May 8

Ethan Brooks
May 08, 2025

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!).

This week, we’ve got a few things on-deck:

📅 Upcoming Events
🔥 Special fireside chat with Poppi’s $2B founder
🎙️ Founders’ Favorite TED Talks

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

-Ethan

Upcoming Events

🗓️ TONIGHT: Raid the Fridge Happy Hour: Chris Taylor is hosting a big mixer down at the Red Fridge Society, one of my favorite local spots for later-stage founders

🗓️ TONIGHT: PE Happy Hour: If you’re in the PE space, Carta’s hosting a get-together.

🗓️ May 9: Leading in Disorienting Times (Online): Austin Women in Tech is hosting Rajkumari Neogy, who’s coached leaders at Google, Facebook, Salesforce, and more

🗓️ May 9: AAPI Professional Summit: The third-annual summit gathering AAPI business leaders in Austin. Looks like 300+ on the guest list so far, so big draw

🗓️ May 9: League of Originals: This looks like a killer lineup of DTC founders and marketers, including Holly Thaggard, founder of Super Goop, acquired for $700M

🗓️ May 12: SaaSOpen: Post-revenue SaaS leaders gathering to knowledge-share and network.

May 13: Founder Poker Invitational: Another one from Chris down at Red Fridge. $200 buy-in, $200 re-buy for the first hour. Top 6 in the money

May 14: Investors & Innovators: Scott Kelly of Black Dog Ventures is hosting a happy hour downtown, connecting PE firms, family offices, VCs, angels and innovators.

May 14: Mix & Match: This one sounds creative – a business mixer where you learn to make a new cocktail

May 14: Prosper XO: Prosper is a startup in the music space, and founder Lauren Bruno hosting a town hall on empowering artists, with founder + artist fireside chats

May 15: Arena Mag Launch Party: If you haven’t seen Maxwell Meyer’s magazine yet, you must. Celebrating all things America & innovation, Issue No. 4 is dropping live

May 15: Growing Your Business in the Era of Continuous Change: I feel like the name on this one says it all.

May 15: Founders Night Out: Martín Martinez and Gabriel Rucker are hosting this happy hour down at Freddo to celebrate the launch of a new product

May 15: Embracing Risk with Confidence: Austin Women in Tech is hosting this intimate conversation around what it means to take risks in your life and career, and how your personal risk style impacts both

May 16: Female Founders & Friends: Hosted the third Friday of every month by Juliette Richert of the Artemis Fund, and Angie Neas of JustWorks

May 16: The Urban Betty Story: Texas Women in Business’ May luncheon is with Chelle Neff, local founder of the 4x Inc 5000 beauty salon, Urban Betty

One More Thing… On May 16, I’m giving a little talk on newsletters. Every month, Sam Huntington and John Davison get a small group of active founders together for coffee and community discussion over at the Red Fridge Society. They invited me to join and share some of what I’ve learned about the space over the years.

The talk will be largely based on this book, which my team and I wrote while I was working at The Hustle, along with other stuff learned helping launch Hampton, and building ABR. So if you’re interested in joining us, snag a spot and I’ll see you there.

–– Powered By Hampton ––

From Farmer’s Market to ~$2B Exit

Hampton is hosting a private Q&A with Allison Ellsworth, local co-founder of Poppi, the better-for-you soda brand that just sold to Pepsi for $1.95B.

Ellsworth originally developed Poppi in her home kitchen here in Texas, and under her leadership, the brand:

Raised $52M+ (including early funding on Shark Tank)
Won 19% of the prebiotic soda market, and 36,000 retail doors
Did $500M in revenue in 2024 – a 5x increase over the previous year

These events are typically member-only, but they’re holding a few seats for ABR readers.

So if you’re a high-growth founder, or you’ve raised/exited recently, and you’d like to spend the evening with some inspiring peers, request a spot here.

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.

May 11: Mother’s Day Clay & Bouquet at Ceramigos
May 11: Mother’s Day at LBJ Wildflower Gardens
May 12: The Chefs Who Shaped Us - Dinner Series at Foreign & Domestic
May 13: Author / Food Influencer Hailee Catalano, live at First Light Books
May 14: Frankie’s Lounge - DJ plus dinner curated by Aaron Franklin

One More Thing… The Affordable Art Show is back, May 15-18, featuring 55 galleries from around the world, and art starting as low as $100 (and up to ~$10k). It was cool to see this pop up. I reported on their first installment last year, which I guess was a huge success.

Founders’ Favorite TED Talks

Typically, I round up a list of articles and insights published by local founders. But this one podcast and its related links have kept me busy for a few days.

Local unicorn founder, Brett Hurt, has gone to TED more then 15 times. Recently, he sat down with three other local founders – JP Newman, Chantel Mc Daniel, and Brad Weimert – all fresh back from Vancouver, to talk about their favorite talks and takeaways from TED 2025.

It was a great discussion, especially once they got into the consciousness-of-AI debate. The sessions they refer to most are:

They also mentioned one from Boyan Slat on ocean cleanup that doesn’t look like it’s live yet (but here he is 12 years ago, talking about that very same thing), and another from John Mackey, local founder of Whole Foods, that doesn’t look like it’s live yet but sounds like it might be similar to some thoughts he shared here on the history of capitalism.

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