I thought I knew the straightforward Firefly Aerospace story. First an Austin space unicorn, then an IPO, and a finally a Moon landing. I watched To the Black (https://totheblack.com/) and realized I had no idea how brutal the road was. Eric Salwan was one of Firefly’s co-founders and earliest investors,…
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,…
A clip from our episode "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…
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…
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…
A clip from our episode "Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen Blashek, Austin Home Magazine"
A clip from our episode "Love Conquers Fear: The Last Barrier to Abundance Is Our Own Fear | Brett Hurt"
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,…
A clip from our episode "EP 179: Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen Blashek, Austin Home Magazine"
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…
A clip from our episode "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…
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…
A clip from our episode "The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON"
Clip from our episode "What Building in Austin Actually Feels Like Right Now | Will Johnson & Alex Cohen"
Clip from our episode "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…
A clip from our episode "The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON"
A clip from our episode "The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON"
A clip from our episode "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…
A clip from our episode "Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent Flywheel | Joe Liemandt, Alpha School"
A clip from our episode "Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent Flywheel | Joe Liemandt, Alpha School"