Memphis Answers Call To Task On Women Entrepreneurs With Upstart Accelerator

On Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013, Alexia Tstotsis got some of the more influential names in the tech/vc community to talk about women entrepreneurs and venture capital. David Tisch offered this tidbit in regards to what really pisses him off when VCs are talking to women. Aaref Hilaly (Sequoia) offered this opinion on why there is such a divide. Hilaly also called everyone to task to help increase the number of women entrepreneurs ready for venture funding.

While startup communities everywhere are starting to embrace and cultivate their women entrepreneurs. One startup community in particular has taken a very proactive role.

Eric Mathews, Andre Fowlkes and Elizabeth Lemmonds the team behind Launch Your City and Launch Memphis started a women’s initiative in 2012 called Upstart. Upstart is a multifaceted initiative with their latest phase coming into fruition now. It began with a meetup group, office hours for women entrepreneurs and a 48 Hour launch event for women founders.

Upstart is just one of the many startup community initiatives that Launch Your City has developed. They are also responsible for Seed Hatchery, a general tech accelerator that is two weeks away from their third graduation (demo day). Interestingly enough there are two startups in the class of six that have women founders; Boosterville and Mentor Me. A third woman entrepreneur, Rachel Hurley, started as a co-founder for one startup, Soundstache and has since segued to another team, Musistic. Hurley has always been active in the Launch Memphis startup community and took the challenge to apply to this years Seed Hatchery class.

In addition to all of this, Lemmonds, served as the moderator for the “Kick Ass Female Founders From Everywhere Else” at the everywhereelse.co inaugural conference. It was there and on a trip to Silicon Valley that Lemmonds continued to forge relationships with women entrepreneurs across the country, some of which will serve as mentors for the upcoming first session at Upstart.

The Upstart Accelerator basically starts as soon as Seed Hatchery graduates. The application deadline is May 24th and the application can be found here.Those accepted will be notified by May 31st. The session starts in Memphis at the Launch Your City Launch Pad on June 20th and runs until October 3rd.

Upstart participants will get access to the four M’s, mentors, milestones, money and Memphis. The Upstart team is encouraging women led startups from across the country and around the world to consider their program. Memphis is a great place to launch startups, cost of living is incredibly low and the startup community is close knit and growing. And YES their can be men on the team as well, but one of the cofounders must be a woman.

You can find out more here at upstartmemphis.com

See why this woman, and her husband, the founding CTO at Cha-Cha moved to Memphis for an acceleartor.

Launch Your City Graduates Out Of Memphis Incubator

The umbrella organization that oversees Launch Memphis, Wolf River Angels, Seed Hatchery, UpStart and Memphis Venture Mentors, Launch Your City, has graduated out of the Emerge Memphis accelerator. Launch Your City was situated in Emerge Memphis where they grew the Launch Pad co-working space and successfully put on the first two sessions of Seed Hatchery.

Launch Your City has hosted several 48 Hour Launch events in the Emerge facility, with it’s most recent event focusing on women entrepreneurship.

With all the positive growth and Launch Your City serving as the catalyst for entrepreneurial growth at Emerge, the incubator’s Board of Director’s, asked Launch Your City’s Co-President, Eric Matthews to serve as interim executive director over the last year.

That one year stint ends today and Mathews will transition back into his full time role as Co-President of Launch Your City along with Andre Fowlkes. While the organization had one of it’s best years to date, Mathews and Fowlkes weren’t able to work as closely as they had in years past, with Mathews at the helm of Emerge.

“Eric and I haven’t been able to work as closely together for a year” Fowlkes to nibletz.com Both Co-Presidents have a laundry list of things they want to tackle in 2013 to help enrich the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Mathews will vacate the Executive Director’s office at the end of the day today, roll up his sleeves and return to co-working in the launch pad.

There’s no time to rest in between job transitions. Fowlkes and Mathews, along with the Launch Your City team and community supporters, are launching the next class of Seed Hatchery later on this evening. In addition they will be helping out with everywherelse.co The Startup Conference through the weekend. As Winter turns to spring the Launch Your City team has a full plate at home and on the road. The organization is planning a working tour of Silicon Valley with some of the startups that have gone through their ecosystem. They are also planning a trip to Washington DC and New York while simultaneously planning events around Memphis In May, including Investor Day for Seed Hatchery.

“We felt like if we fumble the ball regarding the opportunities in front of us, it would not only be a detriment to us but to partners like EmergeMemphis. We’re an important client and feeder to Emerge, and we’re poised to grow our capacity 50 percent to 100 percent in the next year.” Mathews told Andy Meek of the Memphis Daily News

As for Emerge Memphis, Mathews, speaking to us from the Executive Directors office in front of a 14 foot back drop of Memphis Grizzlies ‘ All Star Zac Randolph, says that Emerge has filled to capacity, bringing on over 20 new high growth potential client companies to occupy the space that also includes mentorship opportunities, and other startup resources.

The Emerge Memphis Board has hired local aviation entrepreneur and former CEO of Pinnacle Airlines Phil Trenary, to consult while they find a permanent Executive Director.

As an incubator, by design Emerge Memphis is supposed to house startups and growing small businesses for a short time until they’re ready to graduate to the next phase. With that in mind, Mathews and Fowlkes will relocate Launch Your City into their own space.

“Really, this is a testament to incubation. It’s a good story for incubation and entrepreneurship,” Mathews said of the impending move to the Memphis Daily News. “This has been personal to me. I’ve dedicated a lot of time to it. And it’s been a spectacular year if you look at the past 12 months.”

Startups everywhereelse can see what Memphis is really made of, at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference.

Memphis Prepares For 48 Hour Launch October 12th-14th

We’re just a couple of weeks away from Memphis’ next 48 hour launch. We were at the last 48 hour launch hosted by Launch Memphis at Emerge Memphis back in June. That 48 hour launch saw four teams of entrepreneurs present Happy Potty, Screw Pulp, YaDoog and LostPetCast.

Very similar to Startup Weekend, 48 Hour Launch puts a room full of entrepreneurs, designers, developers and coders together for 48 hours of hacking together a business.

Friday evening all of those registered for 48 Hour Launch will eat dinner, get to know each other and then pitch their ideas in 60 seconds or less to the room full of attendees. After all of the ideas are pitched, everyone in the audience will get a chance to vote for their favorite startup ideas. At the end of the voting process, an based on how many people are registered, ideas will be chosen that will be developed over the weekend.

Saturday teams will work on customer validation and building product. They’ll have community mentors around to answer legal questions, marketing questions and anything else they can think of.

Sunday, the teams will make their final pitches to show off the work they did over the previous 47 hours.

That’s typically where the traditional “Startup Weekend” ends. Startup Weekend events end with the judging of the final pitches. That’s not where 48 Hour Launch ends though.

After the weekend the 48 Hour Launch teams are invited to utilize the other resources from Launch 48 and it’s parent company Launch Your City. These resources include office hours from experienced entrepreneurial and startup advisors, free office space in the drop in LaunchPad co-working space and some 48 Hour Launch teams may decide to apply to Seed Hatchery, Memphis’ cohort based accelerator.

While some “Startup Weekend” events are held in incubators and can pull resources, Launch Memphis makes 48 Hour Launch a natural introduction into the Memphis’ Startup Ecosystem.

Memphis’ Startup Ecosystem is spearheaded by the efforts of Eric Matthews, Andre Fowlkes and Elizabeth Lemmonds, the team behind Launch Your City. Matthews has been an integral part of the Memphis entrepreneur and startup scene for nearly a decade. He founded Launch Your City in 2006 and before that was a director at the FedEx Institute of Technology on the campus of the University of Memphis.

Fast forward to 2012, and while many cities are just laying roots in a startup ecosystem, Launch Your City has their Launch Memphis efforts, which often plays quarterback to many of the regions entrepreneurial and startup events. Launch Memphis also organizes meetups, runs a mentor network, a co-working space, and provides countless other resources to young, high growth potential startups.

Launch Your City also runs Seed Hatchery and collaborates with other area resources for C2 and Zeroto510 accelerator programs as well.

These twice yearly 48 Hour Launch events, serve as a great place for new entrepreneurs to get their feet wet and get exposed to all that Memphis has to offer. One of the great things about these particular events is the way that others who have participated in any of the Launch Your City programs come out to support the growing startup community.

48 Hour Launch boasts that for just $40 you can:

Launch brand new tech-supported companies, contributing toward our local innovation economy and creating jobs;
Learn by doing, experiencing firsthand entrepreneurial principles that can be applied to any endeavor or work environment;
Connect with like-minded and talented professionals, developing your network;
Play an active role in Memphis’ entrepreneurial community, volunteering your current skills while learning new ones;
Eat and drink well, including all meals and copious amounts of coffee and Red Bull; and
Be a part of something this collaborative, creative and cool?!

You don’t have to live or work in Memphis to participate in 48 Hour Launch. People from as far away as Alabama and Atlanta have come to Memphis for weekend startup hackathon events.

There’s still space left. Hit the link below

Linkage:

Check out our 48 Hour Launch coverage from June 2012

Check out Launch Your City here

No One covers high growth tech news for the southeast like we do, here’s more

Memphis Gears Up For Zeroto510 Demo Day

When you think about Memphis Tennessee thoughts of music, culture, barbecue and Elvis Presley often consume those thoughts. You may not be quick to associate the birth place of Rock & Roll and the overnight package (FedEx) with startups, innovation and bio medical devices.

Since 2006 Memphians have band together to launch several entrepreneurial and startup resources. In fact the city of just under 650,000 residents has an infrastructure of resources for startups and entrepreneurs that would rival cities twice it’s size.

Four of those resources, Seed Hatchery, the local startup accelerator program; Memphis Bioworks Foundation, the local bio and life sciences incubator; along with Innova and MB Ventures (both venture capital firms) have created Zeroto510.

They’re calling Zeroto510 the first cohort-based medical device accelerator. To that end Eric Matthews the President of Seed Hatchery is working with Allan Daisley, who runs Memphis Bioworks, to apply the Seed Hatchery and familiar tech incubator model to medical device ideas, and turning them into startups.

Charleson Bell, a PhD candidate at Vanderbilt University, and the co-founder of Zeroto510 resident company, BioNanovations explained: “Doctors and researchers have great ideas that often times get shelved because they don’t have the resources or skills to apply a business model to those ideas”.

That’s exactly why Seed Hatchery and BioWorks started Zeroto510. Chief Brand Officer at LaunchYourCity, the company that manages Seed Hatchery told us: “In addition to seed capital and mentorship the six companies in Zeroto510 also receive advice on marketing their idea and pitching it to investors”.

Mike Hoffmeyer CEO and Co-Founder of Memphis based Paytopia was a recent graduate from the 2012 class at Seed Hatchery, and told us “I consider myself a smart guy but after a few minutes of Zeroto510 pitches I was totally lost”. Hoffmeyer is helping the Zeroto510 residents with refining their pitches into laymen’s terms.

For a better understanding to Bell’s company for instance. Bell and his co-founder Andre T. Stevenson developed separate research projects at Vanderbilt. Bell had discovered a new nanoparticle that could be used with far better accuracy than what’s currently available, to identify and track virus’, bacteria and infections. Prior to Zeroto510 Bell would roll through his presentation despite losing people’s attention because he was talking over their heads.

Now his pitch includes a great description of a nanoparticle “imagine taking one piece of human hair and dividing it by 1000, that’s roughly the size of a nanoparticle”. The PhD scientist seems a little uneasy about the example because you can’t objectively measure one piece of human hair, but it gets the point across.

The name Zeroto510 comes from the term 510K clearance which is the clearance given to medical devices. With a 510K a similar device or process that has already been approved by the FDA is compared to the new process or device, which fastracks the approval process at the FDA.

The goal around ZeroTo510 is to take the medical device and process startups from 0 to a point where they are ready for their 510k

There are six startups in all going through the current session at Zeroto510 which are:

BioNanovations uses nanotechnology to more quickly diagnose specific types of bacterial infections. Rather than treating with broad antibiotics and waiting days for test results, TestQuick provides physicians a portable option that can recognize a flesh-eating bacteria in only 30 minutes.
HandMinder is building a glove-like device that aids the rehabilitation process for stroke victims. Self-contained and battery-operated, the glove provides an affordable and convenient alternative for regaining motor control.
Nanophthalmics brings engineering concepts to clinical medicine, creating microscopic tools with etched glass for ocular surgery which will help remove scar tissue for patients with retinal or corneal diseases.
Randall Surgical is working on soy-based surgical positioners, an eco-friendly alternative to the foam currently used that contains petroleum and releases toxic chemicals when incinerated after use.
Restore Medical Solutions increases the speed and effectiveness of the sterilization process necessary for surgical instruments. Their product could lead to cleaner tools and the ability to perform more surgeries in a day- wins for both hospitals and patients.
Urova Medical is building UroGuide, a device that can be implanted during an outpatient procedure that provides a permanent and safe solution to stress urinary incontinence in women.

Like most incubators, the current session at Zeroto510 will culminate with an investor pitch day later this afternoon. If the program is effective, the audience will have no trouble understanding the brilliant minds behind these startups.

Linkage:

More about Zero To 510 here

Check out LaunchMemphis.com

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