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).

Did you enjoy your one quiet weekend, after Tech-Week, ACL, F1, etc.?

Hope so, cuz we’re officially headed straight back into fall-social-overload with summits, festivals, (healthy) raves, and more.

In this week’s issue, keep an eye out for…

• 🚀 Leadership talk with former astronaut/navy SEAL

• 📚 Austin Food & Wine Fest… and book fest… and film fest

• ✉️ An excellent new newsletter for ATX parents in tech

• and more…

Somebody forward this to you? If you like it, you can sign up here.

-Ethan

PS. Huge thank-you to Chris Taylor, owner of The Red Fridge Society, for opening his doors the other day to host this talk I did. If you haven’t been to The Fridge yet, it’s a founder club on the west side, and one of my absolute favorite spots in town. You can read all about them in this deep dive I wrote.

Upcoming Business Events

🗓️ TONIGHT: Austin Robotics & AI: Rohit John Varghese, Director of Systems Engineering and Product at a robotics company, is giving a talk on MCP in robotics

🗓️ TONIGHT: Sales OStin: Michael Tessler, who built and sold a company for $1.9B, and Capital Factory co-founder, Gordon Daugherty, discuss planning your exit strategy

🗓️ Oct. 31: Office Hours at Remedy: This bar is co-owned by Jay Boisseau, founder of the Austin Forum on Tech & Society. They open early on Friday… so you can “work”

🗓️ Nov. 2-4: Main Street Over Wall Street: Big multi-day event by Codie Sanchez, featuring all kinds of legends on-stage including Joe Lonsdale and Bill Perkins

🗓️ Nov. 3: Agents for Work-Life Balance (ONLINE): Ruqaiya Shipchandler Akbari is joining Austin Women in Tech for a hands-on workshop building two AI agents

🗓️ Nov. 4: Founder Coffee Tasting: Chris Taylor is hosting this mid-morning coffee and conversation over at The Red Fridge Society (best founder club in town)

🗓️ Nov. 4: Technology Transactions: Part of Shannon Sibold’s annual ScaleUp series, for founders growing from 7- to 8-figures

🗓️ Nov. 4: Leadership Under Pressure: Lindsay Whorton is sitting down with retired Navy SEAL and NASA Chief Astronaut, Chris Cassidy to talk leadership

🗓️ Nov. 4: Women In Product: Kat Rector is joining to talk about growing your visibility and influence at work

(Note: Kat curates an excellent local event calendar over at Austin Tech Events)

🗓️ Nov. 5: Hill Climbers Annual Summit: If you like cycling and entrepreneurship, you’ll love Hill Climbers. Sam Huntington is interviewing Noah Kagan at this event.

(Note: Me again… Sam host’s a weekly ride for founders too)

🗓️ Nov. 5: America’s Fourth Industrial Revolution: Tour the Hayes Innovation Center for Advanced Manufacturing with executive director Marcus Metzger as he talks about the core technologies underlying the future of manufacturing

🗓️ Nov. 6: Leading with Values: Patrick Terry, of P.Terry’s fame, is sitting down with the Austin Business Journal for their Power of Better Business roundtable 🍔

🗓️ Nov. 6: TWIB 15th Anniversary Party: Texas Women in Business is celebrating fifteen years. Join the festivities at Chinatown North (where it all started)

🗓️ Nov. 7: Coffee & Connections: For those of you out west, tired of going downtown for events, the West Austin Chamber is hosting their coffee hour

Other Fun Stuff Coming Up

This is a crazy week for food and the arts, with Austin Fashion Week, The Round Top Film Festival, the Austin Food & Wine Festival, and the Texas Book Festival to name just a few.

We’ve also got…

• TONIGHT: Candlelight Concerts: A Haunted Evening

• TONIGHT: Black Violin, Live In Concert

• Oct. 30-31: Undead - Haunted House of Dances

• Nov. 2: Jacob Collier Live at Bass Concert Hall

• Nov. 3: Special Dinner at St. Elmo Hosted By Texas Country Reporter

• Nov. 4: World Ballet Company Presents - Cinderella

• Nov. 4: Elyse Myers, Live at the Paramount

• Nov. 5: Dinner with the Winemaker at Lutie’s (7PM Option Too)

• Nov. 5: The Tribeza Curators Dinner

• Nov. 5: Romesh Ranganathan Live at The Paramount

• Nov. 7: Wine & food Foundation Winemaker Luncheon

• Nov. 7: Cookbook Release - Borderlands by Hank Shaw

• Nov. 7-9: The 50th Annual Texas Big Garage Sale

• Nov. 8: The Austin Wine Auction by Wine & Food Foundation

• Nov. 8: Art & Beer Market at Brewtorium

• Nov. 8: The Fifth Annual Consulate’s Cup Sumo Tournament

• Nov. 8: The Second Annual ATX Chicken Wing Festival

• Nov. 8: The Fifth Annual Hot Sauce Hootenanny

• Nov. 8: Good Juice Grand Tasting - 200 Agave Spirits

Word On The Street

A roundup of cool local opportunities to boost your career (or your kids’ careers)

• Fundraising? November 3rd is the application deadline for Central Texas Angel Network’s final funding cycle of the year

• Is your kid into aerospace? Firefly, the local company that recently landed a spacecraft on the moon, opened internships for 2026

• Not quite old enough for internships? If you’ve got kids 12-17 who are into cooking, they might dig this Farm to Fork Junior Chef Competition next spring - they get scholarship money and a chance to cook with big time ATX chefs

A Newsletter For ATX Parents In Tech

Okay, you’re gonna love this. Nicole Stump works in VC here in town. She’s also a mother, a nature-lover, and the author of Stumped By Nature, which is all about revealing the natural world you see every day, but rarely notice.

It’s excellent for anyone who enjoys being outside. And it’s particularly great for parents here in town, who spend a lot of time at a screen and are looking for fun ways to explore the world with their kids.

Witty, insightful, and just a general joy to read – below is a lightly-edited excerpt from a recent piece on oak galls (the little pods you find under oak trees). For more like this, plus a roundup of cool outside-y stuff going on in ATX, snag the newsletter here.

Enter Nicole…

Buckle up, y’all. Today we’re noticing galls. You’ll find them under some oak trees.

Once you see galls, you can’t unsee galls.

Here’s the deal: A gall forms when a wasp lays an egg on an oak tree and deposits a chemical that convinces the oak tree to CREATE A PROTECTIVE, NUTRIENT-APPROPRIATE WOMB FOR THE WASP LARVAE TO DEVELOP.

My jaw. The floor…

Oak trees are apparently cool with this benign parasitic system. It’s symbiotic if you consider that the wasp gets to become a mature wasp, and the tree gets some temporary jewelry. #fashion

For the larger ecosystem, galls make up part of the diet of woodpeckers, nuthatches, squirrels, opossums, raccoons, and skunks. Some creatures peck out the larvae and some take down the gall whole.

Despite the temptation of eating wasp larvae, humans should resist snacking on these—the tannic acid would give you a belly ache. (I don’t know this from personal experience, but going to trust the internet on this one.)

I 100% believe you can (and should) find a gall and pick it up and look at it with awe.

Parenting Tip:

Triangulate how high your offspring can count and how many moments of relative peace you need. Encourage said offspring to collect that number of galls (with exit holes!).

Life Skills in the Apocalypse/ Homesteading Tip:

You can make natural ink from collected galls, just like Pliny the Elder and Shakespeare

Step 1: Lug your mortar and pestle outside in case the galls your offspring collected are not as vacated as the exit hole might imply

Step 2: Pestle the hell out of the galls

Step 3: Combine pulverized galls with hot water, let soak overnight

Step 4: Spend the entire waiting time deep cleaning your mortar and pestle

Step 5: Strain the liquid. Add a nail to make chemistry happen for darker ink

Step 6: Set up your workspace with a found-feather quill and the paper you made from the pulp of your offsprings’ school worksheets, and you’ve effectively created a multi-day process out of what were readily available materials. Very hygge!

Step 7: Write something. Obviously.

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