From $750m to $12B+ In Four Years

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!)

It’s September in ATX, which means everyone’s finally coming back into town and we’ve got a ton to get into, including:

• 🗓️ Upcoming Events (we are so back)

• 🎓 Word on the Street: Elon Musk’s New School Opens Applications

• 💡 Insights From Local Founders

• and more…

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

-Ethan

PS. You read this newsletter to meet other badass local operators, so I’ve gotta introduce you to Geoff Woods.

He was a C-Level exec at Jindel Steel when he recognized the power of AI, and helped lead them from a $750m market cap to $12B+ in four years. Then, he interviewed 200+ other execs to learn how they’re using AI in their companies. Then he wrote a book.

Seriously, this one left me speechless (I have the interview audio to prove it)

The AI-Driven Leader, comes out Monday but you can read my interview with him right now. He’s also doing a live book launch party on September 18th over at The Red Fridge Society. Hope to catch you there!

Upcoming Events

NOTE: I’m trying to keep this email digestible, so I curate this heavily, leaving out a lot of repeat events I’ve shared before. If you want a much longer list for next week, you can find one here.

🗓️ Sept. 13: UpLevel Her: A day-long summit from Austin Woman Magazine. The sessions look good – especially the ones on EOS, and becoming an author

🗓️ Sept. 13: Founder Walk: Every other Friday, Ellen Cassidy organizes an early-morning walk around the lake for experienced high-growth tech founders. They meet at Mañana (north of the river) at 7AM. Ping her on LinkedIn for details!

🗓️ Sept. 13: Ops Not Oops: Sara Loretta is starting up this new coworking session. Two hours of silent deep work every other Friday over at Radio East

🗓️ Sept. 15: Leadership Ruck: Join investor Kevin Noble, and other business-minded lunatics folks for a 3.6 mile weighted ruck through hill country

🗓️ Sept. 15-18: Symposium On Trustworthy Autonomous Systems: Shout out to Kat Rector for finding this event, which showcases 25 papers and talks. If you like this kind of deeply technical stuff, you’ll love the Austin Tech Events calendar she curates

🗓️ Sept 16: AI Made Easy: A new Lunch & Learn series running Sept. 16-Oct 19, sharing practical use-cases for AI in non-profits, municipal teams, and brick & mortar or non-technical businesses

🗓️ Sept. 17: MPL Live - Work 2.0: The hosts of the Modern People Leader podcast are leading a panel discussion with CPOs from three major companies, plus Jessica Zwaan, author of Built for People

🗓️ Sept. 17: CTO Fireside Chat: Join John Davison in conversation with Damien Kan, co-founder and CTO at Meeko Health. Before that, he co-founded Shogun (valued at $800m) and was founding engineer at the unicorn Alto Pharmacy

🗓️ Sept. 17: Book Launch - Becoming Fearless: Dr. Benjamin Ritter has coached execs at Google, Amazon, Virgin, Yelp, Doordash, Pinterest, EA, and more

🗓️ Sept 18-19: Scaling Workshop with Codie Sanchez: This looks rad. Codie Sanchez and Ayman Al-Abdullah (who grew AppSumo from $3m to $84m) are hosting a workshop on scaling from 7- to 8-figures

🗓️ Sept. 18: Future of Chatbots & Conversational AI: A summit specifically exploring everything from personalized CX chatbots to AI-powered virtual assistants

🗓️ Sept. 18: TurnUp! CPG Happy Hour: Marc Nathan and Bill Murhpy are bringing together dozens of founders from two of the best CPG communities in town

🗓️ Sept. 18: CTO Answers: This is awesome… If you’re a non-technical founder of a post-revenue SaaS company, founder/CTOs Gerardo Vazquez and Pablo Sosa will offer guidance on your dumbest most pressing tech questions

🗓️ Sept. 19: Ecommerce Mornings: Hosted by AJ Davis, who led optimization for brands like CVS and Lululemon

🗓️ Sept. 19: West Austin Chamber - Monthly Luncheon: Guest speaker Joseph Cope will be giving a talk on empathy and leadership. Open to non-members!

🗓️ Sept. 19: The Singularity Is Nearer: The Austin Forum on Technology and Society is gathering to discuss Ray Kurzweil's latest book

🗓️ Sept. 19: Nerd Night: Like a mini-TED event, this month’s speakers focus on, “the dark corners of the mind with talks about killers and asylums.”

🗓️ Sept. 22: Doing Business With Japan: The Greater Austin Asian Chamber of Commerce is hosting this market briefing as part of a broader festival celebrating long-standing connection with our sister-city of Oita, Japan

One Last Thing… For the first time since 2019, the INCF is hosting an in-person summit on the future of neuroinformatics. The theme? The Brain Meets AI. It’ll run Sept 23-25 with further training activities Sept. 26-27. You can find more info here.

Other 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.

It’s a big week for throwbacks – Rob Zombie, Alice Cooper, Slipknot, Five Finger Death Punch, and Marilyn Manson are all coming to town – plus bar trivia for Schitt’s Creek, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Office, Harry Potter, and yes… Taylor Swift.

Elsewhere…

• Sept. 13: Beginner Acroyoga Orientation

• Sept. 14: Vino Vinyasa at the Four Seasons

• Sept. 14: CommuniTEA at West China Tea House

• Sept. 14: Supercars and Superyachts (this sounds like a trap)

• Sept. 15: Chess IRL at Central Machine Works

• Sept. 16: Wine Night at First Light Books

• Sept. 17: Mid Autumn Wine Festival 5-Course Meal at Zoé Tong

• Sept. 17: Collage & Connect at Riches’ Art (more about him here)

• Sept. 18: Whiskey & Wagyu Six-Course Dinner

• Sept. 18: Preserving Ingredients - Cooking Class with Six-Time James Beard Award Nominee, Chef Steve McHugh, author of Cured

• Sept. 18: Whiskey Flight Wednesday at Acre 41

• Sept. 18: Wine & Food Foundation: End of Summer Cellar Salon

• Sept. 18: Watercolor Class: Skulls & Florals

• Sept. 19: Latino Moonlight Serenade - Music on the Lake

• Sept. 19: Poolside Movies - Mean Girls

• Sept. 19: Sex & Psychedelics (pretty much what it sounds like)

• Sept. 20: Candle Light: Tribute to The Beatles

One last thing… Pioneer Farms is opening its Pumpkin Nights experience next week. A half-mile immersive trail lit by thousands of jack-o-lanterns, it’ll run Sept. 19 - Oct. 31 and you can find more info here.

Word On The Street

A roundup of cool local opportunities for your business, family, or life

• The school Elon Musk started, Ad Astra, is opening this fall in Bastrop. Applications are currently open for all kids age 3-9 for the ‘24-’25 year.

• Cosmos Ventures opened applications for their second cohort of grants, designed to support people working on AI prototypes, experiments, or thought leadership

• Austin Tech Week is coming. If your company wants to host a pop-up event off-site, you can apply to have it added to their programming here.

• Reminder: If your company is located in ATX (or relocating here), the City of Austin offers thousands back on wages, hiring, and property taxes.

Insights

Thought-proking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. Tim Ferriss returned from sabbatical with a new episode of the podcast (Random Show format) after about four months away.

2. University of Austin the new college co-founded by local billionaire Joe Lonsdale and others, asked followers on X about the most impactful books they’d ever read. I was surprised – hadn’t heard of ~60% of them

3. Ben Wolff runs an 8-figure STR portfolio and recently did a deep dive on how he engineers “perfect moments” to drive social media sharing and increase bookings.

4. Jean Buckner owns Vintage Wine & Books on the east side, and she recently sat down with the Lone Startup podcast to share their wild story. This one was so cool to me because I think her building is one of the most important in the whole city. I wrote all about it here.

5. Two local founders (and by that, I mean Elon and JCal) talked about all things politics, AI, SpaceX, and more on stage at the All-In Summit. If you haven’t heard “the SNL story” yet, it’s hilarious.

Speaking of All-In Summit…

…There’s one more person I want to introduce you to this week – Alice Huang.

A real estate investor by day, she’s a huge podcast fan, and spends a lot of her free time organizing communities for other fans of shows like Modern Wisdom, All-In, The Joe Rogan Experience and more.

She’s fresh back from the All-In Summit, and is hosting a get-together for My First Million junkies on September 17th.

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