SXSW Part 4: Enterprise Ireland/Hypersciences

It’s day 4 at SXSW and the Mount Bonnell team visit the Enterprise Ireland Stand, which dwarfs its British neighbour in size. There Kevin encounters Andris Macs from Gecko Governance who talks about his 1st time at the event. Next up, Kevin chats to Paul from Enterprise Ireland who is an old hand now being there for the 7th year. Then Kevin meets Christine who represents Service Bot, specialising in conversational AI. Another company at the Krib aka Enterprise Ireland stand is System-Link, represented by Sophie Madigan. Then finally, Kevin talks to Mark Russell from HyperSciences.

Sebastian Sauerborn: LinkedIn

Kevin Turley: Website

Andris Macs: LinkedIn

Sophie Madigan: LinkedIn 

Mark Russell: LinkedIn

Episode Transcript

Episode 17: SXSW Part 4 – Enterprise Ireland/Hypersciences

We’ve busting at the same already I know that a lot of fellow, long term Austinites are like, “oh no more people”, but at the end of the day, they say that jokingly, because, we welcome people.

You’re listening to Move Your Business to the United States, with me, your host, Kevin Turley.

And yes, the rest of the states, as I’ve mentioned, are great, I’ve been to, you know Nashville, Dallas and Houston.

Kevin: So Mount Bonnell Media, on its way to Day 4 of South by Southwest with our driver here Mason, Mason, what’s the traffic like today?

Mason: Busy.

Kevin: Busy, yeah, it’s always busy. South by Southwest is not just a festival for creatives and tech and music and film, it’s also a great meeting place and you are meeting exceptional individuals, thought leaders, people at the top of their game, innovators, people that can see into tomorrow. So it is an extremely stimulating environment to be in. Sebastian, would you say that that’s a first submission of what we’ve experienced so far?

Sebastian: Very much so, yeah, very much so. I think that number of people that we have been meeting as it goes most overwhelming and it’s difficult sometimes to keep track and to remember all the wonderful conversations that we had. For example yesterday with Ethan Myers who is a serial entrepreneur, mentor and investor, we had a wonderful conversation more than hour record the podcast about philosophical aspects and other very deep topics around entrepreneurship for example.

Kevin: Yes, me meeting Ethan Myers was quite something, how did you find at it Emmett?

Emmett: When I met Ethan, I spoke to him about the crypto currency and that was based on the bio that South by Southwest page provided about him. And shortly after we’ve met and talked about story telling instead and so that’s what we did. So it was great to see the enthusiasm, you know, he’s a busy guy but he messaged me back, we pinned at a time you know, schedule on South by Southwest is busy so I think we just see is this kind of great ambition of people to increase their network of whatever they feel is, whatever their philosophy is to share with as many people as possible.

Kevin: Yes I think that’s absolutely right. What other things have you been seeing around here with your sort of lens at the moment, Emmett, what would you say has caught your attention, anything very visual, anything music wise?

Emmett: Well, I’m was just thinking now about, I’m actually really enjoying the periods where I’m not shooting, because I get to wear my cowboy hat [smiling] cause the camera is so damn big that when I wear the hat, I can’t quite hold it right, so I have to sacrifice my badass Texan look in order to hold the camera right. So actually today I’m just going to enjoy these thirty minutes of driving into town where I get to wear my cowboy hat, just had a breakfast taco from Buc-ee’s and I’m really enjoying the whole Texan experience.

Kevin: Yes, I think we got the best of both worlds, really, at Mount Bonnell here, because we’re in the buzz of Austin for the whole day, meeting some fabulous people and then we retreat to our wonderful little high sided drop which is just a pure slice of Texas Americana, so, I think Mason, is that Austin coming into view?

Mason: No, that is not.

Kevin: Okay, so not as close as we thought. Okay, so beginning a day four, overnight, from the Mount Bonnell crew on route to Austin.

Emmett: Hello, it’s Emmett and we’re back at South by Southwest, it’s been a crazy week so far, but we’re going to keep going a full speed in order to soak up all the vibe this year at South By, so anyway today is the start of something very special indeed. And that is the South by Southwest trade show, 2019. Unlike other trade shows, South By seems to cover such a huge range of industries and interests, from wearable to edible tech, news, film, games, education, mankind, alien life forms, it’s all here and more. And I actually can’t really get my head around where to start. It’s magnificent and slightly daunting. However, we’ve got some friends here. Enterprise Ireland, Enterprise Ireland is a business development agency for Irish entrepreneurs, looking to launch their products worldwide. And they’re here. They’ve got a hefty stand. In fact it slightly overshadows Enterprise Britain’s Stand next door. And what’s more, they’re serving the black stuff, so they’re very popular. So listen in, as we go from exhibit to exhibit, meeting the future generation of entrepreneurs.

Kevin: Okay, we’re here in the exhibit hall of South by Southwest, 2019, and I’m going to introduce you to somebody here with the Irish Enterprise zone here.

Andris: How you’re doing, so my name is Andris Macs and I’m the head of business development for a company called the GECKO Governance.

Kevin: So what does that do, Andris?

Andris: So we provide a suite of technology, KYC and compliance services to the asset management industry, banks and digital asset companies.

Kevin: And it’s your first time at South By?

Andris: Absolutely, we’re very excited, Enterprise Ireland has been very good to us, and fantastic support, they’ve brought us here to Austin, it’s our first time we’re looking forward to expand the network here in the US, meet potential exciting clients and investors.

Kevin: And I believe you’re pitching here at 02:30?

Andris: Absolutely, yeah absolutely, the Irish Innovation hour is on 02:30, and my pitch is at 3 o’clock. So definitely come by and see our speech.

Kevin: Andris you’ve got a wonderful Irish accent but you’re not from Ireland, right?

Andris: No, no, absolutely not, so I come from Latvia, from the Baltic states and I moved down in Dundalk about 12 years ago and just, had to pick up the accent, had no choice.

Kevin: So, just for, your offices are in Dundalk -?

Andris: Sydney, Australia and New York.

Kevin: All very similar places [smiling]

Andris: Yeah, absolutely [smiling]

Kevin: Okay Andris, thanks very much.

Andris: Thank you, thank you.

Emmett: Andres is by no means alone in this journey to Austin, and he’s supported by our next guest, who is running the show here the Enterprise Ireland show.

Paul: Hey, I’m Paul Belfield so I’m manager of Western southern region for Enterprise Ireland for our offices here in Austin and California.

Kevin: And how is it going this year at South By?

Paul: It’s great, we’ve been- this is our seventh year in a row we’ve been at South By, it’s always a great eclectic mix of big brands, investors, tech scouts, innovation scouts, it’s always a great opportunity for us to have out our portfolio companies, kick some and some very propositions but also have real connections with buyers in these markets, right.

Kevin: Paul you’re a veteran at South By, does it ever get boring?

Paul: It’s never gets boring, Austin is electric at this time of the year, so there’s no better place to be in the US than at South By.

Kevin: Okay, for a newbie to South By, give me an idea of something I should really look out for on the coming week.

Paul: So this week it’s all about conversational, there’s a really interesting 3D printing and robotic here, from our side, image detection is one of the companies is leading here, but you need to check out the Service Bot here as well and their robotic products, bot products, really, really interesting technology that’s going to take over.

Kevin: Okay, Paul, that’s great, thanks very much.

Paul: You welcome.

Emmett: And on Paul advice we’ve headed over to meet Christine from Service Bot.

Christine: I’m Christine, I work with Service Bot and we are a company that uses conversational AI and chat bots to help businesses better engage with their customers.

Kevin: Conversational AI now the Irish having a monopoly on that, right?

Christine: Yeah, absolutely, definitely. Conversational AI is really just about using natural language in a conversation. So instead of dragging our customer through a process from A to Z, you are able to use conversation to meet the customer where they are in their journey, and natural language and how we talk is going to be key in providing a proper answer to a problem, or being able to proactively guess when a customer may need before they come to you.

Kevin: That’s wonderful Christine, first time at South By?

Christine: This is my second time but I haven’t been since 2008 so it’s been quite a while and it’s changed a lot.

Kevin: Is it as good as last time?

Christine: It’s better, I mean I think that they could probably take a look at their digital engagement and make some improvements so the people can better navigate, maybe using something like a smart chat bot, but yeah, the show is fantastic.

Kevin: What’s the highlight you’re looking for this week?

Christine: We just want to get out there test some messages, test our value propositions, interact with people and learn about how they use bots in their business.

Emmett: But it’s not all robotic and AI at South by Southwest this year, as our next guest talk to us throughout innovative solution to water conservation and having more efficient showers.

Sophie: Hi, I’m Sophie Madigan, I’m here from Krib so what we are doing is a smart home heating control, so we’re different to everything that’s out there. So what we do is actually connecting to the pipes the wet system where the current arrivals out there are only in the wiring control system. So it really gives us that absolute control. So you get your hot water by volume rather by time, so it’s compatible with your heat pumps and your furnaces and your boilers, and a really interesting thing is that it’s a first time you can get instantaneous hot water from heat pump.

Kevin: So Sophie is this the end of the switching on the emersion?

Sophie: Yes the emersion days are gone, the wars are over, you won’t be fighting anymore and you can actually control your children when they go in the shower, they won’t be able to stay in there for half an hour if you only ordered a certain amount of water.

Kevin: But on a serious point, this sounds like a save money and save energy.

Sophie: Yeah, so it saves money, it saves energy and it conserves water. Cause it makes you more thoughtful about the water that you’re using and even I do know Ireland, you think that we have a lot of water but we had a hose pipe ban last summer and that was massive. So if people are actually more conscious about the water usage, it will be very beneficial to the entire world.

Kevin: How do you finding South By?

Sophie: I’m loving it, I’m loving it, it’s a melting pot of amazing people and just having the chats, having fun, and just keep meeting likeminded individuals which I think it’s just incredible.

Kevin: And you’re getting a good reaction to your innovation?

Sophie: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, really great, some really exciting prospects coming from this, but it’s going really good. So far it’s been amazing.

Hi, you’re listening to Move Your Business to the United States. Just a quick word from our sponsors, Mount Bonnell Advisors. The people have been advising clients in moving state side for years. For all your needs, both business and practical, head over to mtbonnell.com to find out more. Thanks for listening.

Emmett: I don’t know about you but that was rather exhausting, so we’ve headed outside to get some fresh air, and it’s a lovely and hot here in Austin. South by Southwest is full of surprises but a particular tall metal rocket shape object has been turning the heads of most festival goers as it’s just outside of the exhibition center. And now it’s time to find all about it, so let’s talk with Mark Russell, CEO of HyperSciences and find out what is all about.

Kevin: We’re here at South by Southwest by Mount Bonnell Media, we’re meeting interesting people doing very interesting things and one of those people is this man, who I’m just about to introduce you to.

Mark: I’m Mark Russell, I’m the CEO and founder of HyperSciences and what you have here today, we’ve got a hypersonic platform technology company and what we’re doing is we’re revolutionizing three industries, tunneling, mining, energy drilling and aerospace. The way we do that in the mark five and above, I mean five time as speed as sound, we’re able to change the economics of rock breaking industry such as tunneling or drilling, we’re under contract with Shell, they are funding our Hyper Drill program, we are going in the field trials here in the summer where we are firing out projectors about this size into the ground, right ahead of the drill bit allowing us to access new energy resources like ten times faster than ever before.

Kevin: Okay Mark that’s great, now, why South by Southwest, why have you come here, with this amazing rocket?

Mark: [smiling] Well not rocket but we’re in South by Southwest because we have an office in Austin here and energy drilling is both in the Houston and in the Austin area so we’re really here because of this pull for energy. But South by Southwest itself is just this crossover of imaginative people, technology industry you’ll go here, Elon Musk is visiting and then you’ll find there’s something on I mean it’s just a cross over and right here what we did is crossover with mining and aerospace and some of us are creating these incredible solutions so we are that kind of people [smiling] and we feel well in Austin.

Sebastian: How does this happen, did you wake up one night and said “I have to shoot stuff in the space and revolutionize the drilling industry” or, how did this happen?

Mark: So, it was a little bit like that, I mean I’m an astro-engineer I worked as a lead manager and engineer for Jeff Bezos Blue Origin Company, I’ve led their first vertical takeoff and landing vehicle and then I also led the crew capsule development and then after years of looking at rocket after rocket and trying to predict how they would fail I’ve realized we would need a new way to fly. And so I left, my family is all in the mining business, third generation miner, my brothers and my father run publicly trading mining companies, so I’ve learned to trade from them after living Blue Origin, I was drilling one night, I was literally, it was two in the morning, it was eleven thousand feet or over three kilometers down in a hole and I’ve had an “Aha” moment, that I could, I’ve seen a technology called ram accelerator from the University of Washington where there’s just two filled with national gas and air and you can take a projectile and fly it through it and exit at multiple times as speed as sound putting vehicles to the edge of the atmosphere, and so you only need the teeny little rocket to get you into the space so that put me down on a path to both merging the aerospace with the underground solutions.

Sebastian: And when was that -?

Mark: So that was a- well we formed the company in 2014 so it was a little bit of earlier than that, but it’s been a few years of technology development and that we’re at the point where we had commercial solutions that are using small projectiles, just like the big projectiles, once punching into the ground, in the rock, once punching through the sound barrier on the way out.

Kevin: You worked for Boeing, and Raymond worked for NASA and you know that this type of technology cost a lot of money. How did you manage to raise the funds for this?

Mark: Yes, so this is great, it’s an awesome story, we use a company, a broker dealer called Seed Invest and Seed Invest also has partners in the UK called Crowd Cube so you can invest, anyone can invest in this company. So instead of going down the traditional venture capital route where the VC says you can only do one thing with our money and this is it, you can only drill, you can only do space, we said look, there’s multiple billion dollar market, in fact on aggregate we can affect a hundred billion dollar worth of these markets from tunneling to drilling to all the way to aerospace and so Raymond actually has both the NASA background and a financial background from Goldman and Sachs, I have this background in Aerospace and publicly trading mining companies, so we’ve put our brains together, worked with Seed Invest and we were able to raise over six million dollars so far and we’re raising like hundreds of thousands dollars a day while we are sitting here at South by Southwest telling our story.

Kevin: What would you say- that’s amazing Mark, what would you say is that kind of emotional charge, you’re talking about firing rockets in the space, how do you fire up your investors, what’s the thing that make them think yes I want to be part of this?

Mark: Well, I think it’s two-fold, it’s rocket science and so-

Kevin: It really is.

Mark: It really is and so, we have, we have thirty two patents so there’s a lot of brain power, it works and it works like an engine. So the ability to use unique business model, we call it equipment as a service so an investor we’re able to fire these projectiles every five seconds. So the big projectiles maybe every few minutes, so you’re able to create brand new industrial uses for this and those are multi-billion dollar opportunities. So what gets me going is we’re going to revolutionize energy drilling for deep geo thermal and we could become the biggest energy producer that’s completely clean. That gets me out of bed in the morning, the ability of course to fly up to the atmosphere without rocket and I don’t have to worry about anything exploding, this is exciting.

Kevin: So, to sum up Mark, it sounds to me like HyperSciences ambition is as far as that rocket thing goes in terms of up.

Mark: [smiling] We think that this is just going to be one of the biggest companies in the future, and I’ve had some experiences so does Raymond on how to build companies of huge value, we think that this is the way to do it, crowd financing is the first step and really bringing this out to the public and it’s been exciting ride I think it’s going to- seems to me go a quite well now, yeah.

Sebastian: And is this, the crowd funding that you use is active crowd funding so all these investors are becoming active investors in the business?

Mark: Yeah, that’s exactly right, so you’re buying stock in the company, actually our stock is $3.84 per share in the US is a $1000 per share in the UK is like you can buy a little bit less than that, oh sorry , per share but actually the minimum investment requirement and then you get a certain number of shares and you get to hear about our updates and you eventually as we get more cash flow and get to a point where we can exit, then you make multiples on your money and that’s the plan we wrote. Crowd funding is an SCC US regulated financing, it is like being a mini public company, you have to follow various rigid rules and I know exactly what I can say and what I can’t say, everything you heard today is us saying, this is what we’re really doing, we’re actually building a hardware and we’re going to make money.

Sebastian: And if I want to invest, how much I have to put in you know is it only go for sophisticated investors kind of investing small amounts, what are the typical investments put in the business?

Mark: Well that’s a great question, so that’s what crowd financing is all about, anyone can invest in this company, you do not have to be a high net individual, you can say, hey look I love to invest in the, you know, Blue Origin Jeff Bezos company or I love to buy at the Elon Musk, but you can’t, here you can buy, anyone can buy shares in our company. So the minimum invest in the US is a $1000 in the UK I think it’s about £20, we actually have a lot of UK investors and they were excited to have this kind of reach.

Kevin: Mark when I first saw this contraption I was thinking what is it doing here what is its purpose but having spoken to you now I see how perfectly fits with South by Southwest, so thank you to you and Raymond showing us around, how can people find out more about HyperSciences?

Mark: Sure, just go to seedinvest.com/hypersciences or come to hypersciences.com we have the next few days, so it’s March 22 is when our raise closes so go to HyperSciences and just, you know learn about us and invest in us.

Kevin: That’s great thank you very much

Mark: Thanks so much, I really appreciate.

You’ve been listening to Move Your Business to the United States with me, Kevin Turley

And for the short feature of South by Southwest, you’re also joined by me, Emmett Glynn.

To find out more, go to mtbonnell.com and remember, Dream Big, Dream America.