Ingrid Vanderveldt is an American businesswoman, media personality, and investor. She was the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Dell and is the founder and current CEO of the Empowering a Billion Women. Vanderveldt was the creator and manager of the Dell $100 million credit fund, and a member of the 2013 United Nation's Global Entrepreneurship Council  

Ideas to Invoices

Ingrid Vanderveldt, Founder & CEO of Empowering a Billion Women

Joe Lonsdale wants to build an experimental tech Beta City on the outskirts of Austin with transportation tunnels, autonomous vehicles, robots, flying drones, smart buildings, and all the latest technology applications. Lonsdale is an entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, who recently moved 8VC, his investment firm, and The Cicero Institute, a public policy think tank, to Austin from San Francisco. The project would rival Neom, the revolutionary $500 billion new city that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is building in the desert bordering the Red Sea. That project is slated to be complete by 2025 and will include drones, robots, artificial rain, holographic teachers and more, according to plans obtained and reported on by the Wall Street Journal. Lonsdale, the Co-Founder of Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, Affinity, Esper, is also on the board of The Boring Company, founded by Elon Musk. The Boring Company recently bought a building in Pflugerville, according to the Austin American Statesman. Lonsdale plans to help solve Austin’s transportation problems using technology and tunnels built by The Boring Company. Lonsdale plans to do that project and the Beta City with a little help from his friends, which include Musk, who recently moved to Texas. 

Joe Lonsdale, Founder 8VC, Co-Founder Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov

Pat Matthews is the Founder and CEO of Active Capital, based in San Antonio. The firm recently announced it has closed on its second fund worth $25 million. Matthews knows what it’s like to build a company from idea to exit. While a college student at Virginia Tech, he co-founded Webmail.us. He helped build Webmail.us into a $10 million business which sold to Rackspace in 2007. Then he spent six-year in executive positions at Rackspace as a Racker. He has invested in dozens of startups as an angel investor before founding Active Capital.

Pat Matthews, Founder and CEO of Active Capital

Lanham Napier is the Co-founder and CEO of BuildGroup, an Austin-based venture capital firm, founded in 2015. Previously, he served as CEO of San Antonio-based Rackspace where he led the company from $1.5 million in revenue to more than $1.5 billion in revenue during his 13-years there. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Rice University. He is also the author of Billion or Bust! Growing a Tech Company in Texas, which was published last year.

Lanham Napier, Co-Founder and CEO of BuildGroup

A native of Austin, Leigh Christie has seen the city change from a sleepy college town to a high tech boomtown. Today, she serves as senior vice president of global technology and innovation at the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce. She's also a lawyer who previously served as executive director of the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Central Texas and served as director of Lemonade Day Austin, which is geared to getting youth involved in entrepreneurship.  In this episode, Christie talks about the 2020 A-List Austin Awards, which has broadened its scope this year to include more entrepreneurs than ever. She also talks about how the Pandemic has affected entrepreneurship in Austin and how businesses are coping with the dramatic changes. 

Leigh Christie, Austin Chamber's SVP of Global Technology and Innovation

Jess Gaffney, CEO and Executive Director of Women@Austin, discusses the new angel network the organization just launched called Beam Angel Network. Its focus is on funding female-founded startups in a variety of industries. Applications open up on Sept. 1. Notley Ventures has pledged $250,000 in initial funding for the network. 

Jess Gaffney, CEO and Executive Director of Women@Austin

Brian White is the Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Mashup Foods, maker of Picklesmash, salsa made from pickles. He founded the company a few years ago with his wife, Liz, in Waco, Texas. Last year, Picklesmash participated in the consumer packaged goods accelerator SKU in Austin. During SKU, the company went through a rebranding and grew its distribution channels. Soon the product will be available in Central Market. 

Brian White, CEO and Co-Founder of Picklesmash

Ben Lamm is a serial technology entrepreneur and the founder/CEO of Hypergiant. Previously, he was the founder/CEO of Conversable acquired by LivePerson, founder/CEO of Chaotic Moon Studios acquired by Accenture and Team Chaos, acquired by Zynga.

Ben Lamm, CEO and Founder of Hypergiant

Carla Piñeyro Sublett is the Chief Marketing Officer at NI, an Austin-based tech company that is publicly traded with revenues of more than $1 billion annually and more than 7,700 employees. She is the former Chief Marketing Officer at Rackspace where she helped define the corporate strategy, pioneered a new visual identity, and doubled the company’s brand awareness. Prior to her role at Rackspace, she spent 15 years at Dell in a variety of executive leadership roles across sales, marketing, and operations. In this episode, she talks about NI's recent rebranding and its focus on "Engineering Ambitiously."  

Carla Piñeyro Sublett, Chief Marketing Officer of NI

 Christy Cardenas is the managing partner of Austin-based Ecliptic Capital, LLC, a venture capital firm focused on early-stage startups. Cardenas joined the firm a year and a half ago after working in private equity and investment banking focused on the energy industry. Cardenas recently published a new report on "The Silver Linings" of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  "The Silver Lining is a deep dive into the macroeconomic conditions in the United States in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the opportunity that lies in entrepreneurship and innovation," according to the report. In this podcast, Cardenas discusses how Texas and its maverick and risk-taking entrepreneurs are poised to lead innovation in the wake of the Pandemic.     

Christy Cardenas, Managing Partner of Ecliptic Capital in Austin

Steve Cody is the co-founder of Ruckify, which it bills as the world’s largest peer to peer rental platform. He is a serial entrepreneur who has built and sold six different rental companies and a software company. And in March, at the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, Ruckify moved its headquarters to Austin, Texas.

Steve Cody, Co-Founder of Ruckify

Brian is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and is currently the CEO of AlertMedia, a company he founded in 2013. AlertMedia is now the world’s leading provider of emergency communication software, used by over 2000 enterprise companies in 100 countries to keep employees safe from threats to their health and safety. Before AlertMedia, Brian co-founded Xenex in 2008, where he and his team developed a germ-killing robot, now used in over 500 hospitals around the world, preventing infections and saving thousands of lives each year. He is also an investor and adviser to dozens of early-stage startups through his investment firm, Marketdriver Ventures. Brian’s focus on starting companies with a positive impact stems, in part, from his experience working at Enron, where he was part of mass layoffs when the energy giant went bankrupt in 2001. He turned his Enron experience and the lessons learned into a best-selling book, Anatomy of Greed, and later a movie.

Brian Cruver, CEO and Founder of AlertMedia

Morris Miller is the Chief Executive Officer at Xenex Disinfection Services, based in San Antonio. Morris co-founded and provided the initial funding for Xenex, which produces a robot used to disinfect healthcare facilities, nursing homes, schools and pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and other environments. Previously he co-founded Rackspace Managed Hosting. Morris also founded Curtis Hill Publishing, the first company to publish Texas case law on CD-ROM, which sold to Thomson Legal Publishing. On this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Miller discusses how Xenex robots are being used to clean environments that have come into contact with the Coronavirus. Its robots have been highly effective in reducing infections in hospital environments. Xenex is also in talks to provide up to 2,000 robots to the committee hosting the summer Olympics in Japan. 

Morris Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Xenex

David Perez launched Lumen Insurance Technologies in 2016. He saw a need in the marketplace for someone to provide insurance policies to funded technology startups. Lumen’s clients have included Opcity, Strangeworks, Vault, previously known Student Loan Genius, Rocket Dollar, Valkyrie Intelligence, Kronologic, Living Security and others. Lumen provides policies for startups with products like directors and officers’ liability insurance, general liability, and commercial property insurance. Lumen is based at Galvanize in downtown Austin. In this episode of Ideas to Invoices, Perez talks about the maturation of Austin's technology industry, greater access to funding, the InsureTech boom in Austin and opportunities for further growth. 

David Perez, Founder of Lumen Insurance Technologies

Sean Foley co-founded Nine Banded Whiskey in 2014 in Austin and launched the product two years later. In 2018, he became CEO of the company and is leading the company's growth phase. It is available in 12 states and recently inked a deal with the Los Angeles Rams to be the featured whiskey in the Rams' football stadium. Foley has a background in sports and entertainment. He previously served as venture capital and media executive for Raptor Group. He is also a partner in Austin Sports & Entertainment.  And he is a three-time national swimming champion for the University of Texas at Austin.  

Sean Foley, Co-Founder of Nine Banded Whiskey

Interviews with successful entrepreneurs, many of whom have built and sold companies, featuring lessons learned in the process and advice for others wishing to become entrepreneurs. This podcast is a product of Silicon Hills News, a six year old technology news site covering companies and people in the Austin and San Antonio technology region in Texas.

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Ideas to Invoices

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