Are you ready to see what new startups the University of Texas has in store for you? Tomorrow is Longhorn Demo Day, when students from the Longhorn Lab present their companies in hopes of gaining recognition and maybe even funding.
The companies are as varied as the students who create them. Tomorrow night, after a conversation with Michael Dell, each of the following 13 companies will get six minutes to present their startup:
- Beek: A social network for Spanish-speaking booklovers.
- Freebee: A fast-casual restaurant loyalty program.
- Cerebri: Redefining the way call centers interact with callers.
- Tastebud: A local restaurant deals aggregator.
- Gray Matter: An impact-sensing sports mouth guard.
- Hapback: Helping small events find sponsors.
- Lyte Labs: Creating a blood glucose reading smart-ring.
- Entrée: Producing point-of-sale technology and smart analytics for restaurants.
- MyCoachLive: Providing life coaches online.
- Prepify: A web and mobile app helping the disadvantaged to study for the SAT.
- Retell: Bringing property management into the digital age.
- SENSUS: Promoting science-based education in underfunded areas.
- Who’s Hungry?: Connecting hungry people for social meals.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, the Longhorn Startup Lab is something akin to a class in creating a successful startup – only instead of studying how to make a company successful academically, the students just go ahead and make a real one.
“The uniqueness of this program is that the mission the students have is to create a real company over the course of a semester,” entrepreneur in residence Ben Dyer said. “That’s why it was originally called ‘One Semester Startup’.”
Every Spring the Lab takes student entrepreneurs from around the school and gives them course credit for working on their startups while they’re still in school. The students get weekly mentoring sessions and memberships to a co-working space — and any profits generated by their startups.
“The Longhorn Startup Lab has helped immensely,” Will Siegfried, co-founder of HapBack said. “Our professors and the mentors they have matched us with have helped us avoid tons of mistakes we likely would have made.”
Starting a company is hard enough on its own, student entrepreneurs often experience a unique set of problems.
“The most challenging obstacle for us has definitely been development,” Yousef Okasheh, cofounder of Who’s Hungry? said. “With the full time class schedules and often other extra curricular activities it's really difficult for our development team to churn out our product.”
While Demo Day comes in at the end of the semester, many of these companies will continue far after school is out and grades are submitted. They are, after all, real companies, and Demo Day is just the start for many of them. Michael Dell will be there watching the student’s presentations (and presenting himself), as will many from Austin’s startup community. Two years ago Mark Cuban was there and even invested in one of the companies.
If you’re interested in seeing the next big thing that’s going to roll out of the UT Longhorn Lab, you can register here. Who knows, maybe you’ll see the birth of the next Facebook.
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