Laura Beck
Founder, StripedShirt.com
Tech Startups Guru
Laura Beck, marketing and PR consultant, entrepreneur, Tshirt lady, Sports nut, Mom.
As of May 1, 2010, Laura Beck is focused on independent marketing and PR consulting, as well as starting her own ecommerce business, after 18+ years PR agency-side. Until then, she ran the Austin office of Porter Novelli, a global PR firm, for nearly 10 years, opening it at the very end of the dot com bubble in 2000 at 29 years old. Under Beck’s leadership, the office grew to staff 16 people, service upwards to 25 clients at a time, and bring in about $3M in revenues each year. Beck’s focus for the office, and personal passion, has been largely technology start ups, working with entrepreneurs to bring their dreams to life, gain critical visibility, create positive buzz. That continues now as an independent consultant.
Beck’s expertise – and love - lies in client counsel, project management, strategic program development, media relations and staff development. Beck prides herself with being active on the press front lines every day and loves nothing better than successfully placing a good story, which she still does, regularly, all the way up the line to New York Times profiles, and Wall Street Journal reviews. In fact, Beck was named one of PR Source’s 35 Top Tech Communicators of 2008, as so voted by the media.
Over her time in Austin, Beck’s personal points of pride have included:
- Representing the amazing PwC MoneyTree brand for more than 10 years!
- Supporting multiple acquisitions like Exterprise to CommerceOne, WholeSecurity to Symantec, WirelessValley to Motorola, Lombardi to IBM
- The Motive-BroadJump acquisition, and IPO
- Big-time launches of TippingPoint and WholeSecurity, local security studs!
- Getting Jim Offerdahl featured in a POSITIVE Forbes story on traq-wireless
Launching Bones in Motion including an 80 city newspaper AP pick up (and them getting acquired by Adidas 4 years later)
- Building out a cult-like Rails following for FiveRuns, with some of the world’s first social marketing, blog programs
- Postponing Convio’s IPO at the height of the recession with beautiful PR results: “good companies should not go out in bad markets.”
- The lights-out successful social marketing launch of Netcosm for NetQoS
Gaining business-moving visibility for local co’s who hold a huge place in her heart like Spredfast, Tiff’s Treats, DadLabs, Actacell, uControl, CheapTweet, Trulucks, Motion, OtherInbox, Phurnace
- Representing the DEMO conference brand, and guiding several Austin companies through the process, many to DEMO God awards
- 6 straight years representing the solid-gold SXSW Interactive brand
And countless national brand and PR campaigns – like for HP, CapitalOne, Lotus, Bluetooth, EMC, FriendFeed, Chegg, Like.com, etc. - with reach far beyond Austin City Limits
Prior to her 10+ years with Porter Novelli in Austin, she was with the Boston office working on clients like EMC, Sterling Commerce, CMGI and ZEFER. Before that, Beck was with Lois Paul & Partners working primarily with Lotus, now a division of IBM. She began the 18 year agency stretch at Weber Group, now Weber Shandwick.
Beck is now a proud adopted Texan, but will always keep the Boston roots strong, especially cheering on the Red Sox. She is lucky to be raising two independent minded little girls, and as a Boston College alum, is a loud Eagle fan.
