Texas Evening Entrepreneurs

Texas Evening Entrepreneur June Speaker Series Event – Austin E-commerce Entrepreneurs

When: Saturday, June 5^th 1-3pm

Where: UT Campus, GSB 2.120

2100 Speedway

Austin, TX 78705

Star Nine Ventures – internet-based venture firm

www.StarNine.com

                Seeking interns

Company Overview

Star Nine Ventures is a venture creation company. They craft unique web-marketing products and services that benefit the strategic partnerships they cultivate.  The firm’s entire system hinges on an ability to capitalize on changes in consumer trends before their competitors have a chance to catch up. It’s structural agility at its best, run by a team that’s always looking forward.

The company own thousands of niche domains (e.g. whoLinksToMe.com, DebtConsolidation.com), of which about half are live and delivering revenue.  They are extremely profitable and drive all of their traffic through organic search.   The firm maintains that it’s best to stay selective in ventures and build bridges with groups that show the most promise, the most ingenuity.  Partnerships work when two sides are pushing each other to always get better. It’s where trust is built; it’s where commitment is fostered. It’s where we add the most value.

About the Speaker

For the better part of the past decade, Ryan Russell has provided search marketing solutions to prominent national businesses in some of the most highly competitive consumer verticals. While studying Economics and Computer Science at Trinity University in San Antonio, Mr. Russell became fascinated with the science of search algorithms, and developed an in-depth understanding that allowed him to consistently deliver top search result rankings for his clients. In 2008, Mr. Russell decided to apply his vast experience and knowledge to power his own network of national business-to-consumer online marketplaces. As founder and CEO, Mr. Russell is the visionary and driving force behind Star Nine Ventures™.

Speaker Topics

1. The transition from BootStrap to National

2. Finding niche play in the B2C markets

3. Be prepared for 100 hours a week regardless of the size of the company you are building

4. White Hat Internet Marketing versus the rest

Uberoom- internet-based hotel experience service

www.uberoom.com

Company Overview

Uberoom’s service was born to create a personalized environment without the hassle and high cost of driving around and setting-up.  The customer selects the theme and the location and the company handles the rest.  The firm has relationships with many hotels and bed & breakfasts and compensates them for business leads and cooperation

About the Speaker

Bryan Ulatowski’s traditional, disciplined upbringing clashed with the shocking reality of friend's lives cut short at a young age.  More than any other reason, he pursued Chemical Engineering and Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to help explain the world around him.  The “work-hard / party-hard” philosophy at UW helped lay the groundwork for his first venture.

After graduating, Bryan became employed at Samsung in Austin, Texas, and managed multiple square-peg / round-hole projects with declining satisfaction. He soon realized that most young men and women are going through the very same experience, spending time at work for works sake and not focusing on what engineering taught him: productivity.

After a final complaint from his father about how a simple gift-basket he ordered couldn’t be delivered to a hotel in time, it struck him. Hotels offer too little to help people create meaningful experiences together, so Bryan decided to start a different company that would help.  In January 2008, Uberoom was founded to personalize and decorate hotel rooms for celebrations.  The company continues to partner with hotels to outsource their special package offerings, saving partners from inventory management while increasing offerings to their guests.

Speaker Agenda

1.       E-commerce pros and cons

2.       Deciding on what kind of business to start

3.       Why it is good to be a second/third mover

4.       Social media for small businesses

5.       Virtual assistants and contracting

6.       Using international vendors

7.       Managing affiliates

Hi All,

We're proud to announce our first speaker event in 2010.  Our kind volunteer is Gary Hoover and his bio is listed below.  Gary plans to speak about the eight keys to building and leading successful enterprises.

The event is setup for Thursday, February 11th at 6pm on Campus (GSB 2.120).

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Gary Hoover began his entrepreneurial journey at an early age. His question about enterprises was, “What separates the losers from the winners?”As part of his education, he studied economics at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and two other Nobel Prize winners, served as a securities analyst for Citibank on Wall Street, worked as a buyer for Federated Department Stores, and headed up acquisitions and strategic planning for the May Department Stores Company.

At the age of 30, after he finally took the plunge and created pioneering book superstore BOOKSTOP, which helped change the nature of book shopping in America. This company was sold to Barnes & Noble for $41.5 million cash when it was 7 years old, and became a cornerstone for their industry-dominating superstore chain.

After he and his partners sold BOOKSTOP, Gary returned to his first love of understanding businesses, and began the company that became Hoover’s, the world’s largest Internet-based provider of information about enterprises. Hoovers.com covers over 40,000 companies around the world. In July of 1999, Hoover’s went public and in March of 2003, the company was purchased by Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million. Like BOOKSTOP, Hoover’s has changed the way we do things and today employs over 300 people.

In the autumn of 2009, Gary was appointed Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin. There he focuses on inciting and inspiring entrepreneurial thinking among students of all types, graduates and undergraduates, inside and outside of the business school.

Gary lives in Austin, Texas, with his 50,000-book library. He has consulted, spoken to conferences, and worked to encourage entrepreneurial thinking on every continent and in every industry, for profit and not for profit. In 2009 he launched www.hooversworld.com, a blog which includes reviews of books, ideas, and places from Gary’s iconoclastic angle.

In January we plan to meet with local entrepreneurs, discuss potential business problems, brainstorm ideas, and help implement solutions.  We also plan to hold one speaker event and are still in the process of structuring our self for 2010.  If you're interested in regular updates, then please register and sign yourself up for our newsletter.

We are active and growing bigger.  Recently we’ve held a speaker event with Christian Landers, writer of Stuff White People Like, and Joshua Bingaman, owner of Progress Coffee and other ventures. We will continue to have speaker events, discussion panels, social gatherings, networking events, and more activities over the next two months.

We are currently in the process of re-structuring the organization, building an active officer team, looking for a pool of ambassadors/volunteers, and trying out an effective way to bring value to every participant.

Welcome Enterepreneurs,

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