The University of Texas at Austin’s newest space for startups — Longhorn Startup Camp — will be a stop on the SXSW Startup Crawl, which takes place Thursday, March 8, from 4 to 10 p.m. as part of UT Entrepreneurship Week. As a stop on the crawl, Longhorn Startup Camp will showcase its residents – 27 new startups, all originated at the university. The crawl is open to the public, and interested attendees may RSVP online.
The 27 companies, along with Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the Cockrell School of Engineering, and Kyle Cox, director of the Austin Technology Incubator’s University Incubator, will discuss business visions and the startup environment overall.
Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com Corp., will give an overview at 6 p.m. of the startup camp and the new vision for startups at the university.
“The paramount goal of Longhorn Startup Camp is to establish a space in which students with startups can congregate, creating a critical mass of startup activity, a breeding ground for ideas, learning, exchanges of best practices, team formation and general celebration of startup progress,” Metcalfe said.
The 30,000-square-foot space, located at 1616 Guadalupe St., is a new initiative of The University of Texas at Austin. Executive Vice President and Provost Steven Leslie has agreed to loan the camp the space until the end of the spring semester. Its goal is to encourage student entrepreneurship and collaboration among startups at the university.
The vision for Longhorn Startup Camp came from Metcalfe and Cox, along with John Butler, director of the university’s IC2 Institute, and Austin entrepreneur Joshua Baer, who is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Computer Science and managing director of Capital Factory.
The camp is currently at 85 percent occupancy, and primary residents have been companies from 1 Semester Startup (1SS) and ATI, which is directed by Isaac Barchas. Within the first days of alerting the 1SS and ATI, 27 companies and four student organizations had committed to space.
Other student companies have also taken up space at the camp, including companies from ATI, 3 Day Startup, the graduate level Idea-to-Product courses, McComb’s Master in Science and Technology and Texas Venture Labs programs, the Dell Social Innovation Challenge and more.
“I believe Longhorn Startup Camp represents the future of student entrepreneurship at UT Austin,” Barchas said. “There needs to be a place where student innovators can congregate and benefit from Austin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and from each other.”
Student organizations, including the Technology Entrepreneurship Society, the Student Entrepreneurship Organization and the College of Natural Science’s newly formed Entrepreneurship Society, have also used the space.
Current Longhorn Startup Camp residents:
- 3 Day Startup
- AgreeOn
- BeDJ
- Stick.it
- Clay.IO
- DaBL
- DebateTab
- GameUp
- Hoot.me
- Kymyk
- Moth to Flame
- Semiproductive Labs
- Simpler Schedules
- SolSpot Systems
- Spectrum (Lynx)
- StacheStudios
- Texas Property Photos
- The Food Lab
- Toopher
- Unique Influence
- UThinkTank
- College of Natural Sciences Entrepreneurship Society
- CS Hackers Lounge
- Technology Entrepreneurship Society
- MunchyMart
- NowOnCampus
- PhotoWhoa
- PowerSmart Labs
- Predictable Data
- ReQwip
For more information, contact: Marjorie Smith, Cockrell School of Engineering, 512 471 7541; Kyle Cox, Austin Technology Incubator, 512-522-4768; and follow Longhorn Startup Camp on Twitter at @LonghornStartup, using hashtag #UTEWeek during the startup crawl.
