Bill Gates Came to Texas to "See The Future"

PLUS: LinkedIn B2B Growth Playbook... The First Cyborg... Macro 101... And more...

Author

Ethan Brooks
March 28, 2024

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!).

On-deck today:

  • 📅 Upcoming Events

  • ☀️ Tips For The Eclipse

  • 📣 Word On The Street

  • 🧭 More Adventure In 2024

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

-Ethan

PS. Spring is accelerator season here in ATX and there are a couple cool opportunities open right now - Whole Foods is looking for new local CPG brands, SKU is accepting applications for its Fall ‘24 track, and you have ‘til Mar. 31 to apply for Founder Institute’s Build a Fundable Global Startup program.

Upcoming Events

I’m trying a new format here this week. Let me know if you like this or the old way better!

Mar 29:

Apr 2:

Apr 3:

Apr 4:

Fun Stuff Coming Up

…Annd 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.

  • Mar. 29: Sans Bar Non-alc Happy Hour with SwiftFit

  • Mar. 30: Native Plant Walk on the Violet Crown Trail

  • Apr. 2: Brené Brown Live - A Night of Song & Storytelling

  • Apr. 2: Salmon 4 Ways Cooking Class

  • Apr. 3: Chicken Cock Whiskey Tasting

  • Apr. 4: ATX Social Series - Casual Happy Hour

  • Apr. 5: Cars, Coffee, Croissants - Porsche Edition

  • Apr. 5: Hasan Minhaj - Off With His Head Tour

  • Apr. 6: Fly Fishing Film Tour

  • Apr. 7: The Universe in Verse with Maria Popova

  • Apr. 10: The Fragrance of Ink - Chinese Calligraphy Class

  • Apr. 11: CultureMap Tastemaker Awards

  • Apr. 13: Tequila Tempo - with 200+ agave spirits to sample

Maria Popova writes the wildly popular Brain Pickings blog

As for the eclipse…

In 2017, I drove six-hundred miles for the Great American Eclipse, and sat in bumper-to-bumper traffic for twelve hours without getting to the path of totality.

You wouldn’t believe how many people travel to see these things.

If you want to experience it with a big group, Tribeza’s done the best job pulling a bunch of local viewing events into one place.

But my advice would be to ice down a cooler, call up some friends, and park it in your yard for the day with a grill and some music. If you don’t have a yard, pick anything within walking distance of your place so you don’t waste the day stuck in traffic.

Oh, and order the glasses! Without them, it’s hard to see anything impressive (unless you look down 👀👇)

From 2017 – If you look down during the crossing, all the dappled sunlight coming through the leaves transforms into crescents mimicking the eclipse.

Word On The Street

Thought-provoking ideas and stories published by founders in ATX

1. Bill Gates “In Texas To See The Future”: A friend of mine once wrote of Austin that, “when future folk talk about the American Renaissance, this will be the epicenter.” Bill Gates might say the same for Texas as a whole.

He’s invested over $130 million into TX founders, largely in the energy space, and came here this week to visit visionaries like:

A big advantage: Texas has almost 500k oil and gas workers, and many of their skills transfer to next-gen energy projects. We also lead the country in opportunity for Direct Air Capture, which alone may employ 400k people by 2050.

“If you want to catch a glimpse of our country’s clean energy future,” Gates wrote, “you should head on down to the Lone Star State.”

2. Macro 101: Speaking of the future, this week, local founder Joe Lonsdale interviewed Whitney Baker, founder of Totem Macro and former head of emerging markets at Bridgewater. They talked about the basics of macro investing, and the often-unseen forces that move markets around the world.

Her Current Stance: The US stock market is over-valued. Fed printing created a disconnect between market-caps and GDP that was higher than ever before. Printing has now slowed in response to a fresh wave of inflation, and as that plays out, market values will adjust down.

AI innovation may ease that… but only if it increases real productivity (not just profit retention through shifting labor costs), and doesn’t get stuck in the hands of a few oligopolies. Baker stressed the idea that investors need to double down on meritocracy in this environment, with funding going to those with the best ideas & execution.

Where She’s Bullish: Alpha-centric macro investments

3. The LinkedIn B2B Growth Playbook: One of my favorite local founders to follow is Adam Robinson from Retention.com. For a SaaS guy, he really gets how to make compelling content (see, “How to Never Pay Us” as proof).

Last week, I wrote about their plan to scale the company with no more than 10 employees.

This week, he broke down the “Inbound-Led Outbound” content engine that has already driven 2.5k+ waitlist signups and 328 client calls over the last 3 months. Definitely worth a read if you’re building B2B and trying to get more from your LinkedIn presence.

4. What’s In Your Binge Bank: This week, David Perell interviewed Shaan Puri form My First Million, talking about the craft of storytelling. There was a lot of gold in the conversation, but I think my favorite concept was that of the “binge bank” – a library of past work that you build for people to binge once they get curious about you.

It has me asking myself all kinds of questions, like: If people get curious about my work, what should they binge? Is that easy to find? What (if anything) are they finding now? What kind of story does it all tell?

Anyone looking to build their personal brand will get a lot from the talk.

5. The First Cyborg: You may not recognize the name Noland Arbaugh but your grandkids probably will. He’s the first human ever to receive a Neuralink implant, and appeared on-stage this week to talk about the experience.

Some highlights from the video:

  • Noland lived for 8 years as a quadriplegic following an accident

  • Since getting the implant, he’s used his mind to complete…

    • 148,360 mouse-clicks

    • 11 games of chess (won 7, lost 4)

    • 7.6 hours of playing Civilization 6 on his own (something he thought he’d never be able to do again)

The most touching part is where he told researchers that for the first time in years, he’s waking up early and going to bed early again because he finally has something to look forward to each day.

Check out the full vid to see history in the making – Nolan’s first brain activity visualized after surgery, his first time controlling a cursor (and later breaking the record for that), his advice to patient No. 2, response to critics, and more.

How To Get More Adventure In 2024

One of the big things I’m trying to do this year is get away from the computer and spend more time out in the country, experiencing the kinds of wild places Texas has to offer.

It’s hard to know where to start though – Texas is huge!

So the other day, I sat down with Jonathan Newar, a local sportsman and founder of Captain Experiences, a platform that makes it easy to book guided fishing and hunting trips all over the world.

I wanted him to help me pick my shots for the next few months, and he gave me the inside scoop along with his top fishing hit-list 👇

What’s Texas known for?

“The first thing that I would have to think of in terms of Texas fishing is bass,” he told me. “Large mouth bass.”

The Colorado River chain of lakes (specifically, lakes Austin, Travis, Buchanan, and LBJ) all offer great bass fishing in and around Austin.

Further afield, down along the coast (think South Padre, Port Aransas, and Galveston), Texans are spoiled with enviable salt water options too. Inshore, it’s red fish, speckled trout, black drum, flounder, and the like. And then bigger species, like Mahi Mahi, Wahoo, and even Blue Marlin out in the deep water.

Hottest Spot Right Now:

About three hours out of town, on that Colorado River chain, is Lake O.H. Ivie, where it seems like every week people are pulling ten-pound large-mouths out of the water.

Hidden Gems:

This is almost a capital sin in the world of fishing, but Jonathan told me about two spots that get less attention than they should:

  1. Fly Fishing in New Braunfels: The state stocks the Guadalupe with rainbow and brown trout every year and you can fly fish for them beneath the shade of the cypress trees.

  2. Picture Perfect Brazos: West of Dallas, out along the Brazos, lies the spot where they filmed 1883 (the precursor to Yellowstone). You’ll catch bass all day, but the real gem is the landscape.

Photo Credit: Erich Schlegel, on the Brazos

Crawl, Walk, Run:

So if you’re looking at your calendar, trying to pick a few trips this year, here’s Newar’s hit list (from easiest to most intense):

  • Crawl: Bass fishing on Lake Travis or Town Lake. Spring is the best time to plan that.

  • Walk: Head down to the coast and do some wade fishing for speckled trout in Rockport

  • Run: June through early August, the red snapper are running offshore from Port Aransas. Or you can go even further offshore (what I’ll call, “the full Hemingway”) to chase Tuna, Mahi Mahi, and Wahoo out past the horizon.

That’s all for this week.

You can email me here if you’re hosting something for local founders that might be a fit for the newsletter.

Until next week,

-Ethan

Thank you to all the incredible local founders and leaders who share great insights and events. You can follow and connect with them here…