Austin Tech Connect: The Podcast For The Austin Technology Ecosystem, Business Leaders, and Tech Entrepreneurs!

Richard Walker is the CEO and co-founder of Quik!. Having started 10 companies since age 12, host of The Customer Wins podcast, author of two books, and father to three boys, Richard empowers people to do their best work. Prior to starting Quik!, Richard was a financial advisor with Financial Network and a business consultant with Arthur Andersen. He started Quik! in 2002 to help people spend less time on paperwork and more time on what they do best. Quik! is the industry leader in enterprise forms automation service and provides an extensive library of fillable forms. Quik! eliminates handwriting on forms which translates to fewer errors and faster processing for paperdriven transactions. As an added benefit, Quik! saves a tree every hour of every day. For more… Visit www.quikforms.com or find Richard as “QuikFormsCEO” on LinkedIn to get a free copy of his book, “It’s My Life! I Can Have The Job I Want”.

John has founded and led multiple startups and early growth projects to successful exits by identifying market value gaps, matching innovative technology solutions. Early in the ATM technology curve he started Hartigan ATM and built a network of ATMs across CA and Arizona later selling to Marathon ATM/ Cord Financial. He then launched Mobile Cloth®, a CPG brand leveraging the touch screen device growth explosion, distributing to over 30 countries, and later selling to The Clouser Group. Over the past seven years, he has focused on learning technologies and practical business applications of blockchain. As CEO of Intiva Health he launched "Ready Doc" the first decentralized (blockchain) application for healthcare provider credentialing.   John has served in C-level roles in private and public companies and is frequently invited to speak around the world to share and discuss the practical impact of information technologies. John sits on the board of the Round Rock Area Serving Center, a community-based food pantry and financial assistance organization serving over 60,000 individuals every year. He received his Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from California Polytechnic University, Pomona and currently resides in the greater Austin area, Texas. Domain-U is a complete SaaS solution delivering a video based, on-demand, interactive, “hands-on” training platform. Domain-U is purpose built for training the Hybrid workforce no matter where or when they are!

Matt Stephenson is the CEO and Co-Founder along with his wife of Code2College (www.code2college.org), an Austin, TX based nonprofit that is building a national network of diverse, college-going technical talent. Through its skills-based, volunteer-driven program model, high school students – who are primarily Black, brown and girls – develop coding and professional skills, gain exposure to a variety of STEM industries through case competitions and workshops, and build competence, confidence and a deep network through mentorship relationships with industry volunteers. Under Matt’s leadership, Code2College has become the national leader in preparing girls and students of color for STEM undergraduate majors and careers through paid, technical high school internships. These highly competitive technical internship placements continue to be one of Code2College’s key differentiators as these students are able to launch their careers in software engineering, AR/VR and other technical fields at leading companies including Atlassian and VMware prior to entering college.

For over 30 years, Lawrence Waugh has been rethinking the way that software is developed.  After graduating from MIT, he spent 7 years flying combat jets for the Navy before leaving to pursue his MS in Computer Science at Stanford. Recruited to Austin by Trilogy Software, Lawrence spent the next several years with various Enterprise Software companies, becoming progressively frustrated by their poor product quality and lack of sound development process.  By 2001, his passion for efficient and reliable software development led him to found Calavista Software. An early pioneer in continuous integration and delivery, Lawrence holds some of the early patents on software tools and methodologies in these fields.  Over the past 20 years, Calavista has served both as a development resource for its customers - delivering high-quality Enterprise software on time and on budget - as well as helping companies improve their own software organizations by transforming their development and delivery processes.  In addition to Calavista, Lawrence serves on the Board of the Austin Technology Council and several other organizations and companies.

Maren Miller is Americas EY Private Business Development Leader.  She works with high growth companies on how to navigate success through the services offered by EY in the areas of tax, audit, and consulting.   She works to provide high-growth, private or IPO-bound companies with the best EY services for their unique needs. Maren is committed to delivering exceptional client service and bringing expert go-to-market advice for the companies served by EY.    Link to apply for EY Entrepreneur of the Year: https://www.ey.com/en_us/entrepreneur-of-the-year/central-south/overview

Tom Kieley graduated from Texas A&M in 2004 and co-founded SourceDay in 2015 after launching his first tech startup, RG in 2008. Earlier in his career, he started as a manufacturing supervisor at Dell and later into enterprise selling with software companies like Boomi and Pervasive.  Tom and his co-founder, Clint, started SourceDay to transform how manufacturers, distributors, and retailers collaborate with their suppliers to solve supply chain challenges they experienced early in their careers.  At the time of publishing, SourceDay has helped over 250 customers and 16,000 suppliers globally improve visibility and collaboration in their supply chains.  Tom is a husband, father of three, and exercise fanatic who loves cars, boating, and anything outdoors.    And About SourceDay :  As much as 70% of your supply chain problems occur before your parts ever ship. Stop supplier misses with SourceDay. Align with your suppliers on orders and changes. Know where your parts are and when you are going to get them. Late parts will shut down your production line.  Our supply chain collaboration software integrates with most ERPs and connects with your suppliers to automate direct materials PO changes and orchestrates actions to keep supplier execution continuously aligned for continuity of supply.  In 2022 alone, SourceDay has connected over 12 thousand companies, managed 11.6M PO changes, orchestrated receipt of 16.6B parts on-time and protected $755M in revenue on average for 250+ customers. 

Dave Parks has over 25 years of experience in the digital strategy and transformative solutions arena. Beginning his career as a software developer, he eventually transitioned into technology management, technical sales and solution sales roles. Dave founded Adjacent Technologies, Inc. in 2002, and was acting CEO until merging Adjacent with enChoice in late 2019. Dave holds a bachelor’s degree in Business from Texas A&M University. Founded in 1993, enChoice®, Inc. is an award-winning Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Digital Transformation solutions company, with 29-years’ experience helping customers improve business processes and protect critical information with software and solutions that accelerate their path to digital efficiency. With offices across the United States and Europe, enChoice is an IBM Platinum Business Partner, 2015 IBM Business Partner of the Year, Microsoft Partner and OpenText Technology Partner.

Justin Fischer has over 20 years of financial technology experience, with a heavy focus on community financial institutions and user experience. Before RiskScout, Justin was the founder and principal consultant of Launchy Consulting, which provided MSB and scale consulting to start-ups and financial institutions around the country. Launchy also worked with VC and PE groups for buy-side reviews of emerging technology companies. Previous to Launchy, Justin served as the CEO and CPO for Student Loan Genius (SLG), a Prudential Financial-backed company with clients such as Voya, John Hancock, and New York Life. Prior to SLG, he served in various executive roles with Q2ebanking, including Senior Vice President of Operations, in the approach to their hugely successful IPO in 2014. Before Q2, Justin worked in the enterprise banking and international payments company S1, where he led senior development teams providing FinTech solutions for large financial institutions and payments processing. Justin was also the co-founder and CTO of CoreTrac, Inc., who developed some of the first CFI CRM and marketing solution software, and was later acquired by Aptean About RiskScout After decades of developing enterprise software for financial institutions, pioneering cloud banking and infrastructure, and writing regulatory compliance as part of the FFIEC, our team of experts came together to solve a big problem for financial institutions (FI) compliance. Traditional FI tools are too broad in scope to effectively address the increasingly interrelated risk environment that FIs are forced to manage.  Currently available tools tend to stop at basic scoring and evaluation, forcing FI staff to perform duplicative time intensive work when qualified staff are more difficult to find than ever.  Think: the TSA line at the airport on a good day. RiskScout is a modern compliance system that automates the onboarding, business verification, and ongoing compliance required to handle all higher risk businesses and entities.  RiskScout is the Clear terminal at the TSA line - not less compliance, just done in a better way!  

How can someone thrive as an entrepreneur with their startup, not only once, but many times over? CEO of Austin Technology Council, Thom Singer sits down with the Founder & CEO of Gembah Henrik Johansson and discuss his entrepreneurial journry here in Austin, TX.  \ Henrik Johansson is a serial entrepreneur who co-founded and built the product company Boundless into a $100M company. Currently he is the co-founder and CEO of Gembah, a product development platform and marketplace, and the Executive Producer of Final Product, a reality TV show incubated at Gembah. He was previously a co-founder and board member of OutboundEngine, and before that the president of EverydayWealth, and co-founder and president of Creditland. Johansson specializes in technology-enabled services, marketplaces, and software as a service. He is an expert on scaling startups, building world-class teams, culture, and scalable processes and infrastructure and has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Austin Business Journal, and was named Counselor's 2017 Person of the Year. Gembah- The 1st Marketplace for Product Development Gembah is a product development marketplace specializing in bringing new products to market through all stages of development. Gembah connects creators with its global network of designers, engineers, and supply chain specialists and oversees production at factories in China, Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America. Founded on the belief that humans are natural inventors, the company’s goal is to empower creators and make product development accessible to anyone. Gembah was established in 2018 in Austin, TX and has been featured in Forbes and Entrepreneur. To learn more, visit Gembah.com, or find us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.

AI is a major focul point in the world right now. Austin Technology Council CEO, Thom Singer sits down with the Founder of Macami.ai and discusses the quickly changing world of AI and  how it's impacting the Tech world, specifically in Austin. Carlos Martin is the CEO of macami.ai, a company focused in bringing efficiency to the enterprise by leveraging Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and AI. Formerly Director of Strategic Alliances for Brazil for the company Blue Prism, which pioneered the RPA market, and where he worked for 5+ years. Carlos has a degree in Computer Science and a Master’s in Technology Commercialization from UT Austin. He has more than 20 years in IT with a solid experience in technology, systems, problem solving, research and business strategy.  Carlos is the author of the upcoming book “The Efficient Enterprise”, which will discuss topics on how to leverage these technologies for bring exponential benefits to business.  Carlos' company macami.ai is an AI consultancy headquartered in Cedar Park, Texas that demystifies the use of artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to make businesses more efficient and allow them to scale effectively. The founders have trained and mentored the top consulting firms on best case use of AI and practices of automation. macami.ai analyzes companies’ financials and the cost of business processes with a top down approach to recommend and execute simple financial and software methodologies that incorporate AI and RPA technology. The company will also be providing free trainings online and within local communities on spotting financial scams.