State0 Blog

This is Tarun. He is a model Austin entrepreneur. He just recently graduated but has already worked on a couple of cool projects and is currently working on SparkPhone. SparkPhone is an app for smartphones that enables international and long distance calling. It is a simple value proposition: it costs less to call people.

This is Candice Lapin from PARA ti NOVIA. PARA ti NOVIA is a guidebook and community for Hispanic brides. You can think of it as a Latin American version of The Knot, who also happens to have its development offices here in Austin. It seems that we attract these types of wedding communities.

Dan Graham is a co-founder and managing director at BuildASign.com. BuildASign.com is a great success story and example for folks that are trying to bootstrap and grow a company gradually. They got their start consulting in Austin. They saw the opportunity to grow into a product business and went for it. They are pulling well over 10M revenue now and expanding into international printing. If you are running a startup in Austin, here is a special treat for you.

Tina Cannon is the CEO and a cofounder of petsMD. The name petsMD speaks for itself. I am avoiding both pets and kids in life right now, but I imagine that when that time comes, I will be all over both petsMD and webMD. I have watched friends and family spend a pretty penny keeping their pets healthy. Anything that can make that process easier, cheaper, or faster is valuable. I look forward to seeing petsMD grow.

This is Chuck Gordon from SpareFoot. He is the CEO of one of the 5 companies that pitched at Demo Day. He is a recent grad out of UCLA. He and his team of 3 other co-founders moved out to join us in Austin after getting funded by Capital Factory.

SpareFoot is an online marketplace for storage. It serves to unify a very fragmented market. They liken themselves to Expedia. However, they still have features that allow users to lease their own extra space. Perhaps a better comparison is UShip.

I went to Capital Factory Demo Day on Wednesday and here is the first of a handful of interviews from the event. This is Sam Decker talking about Capital Factory. He is one of the three Co-Founders and Managing Directors at Capital Factory. Demo Day was the end of incubation for the first round of startups for Capital Factory to invest in. It was great to watch them all pitch.

Cesar D’Onofrio founded CommonSense in 2006. Charlie is the VP of Marketing at CommonSense and holds down the Austin office. CommonSense does IT consulting and email marketing for many companies in the Austin and San Antonio area. They are starting to get more into iPhone product development and iPhone consulting. They are using the consulting to drive the direction of the product development. This seems to be a common theme for startups right now perhaps because of the lack of seed and early stage money.

David Nguyen is starting a cool green company called Natures Wash. He has a bag of nuts that will make your clothes washing a delight. He is a good communicator and has a very interesting offering. I like the green space. There seems to be money for this kind of thing if you can find the right kind of socially interested investor. Hope you enjoy the interview and go purchase yourself some soap nuts.

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of hanging out at ProductCampAustin. It was a great opportunity to learn more about Product Management and get to meet other folks who love strategy. I met a number of other entrepreneurial Austinites there. I purchased a 3GS last week and I love it. All of these interviews were taken on it. It is not the HD quality I was getting before, but it is much more convenient. Hope you enjoy this first interview with Sherry.

Sherry Lowry is a local serial entrepreneur. She has started 7 different businesses in 7 different industries. For the last fourteen years, she has been transfering those experiences to others through coaching and training. She is also currently working on Bridging Futures. Bridging futures is a business built around helping companies with e-commerce and social networking. She is a sharp and wise member of our community. She volunteers and advises in many areas of the Austin Startup and Social Media scene.

This is Casey Grooms. He is the founder of mushibo. They are a local Austin gaming company that is building a mix between Street Fighter and Pokemon for the iphone. (As a sidenote, I once met a kid named Pokemon.) They are going to deliver awesome combat and make money on virtual goods. Casey is bootstraping the game and putting a lot of effort into getting every detail right. Here are some character sketches that they are thinking about using for the game: