DFW Entrepreneur Alexander Muse Featured in Dallas Morning News

Here’s a recently published story from Dallas Morning News about DFW entrepreneur Alexander Muse (known for the ShopSavvy app). Alexander was one of speakers at the MIT EF DFW Bootstrapping event in 2009. Alex hosts happy hours on first Mondays of the month at Infomart.

Unconventional describes Alexander Muse.

He thinks big and – for the most part – it has paid off.

He helped start a half-dozen technology companies in Dallas – with creative names such as MotorSport Ranch and Big in Japan – since the late 1990s. He sold three of them for tens of millions of dollars; he still runs the others.

LayerOne, a telecommunications infrastructure company he started in 1999, went bankrupt. Muse raised $4 million in venture capital to buy back the assets and relaunch the company. He sold it to Switch & Data for $22 million on Sept. 12, 2001.

“I was supposed to sign the deal on Sept. 11. That was so scary. I had a newborn baby, a big new house and a Porsche. I thought, ‘If this doesn’t happen, I could lose it all,’ ” said Muse, 38. “We ended up making a lot of money, but we lost a lot of money for a lot of people. That was a turning point for me.”

Early on, Muse named himself CEO of all his ventures. But he learned his attention span was limited to about two years.

“I’m more effective being part of a leadership team than the leader,” he said.

Now he finds partners to incubate ideas at Architel, an IT outsourcing company he started in 2001. If successful, they’re spun off with a CEO who has an equity stake in the company.

Muse focuses on Architel and ShopSavvy, a cellphone application that lets users scan a product’s bar code to compare prices online and at local stores. Revenue reached $11.5 million at Architel and $1 million at ShopSavvy in 2009. Both turn a profit.

With a foosball table and a giant Incredible Hulk at his Dallas Infomart office, Muse created a fun place to work as well as a nurturing environment for budding entrepreneurs. He shares spare office space, invests in promising ideas and holds monthly happy hours where he foots the bar tab.

In 2005, Muse launched the Texas Startup Blog and co-founded SpringStage in 2008 as an online network to promote local entrepreneurship.

An avid blogger, Muse writes about his adventures, attracting at least 175,000 online followers. Soon, he plans to start a blog called the Startup Muse.

Next? Muse wants to develop apps that integrate social networks with services.