Austin, Texas
It’s no surprise that Austin is a booming city for young entrepreneurs, new firms and new jobs. With the massive increase in popularity for Austin’s annual attraction, SXSW, more companies have noticed the superb conditions for raising a startup in the city. Austin has grown in every way over the last ten years with an annual increase of population growth at 3%, job growth at 3%, and an ever expanding economy. It is continually ranked on Forbes’ America’s Fastest Growing Cities list.
Austin’s big name high-tech firms such as Apple, Google, Facebook, eBay, Cisco and HP have made the area an international hub of innovation. Paired with a low cost of living and an all around “cool” vibe, Austin is a fantastic city for young entrepreneurs.
Austin Partners
Featured
Featured
When Jennifer Hyman and Jenny Fleiss were attending Harvard Business School, it gave them an intellectual oasis to test out among classmates and professors their idea for Rent the Runway. Five years later, the dress-rental concept has amassed 5 million members and $100 million in venture backing and they realize how lucky they were for the time they had to develop the concept.
But not every woman gets that type of opportunity, which is why Fleiss says she and Hyman have joined with financial giant UBS to launch Project Entrepreneur, and separately to kick off their own not-for-profit organization, the Rent the Runway Foundation, Tuesday. Read More.
According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, millennials are optimistic (despite events like 9/11 and the great recession that have punctuated their lives), they’re caring and community-oriented despite the copious use of a solitary activity such as social media, and they’re eager entrepreneurs, even when they’re often laden with college debt that has forced them to continue living at home after graduation. Read more.
President Barack Obama is hosting the nation’s first Demo Day at the White House to showcase innovative technology startups from all over the country.
Among them, Jeanette Hill, CEO and founder of Spot On Sciences, will show off its portable and easy to use blood test kits. The company has created a product, HemaSpot, that lets people take a blood sample easily by pricking their finger and collecting a drop of blood in the special container and then sending it by mail to the lab. The product eliminates needles and trips to the lab. Spot on Sciences has received grants from DARPA and the National Institutes of Health. The company has also “announced a collaboration with the U.S. Military HIV Research Program and Walter Reed Army Institute of Research to support a study for detecting infectious pathogens such as HIV, hepatitis B and hepatitis C, and mosquito-borne infections such as dengue, West Nile and chikungunya virus in deployed troops,” according to a news release from the White House. Read more.