If you’re enjoying The Austin Business Review, I want you to meet one of the people who makes it possible.

John Davison is the founder of Startuplandia and GSD Camp – both focused on helping founders develop world-class products.

He’s a long-term sponsor of ABR, and also, a fixture of the local founder scene, frequently hosting everything from poker nights to pickleball tournaments for business owners around town, and supporting other key startup communities as well.

John’s got a fascinating story in tech (for example, he was one of the few people to stay in the very first Airbnb), and in this piece, he looks back on almost two decades in the industry to share some of his best insights, book recommendations, favorite purchases, and under-the-radar spots in Austin.

ABR is about connecting you with people in town you should know. John is definitely one of those.

Give this a read, and be sure to connect with him here…

I became super interested in product engineering after I got my MBA in 2010, and was basically locked out of formal employment and had to look for alternatives.

I had stayed at the founder of Airbnb's house, Joe Gebbia, on Rausch Street in San Francisco. I rented the room on Airbnb while they were running Airbnb out of it and it was my first look at early stage tech, where people were taking fringe ideas and turning them into valuable businesses.

That really sparked my interest

Then, in 2012 I was one of the first people to join a formal developer boot camp. I joined the actual Dev Bootcamp, and dove into full stack product engineering in San Francisco starting multiple businesses in the following years.

I was a founder, I worked with founders, and then around 2016 I realized I probably didn't have the DNA or the desire to be a venture backed technical founder and so I kind of took a moment in life to pause, and that pause helped me understand a few things like what do I love to do, and what there is a market for.

I merge those two things.

What I love to do is the creationary stage of product engineering.

If you look at the Startuplandia logo, I would hope you would notice that it's somewhat inspired by Da Vinci's Creation of Adam – the little touch between two people that creates things, and I looked around and I was like, “Well, where can I market that? Where does that solve a problem?”

I understood Circa 2016-2017 in San Francisco a lot of non-technical founders were raising money and then either hiring an engineering team themselves or looking to bring on a CTO, and both of those two strategies can be very problematic.

Bringing on a CTO who you've never worked with has an incredible amount of relationship risk. And hiring a team of engineers is a huge amount of economic risk.

And so what I decided was I was going to try to build a services business where I could help founders build things significantly cheaper than the market, whether or not it was finding technical talent that was sort of mis-priced or it was making decisions about features (to build or not to build).

I just looked around the room and I thought, “there has to be a better way and I can help founders do this.”

I'm not entirely certain who I would classify as my first customer but I think for this story it's easy to say Tom Ruginis of HappiLabs.

He was referred to me by a dev shop in Chicago. They had him as a client, and I built some stuff for that dev shop, but they didn't want to stay in startups. So they handed him off to me and he and I built out his full product suite we have work together continuously to this day, 10 years later.

His business has been acquired by a medium size Bay Area science and logistics company, and so we continue to have a good relationship to this day.

Startups and businesses in general tend to view offshoring as a process to massively reduce costs, and there's a lot of accompanying baggage that comes with what happens to the value being delivered.

One of my original observations about startup culture in San Francisco was that it was very averse to remote talent, but it was very happy to hire expensive local engineers who are very difficult to work with and expected a lot of concessions in how they were treated.

I had experienced too wide of an array of the quality or volume of work being done and so, I don't know why – I think it's my global nature – I decided that I was going to go find the best people I could overseas.

Instead of going offshore, because I felt like that was the cheapest way to get talent, I started exploring kind of like the Warren Buffett style.

I don't want a bad business at a cheap price. I want a great business at a valuable price. So I started looking for people who I just thought were amazing to work with, had great communications skills, but because they weren't in San Francisco, their expectations around salary and pay and all that stuff were a lot more realistic and driven by the market.

And I also set up a lot of contract structures so that it was easy to acquire and to release people if things didn't work out.

This is another aspect of startup culture in San Francisco that was tough. Once people were hired, there was this sort of implicit agreement that they would never be released from service if things didn't work out, and I think that can really build dysfunctional businesses.

So that really led me to the contract demand-driven model, a lot like Uber, or Hollywood.

It has shaped the trajectory in so much as I have a very small team, I know them incredibly well, they're very autonomous and they do incredibly good work.

Fiction: The Philip K. Dick Reader is an incredible look at sci-fi. Very dark. Very much coming true in modern life. And a lot of those stories were written between 1953 and 1966, though the book itself was published [later]. But it’s really mind bending thinking about how humans and computers and machines in the AI economy will converge, and if you aren't familiar with Philip K. Dick, his writing has gone on to produce things like Blade Runner, Man in the High Castle, Minority Report, Total Recall – I mean these are all sci-fi heavy hitters

Nonfiction: I would go with Bruce Lee Artist of Life. It’s not specifically written by Bruce Lee – it's a Bruce Lee historian writing about some articles and notes that Lee published, or were found in his personal effects. And it's ultimately an exploration on how Bruce Lee defined his martial art.

But it's a really interesting look at how to think about absorbing knowledge, and Bruce Lee had some incredible perspectives on that that I think everybody could benefit from.

For example, understanding that almost everything has some value, and that it’s important to look at where the value lies – versus assuming all the information should be absorbed because it was told to you by someone of authority.

I think this also relates a lot to Charlie Munger's thinking about how to be successful in business. You need a sort of arsenal of multi-dimensional or cross-functional mental models, and Artist of Life really digs at that.

It's a master class on thinking about how to interact with information.

This is a tough one to answer. Probably that at some point in the past, I probably held on to the belief that things would get easier.

As I looked at other more successful entrepreneurs, and as status, and wealth, and experience grow, the whole nature of being independent would get sort of nicer –whatever that means.

And I think at this point I don't really believe that to be true.

Our skills grow, but the complexity of our lives as entrepreneurs basically grows in a linear manner to how our skills grow, and so equilibrium and psychological stability ends up being more determined by our internal state then it does anything else.

“Getting easier” doesn't really happen. The challenges and hurdles we face grow, and so all we have is the opportunity to create a kind of internal mental stability and keep pushing forward and I think that's true for entrepreneurs on day zero or day 20,000.

There's a handful of purchases  that come to mind.

I have a 4G wireless hotspot that I love. It isn't fancy tech (and I think it costs $50 a month or something) but it's so useful to have it in my backpack. Anywhere I go, at any moment, I can sit down, put my noise canceling headphones on, and work, and there's a lot of moments when that ends up being really powerful.

Another thing that I think is really valuable is having a home kettlebell gym. I have four or five kettlebells at home, and I have a trainer that I can attach to a bike and I can't recommend people to learn kettlebells well enough for fitness.

There's a decent amount of scientific research that indicates that some proxies for how long you're going to live, or how happy or how healthy you're going to be, are grip strength and your ability to get up off the ground in different ways (especially without using your hands).

Kettlebells are really powerful way to train grip strength, proprioception, and our relationship between mind and body.

I would also say under $1,000 I bought my wife an Oura Ring. After having kids, her sleep got really disrupted for obvious reasons. And we protect my sleep because I'm the primary earner for the family. So having the aura sleep score really gave us some metrics that we could cooperate on.

Sometimes her sleep might be really low because the kids are fussy all night, and it could be like in the 50 to 60 range; then in the 60 to 75 range we know it's decent, and then above 75, she feels really good. So that has really helped us cooperate on improving her health and it's a very minimal purchase.

I am married. We met in San Francisco. I saw her picture on Tinder, and she was connected to some people I knew in The Burning Man community, and I asked for an introduction and we basically haven't been apart since then.

That was 2017.

We are pretty tightly bound to my entrepreneurial journey – she gives me lots of feedback about my decisions, how to think about different situations, details, and all kinds of stuff, so she has definitely provided me a lot of internal counsel over the last couple of years.

I have worked with her to teach her what I know about internet businesses and she's had some success doing things like building teams of engineers and doing Shopify development on Upwork. She also created a How To Tse Etsy class for the Russian community called Etsy Boss that had some good moments of high traction.

She used Instagram ads to sell seats for an educational experience, and had some solid success there, all of which was really good training for her and I to learn how to work together.

In the last quarter, we've started cooperating heavily on a new service and product that I have called GSD Camp which is an educational experience for people who are new to AI-enabled building. She helps with growth and marketing and paid ads and lots of the sorts of marketing skills that I don't have the time or natural demeanor to be incredible at. It feels like we're working well.

I would actually recommend two and I hope these places don't get swamped because of these recommendations, LOL.

The Austin bouldering Project at Westgate which is near the Central Market South. I love that place because the gym is incredible, and upstairs they have this kind of open bay co-working environment with really nice hardwood table desks and couches and nice lighting.

Since the gym itself is cavernous, this working area has quite a lot of open air, and the level of sound stimulation is kind of low. But it's not quiet, so it hits this sweet spot of like, a little bit of stimulation, so you don't feel like you're sitting by yourself at home, but not too much stimulation (like comes from packed coffee shops).

I do really good work where I'll go in, sit up there, and work for 2 or 3 hours. Then go work out. It has recently become my happy place.

The second spot I would recommend is actually Reimers Ranch Park. It’s a 20 minute drive out of Austin and on the weekends it is truly spectacular.

It's quiet. You can go ride your bike there on the dirt, you can walk, you can hike – there's some rock climbing.

It's just very peaceful place to unwind and I love it 

In addition to supporting The Austin Business Review, John is super active in the local founder community. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, or check out live events he hosts via his calendar here. And if you’re building a software product, check out GSD Camp and Startuplandia