startups Archives - StartupsSanAntonio.com

How Startups Can Weather Challenging Economic Times

8Nov

By Guest AuthorNo Comments

How Startups Can Weather Challenging Economic Times

Andi Littlejohn is chief of the EPIcenter Energy Incubator and Accelerator (EEIA). EPIcenter is a nonprofit organization propelling energy innovation and thought for our global future with a think tank, incubator and accelerator, strategic partnerships, and critical conversations about energy, with the aim to support startups in all phases of development to incite the energy evolution.Startups and small businesses will always fight an uphill battle when innovating and commercializing technologies, regardless of the external economic conditions. More established enterprises have advantages that startups do not – more financial resources, larger teams with more diverse areas of expertise, and more robust legal teams to protect innovations, to name a few.In an economic downturn such ...

Geekdom Pre-Accelerator Program Mentors Startups to Success

14Oct

By Iris GonzalezNo Comments

Articles, Featured

Geekdom Pre-Accelerator Program Mentors Startups to Success

Geekdom, a downtown San Antonio co-working community, hosts a variety of programs designed to help founders build successful startups. Six teams will showcase their progress after participating in Geekdom's Pre-Accelerator program.Since 2018, Geekdom has run the annual six-week program to help local startups prepare for accelerator applications or early-stage investment. As founders practice their pitches, area tech leaders and investors mentor the teams in weekly workshops. The teams learned how to refine their business model, focus their marketing, and polish their pitch decks. (Watch the recorded pitch videos of the 2022 pre-accelerator teams here.)Christian Garcia founded Developmate, a software platform that maps static and streaming real estate location data for developer...

Geekdom Incubator Program Helps Founders Launch Startups

11Aug

By Iris GonzalezNo Comments

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Geekdom Incubator Program Helps Founders Launch Startups

When you look closely at a city’s startup ecosystem, you’ll find companies at different developmental stages. However, to have the good news of a startup’s acquisition success like Promoter.io, Intrinsic Imaging, or Parlevel, an ecosystem needs resources to support first-time entrepreneurs incubating an idea into a successful business.That’s where Geekdom comes in. The downtown-based startup community offers programming to support aspiring entrepreneurs. Its incubator program teaches first-time founders how to fine-tune startup ideas, create a working business model, and work toward gaining traction with customers.Geekdom offers multiple programs, including its incubator and a pre-accelerator for startups. Since June 4, the 10 startups have met every Saturday for mentoring, worksh...

Geekdom aims to launch 500 new startups in San Antonio

23Feb

By Iris GonzalezNo Comments

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Geekdom aims to launch 500 new startups in San Antonio

Geekdom — a technology-centric co-working space — shared milestones from its first 10 years in operation to convey how it has fostered the growing startup economy in San Antonio.Entrepreneur and philanthropist Graham Weston and entrepreneur and mentor Nick Longo launched Geekdom in 2011. Located on Houston Street in the heart of downtown San Antonio, the co-working community was the first in San Antonio focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs refine their ideas into thriving businesses. Today, the co-working community has over 1,300 members and 50 office spaces. Geekdom offers a variety of programs designed to help first-time founders learn how to incubate and refine ideas into a successful startup.Over the past 10 years, Geekdom has helped founders build successful new comp...

How Can Your Startup or Small Business Survive a Pandemic? Know What to Expect

24Mar

By Iris GonzalezNo Comments

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How Can Your Startup or Small Business Survive a Pandemic? Know What to Expect

Life is changing rapidly for everyone. On March 11, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 infectious outbreak as a pandemic, the first pandemic in modern times caused by the emergence of a new or novel coronavirus.There is so much information coming at us daily. Yet, founders and small business owners are struggling to decipher what it all means for business operations.Let's walk through what we know and what we can reasonably expect, given the best available information from trusted sources. Then we can offer some recommendations to help you adapt your business operations during a pandemic. First, stay informed COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease caused by a new coronavirus that emerged in China in December 2019. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC...

Newchip Startup City Video Highlights San Antonio

31Jul

By Joshua Lawton-BelousNo Comments

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Newchip Startup City Video Highlights San Antonio

Spend some time in San Antonio and it’ll be impossible for you to miss the vibrancy and feeling of change that permeates all of downtown. From the rebuilding of the downtown to the people, San Antonio is optimistic about its future prospects. Nowhere is this feeling of exuberance more profound than in San Antonio’s startup community.The Austin-based accelerator program Newchip sent its video producer Armando Vera Carvajal to accompany me on our visit to San Antonio to interview investors for a Newchip series that we are calling “Investor Talks.”It soon became apparent that rather than only talking with investors, we wanted to take the pulse of San Antonio’s startup community. We wanted to know why entrepreneurs decided to build their businesses in San Antonio and get their take on ...

Why You Need to Manage Your Cap Table Plus Free Tools to Help

16Jul

By Joshua Lawton-BelousNo Comments

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Why You Need to Manage Your Cap Table Plus Free Tools to Help

Bookkeeping is tedious, confusing, and often the last thing on an entrepreneur's mind. Yet, understanding the basic elements of startup finance is critical. That comprehension starts with learning how to manage your startups’ cap table.Let’s talk about what a cap table is, how founders typically manage it, and three free online tools you can use to make managing your cap table easier. What Is a Cap Table? A capitalization or “cap” table is a spreadsheet showing the equity capitalization for a company. Most commonly used by startups and early-stage businesses, the cap table breaks down the distribution of a company’s shareholders’ equity.A basic capitalization table lists out each type of equity ownership capital, the individual investors, and the share prices. Your cap table shou...

9Jul

By Jarod AngehrNo Comments

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Six Ways To Kill a Startup

It isn't difficult to get online and find tips for startup success. What often isn't discussed are the unforced errors founders often make when running and scaling a startup. There are six deadly sins that will kill any startup regardless of industry, client-type, size, tenure, or founder skill set.Commit one or more of these mistakes, and it often marks the beginning of the end for a startup. These are extremely difficult to recover from and make the chances of long-term success slim. Failing to establish your startup’s culture and values from the startSuccessful startups create an engaging culture for all employees from day one. A company culture based on a definable set of values often sets it apart from the companies that will scale up and attract talent and investmen...

The Seven Deadly Sins that Prevent Investors from Funding Your Startup

26Apr

By Joshua Lawton-BelousNo Comments

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The Seven Deadly Sins that Prevent Investors from Funding Your Startup

Guest writer Joshua Lawton-Belous is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and an adviser at Newchip. You can follow him on Twitter @alertingmainst and connect with him on LinkedIn.Going after venture capitalists to invest in your company is a lot like dating. Get enough rejections and you’ll start questioning, “what’s wrong with them?”Unfortunately, the question everyone should ask instead is, “What’s wrong with me?”There are times when investors just do not understand what you are trying to do. These types of investors are never going to get what you are trying to do.The dirty secret is most investors don’t care what you are trying to do. They care about making money, their portfolio returns, and how those returns are going to impact their ability to raise additional fu...

The Man Who Reads Thousands of Books: Interview with Read It For Me CEO Steve Cunningham

22Oct

By Iris GonzalezNo Comments

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The Man Who Reads Thousands of Books: Interview with Read It For Me CEO Steve Cunningham

This post contains affiliate links at no extra cost to you. Please read my disclosure for more information.It is not every day you interview a voracious reader who has consumed over 2,000 business and personal development books and continues to read a book every day.Steve Cunningham condenses the top points from a book each day into a 12-minute video recap for Read It For Me, his book summary service for entrepreneurs and business executives. Cunningham headed a digital marketing agency until 2016 and provided book summaries at first as a side project. The Canadian native launched his San Antonio-based startup in July 2017 after noticing how many marketing vice presidents and business owners he’d meet lacked time to read the business books in their offices. Read It For Me has t...