Welcome to this issue of The Austin Business Review, a weekly roundup of great local events and insights for Austin business owners (plus some other cool stuff for your life outside of work).

In this issue, you’ll find…

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-Ethan

PS. The city of Austin is awarding “an amount not to exceed” $1.8m for the mural on the side of their new garbage truck maintenance facility. Reply here with your best AI-generated mural idea, I’ll share them to LinkedIn, and the ABR community will decide if this contract should go to YOU instead 👇

Upcoming Events

🗓️ TONIGHT: North Austin AI: Hosted by Steve Ward, and featuring Aniket Sakpal, who helped build Asia-Pacific’s largest fantasy sports company

🗓️ Feb. 20: Texas Venture Group is co-hosting a “c0mpiled” hackathon, YC-backed founders will judge and builders will prototype what AI-powered cities could look like

🗓️ PFeb. 20: Austin Science Network: If anyone out there still knows how to write code, enjoy this screening of Python: The Documentary and Q&A with Travis Oliphant

🗓️ Feb. 21: ATX Writing Club: If you want to hang out with a truly absurd number of fascinating local thinkers and writers, check out my buddy Zac Solomon’s annual event

🗓️ Feb. 24: Fridge Fire: Chris Taylor’s firing up the brand new sauna over at The Red Fridge Society for a founder social with Mark Hellweg of Vim Custom Saunas

🗓️ Feb. 24: Business After Hours: For those of you out west, tired of going downtown for events, Ray Freers is organizing this on behalf of West Austin Chamber

🗓️ Feb. 24: Atoms, AI, and Aspirations: Part of UATX winter speaker series, with MIT professor and founder of Ethics for Engineers, Bernhardt Trout

🗓️ Feb. 25: ScaleUp Bootcamp: For years, attorney Shannon Sibold has hosted one of the best lunch & learn series in the city. This collab with FIESTA hits the highlights in an afternoon

🗓️ Feb. 25: Human-Centered AI Hackathon: Several local AI communities exploring the question, “What could AI do for people if it had access to their memories?”

🗓️ Feb. 25: Robotics & AI: Bhairavsingh Ghorpade is talking about Enhancing BRepMFR for Machining Feature Recognition via Vision Transformers (obviously)

🗓️ Feb. 25: Venture Dinner Series: Anthos Capital Sam Teden and the Cyber Security Council are highlighting two intriguing startups in the security space

🗓️ Feb. 26: Raw Conversations: Arturo Pina’s monthly meetup for founders. This month’s topic: Conviction, how belief forms, grows, and breaks in early-stage investing and company building

🗓️ Feb. 26: GTM & OpenClaw: The second installment of Michael Daigler and Gary Sheng’s new series on practical uses for AI in business

🗓️ Feb. 27: Founder Pickup Basketball: Every month, Nick Schenck hosts a pickup game for founders at Ramsey Neighborhood Park. Email him here to get on the list

🗓️ Feb. 27: Founder Coffee Tasting: Another one by Chris Taylor, drop by the Red Fridge Society for coffee and a chance to hang with other founders

Other Fun Stuff Coming Up

Word On The Street

See what other readers are up to with a roundup of jobs, product launches, fundraising opportunities, and more.

Insights

Thought-provoking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. How To Set Up OpenClaw: Resent Austin transplant, Jason Calacanis, published a step-by-step breakdown of how to set up OpenClaw on AWS for $20/mo.

2. Checkout Is Moving To Chatty: People are starting to buy stuff directly inside ChatGPTs interface. Ramin Ramhormozi sat down with Scot Wingo to talk about what this could mean as OpenAI’s 400M users pick up the habit

3. No AI Tool Can Build a Functional & Scalable App: A bold title, especially considering all the hype on X. But Onyeka Gift spent two weeks and $200+ in tokens trying to replicate her engineer’s work with AI, and documented all the security vulnerabilities

These Brothers Built a $1M+ Hat Company In A Year

I first came across Drew Rhodes’ story on LinkedIn around the holidays.

“What a year it’s been,” he wrote… Starting in a 200 square foot office with one embroidery machine twelve months earlier, he and his brother had grown their custom hat company to a garage, three machines, two FTEs, and $1M+ in revenue – double their projections from a few months earlier – and were headed for a full warehouse.

Their company, Rhodes Headware, specializes in custom-embroidered hats, and already works with more than 300 brands across the country, including some right here in ATX, like Via313.

It’s a great example of young founders who err on the side of action, and have built something impressive as a result.

Without further ado, here’s Drew…

1. Okay, tell us about your business! What's the backstory? And how did you get your first customer. 

I started with a retail hat brand my senior year of high school called Lone Star Outdoors. It began as a fun side project. I liked hats and wanted to see if I could build something people actually wanted to wear. Things took off when artists like Ty Myers and Hudson Westbrook started repping the brand, which gave it unexpected traction. 

When I came to Texas A&M, I was selling hats mainly through Instagram. Around that time, a coffee shop owner back in Austin that I knew reached out and asked if I could make a small batch of custom hats for their shop. I had never seriously considered doing custom work for businesses before, but I agreed and made about 12 hats for them. 

That small order completely shifted my mindset. I realized there was a much bigger opportunity in custom headwear than I had originally planned. As the business grew, my brother Ryan joined the business, and together we scaled it into what it is today. The company now has three full-time employees, three top-of-the-line embroidery machines, and works with 300+ companies across the nation, all of which started from that first 12-hat order.

2. What’s one unconventional decision you made early in your business that you believe set you apart from competitors, and how do you think it shaped your trajectory? 

One unconventional decision I made early on was bringing all production in-house instead of outsourcing, even when it didn’t make sense financially at the time. Most competitors relied on third-party shops, but I wanted faster turnaround times and full control over every part of the process. 

By keeping everything in-house, we could control quality, timelines, communication, and problem-solving instead of waiting on outside vendors. It forced me to learn production at a deep level and invest early in equipment and people, but that decision shaped our trajectory. Speed, consistency, and reliability became our differentiators, and those advantages helped us scale and earn long-term trust with clients. 

3. What’s one book most people have never even heard of that you think is worth reading. (DIG DEEP – we’re looking for the books you’ll never see on the NYT list) 

How to Become a Rainmaker by Jeffrey J. Fox. 

It’s a super straightforward sales and marketing book with zero fluff. It’s basically a collection of short, sometimes unexpected ideas about how to win and keep customers. What I like about it is how practical it is. You can read a few pages and immediately apply something. It really changed how I think about sales and accountability, especially the idea that creating revenue and bringing value should always be the priority. 

4. What’s one belief about entrepreneurship you held when you started that you’ve completely abandoned, and what made you change your mind? 

When I first started, I believed that if I just worked harder than everyone else, everything would work out. I thought long hours and doing everything myself was the only way to grow. 

Over time, I learned that mindset actually limits growth. The business really changed when I started building systems, hiring people I trust, and letting go of control. Seeing how much faster things moved and how much better the quality became forced me to change my thinking. Hard work matters, but smart systems and good people matter a lot more. 

5. What’s one purchase of less than $1,000 that’s made the biggest impact on your happiness, health, or wealth? 

A proper desk setup, specifically a second monitor and a comfortable chair. It sounds small, but when you’re running a business, you spend a lot of time juggling emails, designs, numbers, and schedules. Having an efficient workspace made it easier to stay focused and organized, saved me hours every week, and honestly lowered my stress quite a bit. 

That’s all for this week!

Email me here if you want to share any feedback, or let me know about an event you’re hosting.

Until next week,

-Ethan