They are pioneers and barn builders who venture forth from the (tech) ranch.

150 years ago this description fitted many men and women who aimed to settle the fledgling state of Texas. Today, young Austin entrepreneurs have come to Tech Ranch Austin, where they hope the collaborative working environment, mentoring and the experience founder Kevin Koym and his partner Jonas Lamis have building startups will accelerate their new ventures.

Tech Ranch Austin offers space for startup companies with great ideas, a small staff, need for low overhead, and that want the support to accelerate their venture. Koym says Tech Ranch extols a new model for how to make an entrepreneur successful “as opposed to the traditional, old-style venture capital model. That has been in the process of dying since the bubble burst of 2001.”

Koym is a proud fifth-generation Texan. It was a desire to bring his model for entrepreneurial success to his home state that brought him back from five years launching entrepreneurs in Chile and Mexico. When he and Lamis formed the Tech Ranch Austin partnership in 2008, and a separate venture in Cedar Park earlier this year, their plan was to offer direct and indirect support for startup businesses in a collegial environment.

“Our classes are not for learning about business, they are about launching ventures,” Koym says.

Tech Ranch Austin’s Venture Forth program costs $495 and helps entrepreneurs learning by doing as they take their business from concept to reality during an eight-week program.

So far Tech Ranch Austin has had a hand in developing 12 companies, Koym says. Those are companies using the Austin facilities to operate, develop and collaborate.

Hands on Help
“We are intimately involved in four companies,” he says. Those firms, Vitasio, Zehicle, IPX and Piryx, are in various stages of growth — from product development to multi-million-dollar volume. Unlike most of Tech Ranch Austin’s community, Piryx product was close to marketing its product by the time founder Tom Serres first connected with Lamis in October 2008.

“We’d already raised our first seed round of investment and never used the Tech Ranch facilities itself, Serres says. “We’d moved beyond that but needed more incubation of the executives.”

Going Big-Time
Piryx evolved from Serres’ original political consulting firm started while he was in college to the creator of a payment processing software suite that works for political nonprofits and small businesses. Perhaps its best-known client is South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, who created a firestorm when he heckled President Obama during a joint session of Congress in September. The national attention Wilson garnered turned into an opportunity for him to build on the success of online political fundraising first demonstrated during the 2008 presidential election by the Obama campaign.
“[Wilson’s campaign] came to us in desperate need of an online solution,” Serres says. “They ultimately ended up out-raising his opponent three to one. It was a case study on how to rapidly deploy a fund-raising solution and collect real-time information on how the funds were sourced.”
Tech Ranch Austin’s co-founder Lamis has become a major part of the influence on Piryx, recently becoming the seven-person company’s chief of operations.

“Mentorship is something young entrepreneurs really need,” Serres says. “Jonas goes to venture capital meetings with me. We work together on financials, forecasting, operations — things you learn in school, but you have to go through it to really learn.”

From no job to entrepreneur
“A lot of people lost their jobs and those jobs aren’t coming back,” Koym says.

For many people who have no work and aren’t already entrepreneurs, even Tech Ranch Austin’s low cost solutions aren’t a viable option. But there are plenty of skilled people looking for — and fledgling companies who can use those skills but haven’t the cash to pay for the work.
Koym says Tech Ranch Austin’s Barn Builders program pairs entrepreneurs with laid-off workers who volunteer their skills four- to six-hours each week. Some have ended up creating their own jobs, he says.

Austin has long attracted people interested in tech sector jobs. For Alora C. Chistiakoff, co-founder of Indigo Heron, a content strategy and project management company, and her husband who relocated from New York City, the jobs they interviewed for disappeared. The pair decided to build on small client work they obtained during the first part of the year and enrolled in a class that was a forerunner to Venture Forth during the summer.

“We were able to get a lot of clarity around what we were trying to do and started to really plug into the entrepreneurial community in Austin,” Chistiakoff says.

For a $250 monthly fee, Indigo Heron has a place in the Pioneers Program working out of Tech Ranch Austin’s communal space, sharing infrastructure, the collaborative working environment, conference and classroom facilities.

Rebuilding America’s Economy
The community environment is a contributor to Indigo Heron’s growth as it helps other startups establish a strategy for success. The interactive space is “especially helpful” and better for an extroverted person like her than working out of a home office or spare bedroom, Chistiakoff says. “A lot of what is great with what Kevin and Jonas do with Tech Ranch is they built a community with a lot of capability,” she says. That gives each person access to collaborators with specialties each can barter.

Small startups will be a big factor in America’s economic recovery, Koym says.

“You’ll see all sorts of companies working with each other, not for each other,” he says. “The future is not going to be IBM with 300,000 employees, it’s going to be a number of companies that are much smaller. In the last few years, most U.S. jobs were created by companies of 10 employees or less.”

Koym and Lamis regularly add new online video’s highlighting the community’s programs at Tech Ranch TV.

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Piryx Plans Your Payments

Next time you go online to contribute to a political candidate or a nonprofit organization, Austin startup Piryx might be thanking you. Described by some as “Paypal for Democracy,” and by its founder Tom Serres as “TurboTax for political organizations,” Piryx software is an engine for collecting contributions quickly engaging the tools and social media environments on the Internet.

Serres says Piryx has gone from collecting $7,000 online in its first month of operations, January 2009, to a multi-million dollar month in September. The company opens the toolset to developers who can enhance its features.

“We didn’t want to focus on features,” Serres says. “We wanted to empower others. We focus on core infrastructure, staying on top of things to make it faster, more efficient and ensure security.”

Piryx evolved out of a political consultation firm and still focuses some of its products to candidates and political action committees with tools that automatically file reports with the Texas Ethics Commission or for local candidates, file electronically to municipal or county clerks.

Indigo Heron

Not everyone with the next big idea knows how to bring it to market. Indigo Heron is a startup that helps startups. Founder Alora Christiakoff’s background in technology startups has given her experience in the skills and tools companies need to succeed.

“Most bootstrapped entrepreneurs can’t afford four digits per month for recurring costs,” she says. “And most don’t need it out of the gate.”

Her “startup product” is consulting and coaching for other companies, particularly bootstrap startups that aren’t well capitalized, helping them obtain cost-effective tools that fit their needs.

Tags: STARTUPS, VENTURE CAPITAL