Hurt Technology Consulting

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

For all of us Austin fans, I'm talking about Cotter Cunningham, the founder and CEO of RetailMeNot. Last night, Cotter was one of our keynote speakers, along with Mark Cuban, at the University of Texas for Longhorn Startup Demo Day (the event was just fantastic, by the way, and Josh Baer, Ben Dyer, and Bob Metcalfe deserve a huge round of applause for it).

As of today, RetailMeNot is worth $1.33 billion as a public company (it went public in July and just filed for a follow-on offering). It is just four years old - for a value creation of $333 million per year. Who says Austin can't do B2C now? HomeAway is another one of our five tech IPOs in the last five years. It is worth $3.4 billion today as a public company (it went public in 2011). It is just nine years old. Yes, we haven't produced a Facebook or Twitter size outcome - there needs to be a higher volume of failures (entrepreneurial experiements) to do that, but don't forget we did produce a Dell, a National Instruments, and a Whole Foods.

Announcing Hurt+Harbach

I'm very proud to announce Hurt+Harbach, a seed-stage venture capital firm focused primarily on Austin investments.

I've enjoyed working at Austin Ventures since November of last year. I've had a long partnership with the good people there, dating back to August of 2005, when the firm invested in our Series A at Bazaarvoice and Chris Pacitti joined our Board of Directors. My last day at Austin Ventures was August 15.

I'm an entrepreneur, after all. I discovered that I really enjoy being a VC. Helping entrepreneurs is the next phase of my career, and this is a natural evolution for me. Co-founding a new venture capital firm is the ideal way to express my passion for building extraordinary companies.

My return to The Wharton School as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence

My return to The Wharton School as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence

I had the pleasure of visiting The Wharton School recently as a returning Entrepreneur-in-Residence. I found myself more encouraged than ever about the student body and their desire to be entrepreneurs. When I earned my MBA at Wharton, from 1997-1999, I was a bit of an outlier as an entrepreneur in a class of almost all aspiring consultants and bankers. In my class, there were a few entrepreneurs, such as John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, the co-founders of MouseDriver (I recommend reading their book on the experience), and Gregg Spiridellis, the co-founder and CEO of JibJab. John is at it again with Rivet & Sway and Gregg is still running JibJab, an unusually long tenure for any Wharton graduate in my class. Gregg is my most humorous friend and his talent has shown in so many ways at JibJab. But, at Wharton, I was even more strange than John, Kyle, and Gregg. And that is because I was founding and running businesses while I was still in school.