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Welcome to this issue of The 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).

If you can believe it, this is a paired down “holiday” edition.

You won’t believe it… You’ll see why in a second…

Upcoming Events

As things taper off for the holiday, here are six places to meet other great business owners who get it…

🗓️ TONIGHT: AI Community Christmas Soiree: With literally too many hosts to name here, this is basically all of the local AI groups getting together in one spot.

🗓️ Dec. 15: MFM Themed Potluck: Alice Huang is hosting a year-end celebration for fans of My First Million down at The Red Fridge Society (best damn founder clubhouse in town)

🗓️ Dec. 15: Driving Connections: Alec Rios, founder of the Young Professionals Network, is hosting a holiday networking/toy drive (Get it? Driving connections?) up at Vuka North Loop. Join for BBQ, wine tasting, giveaways, and more.

🗓️ Dec. 16: Self Love Through Mantras: Maybe it sounds a little woo-woo? But it’s not. Erin Warner is a former lawyer, and a client of mine, and her work is focused on recognizing and controlling your self-talk to build the life you want (she specializes in working with people who usually wouldn’t be caught dead using the word “mantra”).

🗓️ Dec. 16: Closing The Loop: This is a great idea. Nicole Stump works in VC, and is organizing this event, designed to help you finish lingering business/life admin tasks you’ve been avoiding, while meeting cool people.

Fun Fact: Nicole’s a graduate of my newsletter class and if you work in tech, but love being outside, you need to read her stuff – it’s a breath of fresh air (literally) and so fun. Check out this piece about the edible tea plant you’ve walked by a million times.

🗓️ Dec. 19: Year-End Coworking + Reset: Okay, there’s a lot going on here… Silent coworking. (Not silent) networking. Plus more than a half-dozen mentors with niche expertise to help you think through the coming year. I recognize the names, and they’re good. Oh, and because it’s Austin… there will be sauna.

You Should Meet: Zac Solomon, Founder of ATX Writing Club

Okay, slimmed-down holiday edition means we do a few hand-picked events, and a profile on one person you should know heading into 2026.

This week that person is my pal, Zac Solomon, founder of ATX Writing Club.

Zac is one of the most thoughtful entrepreneurs I know. A natural marketer, and world-class community-builder – he’s one of only a handful of people I trust for feedback on my own ideas every week, and Writing Club is an outstanding business. So I asked him to reflect on 2025 below.

Whether you consider yourself a writer or not, the truth is, you are one.

Writing is refined thinking. And the ability to think clearly (and to think for yourself) becomes more valuable every day. If you want to hone that skill, while meeting other cool people who are doing the same, make sure you’re subscribed to his email, and keep an eye out there for cool sh*t in 2026.

Without further ado – here’s Zac…

1. Looking back on the year, what surprises you most about what you’ve accomplished in the business? What were you not expecting? 

At the beginning of 2025 I had a normal job. ATX Writing Club had hosted only 18 events in the preceding year, and there were zero paying members. We didn’t have a logo, newsletter, or even a website. 

Each January, I like to write down my goals for the year. This year was no different. The first one I wrote was to have 30 paying members by the end of the year. Another was to have 500 total subscribers to this new email list. And finally, at the bottom of the page, was a single line that read “physical clubhouse” with a question mark next to it. Each goal was just a fuzzy outline of where I pictured ATX Writing Club going. How I would get there was even fuzzier. Nevertheless, I wrote them down, and didn’t look back at those pages until just now. 

I figured that if I could hit all those goals, I would be able to comfortably leave my normal job in two years and make ATX Writing Club my fulltime pursuit. But I unexpectedly got laid off in January, and decided I wasn’t going to reapply for jobs. 

Since then the club has hosted 48 new events this past year. We’ve grown to over 200 paying members, we’ve given away $2000 in free books, we’ve hosted our largest events ever, we’ve partnered with local writing professors at ACC to lead workshops and novel writing cohorts, and yes, we opened a physical clubhouse for creative’s called The Rosedale Society. 

What surprised me the most? All of it.

2. What’s one hard or unconventional decision you made this year that worked out well? What helped you make that?

Many of the decisions I made this year felt effortless.  Each felt as if it flowed from an obvious continuation of the last. This was even true of my biggest project this year, the opening of our physical clubhouse in Austin. What was not obvious to me, however, was figuring out how to pay for it. 

I initially decided to hold a community fundraiser for the space. My thought was that, if this was something people truly wanted, they would help bring it into existence. This idea worked to an extent, but as with all real estate deals, a clock was ticking. 

Within a week of starting the fundraiser, over 50 donors had given a total of $6,000 to our vision–but despite this amazing generosity, the pace was simply too slow. So I decided to end the fundraiser, and cover the outstanding $30,000 to secure the space myself.

Now, what helped me make this bet? Well the ticking clock was a good one. Faith in this community was another. And maybe the last piece of the puzzle was a wild over-confidence I had in myself to figure out how to recoup my savings. 

3. What’s one book that stuck with you most this year. (DIG DEEP - looking for titles you won’t see on the NYT list)

A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

After 15 years of reading exclusively non-fiction, business, economics, psychology, and self-development books, I decided to start reading fiction. My gateway into this new world was A Moveable Feast. Since picking it up, I have continued on to read every single long-form Hemingway novel ever written.

Now, why is this one so important and why should I mention it here:

1. First is that it's basically a 1920’s gossip magazine. Hemingway spends many pages talking shit about other writers, painters, and poets that were living with him in Paris at the time. Gossip is gossip, even if it’s 100 years old. So it’s a fun read. 

2. This book sets the scene for understanding who Hemingway was before fame. This young artist archetype harkens to a more universal struggle that many of us feel when creating. We’re all trying to break into a world that we initially don’t belong to, we’re all working towards a sharpened craft, we’re all trying to advance despite the odds. 

3. Finally this book dispels the idea of the lone genius. Paris in the 1920s was complete shit. It was not chic or glamorous. Plumbing and electricity rarely worked, yet artists from all over the world started moving there. In Paris, Hemingway befriended Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Sylvia Beach–all of which played instrumental roles in advancing Hemingway’s craft and career. Without them, he would not be the writer we remember today. 

The creative community I’m curating at The Rosedale Society, was directly inspired by this book, and Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris. 

4. What’s one use of money this year that significantly improved your work or personal life?

This was the hardest question for me to answer. Admittedly, I’m not great at accepting help. I’m even worse at leveraging money to make my life easier. But if you really pressed me, I’d have to say the money I spent on my designer this year. 

We worked for a few months together in early 2025 mapping out an aesthetic and vision for the club–creating a strong visual identity which you can see most clearly on our website. Not only was this a big differentiator for us, but it also lent an air of credibility to our club before we had really earned it.

5. What’s a new question you plan to ask more often next year in your work? Why?

1. How can I do less of what I dislike?

2. How can I use money to make my life easier?

3. How can I reorient my work around a seasonal cadence?

4. How can I reorient my life so that I never have to check my email?

At first glance, it looks like I just want to work less (which I do), but these four questions are illustrative of a deeper desire. In 2026, I want to work more intentionally–and answering these questions is the first step. Here is more on my thought process surrounding each one.

1. There are things that I do now to run my business, that are a complete headache and generate no positive business outcomes. They’re mostly menial, mostly administrative, and I dislike them. Figuring out how to eliminate, automate, or delegate them next year will be a central quest for me. 

2. I’m pretty good at using money to make more money. What I’m bad at, however, is using money to make my life easier. I’m not good at staying up to date with new tools that could automate my work, so maybe that’s where I’ll start looking. 

3. Writing is not a linear process. Neither is creativity. As a matter of fact, I’m starting to believe that no human work produces linear outcomes–we’re far more cyclical and seasonal than we care to admit. This pervasive expectation is almost certainly a lingering byproduct of the agricultural and industrial revolutions–which sought to smooth out all our seasonal bumps and dips in production. Getting back in touch with high and low, on and off seasons, will be a big project for me next year. 

4. I’m just now starting to pull this thread. I think that there’s a way to run a thriving small business, without ever checking  email. I just have no idea what that looks like. This is the stretch goal (but isn’t it fucking crazy that I’m here, a “hipster luddite”, racking my brain on how to run a business without email, when 35 years ago no one in the world was running their business with email?)

6. What’s one thing prospective members should know about your plans for next year? Brag about the cool sh*t you’ve got planned

If there was only one thing I could share with you about my plans for next year it’s this: Writers are not hermits. They’re not nerds who sit in a room all day playing pretend. 

Ernest Hemingway fought in World War I and was injured in combat, then he returned to Europe for another bloody battle. When he moved to Spain, he stayed there for seven years reporting on the Spanish Civil War. You know who else was not only reporting on the same conflict, but volunteered at 33 years old to fight in it? George Orwell. The stains of these experiences marked much of their work in the proceeding years. 

But you don’t have to go to war to be a writer. Scott Fitzgerald just went to parties, a lot of fucking parties. He studied the aristocracy just as Hemingway studied war, and love, and rebellion. 

Henry David Thoreau built a cabin near a pond, and then lived in it for a year, and then wrote about that. Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac, or more colloquially known as Jack, went on the road–then wrote about that. This is not crazy stuff, even Carrie Bradshaw went out into the city, had sex, and then wrote about it. You do, then you write. 

So where I’ll be focusing the majority of my time and attention next year is on creating experiences that get writers out of their heads, and back into the world. And not in some new-age, techno-hippy way either. Sitting in a warm wooden box, or bathing in ice water does not qualify as living. 

Living to me looks a lot more like; shooting a gun; riding a horse; talking to an old man with a yellow mustache at a gas station; driving way way out into the desert; fixing something that’s broken; cooking a meal; working the line; harvesting white grapes at the peak of summer; and jumping in a canoe and paddling until you hit Seadrift. That’s living.

This year we dipped our toes into these waters. I took a group of five writers out to Roam Ranch to experience their annual Bison Harvest. We got to meet the farmers, participate in the humane killing of one of their herd, watch the processing of the animals meat, and learn about the stewardship of nine-hundred acres of Central Texas land. Then after it was all done, each writer processed their experience–as writers have done for millenia–before making sense of it on paper. 

FINALLY: Look at your camera roll… What’s one photo you took this year that means a lot to you? Why?

After 15 years of dating, I married my best friend. We got a cottage on the coast of Sicily, and stayed out there for two weeks by ourselves; reading, swimming in the sea, eating swordfish and capers and eggplant and cheese and all the other things you eat when you're in Sicily. It was two weeks of complete peace.

Ethan here. Do you see this damn poster? 👇 See what I mean about “natural marketer”?

If you want to connect with Zac, and stay up to date on all the opportunities and events he’s curating for writers next year (including the adventures a la Hemingway), the best way is to get on his newsletter.

Writing club accepts new members one day each quarter (so seriously… read the emails). But Rosedale, the clubhouse for writers, accepts new members all year long. And if you join, I’ll see you there.

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