Take the CASH you have, and start building your business one customer at time. If you don’t have the CASH you need, then it’s probably not time for you to be starting your venture.

Forget the beta and forget free. Get your product out in front of everyone and start charging! Now is the time for a business model that makes money. (is the freemium model dead?)

Save the money you’re making and don’t blow it on stuff you don’t need. When you do need something, pay for it with the cash you’ve saved.

Sounds like common sense right? You would think. However, here in DFW we’re already seeing business that depend on short-term credit starting to falter, as noted by Alex Muse in this post today on the Texas Startup Blog.

There is a financial guy on the radio and I love one of his sayings:

“… where cash is king and the paid off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol of choice.”

A lot of people in the business world drive BMWs I’m sure, but how many operate their businesses without debt?

Of course, in the business world there are many situations in which credit of some sort is a necessity and it would certainly be difficult to completely eliminate it. If you have to use, do so wisely and with careful consideration.


Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups, Venture Capital |  

Brad Feld Says It’s Time For Entrepreneurs to Step Up…

October 8, 2008

… and we would all do well to listen. Brad’s post on his blog is the type of stuff entrepreneurs should be stuffing into their heads right now, not all this crap about the economy.

I love the last sentence of the post. We should all make this our daily mantra

Get some exercise, take a shower, eat a good breakfast, and get out there and build a great business.

Written by Bradley Joyce · Filed Under Blog, Startups |  

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