Most Recent Episodes
Recent Episodes
Can You Engineer Serendipity?
Serendipity generally looks accidental. These three builders spend a lot of time trying to make it happen. Evan Baehr of Arena Hall, Chris Taylor of Red Fridge Society, and Zac Solomon of ATX Writing Club are building very different physical communities in Austin. We get into fast and slow serendipity, how rooms get curated, why members need roles, and where AI can help without replacing human judgment.
Along the way, the conversation turns into a jam session as they actively steal e…
The Future Is Actually Starting to Happen | Andrew Côté, Deep Tech Week
I had been thinking Austin needed some kind of frontier-tech week when Andrew Côté announced that he was bringing Deep Tech Week here. I reached out almost immediately, and now I’m helping build it.
That gave us the excuse for this conversation, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We are living through a moment when things that recently belonged mostly to science fiction are becoming companies and products you can actually encounter in the physical world.
That is where Andr…
The Army Is Adapting to the New Speed of War | Matt Willis, Army FUZE
The battlefield is changing faster than the systems built to supply it. Matt Willis runs Army FUZE, a roughly $750M portfolio built to get new technology into soldiers’ hands faster. The deeper question is what an institution as large as the Army has to change when technology cycles collapse from years to weeks.
That means accepting more failure up front, shortening the distance between a problem and a decision, getting real-world feedback before a product is fully baked, and buildin…
What This Unlikely Deal Shows About New Austin | Max Cunningham (Sesh) & Jake Medwell (8VC)
Sesh looks like a consumer brand. 8VC looks like the last fund that would back it. That mismatch is the fastest way to see what Austin is becoming.
Sesh founder Max Cunningham and 8VC's Jake Medwell start with the logic that makes the deal make sense. Sesh holds a legal moat most competitors can't cross for years, and it earns software-like margins on a physical product. From there the conversation opens into a bigger question about where ambitious companies belong, and why…
Live from Hack Club Stasis: The Teenage Hardware Frontier Lands in Austin
A custom board that ran two thousand dollars five years ago now costs fifteen and ships in two weeks. That collapse is why a hundred teenagers flew to Austin to build in the physical world instead of code in the digital. The organization behind it is Zach Latta's Hack Club, the hackathon was created by seventeen-year-old Meghana Madiraju, and Blake Liberman of 021 Ventures is why it happened in Austin.
The conversation ranges from how that collapse happened to what teenagers do …
Love Conquers Fear: The Last Barrier to Abundance Is Our Own Fear | Brett Hurt
Brett Hurt returns to Austin Next for the fourth time, more than any guest in the show's history, to argue that the hardest problem in front of us is psychological. Abundance is already on a clear technological path, and the thing most likely to stop us is the fear center we carried off the savannah.
He walks through the four technologies he calls the Superfecta: AI, robotics, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces, and why they land together rather than in sequence. T…
Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen Blashek, Austin Home Magazine
Austin's counterculture is still the ethos. The next chapter is what gets built on top of it. Karen Blashek, the editor-in-chief of Austin Home Magazine, took over a 21-year-old design publication with no editorial background and turned it into one of the city's most consequential platforms for naming what's already happening.
We ask why Austin's design talent operates one neighborhood away from its tech talent and neither knows the other exists. What the city is …
Revisited: How Specificity in Vertical AI Rewrites Industries | Nick Tippmann, TipTop VC
Updated re-release. A year ago we left one question unresolved. Where do foundational AI models end and where do the applications begin? Nick Tippmann returns in a fresh epilogue. A year on, the tension has only sharpened.
Specificity is the differentiator when inches matter. Nick Tippmann, founding partner of TipTop VC, explains how vertical AI is rewriting the software industry by going deeper instead of wider. From the transition beyond SaaS to the gray zone between foundational m…
What Building in Austin Actually Feels Like Right Now | Will Johnson & Alex Cohen
This was not the episode we planned. Will Johnson, founder and CEO of Gyde, and Alex Cohen, founder and CEO of Hello Patient, came on to talk about innovation in the business of health. Instead it became our off the record conversations, but behind the microphone.
An unfiltered field report on what it actually feels like to build a startup in Austin right now. The talent math, hunting for mid-size office space, the venture culture, Austin vs Miami, the press gap, and the political fr…
The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON
ICON has been telling the same story since 2018. Humanity has a construction problem that solving for regulations and supply-demand incentives alone won't fix. We need fundamentally new ways to build.
Jason Ballard, ICON's founder and CEO, and Will Hurd, the former CIA officer, congressman, and OpenAI board member who just joined as President of ICON Prime, came on to lay out what happens when a non-consensus thesis held for eight years starts to materialize in the real wor…
Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent Flywheel | Joe Liemandt, Alpha School
Joe Liemandt built Trilogy, recruited 2,000 Ivy League graduates to Austin, and is now running what he considers the higher-leverage version of the same play, K-12 education. Our host, Jason Scharf, brings a perspective no other interviewer has. He is an Alpha School parent, and he uses that to ask the questions no one else has put to Liemandt. What happens when the app breaks mid-rollout, why diagnostic scores terrify new parents, and whether the motivation model survives past year one.
…
We're Living Through the Cyberpunk Era of War | Jim Rebesco, CEO, Striveworks
Directed energy weapons, autonomous drones, and combat AI agents are not just real. They are deployed.
Jim Rebesco, cofounder and CEO of Striveworks, breaks down what's driving this moment, and the second and third-order effects most people aren't tracking yet. AI can't be bolted onto legacy systems and expected to perform.
It demands a blank sheet of paper. New design philosophy, new economics, new operational infrastructure.
The old model of pitching …
Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones
The hype that landed on Austin in 2021 was correct and at the same time ahead of the curve. Nait Jones, serial founder and former a16z partner who arrived in Silicon Valley in 2011 at the Web 2 moment and moved to Austin during the pandemic, argues that the fundamentals have now caught up
Jones traces what he calls a spiritual succession. A direct genealogy from Arthur Rock's invention of venture capital through Fairchild, Intel, Dell, and UT research into the current generation…
The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos Carvalho, President, University of Austin
American universities stopped optimizing for students a long time ago. The University of Austin was built as a direct counter to that failure. Carlos Carvalho, its president, brings a statistician's precision to the diagnosis, tracing the causal chain from dropped standards to credential collapse while building an institution with no tuition and no government money, staking its survival entirely on student outcomes 20 years out. The conversation moves from the financial architecture of …
Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor, Silverton Partners
The decision to bootstrap a business or raise venture capital is not just financial. It is physics. You are choosing which system to operate within, which rules will govern your company, and whose incentives will shape your options at every inflection point.
Rob Taylor has lived both realities. He spent years building venture-backed companies, raising millions in institutional capital. His brother Chris bootstrapped a company for 20 years and owned nearly 100% at exit. They sold thei…
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About the Host
Founder & Host
Jason Scharf is an Austin-based investor, writer, and host of Austin Next, focused on how ecosystems form, compound, and evolve. He has spent nearly two decades pursuing his life’s mission of catalyzing innovation, with experience across Illumina, BD, and Amgen. As an early-stage investor, he focuses on the Bio Innovation Tech Stack and the Business of Health. Through the Austin Next podcast and Ecosystem Metacognition Substack, he explores Austin’s startup and tech scene, Bio & Health, hard tech, venture capital, talent, culture, and what their convergence makes possible.