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).

This week’s issue is a little shorter than usual.

August is a bit of a quiet time here in ATX. I’m also fresh back from vacation, wading through an absolute sea of notes, and emails, and cool stuff to catch up on (you’ll see, I shared some of my backlog in the Bonus Resources near the end).

I feel like I should have something more profound to say about coming back from a month away, but I don’t. At least not yet. Maybe that’s a good thing? The whole point of this little community is to build a life where time spent away from our desks is just as natural and obvious as the time we spend behind ‘em. So we’ll call it progress!

Speaking of adventures both physical and digital, this week we’ve got…

There really is no city in the country as fascinating as this one.

It’s great to be back,

-Ethan

PS. OH! I forgot to mention… While I was out, I did a 4-hour interview with a local founder who built and sold a concrete company for $3m in less than 5 months. It’s the best story I’ve heard in a long time. Full write-up coming soon…

When I say August is light on events, I mean LIGHT. Looking ahead the next week or so, these were the ones that stood out as particularly worth your time…

🗓️ Aug. 11: Founder Coffee Tasting: In addition to running one of the best founder communities in the city, Chris Taylor makes one of the best cups of coffee too. Drop by The Red Fridge Society for coffee and a chance to hang with other founders

🗓️ Aug. 12: Offshore Austin: Brett Clark, local PropTech CEO, and owner of Austin Boats & Buses, recently kicked off this recurring co-working day that takes place out on one of her boats (… which might be the most Austin sentence ever written in this email)

🗓️ Aug. 12: TWIB Coffee Connection: Texas Women In Business is meeting Wednesday for their monthly networking coffee up north. There’s a similar event on the east side Thursday too

🗓️ Aug. 13: AI Content Factory: Most founders have 100+ hours of recorded material they’ve never done anything with (Zoom meetings, podcasts, sales calls, etc). Thanh Pham is gonna show you how to turn that into useful thought leadership.

Note: Thanh has an excellent reputation here in town. He regularly teaches classes at $1k+ per day, so getting access to this for free is wild

Other Fun Stuff Coming Up

A roundup of opportunities worth knowing about…

🎤 Applications for SXSW speaking and pitch opportunities are officially open. Community voting also opened yesterday, and runs through Aug. 23rd

💰 If you’ve got kids heading back to school, Tax Free Weekend is running Aug. 7-9, with exemptions on clothes and supplies. Here’s a list of everything that qualifies

Thought-provoking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. Better Than Free: This is a piece I’ve been spending some time with over the last couple weeks. Tim Ferriss came across an old Kevin Kelly piece he’d never seen before; one that’s pertinent to the modern day challenge of competing in a world of AI noise. Kevin updated/refreshed it and posted it to Tim’s blog.

One of my favorite lines 👇

2. Does AI WANT To Escape The Lab? Hot off the press – local AI legend, William “Whurley” Hurley just published this piece in response to the hype (and concern) over the recent OpenAI <> Hugging Face debacle. One of his more interesting points – claims of sentient AI “escaping” the sandbox create panic while removing accountability from the people in charge of preventing that. Definitely worth a read

3. Speaking of the press… and AI, this is hands-down one of the coolest creative projects I’ve seen anyone build in collaboration with AI. David Kurkov is a local engineer who built a platform that uses AI to catalogue all the ideas discussed by famous people in their public interviews. His latest project, Steelman Press, pulls that info together in one place, to write deep dive profiles of amazing founders, in their own words, with easy access to every interview, and sub-articles digging into the topics they speak most about.

Bonus Insights: Because today’s a bit of a shorter newsletter, here are a few things that caught my eye as I’m catching up from my time away. Haven’t gotten to ‘em yet, but they’re on my list!

I’ve been lucky to know Codie as far back as the earliest days of her newsletter, and I’m constantly in awe of what she’s built over the years.

Her first book, Main St. Millionaire, was largely about acquiring SMBs. This one is all about how to make them print cash.

It lays out what she calls the O.W.N. framework, a process that you repeat every 90 days in order to diagnose and fix the two biggest killers inside your biz, replacing yourself with systems that run without you and help boost profits.

A great line from the intro…

If that sounds like your jam, she’s doing a virtual launch event September 18th.

Side Note: If you nerd out on marketing/sales, I once wrote a deep dive on how Alex Hormozi sold $106m of books in one weekend. I can tell you, from the looks of it, Codie’s following a very similar playbook, so this should be killer.

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