Don't just start a startup.
Start a personal revolution.
Austin had nothing in 1990. One generation later it is sixth in the world — and it was never the money that did it. I've spent the last decade carrying that method to 42 countries, and I'd like to bring it to yours.
If you're putting a room together, start with the first. If you're a founder in the middle of something and you need an answer today, use the second — it comes straight to me.
Founder & CEO, Tech Ranch Austin
Revolt is against.
Revolution is for.
There is plenty to be against right now, and being against something is free. It costs you nothing, and by Monday it has changed nothing.
Liberation is getting out. Freedom is what you build instead — and almost everyone stops after the first one.
The talk is about that difference. What comes after it is the method Austin actually used: culture first, then capital, then change. Always in that order.
What we could talk about
Pick the one that fits your room.
Two of these are for the whole room — the evening when everyone is in one place. Two are for the founders who come back the next morning wanting to know how. You can have either. Most places end up wanting both.
Don't Just Start a Startup, Launch a Personal Revolution
Kennedy's two-a.m. question in 1960, my father's answer to it, and the argument that nobody is coming to ask us — so we ask each other. Closes on building a bridge, in both directions.
Read →U.S. Market Entry: Five Lenses for Crossing Borders
Why Texas and Austin specifically, the second valley of death nobody plans for, and how to pick a beachhead small enough to actually win. Run as a conversation, not a lecture.
Read →Why Austin Is Overtaking Silicon Valley
What international founders get wrong about the United States, and the three things you need before you land: mindset, relationships, and ecosystem fluency.
Read →Creating a Powerful Future Together in an Age of Disruption
Care, connection, creation — and why the places that have already lived through the worst of it tend to understand this fastest.
Read →The signature workshop
Every founder crossed a valley of death to start the company. Entering a new market means crossing it again.
Two and a half hours with the founders in your city — deep tech, machinery, energy, e-commerce, whoever is actually trying to make the crossing. Five lenses for entering a new market, the adoption curve most companies read wrong, and how a $20 million beachhead pulls a $4 billion market along behind it.
Designed to plug into your network
- You bring a local founder who has already made the crossing — someone from your own ecosystem who went, and came back with something to say.
- You bring a local attorney for the legal and practical layer: visas, entity structure, what actually changed this year.
- I bring the method, the room, and twenty-five years of watching companies get this right and wrong.
You almost certainly already know both of those people. This is built to put them to work, not to talk over them.
What usually happens next
The talk is the first phase of five.
Most places that bring me in are not buying an hour. They're trying to build something that outlasts the event. This is the shape it usually takes.
After the room empties
A small room beats a big list.
Everyone leaves an event with contacts. Almost nobody leaves with people who would actually show up for them.
A talk that ends with applause and nothing else is a wasted evening. So there is somewhere to go afterwards: Campfire, a monthly gathering that is exactly what it sounds like, and the Venture Outfitter cohort for the people who want to keep going.
Who's talking
I have a lot of scar tissue to donate to your process.
Electrical engineering at UT Austin, with honors, in 1990 — into a city that had no jobs for its best engineers. Three and a half years at NeXT with Steve Jobs, then back to Austin anyway, because of how people there treat each other. I wrote the commerce engine that carried Dell's first two billion dollars of online sales, alone, in my living room.
In 2003 a friend died and none of it made sense any more. So I stopped building products and built a place for founders instead. That was Tech Ranch, and it has been twenty-three years and forty-two countries since.
Also
- Built the first internet banking application in the world
- Trading systems for Fidelity, workflow for AT&T
- Consulted on the early design of the Lean Canvas
- Fifth-generation Texan; first cross-border customer in Guadalajara, 1994
Nobody is going to ask us