Making Your Own Luck: Inside The Founding Class of BoostATX

Shannon Sibold had never even been to Austin when her law firm, Morrison Foerster (which unironically goes by MoFo for short), asked if she’d like to move her family here to build a new office.

“When I arrived here in Austin, and I went to my first founder happy hour, no one had ever heard of MoFo,” she said when we caught up recently.

“They're like, 'What? You're a MoFo? Like, what the fuck does that mean?’” she laughed. “So we set out to figure out how to build brand recognition… That's where the ScaleUp speaker series came in.”

ScaleUp is a Lunch & Learn series she hosts 1-2x each year. Founders gather down at MoFo HQ, and an attorney on the team talks through topics like protecting IP, raising angel, raising venture, the finer points of venture debt, equity incentives, and even preparing for acquisition and technology transfer.

Minute-for-minute, it’s one of the most valuable event series I’ve found in almost two years of writing this newsletter.

But the deeper she dug into the community here in town, the more Shannon came to feel there was a deeper need.

“My impression was there was a ton of really early stage programming,” she said. “Not necessarily on the legal side, but, you know, accelerators, Fiesta, [etc.]. The seed founders were being served by the community.” 

But it didn't seem like there was as much for the growth stage – in this case, founders going from 7- to 8-figures.

“It’s very lonely,” she said of entrepreneurs at that stage. “They go to the happy hours with the small startups and they end up mentoring [them]”

“I remember saying like, ‘I know there are other founders growing businesses in this city.’” she said “‘I just don't know where they are.’”

That’s when the idea for BoostATX was born.

A curated peer-group specifically for growth-stage founders, Boost members meet once a month for an intimate dinner with one of Austin’s business leaders, where they have a chance to ask questions, trade insights, and enjoy each other’s company in what is otherwise quite a lonely pursuit.

It takes inspiration in-part from a program called Mindshare – an invite-only network of more than a thousand high-growth CEOs that came out of DC – but leverages another one of the things that makes Austin so unique as a city:  It’s collaborative nature.

“That is a difference – a stark difference – I found moving from the Bay Area,” Shannon said.

She’s fond of a story from one of her first Austin happy hours, in which she found herself chatting with Krishna Srinivasan, co-founder and managing partner at LiveOak Ventures, who’s been investing here in Texas for decades.

“Just the fact that there was a managing partner at a fund at an event that I was attending was kind of amazing,” Shannon said. “In the Bay Area they don't tend to hang out with lawyers.”

Krishna invited her to drop by the office sometime and meet the team, an invite she first thought was just polite conversation. But when she emailed him the next day, he responded within 24 hours, and brought her down to meet everyone at the office.

“I thought, ‘this is not how this works in the Bay,’” she told me.

That collaborative nature helped her assemble a world-class board from across the Austin startup scene – Carl Grant III, who helped build Mindshare before relocating here, plus long-time Austin investors, like Nick Spiller, Venture Principle at Capital Factory, Creighton Hicks and Aaron Perman, partners at LiveOak and S3 respectively, Dax Williamson from SVB, and several more. 

Even Marc Nathan, a super-connector here in town who’s main work is with a competing law firm, pitched in to help make Boost a reality.

“There is no way that I could have gotten the board that I got [here] in the Bay Area,” Shannon said. “Like, I just wouldn't have been able to do it… I think Austin is very special that way.”

That board then helped find the perfect members – founders like Jesse Lozano, Katherine Allen, Jessie Wang, Brand Newland, and Adam Ryan, many of whom you’ve seen written about in this email throughout the year.

They also tapped their connections to pull a killer speaker list for the year.

People like Chris Taylor, who built and sold a software company here in Austin, recognized by Fortune as one of the top companies to work for in the entire country.

Or like Scott Abel, whose companies have employed more than a thousand people, reached tens of millions of users, and generated more than $1B in revenue. 

Or Adam Lawrence, who led operations at two different unicorns, helping raise $500m+ before starting his own company, which sold to the biggest player in their industry earlier this year.

The list goes on. They weren’t all tech founders either. 

Throughout the year, members dined with the likes of Andy Loughnane, president of Austin FC, who’s led the club since its inception in 2019,  and Chris Seals, founder of Still Austin, one of the fastest-growing bourbon brands in the country right now.

“Being around excellent people is always really inspiring to me,” Shannon said. “No matter if they're CEOs or athletes or musicians or whatever… The qualities that make them successful transcend industry.”

Sibold herself is an athlete, and raced on Canada’s national team ahead of the Vancouver Olympics.

“My teammates were eventual Olympic champions,” she said. “And when you get to be around people of that caliber, people who are really truly excellent at their craft, what you will realize is how intentional they are about everything.Nothing is random.

“Sure, they're really talented. But everything they do – what they eat, how they train, who they surround themselves with, what time they go to bed – it's all intentional… That's what it takes to be the very, very best.

“And what I have learned, what I've really appreciated about this year… listening to these executives,” she said, “[Is that] they're so intentional, too, about everything.”

There’s a saying from her competition days that Shannon’s fond of repeating: Life doesn’t let you win.

“Right?” she said on our call, “You gotta make your luck.”

And with the connections at Boost, members are doing exactly that.