20 entrepreneurial mentors

Joshua founded SKYLIST in 1996 in his college dormitory as a one of the first email marketing companies and then in 2004 he created UnsubCentral to help email marketers comply with regulatory requirements.

He holds Computer Science and Information Decision Systems degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and lives in Austin, TX with his wife and two children. You can follow him on Twitter @joshuabaer.

Prior to Smart Bear Jason was the founder of Sheer Genius Software, a venture-funded company during the dot-com bubble, and the first employee at ITWatchDogs, a bootstrapped company (later sold to Geist Manufacturing) that makes inexpensive, internet-enabled server room climate and power monitors. Jason speaks at industry tradeshows and conferences such as Joel Spolsky’s Business of Software.

Jason lives in Austin, TX with his wife Darla. He blogs regularly about startups and marketing.

Brian practices corporate and securities law with a focus on representation of start-up and emerging growth companies, representation of issuers and underwriters involved in public offerings, and representation of companies involved in merger and acquisition transactions. Brian helped build one of the leading technology practices in Texas, assisting emerging growth companies raise billions of dollars in private and public offerings. He also has handled several billion dollars in mergers and acquisitions transactions and has represented leading venture capital firms in Texas and throughout the country.

Jeremy currently runs Websimple, an Austin-based SEO firm specializing in web applications and long-tail,local SEO. Jeremy was previously a product
manager at Irongrid and a software engineer at Knight Ridder Digital and Financial Engines. He holds an MBA from the McCombs School of Business at UT-Austin where he was a Venture Fellow and Sord Scholar, and a BS in Decision Sciences with Honors from Santa Clara University.

Ross has always been involved in building startups. From Ross’ early start as a developer for DataGeneral and Tandem Computers (both internal corporate start-ups) to his long career in ground floor start-ups with both failed companies (not to be mentioned) and successful companies like Hal Computers (purchased by Futijsu), Vice President of Engineering at Excite.com (fastest-growing company in Silicon Valley in 2000) and most recently as the CTO of HomeAway.

Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the often-publicized MIT Blackjack team) and holds graduate degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Rony’s background includes technology consulting at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) and fast moving consumer goods product marketing experience. He holds and MBA from INSEAD and a BSc in Economics from Texas A&M.

Zosh is a company Josh co-founded that lets you fill, sign and return documents as PDF’s via your mobile phone. He launched the product at DEMO Spring 2010 where he won a DEMOgod award for his presentation which included smashing a fax machine with a baseball bat.

Prior to Zosh he was CEO of Ideal Science a software company he founded in early 1998 which developed scalable Bulletin Board software used by Microsoft on their xBox gaming properties (most famously Bungie Studios which produced Halo, Halo2 and Halo3.) Other notable customers include Hachette Filipacchi Media, CNN, and the FBI.

Jack is a serial entrepreneur and a winner of the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. He serves as vice chairman of the Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce and chairman of Texas Emerging Technology Fund for the central Texas region. He also serves on the boards of nonprofits KIPP Austin Public Schools and Peoples Community Clinic, and is chairman of PeopleFund, a community development loan fund for low-income entrepreneurs.

An an entrepreneur, has has founded Fusion Learning Systems (2001), Perficient (1997), and Exact Systems (1991). He enjoys networking and idea sharing with other entrepreneurs and business owners.He frequently participates in panel discussions on technology and startups (TechCrunch, Rice Alliance), and works with his wife on the popular Austin Tech Happy Hour.

Bryan began his career in the San Francisco office of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), working with Apple Computer. He earned a bachelors degree in Business/MIS at California State University at Chico. He was a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and recipient of an Austin Under 40 Award.

Prior to launching Source Spring Ms. Price was the Founder and CEO of Front Gate Tickets– the largest independently owned ticketing software provider in the US. Mellie’s experience also includes serving as a senior executive with Human Code (1997), a leading software and application developer that was sold to Sapient Corporation (NASDAQ: SAPE) in 2000. At Sapient, a leading business and technology consultancy, Mellie was a Vice President of the Media, Entertainment, and Communications division.

Price started her career as a designer, programmer, and system administrator when she founded Monsterbit (1994), one of the first commercial web development and web hosting companies in the nation. She was an early stage investor in Austin’s own San Jose Hotel and is currently invested in several local companies including Black Sheep Lodge, OtherInbox, Symbiot Security and SurgiCoder. She serves on the Board of Directors for Front Gate Tickets and the Austin Music Foundation. Mellie is a frequent guest speaker at industry conferences and a passionate instructor of anything to do with technology or entrepreneurship.

Prior to hitting his stride as a Sales/Marketing/Product entrepreneur, Marc worked for JPMorgan in NYC, and for USBancorp in Minneapolis as an investment banker. He has dual degrees in Corporate Finance and Financial Accounting from the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota.

John received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and his BA summa cum laude from Trinity University, where he graduated first in his class. He is former board member of Ballet Austin, the Austin Museum of Art, and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas; a founding board member of the Entrepreneur’s Foundation; and a former trustee of Trinity University. In 2009, John founded The Texas Tribune, the nation’s first statewide, non-profit, non-partisan, online news organization.

Tocquigny serves a broad range of clients including Dell Computer Corporation, Regent University, Teradata, Mass. Health Connector and numerous small businesses. She has consulted with clients such as Caterpillar, DTCC and AMD on how to efficiently structure and manage a marketing organization to produce results that C-level executives desire.

The firm provides a broad range of integrated services that help companies get new customers and keep the customers they have. These include research, strategic planning, lead generation, web site development, video production, event management, iPhone apps, social media, pay per click, search engine optimization and full creative services.

Yvonne is a frequent speaker for groups of CEOs in the Vistage organization. She speaks frequently for international Six Sigma organizations and is a regular speaker for groups of CEOs in the financial industry.

Michael is widely recognized as an expert in Enterprise Content Management, has authored several articles on the subject, and is a regular speaker at industry conferences. Under Michael’s leadership, Blue Fish was selected in 2007 as one of Austin’s Best Places to Work and was recognized as Austin’s tenth fastest growing company in 2008.

As an active early-stage technology investor, Marc has been involved with many companies through the years including SailPoint, Waveset, Venafi, Network Equipment Technologies, VPNet, and Vitalink.

Marc’s business career began in the early 1980s as a General Partner with Hillman Ventures and later with Austin Ventures.

Marc was first bitten by computers and electronics in the sixth grade through teletype access to MIT’s MULTICS timesharing system. A decade later, after corporate experience as an engineer at AT&T Bell Labs, Marc headed for the world of startups. Marc once hailed from Tufts, UC Berkeley and MIT before becoming a proud Austinite and lover of film noir.

Today, he guides the company from a product and strategy perspective by identifying opportunities that will help Rackspace remain a leader as more and more IT is consumed as a service. Pat is currently working on Rackspace’s cloud computing initiative.

Pat has won multiple awards and been repeatedly recognized for his entrepreneurial vision. Most recently he was awarded the 2007 Entrepreneur of the Year regional award by Ernst & Young and was a finalist nationally.

In 2008, he was selected by the San Antonio Business Journal as a winner of their annual 40 under 40 Award. Pat is most proud, however, of helping create a place where people love coming to work every day. Rackspace was ranked #32 of Fortune’s 2008 list of Best Places to Work in the country.

Pat is also an active angel investor. He focuses on early-stage Software-as-a-Service companies that serve small businesses and free agents.

Pat lives in San Antonio with his wife, daughter, and two dogs.

Most recently he founded Show Initiative, LLC with the creation of the Austin Game Conference in 2003. He sold the company’s portfolio of game industry events to CMP Technology in 2006 and refocused on virtual worlds and social networks. Show Initiative is now in the process of evolving once again.

In 2001 Chris created the Texas Entrepreneur Initiative. From 2001 to 2006 TEI published the daily email newsletter AustinXL and produced events designed to bring together Central Texas entrepreneurs and investors.

Prior to all this Chris was involved in a variety of startups, including various media companies, a web services company managing investment portfolios for angel investors, an online music company, a grid computing company and an ecommerce firm dedicated to horror and Halloween related merchandise.

Last century Chris launched UGO Entertainment which went on to become one of the leading online media networks catering to men aged 18 to 34. He sold UGO in 1999. UGO is now part of Hearst Corp.

Chris enjoys getting his hands dirty with new product development.

Ian’s current venture is Uprizer Labs, which has developed SenseArray,
an easily integrated collaborative filtering technology. SenseArray is
already in use in a variety of industries ranging from targeted
advertising to online dating.

Prior to MessageOne, Samy ran Sales Engineering and Software development teams at PCOrder and Trilogy software.

Samy grew up in Seattle, studied Computer Engineering at the University of Washington, and lives in Austin with his wife and two young daughters.

Before Dell, Decker spent more than six years in the Bay Area leading marketing, sales and product strategy at B2B and media startups. Decker has authored two books on word of mouth marketing, serves on the digital advisory board for P&G, served on the board of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), and posts occasionally at deckermarketing.com or @samdecker.

Ed founded Ghostfire Games, an Austin TX company specializing in making exercise video games for the Nintendo Wii system. Prior to this, he was founder and CEO of The Middleware Company, a Java training/consulting company, which he sold to Precise Software.

While at The Middleware Company, he created the world’s largest Java developer community, www.TheServerSide.com. He also created TheServerSide Symposium, a series of international Java conferences which brought the brightest developers together. He is also the author of “Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans”, a critically acclaimed book on developing complex business systems in Java.

Prior to SolarWinds, Mr. Van Zant was the EVP of Marketing and GM of the Communications BU for Motive and the co-founder and COO for BroadJump, where he managed growth from start-up in 1999 to over $100M in sales and 350 global employees by 2002.
Prior to BroadJump, Mr. Van Zant held engineering, marketing, and sales positions for Cisco Systems, NetSpeed, Cypress Semiconductor and Thomas-Conrad. He has a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin.