ViewMarket (formerly The HAUL Company), a graduate of our 2013 VentureSpur accelerator program, has acquired CultureMap, a Texas company. From the article in today’s Dallas Business Journal: “ViewMarket’s expected acquisition of CultureMap has been finalized in a deal valued at $15 million. Alexander Muse, co-founder of Dallas-based
I had a great time serving on the first panel of the day, Accelerator Panel: Driving Early Stage Startups in Texas, at the 12th annual Information Technology and Web Venture Forum at Rice University on December 11th. My fellow panelists included a Who’s Who of the
I’ll be serving as a panelist on the Accelerator Panel on the main stage at next week’s 2014 IT and Web Venture Forum, organized by the Rice Alliance at Rice University in Houston, Texas. I’m looking forward to discussing current trends in accelerator development and
We had a great audience for my workshop on Angel Investors presented to the LaunchOklahoma accelerator participants on Monday during our weekly Lunch and Learn seminar. This was the last official seminar for this year’s accelerator. Here’s the video:
UPDATE: 9-7-2014 Panel details have been released: McNair Hall, Room 116 Sept. 11 @ 1:15pm-1:45pm SESSION TITLE: “The New Role that Accelerators and Incubators are Playing in Supporting Energy Startups” PANELISTS: Kirk Coburn, Managing Director, SURGE Accelerator Kraettli Epperson, Managing Director, JumpPhase Ventures and LaunchOklahoma
A quick thought for a Saturday: The reality is that seed and angel investors are not investing in your startup. What!? They’re not really just looking at your market space, your business plan, your pitch, your business model, your technology, your marketing plan and your
I don’t have a lot to add on this, except to say, duh! $2100 for a desktop CNC-type 3D fab unit? Take a solid chunk of plastic or metal, and let this thing whittle it down into an installation-ready part, as hard as any other
My latest post at the LaunchOklahoma blog: Crossing the finish line: What does it really take to get admitted? Our job as accelerator managers is absolutely, 100%, the selection of startups with great potential. This is our first and most important job. We could do
Tomasz Tunguz did a small survey on investment rates, sorted by geographic location, using some CrunchBase data. As he admits in the blog post, this is a very small data set and some of the cities have so few startups in the data (Houston with
An excellent post from my friend and fellow entrepreneur, Bryan Hassin: The Green Knight: Startups Should Never Pay to Pitch. An excerpt: These pay-to-pitch scams start off innocently enough. There is often no mention of a fee up front. Then, if you “apply” (a classic