Would Ya Look At That... This Thing Is One Year Old

Welcome to this issue of 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).

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

This week, we’ve got a few things on-deck:

• 🗓️ Cool Upcoming Founder Events

• 📣 Call For Pitch Decks

• 🚀 Sam Parr’s Newest Company (coming out of stealth)

• And more…

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

-Ethan

But first... Ecom founders, this one’s for you – Sam Hill is a client here in town, and runs a fractional CFO team specifically focused on DTC.

For the last few months, we’ve been collaborating on this huge benchmark report, analyzing data across a bunch of large private and public brands to give clear ecom benchmarks for revenue, gross margin, contribution margin, EBITDA, and more.

This kind of data isn’t available anywhere else, as far as I’ve seen. It was a huge process, bringing it all together. But it was worth it.

Use it to review your 2024 performance, and gut-check annual budgets for 2025.

The whole thing is available free and un-gated here (not even an email address needed). I’m super stoked to see this go live, and hope you enjoy checking it out.

Want help with your agency’s newsletter?

I’m opening limited office hours for agency owners who want to up-level their newsletter or content game. You can snag a spot here.

Upcoming Events

With Valentine’s coming up, there are a bunch of galentine female founder events on the docket – Austin Women In Tech, Women In Sales, FIESTA, Women In Music, Safely (self defense), and Antler are all hosting next week. And for the boyz? I got you covered here.

Elsewhere, we have…

🗓️ TONIGHT: HealthTech Nerds: If your company is innovating in the healthcare space, check out this happy hour hosted by Destinee Berman and Sheila Pande

🗓️ TONIGHT: Austin Women In Tech: AWIT is co-hosting this gathering with the Austin Forum over at Remedy

🗓️ TONIGHT: Austin Acquire & Invest Club: New on my radar, but Dan Jensen has been gathering SMB pro’s to talk acquisitions & investing for months now

🗓️ Feb 7: Founder Fridays: Hosted by founders Georges Colbert and Ash Uprety in partnership with LAUNCH, the VC firm founded by Jason Calacanis 

🗓️ Feb 8: Vibe & Venture: Michelle Young and Alison Gratz are leading a hike for entrepreneurs and creatives out in the greenbelt

🗓️ Feb 11: Between Shells: This event is specifically designed for founders who are in a particularly tough or vulnerable part of their journey - cohosted by Kristen Pavle and her partners at Liminal Labs

🗓️ Feb 11: Wine, Women, and Vision: Texas Women in Business is hosting this combo wine-tasting and vision-board-creation night

🗓️ Feb 11: State of AI in Austin: Austin AI Alliance is bringing together about a half-dozen heavy-hitters for multiple panels + live demos

🗓️ Feb 11-12: Facilitation Lab Summit: Every month, Douglas Ferguson, hosts a group dedicated to hands-on practice of group facilitation skills (great for PMs, execs, and anyone else in charge of wrangling cats professionally). This is their annual summit.

🗓️ Feb 12: Hill Climbers Live: This is going to be a great night. Sam Huntington will be interviewing Rob Taylor - whose scaled/exited multiple companies – over at Red Fridge Society.

Fun Fact: Rob’s brother, Chris Taylor is also an exited founder, and now runs the Red Fridge as a hub for more seasoned founders here in town. It’s one of my favorite spots, and I wrote all about ‘em here.

🗓️ Feb 12: Generative AI Summit: I’ll be honest – I never know if these conference-type events are worth highlighting. But you guys tend to be very interested in AI, and I see Jay Boisseau on the speaker list (he runs Austin Forum on Tech & Society, and his events kick ass) so this one made the cut

🗓️ Feb 13: Using AI to Streamline Content Workflow: The Asian Chamber’s Women’s Club is hosting Carolyn Cummins for this talk. Open to non-members for a $15 fee

🗓️ Feb 15: ATX Writing Club: Hosted by my buddy, Zac Solomon. Not strictly business-related, but always a great spot to meet fascinating people and get some good work done.

One More Thing… The Austin Forum on Technology & Society is hosting a webinar with Geoff Woods on Feb 25th to discuss his book, The AI-Driven Leader.

Geoff’s the real deal, and his book was a game-changer for me (I wrote all about him here).

The big thing for me that made him different than most people trying to teach you how to use AI, is that he’s spent years in the trenches at the C-Level and has driven big results. He helped take Jindal Steel from a $750m market-cap to $12B+ inside 4 years.

That’s where he honed a lot of his approach to using AI as an exec. So if you feel like you’re behind on this whole AI thing, but you know it’s important, and you’re looking for a great place to start, snag the book, and sign up for the event. Trust me, it’ll be worth it.

Hosting something cool? Email me the details below and I’ll try to share it in the newsletter or on LinkedIn.

Fun Stuff Coming Up

…because if you’re anything like me, you work too much already. So here’s some fun stuff to do around town that’s not necessarily related to business.

• Feb 6: Testify - True Stories, Told Live

• Feb 6: Traveling Chess Club at Mozart’s Coffee

• Feb 8: Used Book Market at Community Garden Coffee Shop

• Feb 8: Water Lantern Festival

• Feb 8: Buda Art Brawl - High Speed Painting Competition

• Feb 8: Watercolor 101 - Valentines Workshop

• Feb 8: Galentine Cake Decorating Class at Sweetniz

• Feb 9: Travel Tumbler Ceramics Class at Mud Studio Austin

• Feb 9: Yoga in the Beer Hall at Central Machine Works

• Feb 9: No Regrets Tattoo Experience at Riches’ Art

• Feb 11: Wine & Write at Vintage Books

• Feb 12: Blue Owl Brewing: Chocolate Dapper Devil Release

• Feb 12: Jazz Night at Opa

• Feb 13: Signs & Wines - Wine Tasting and Astrology

• Feb 13: Beatles Full Moon Cover Convert

• Feb 13: South Austin Chess Club at Buzz Mill Coffee

• Feb 14: Couples’ Acro-Yoga Workshop

• Feb 14-16: Protector 1 Couples Tactical Class at Sheepdog Response

• Feb 15: Valentine’s Wine Tasting at the Austin Winery

One Last Thing… The Austin Steam Train has these 6-hour wine tours that go from Cedar Park out to the Wedding Oak Winery in historic downtown Burnet.

I’ve been trying to share this damn thing for months, but they sell out crazy fast. Well, they just added a few new dates and ticket sales go online today at 10AM 👇

• March 2 & March 9: Wedding Oak Wine Train

• April 12 & April 13: Bluebonnet Festival

• April 6 & April 27: Wedding Oak Wine Train

They’ve also got a Wild West Murder Mystery Train on April 19th, but sales for that don’t open until Feb 14.

Word On The Street

A roundup of cool local business-related opportunities around town…

• Local Billionaire Joe Lonsdale launched a new company this week. MeritFirst is a collaboration between 8VC and Slow Ventures, designed to surface the best startup talent via innovative merit-based tests. Could not love their homepage more. If you need talent, check it out.

• Fundraising Soon? Morrison Foerster is hosting their semiannual Pitch Day April 23rd. Participating founders get coaching ahead of the event, and an opportunity to pitch a panel of VCs. To apply, send a non-confidential pitch deck to [email protected] by Friday, February 28th.

• Interesting Investment Opportunity: Current EV, here in Austin, does these badass electric vehicle conversions for vintage cars. They also do fleet conversions and have a patented install kit they’re working to scale. They’re looking for a handful of investors who grok the vision (Not investment advice, do your homework, yada, yada)

• CPG Founders: If anyone is looking for a great deal on 750 ml glass bottles, local founder Shayda Torabi Howell has 900 ready to go. Long-time readers will recognize the name – Shayda’s the founder of RESTART CBD. I wrote all about them in a deep dive last year.

  These bottles were part of a project that got nixed, so if you know someone, send ‘em this listing.

Insights

Thought-provoking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. Ecom Founders: In case anyone missed it up top, I’ll just shout out this benchmark report again. It’s pretty dope.

2. Speaking of Ecom: Local founder, Cathryn Lavery, sold her brand, BestSelf Co, to a PE firm in 2022. Last year, she bought it back and she’s 4X’d profit on half the revenue. She just published her annual review, and it’s full of great insights on things like…

• How she’s using AI as co-founder

• What it’s like now running a biz as mother of a toddler

• How she thinks differently about metrics and financials - for example 👇

3. A Healthcare Excellence Agenda: I mentioned this in a footnote last week, but wanted to give it proper coverage here. 8VC’s Sebastian Caliri published an excellent deep dive on the five key areas the new administration should look to improve healthcare, and open it to innovation.

I hope lots of founders check this out. Even if you’re not in healthcare – some of the current issues will blow your mind. The more smart people aware of them, the more pressure there will be to fix this.

4. Sam Parr’s New Company: Some of you know that before ABR, I worked with Sam Parr at The Hustle, then helped him start Hampton. I learned a ton from launching a business with him and the people he surrounds himself with.

If you want a taste of what that’s like, he just co-founded a new company with Joe Speiser (his long-time co-founder at several ventures), and Grant Wilkinson, who lives here in town, and also played a key role in Hampton’s early days.

They’re planning to do monthly behind-the-scenes updates, and Grant just published the first one, sharing things like:

• Early samples of the product

• How they’re getting the word out as they come out of stealth

• Biggest challenges so far and where they’re trying to improve

• and more…

Definitely recommend checking it out if you nerd out on early-stage business stuff!

Local Shop of the Week

You read this newsletter to meet other cool business owners here in Austin. So today, I want to highlight John and Kendall Antonelli, owners of Antonelli’s Cheese, which is celebrating 15 years in business this week.

That’s cool on it’s own, but what makes it even cooler is that I featured their shop’s 14th anniversary in one of the first-ever issues of ABR. So I guess this thing is officially a year old! 🥳 🎉 Appreciate you being along for the ride.

To celebrate my their success, the first fifty people through the doors today and tomorrow are getting free cheese wedges.

Valid at both their Hyde Park and South Lamar locations (the last time I wrote this they only had one!). They also do a ton of foodie events every week, so if that’s your thing, go check ‘em out 🧀

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