Reminder

Welcome to this issue of The Austin Business Review, where it’s typically my job to curate great local events and insights for business owners in Austin (plus some other cool stuff for your life outside of work).

This week is a little different.

I said goodbye to my dog, Matilda, yesterday. She was my friend, and shadow for more than a decade – a companion through some of the most formative years of my life. And I will miss her. So no work today.

Instead, I want to talk about why you shouldn’t feel too bad for me.

It relates to business, I promise.

Though there’s now a paw-shaped hole in my life, that life is still bigger and more full than it was when Matilda and I first met (thanks in part to her and the influence she had on me).

I’m surrounded by amazing friends here in Austin; Work I love; A budding relationship that’s special to me; And many other good things. I’m glad she got to see all of that, and be a part of it.

Much of that is new since launching ABR, and it’s a reminder of why I started this newsletter in the first place.

Not just to curate news and useful resources, but to help create a sense of much needed community among the smart, ambitious (and may I say, really quite good-looking) business builders in the city.

Before this, I was helping build a company called Hampton.

It’s a peer group for high-growth founders, and I was the first content/community hire in the door – often the first point of contact for hundreds of successful founders as they navigated challenges in their life and business.

That job was the gift of my career.

Partly because of the people I worked with. But also, because when you interact with that many successful founders, you learn a few important things:

1. It’s lonely at the top

2. The problems don’t stop with money, they only change

3. The people who are the happiest are the ones with challenging work, and very strong family & community ties. Full stop.

With so many of us building digital-first global companies, it’s easy to feel like we have that last one.

But we don’t.

I didn’t.

So I started ABR as a way to force myself to put roots down, focus on the place I lived, and hopefully, help other people like me do the same.

It’s only been a year, but already, it’s been life-changing. And I’ll be okay because I have this wonderful group of people around me. But it’s tough to think about what it’d be like to go through this loss as the person I was before.

So there is no newsletter this week.

Just a reminder to spend a little time away from the screen this weekend with the ones you care about. And a renewed promise – this company is about more than keeping you informed.

It’s about helping build the kind of life that’ll see you through the tough times.

Back to our normal programming next week. But keep an eye out for much more on the community side too, including local founders you should meet, ways to share your own voice here, and (soon) intimately curated special events just for you. Dogs welcome.

-Ethan