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Why I Chose Austin – More Recently

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I met guest blogger Ben Dyer before he moved to Austin, since he runs the Atlanta version of AustinStartup, which is named TechDrawl. As a more recent transplant, he has a great perspective on our theme of the week, “Why I Chose Austin.”

The ATC CEO Summit panel on “Why I Moved My Company to California” provoked
a lot of thought and commentary, with a very well expressed response by Josh Baer
in yesterday’s Austin Startup. He enumerated the reasons why for him and his
businesses Austin is the right location. I’ve been here just over a year, and I’d like to
share my perspective.

As most of you probably know, I was the founding president of Peachtree Software.
My principal competitor in that day was a company called BPI based right here
in Austin. They went public, but I have no idea where they went after that. I sold
to MSA in Atlanta, and Peachtree today is part of Sage and still a highly ranked
brand. I’ve hardly met anyone here in Austin (older than 40, perhaps) who hasn’t
somewhere along the way used Peachtree Software.

I was first introduced to Austin around 1970 when Texas Instruments was trying to
build microcomputers in two different divisions based here. I was under NDA with
each, and I wasn’t allowed to tell one about the other, even though I generally visited
both on the same trip. Neither succeeded.

Fast forward to 1998 when I brought my son Jesse out for a college visit to UT, and
we were both sold. He enrolled in 1999, and his younger sister Audrey followed a
few years later. I enjoyed 14 years of renewed association with the city and made it
a point to get to know some of the technology leaders along the way.

In late 2010 I found myself free to move about the country. A DNA test showed that
my golf handicap gene would never allow me to get better than 12, no matter how
many new technologies I employed or how much I practiced, and I had held just
about every volunteer office one could have at my alma mater Georgia Tech. It was
time for a fresh start.

Every tech city has “Valley envy.” I spent a month in San Francisco contemplating
a move there. I have plenty of friends in the region. I bought Altos computers from
the current Godfather Ron Conway when he and I were both pups. He’s still a friend,
but in his position I figure he’d rather hang out with his buddy MC Hammer than
with Ben Dyer. If there were a time when I should have moved to the Valley, it was
1978 in the formative stages of Peachtree Software. I knew I was missing all the
Friday night poker games where the big deals were getting done (true story), but I
had higher priorities with my family that kept me in Atlanta.

So, here’s my list:

People like Bryan Menell and Josh Baer, and hundreds of others I should name,
make Austin an extraordinarily welcoming town for tech newcomers. It didn’t take
me long to figure out that in the area around San Francisco’s AT&T Park that every

third person is a 25-yr-old $Billionaire, and I’d have a hard time qualifying on either
of those criteria. Nor do I do the all-black dress code very well. Here I’ve had no
problem getting any appropriate introduction I have sought and have always been
made to feel at home. I’ve even hung up my suits and acquired a jeans wardrobe.

Austin is a “git ‘er done” town. As a board member I’ve introduced a startup
company from Hilton Head, SC to the ATI and to HomeAway and given that venture
a chance to succeed that it might never have had otherwise. I’ll never forget the
first meeting at HomeAway where CTO Ross Buhrdorf saw something he liked,
called in his engineers, and started a project on the spot. That type of bias for action
seems typical here.

The University of Texas is a special place. I will always be a Yellow Jacket and proud
of Georgia Tech, but Austin is a true college town with all the energy, enthusiasm
and spirit that entails. UT’s bringing Bob Metcalfe to teach entrepreneurship was
an inspired move, and I’m getting a great return on the tuition I paid earlier for my
children just by mentoring in his class and taking notes. (As of yesterday there was
some talk of GT and FSU bolting the ACC for the Big 12, and Audrey has already said
she will make me a half-gold and half-burnt orange game day shirt if these 2 schools
do meet at DKR.)

Funding is always going to seem easier in the Valley, especially for the social media
deals that have made the big fortunes of late. But, that’s not to say that CA investors
won’t do deals in Austin. They have done plenty to date. Sure we need more
resident capital here, but we may have enough to support all the growth the city can
currently handle. I seem to have attracted 35,000 new arrivals since I appeared,
not enough of them engineers apparently, and the city is fast outgrowing its housing
supply and transportation infrastructure.

SXSW Interactive is a major driver of the Austin tech scene. I’ve been to two, and
as a local now I’ve come to appreciate all the volunteer work required to grade the
panel applications, screen, coach, and judge Accelerator companies. This event is
big enough to move to Vegas, but it would lose its magic in that environment. There
are probably plenty of movers and shakers in the Valley who have “SXSW envy.”

Allow me to conclude with special thanks to all of you who have invited me in to
this “high-revving” tech scene. It’s been great for business, and the lifestyle is like
living the dream.

I Choose Austin

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Guest post by Joshua Baer who helps people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. He founded his first startup in 1996 in his college dormitory and now teaches a class at the University of Texas for student entrepreneurs.  He’s currently the CEO of OtherInbox and Director of Capital Factory. Joshua has helped start a dozen companies, sold four of them, invested in more than fifty of them, and is a mentor to many others. You can follow him on Twitter @joshuabaer

This week I attended a panel at the Austin Technology Council’s CEO Summit titled, “Why I moved my company to California” featuring execs from 3 startups that moved from Austin to Silicon Valley and one that kept an office in Austin but moved the management team to Silicon Valley.

  • James Beshara from Crowdtilt
  • Frank Coppersmith from GameSalad
  • Matt Pfeil from DataStax
  • Tom Serres from Rally
  • Moderated by Laura Beck

Nobody was bashing Austin, but everyone on the panel seemed to agree that for tech startups Silicon Valley was almost always a better choice than Austin. Everyone also seemed to agree that Austin shouldn’t try to be a “better Silicon Valley” because that is hopeless. Tom encouraged Austin to figure out what we are good at and focus on that, but he didn’t have any suggestions as to what that might be.

Austin doesn’t want to be Silicon Valley any more than Texas wants to be California.

In particular, the reasons I heard supporting Silicon Valley were:

  • surround yourself with the thought leaders in your field
  • more investors
  • more top talent
  • things “move faster”
  • investors are willing to fund big ideas with no revenue model
  • business development easier with local companies

They are all really good reasons. It’s hard to argue with them. It’s hard not to walk away thinking that you’d be crazy not to move your tech startup to Silicon Valley.

What did I learn from this? If you ask a bunch of people why they moved to Austin they will tell you how great Austin is and if you ask a bunch of people why they moved to Silicon Valley they will tell you how great Silicon Valley is. Of course everyone thinks they made the right decision. Otherwise they would have moved back!

There is no right answer. For some people Austin is the right answer and for others its Silicon Valley. For most we’ll never know for sure.

For me, the right answer in Austin.

There are a number of trends that make it easier to do a startup in Austin than ever before:

  • it’s easy to get people to move here
  • there are more and more direct flights
  • recent success stories like BazaarVoice, HomeAway and SolarWinds
  • investment in the city by Apple, Facebook and others
  • new entrepreneurial focus at the University of Texas
  • technology makes it easier to collaborate remotely
  • social media makes it easier to keep up with fast moving trends
  • social media makes it easier to do business development remotely
  • Angel List makes it easier to raise funding
  • less funding needed because of open source and cloud computing
  • SXSW attracting national tech to Austin

I think the most important question is this: Do you want to fight your way to the top of an established hierarchy or do you want to be part of building something new?

It’s well documented that the flow of population is into Texas and Austin. We’re growing and our economy is strong. Anecdotally, I’m seeing it too. Every week I’m introduced to an entrepreneur who is moving his or her company to Austin – and the pace is increasing. I hear from engineers in Silicon Valley who tell me they don’t know where they want to work yet but they know they want to move to Austin. Top tier investors like Benchmark, Battery, First Round, Peter Thiel, and Mike Maples, Jr are actively making investments here. Things are getting better and better for entrepreneurs and for tech startups.

In Austin there is a different kind of opportunity. Opportunity to help shape the community that is growing and developing. Opportunity to be a leader and fill a void created by that growth.

That’s why I choose Austin.

Traveling Through Time with SameTimeAs

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Today’s guest blog is  by Will Rodenbusch: “I’m from Austin, the greatest rising tech center in the world! I am a 29 year old code monkey who loves the great outdoors, travel, entrepreneurship, and almost anything that involves an element of danger. When I’m not at my desk, you can find me with my wife, Cora.  We are your typical Austin DINKs, out enjoying life.”

Last summer, my wife and I decided to take our lives on the road. I left my position at Solarwinds, an Austin startup success, to try my hand at entrepreneurship while Cora took on a new role at her current company, PGi.com, as resident “Digital Nomad,” traveling and working from PGi’s 30+ global offices. PGi is a virtual meetings company and so extreme remote working was a perfect fit.

While we have traveled for the last 10 months jumping between offices and wonders of the world, we have faced every imaginable remote working challenge. One of the greatest challenges is keeping track of what time it is and what time it will be in the offices of our co-workers and stakeholders.

What I mean is that if you type “What time is it in Austin, when it is 6pm in Kyoto?” into Google, you get some Japanese restaurant reviews and two links to timezone lists. These lists show you the current time but you still have to do the math to get the future time. It gets even more confusing if you want to know the time in multiple places: let’s say for a team meeting. There are other world clocks and schedulers out there but I found it was difficult and time consuming to get to the basic information I needed. So, I built a website to solve our problem: www.sametimeas.com. Here is a link to show you what you get if you ask the question above: http://www.sametimeas.com/at/6pm/in/kyoto/what-is-the-time-in/austin .

I call SameTimeAs my World Clock Time Machine. My goal is to make it painless to find the time in multiple places given the time in one place. The UI leverages some fun interactive components, but the site will happily accept anything that looks like a time and place.

SameTimesAs.com is only a few hours older than this post and this is the first public mention I have made of it. Give it a try and let me know what you think. I have a bunch of ideas about new features but I am also looking for ideas and errata. Please post any thoughts or ideas to http://www.facebook.com/SameTimeAs.

Forecast Looks Solid for AllWebLeads

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Market research companies like IBISWorld forecast an increased demand for insurance coverage in 2012, but by the same token, insurance buyers are expected to be increasingly selective on the plans they purchase. Sites like InsuranceQuotes.org and others of a similar breed are widely used by insurance shoppers to compare plans and find both what is right and most cost-effective for them. However, where does that leave the hard-working insurance sales agent?

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, the startup All Web Leads completes the other side of the equation, connecting insurance agents and agencies with consumers ready to buy. This is accomplished by using data from self-owned insurance quote sites consumers are already using, coupled with complex internet marketing methods and search algorithms.

The result is a detailed lead for a shopper actively looking for and ready to buy an insurance plan. These leads are then forwarded to insurance agents in the All Web Leads network. But agents do not need to worry about fighting everyone else for the same lead, either. All Web Leads will only share a single lead with a maximum of four agents, a much better ratio than other similar services – in fact, the company received an award for it in 2011.

While All Web Leads does specialize in health, life, auto and home leads, they also have a vast selection of niche sub-categories to fit any insurance agent’s needs. All of these leads are delivered in real time, just as consumers finish submitting their information for a quote, making agents able to contact a prospective customer right away and while they are still in a “shopping mood.”

The leads an insurance seller can receive are highly customizable, and include a large amount of filters to suit any business need. Perhaps one of the key filters for solo agents or small insurance firms is the ability to geo-locate leads, homing in their results to a specific geographic zone and target demographic.

Of course, like any other service of its kind, there is a price attached. Where All Web Leads sets itself apart, however, is the fact that it requires no minimum purchases, it has no contracts to worry about, and it does not require upfront deposits at all. Insurance sellers pay only for however many leads they actually want to receive, and they do so at fixed and upfront prices. As an added bonus, All Web Leads also has a return policy, where insurance sellers can get a full refund on any invalid leads they receive.

All Web Leads even includes payment tools that agents can use to automatically control their leads volume, payment methods and even a pause button that can be used to stop leads while on vacation, during personal emergencies or due to other commitments.

As the old adage goes, seeing is believing, and All Web Leads is so confident on the quality of its product that it offers an impressive $200.00 USD in free leads to any and all new agents who sign up for the service. That is just the cherry on top for a service that anyone looking to boost their insurance business should try.

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