June 13, 2024

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 work).

My name’s Ethan, and I’m the one writing this (holler at me here)

This week, we’ve got:

Someone forward this to you? If you like it, you can sign up here!

-Ethan

PS. Shout out to fellow ATX founder, Elon Musk – Tesla shareholders are voting on his $48B comp package this afternoon. The vote comes on the heels of one hell of a week across his companies:

Oh… and Starship made history with its first successful soft landing, despite nearly losing a flap on reentry.

Upcoming Events

Running a business is tough. Here are a few great places to meet cool people going through the same sh*t you are.

🗓️ TONIGHT: Hot Industry Nights: If your business has anything to do with events, this one’s for you!

🗓️ June 14: Design & Innovation with Rivian: The Austin Tech & UX meetup, led by Kasey Randall, is going behind the scenes with Rivian

🗓️ June 14: Pitch & Run: Join Zeke Torres and other ATX founders to chat business and get feedback while running 4.2 miles around the lake

🗓️ June 18: Food Truck vs Brick ‘n Mortar: If you’ve ever thought of getting into the ATX food scene, award-winning operators are sharing their experience

🗓️ June 19: AI Creative Meetup: Long time director/producer Carson Coots is walking through his new AI workflows, and film experiments

🗓️ June 19: Creative CEO Craft Club: Typical networking sucks! Sarah Klein’s new group is for CEOs who want to hang out, talk shop, and make stuff

🗓️ June 20: Ecommerce Mornings: Hosted by AJ Davis, who led optimization for brands like CVS and Lululemon

🗓️ June 20: Frankly Ecommerce CFO Series: Join Patrick Scott Pitman and Sam Hill for this deep dive on ecomm budgeting for Q4, complete with spreadsheet templates, checklists, and more

🗓️ June 20: Startup Support Circle: A group for female founders, led by Vas Daskalakis, who recently came to ATX after 6 years building Africa.ai in Kenya

🗓️ June 20: Startup Experts Summer Social: SUE is a community for HR, Ops, and Finance experts inside startups. Join Shelby Wolpa, and other operators to talk shop at Central Machine Works

🗓️ June 20: TurnUp! CPG Firestarter: The summer solstice edition of Bill Murphy and Marc Nathan’s excellent monthly happy hour, showcasing local CPG brands and founders

🗓️ June 20: Summer Solstice Homeroom: Speaking of solstice and CPG, local incubator, Naturally Austin, is hosting one last coffee hour at Mozart’s before summer

🗓️ June 21: Founded With Pride: Rooftop happy hour for LGBTQ+ founders, co-hosted by StartOut and Sputnik

🗓️ June 21: Artemis Female Founders & Friends: Hosted the third Friday of every month by Juliette Richert of the Artemis Fund.

🗓️ June 22: The Board Walks – No. 100: If you’re in Austin, you’ve probably heard of Elle Beecher’s incredible walk & talk group. This week’s special because it’s the 100th installment.

🗓️ June 22: Texas State New Ventures Pitch Day: Watch founders from Texas State’s accelerator program – which supports students, faculty, and alumni – pitch for $60k+

Fun Stuff Coming Up

…because let’s face it, you work enough already. So here’s some fun stuff to do around town that’s not necessarily related to business.

Last Thing: Through the summer, there’s an immersive exhibit at the old Austin-American Statesman building called Beyond Monet | Beyond Van Gogh that looks awesome 👇

Word On The Street

Thought-provoking ideas and insights published by founders in ATX

📈 1. For Founder-Led Brands: In 2022, Adam Robinson’s company had been stuck around ~$8m rev for a year. He decided to build a LinkedIn following and it changed everything. Last week, he gave a super tactical talk on how he grew to 80k+ followers, more than doubling revenue along the way.

Some surprising notes:

It’s been so effective, he now spends 25+ hours per week on content. For more on that, check out this follow-up on how he structures that time.

👶 2. The Math On Parental Leave: Back when I was at Hampton, founders had a lot of questions about parental leave – how much to give? To whom? When to extend it? Etc.

This week, founder, investor, and recent mom, Cara McCarty Abbott, broke down some interesting math on how leave programs can boost productivity while saving your company money.

My Takeaway: The biggest savings seems to be in turnover and replacement costs. When Google bumped parental leave from 12 to 18 weeks, new mothers resigned 50% less often.

💰 3. Breaking Into Big Retail: “For most brands, jumping into big retail is like going into the jousting ring with no training, no armor, and a slow horse. You’ll be eaten alive…and it won’t be a pretty sight.”

Caroline Grace did some myth-busting for CPG founders, showing how the path to big retail is evolving, and what you can do about it.

🤖 4. Streamlining Ad Creation with AI: Michael Daigler created this tutorial on how to use Figma, Midjourney, ChatGPT, and a plugin called CopyDocs to quickly generate ad copy and mix/match Meta ad variants. Huge time saver.

🚀 5. For The Bio-Curious: Dr. Eliah G. Overbey teaches Bioastronautics at the budding University of Austin – that’s the study of how humans adapt to living in space.

She sat down with BioAstra this week for a fascinating interview, covering NASA’s “Twin Study”, mice living on the ISS, and the multi-celled organisms that can survive the vacuum of space.

Until next week,

-Ethan

Thank you to all the incredible local founders and leaders who share great insights and events. You can follow and connect with them here…

Kasey Randall, Zeke Torres, Elle Beecher, Carson Coots, Sarah Klein, AJ Davis, Patrick Scott Pitman, Sam Hill, Vassiliki Daskalakis, Shelby Wolpa, Bill Murphy, Marc Nathan, Juliette Richert, Adam Robinson, Cara McCarty Abbott, Caroline Grace, Michael Daigler, Eliah Overbey, Hayley Dyer, Jay Huang, Adam Weisberg, Kacie Galligan