Rancher Spotlight: Barry Beverly of Innovate Wireless
Around the Tech Ranch Campfires, we like to pop a bottle of vino and swap tales of the entrepreneurial trail. This often involves legends of resilient entrepreneurs on epic business drives through recession and boom. Some of these stories focus on success and revenue, and others focus on lessons learned. Each tale is valuable in its own way.
Today is the first of the weekly blog that will put our rustic Ranch spotlight on a particular entrepreneur or venture in the Tech Ranch Community. We have got a great bunch of entrepreneurs with stories to tell.
Barry Beverly of Innovate Wireless Health is one of the latest entrepreneurs to rent an office at the Ranch for his venture. Innovate Wireless is developing mobile-based medication reminder services. Their initial focus is on Type-1 Diabetes reminders, a hundred million dollar market. To hear Barry tell it, Innovate is an appropriate name for the company.
“We’re connecting the patient with the doctor, the doctor with the pharmacy, and the pharmacy with the health insurer by means of an electronic health record. No one else is making those connections. No one else is using the available technology to do this yet.”
Barry joined Innovate Wireless Health in June of 2009, and is the venture’s only full-time employee. He contacted me about renting office space in December 2009, and then moved in at the beginning of January to accelerate the pace of the business.
In terms of what Innovate is accomplishing these days, Barry told me, “You can’t do everything you want to do all at once. You have to prioritize and do thing one at a time.”
Recently that "one thing" was the funding expedition to Atlanta that Barry returned from on Wednesday. Jonas Lamis had been prepping Barry for the trip since Barry moved in. Barry flew to Atlanta for the weekend to meet with 12 investors, and returned to the Ranch with 5 of those investors asking Barry for a second meeting to discuss funding. A small victory he attributes to Jonas’s help:
“Because of his 3 past companies that went through Austin Ventures, Jonas is the Venture Capital guy. One of the deciding factors in Atlanta was how well Jonas was able to prepare me for the investor meetings. Innovate has gotten more traction in the last month than the whole 18 months that I’ve been with the company. A lot of that traction has to do with being at the Ranch. Being around other entrepreneurs, in a collaborative environment, having access to people like Kevin and Jonas has been amazing.”
That is exactly the sort of talk we encourage around the Tech Ranch.
Well, that’s about it around the Ranch for now, folks. Y’all come again, y’ hear. By the way, we have a new Venture Forth Class starting on February 23. It’s the only program where you can practice entrepreneurship in the world. You should sign up.
