In September of 2009, the company Joel Trammel co-founded, NetQoS, was acquired by CA for $200M in cash. In February of 2010, he was on a Texchange  panel where he discussed the purchase of the company, and his ongoing role. My memory is far from perfect, but I remember asking him about his ongoing role with CA, and he said something to the effect of “I have no current role, and my status is undetermined.” It spoke volumes.

Shortly after, Joel founded CacheIQ, a company that provides storage management solutions. By July of 2010, the company announced they had acquired all the assets of StorSpeed, which had received $13M in Series A funding in June of 2007, and had hit the deadpool by March of 2010. Joel obviously saw something in the technology that he could make use of, and I’m sure StorSpeed’s investors (Covera, Palomar, El Dorado, and Vesbridge) were happy to see something result from their investment.

This week CacheIQ’s filings with the SEC were discovered, and they’ve apparently raised $6M from 27 different investors. If anyone has any insight into who those might be, I would love to see it in the comments. Potentially they are continuing a trend set by uControl of raising sizable amounts of money from non-institutional investors.

Austin needs more entrepreneurs like Joel. Build a company, create value, create jobs, and the innovate the next cycle of value for yourself, your investors, and your employees. Any startup only has a 1 in 100 chance of surviving more than 24 months, but I would bet that Joel leads CacheIQ to level of solid success.