Entrepreneur dishes out advice for startups
Damien Patton loves Las Vegas. After all, he lives here and thinks about his startup all the time when riding his bicycle through Red Rock Canyon or his dirt bike across the desert.
But he knows the tech and engineering firepower that will propel his company, Banjo, to great heights and a prosperous future is in Silicon Valley, so he‘s in California from Monday to Thursday and back in Las Vegas for Friday to Sunday.
That‘s the life of this candid, blunt-talking entrepreneur — a former homeless teen-ager who would join the Navy, work as a NASCAR chief mechanic, serve as a crime scene forensics expert and ultimately launch a company in Las Vegas and Redwood City that would create an award-winning app.
In May, Patton announced he received a $100 million investment to bring his funding to more than $120 million — money that his startup will use to deploy technology to track real-time social media posts, photos and videos without relying on hashtags or key words to identify breaking news and trends that are valued by billion-dollar companies.
Patton stoked the entrepreneurial fires of hundreds of startup artists as the keynote speaker Monday at South by Southwest‘s V2V conference at Bellagio.
V2V producer Christine Auten said the annual startup event has attracted 700 attendees, with about 65 percent being startups and 35 percent funders. Patton‘s talk with titled, "The Entrepreneurial Journey of a Serial Groundbreaker."
Patton said Banjo has 30 workers at space rented at Switch, and another 40 employees in Redwood City, Calif. He expects his work force to grow to more than 100 this year.
Banjo is working on a technological "crystal ball," which will be able to identify major events and news worldwide by monitoring posts on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Patton said 42 minutes after the explosion at the 2013 Boston Marathon, Banjo‘s data base analysis of the social media photos and videos yielded the first photo showing one of the bombers.
"I knew what we were building was important," Patton said.
Banjo has already signed up more than 30 clients such as beer companies and news agencies that seek an edge on trends and news harvested by analyzing social media content.
Japan‘s SoftBank is a believer. SoftBank invested the $100 million in Banjo.
Patton has lived in Las Vegas for more than a decade, but he said he needs the Silicon Valley site because he taps that region‘s deep pool of techies. He said Las Vegas just doesn‘t have enough technological horsepower.
Patton doled out advice for the startups in the packed room, urging the business owners to look into their hearts to decide the best investors for their startups and to hire workers not based on impressive resumes. He recommended hiring people based on this question: "Is this someone I want to work next to?"
V2V runs through Wednesday. It‘s closed to the public.
Contact Alan Snel at asnel@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-5273. Find him on Twitter: @BicycleManSnel.
