Austin, Texas has a technology startups incubator starting from today

Following YCombinator of San Francisco-California, Techstars of Boulder-Colorado now Austin-Texas has a startup incubator called Capital Factory (from today).

The program is 10 week summer long and was founded by the local entrepreneurs like Joshua Baer, Sam Decker, Bryan Menell, Brian Beard, Jason Cohen, Pat Condon, Chris Sherman. These will select 10 finalists from a pool of applicants and from these will, eventually, pick three winners (this will be announced on April 13th).

What those three winning companies will get?
It seems they’ll get a slightly better deal than either YCombinator or Techstars offers (at least financially): $20,000 in cash (in exchange of 5% of the company) and weekly mentoring sessions with a select group of proven, successful technology entrepreneurs (other perks are included)

The program runs from May 22nd to August 7th with August 14 being the Demo Day where the chosen companies will showcase their products.

YCombinator’s success in funding early stage startups prompted others to replicate it around USA, Boulder-Colorado being one and now Austin, Texas.

Austin is a great place for technology startups having almost all what it needs for a startup to thrive: infrastructure (startups will use Tech Ranch Austin), talent (University of Texas is there), venture capitalists (Austin Ventures is one of them), small town feeling (although it has 1,6 million inhabitants) and nice weather (no winter).

What it doesn’t have is the close proximity to the ocean (like Silicon Valley-San Francisco has) or to the mountains (like Boulder has). The ocean is like 2-3 hours away (driving) and that shouldn’t stop people who want to enjoy the water. But the closest mountains are like 12 hours away (driving) and that could be a problem if you crave that (which rules out spending weekends skiing – unless taking the plane comes to the rescue).

Austin was known before as a technology hub among other “celebrities” like Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York being a central location for companies like Dell, 3M, HP, AMD, Applied Materials, Cirrus Logic, National Instruments, Samsung, Sun. This gained the city the nickname of “Silicon Hills”. There are also pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
It is also known as the live music capital of the world and that’s not a small thing. Almost everybody likes music but not everybody gets to see artists perfoming live on the city streets.

I visited Austin last spring and I liked it (I have stayed only one day though).
The city feels more european than many other american cities and, for an european like me, that’s a plus (I’m not forgetting my roots).

I hope to hear about companies who originated from Capital Factory’s incubator and have done good things.