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 Andrew’s perspective gets especially useful. He has moved from engineering physics and fusion into shaping what is essentially a storytelling platform around the people trying to make these futures real. Austin is becoming one of the places where that transition is unusually tactile, where the imagined future is starting to become something you can walk into, touch, and build.

Agenda
0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism
10:00 Where physics meets economics
17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy
28:18 The geography of deep tech
33:29 Underwriting hard tech
39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future
46:47 Austin’s factories and permission
53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next

Come to Austin Deep Tech Week

The week opens with a hardware showcase at The American Housing Corp on September 21. The Factory Crawl runs September 22–24, with stops including ICON, Neurophos and Emerald Cloud Lab. We close with a nuclear-powered party at the Aalo Atomics factory on September 25.

Explore the full schedule and register
https://www.deep-tech-week.com/austin-2026

Guest Bio & Links
X: https://x.com/Andercot
Writing: https://andercot.substack.com/
Deep Tech Week: https://www.deep-tech-week.com/

Andrew Côté is an engineering physicist that went from designing superconducting magnets for nuclear fusion to running deep tech week.