Hitching a Ride on a StartupBus Bound for Austin: Part III

Cameron Keng is still in his pajamas. After coding all night at the alumni hotel on the LSU campus, he’s downing Coke Zero and catching some air before he heads to the back of the bus with his TaxCast co-founder, Sohel Siddique. Five new buspreneurs from Florida, founders of the newly created BumperCrop, have joined us today. After carrying their pillows down the aisle, they set up their laptops on one of the bus’s table configurations near TaxCast.

The TaxCast founders just spent the night on the floor of the hotel lobby, sleeping for two hours, from 5 to 7 a.m. “Someone came in and laughed at us,” says Keng. The Cook Hotel had only 40 rooms allotted for more than 150 entrepreneurs, and two guys had taken their room. So they used towels and jackets as blankets. “It was pretty shameless,” says Keng. They still managed to build an interactive spreadsheet, a tax-predicting algorithm, and an infographic asking the questions “How much in taxes do you pay? Are you struggling with receipts? Is the IRS your secret boogie man?”