About
I have a lot of scar tissue to donate to your process.
Thirty-four years an entrepreneur, twenty-three of them building a place for other people to be one.
Austin, Texas
The arc
I graduated in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, with honors, into a city that had no jobs for its best engineers. That is not an exaggeration — Austin in 1990 was a college town with good music and no reason for anyone to take it seriously.
So I went to Silicon Valley and spent three and a half years at NeXT, Steve Jobs' company, learning what technology could do to the world when someone meant it. Then I came back to Austin anyway, because of how people there treat each other.
What followed was the building years. A trading system for Fidelity. Workflow for AT&T. The first internet banking application in the world. And the commerce engine that carried Dell's first two billion dollars of online sales, which I wrote alone, in my living room. In 1994, at twenty-four, I sold software to a bank in Guadalajara — an accidental cross-border sale that turned out to be the shape of my whole career.
In 2003 my friend Danielle died. She was twenty-four, with a daughter a year and a half old, and by every measure any of us used then she was winning. Afterwards none of the things I had built made sense to me, and it did not make sense to build one more.
So I stopped, and I built a place for founders instead. That was Tech Ranch. It has been twenty-three years, six and a half thousand entrepreneurs, and forty-two countries since.
It has cost me. Twice I came close enough to bankruptcy to see the bottom of it — I never declared, either time, but I want to be precise: I have sat down on a Thursday night with thirty thousand dollars due Friday morning and no idea on this earth how I was going to meet it. What got me up was not my network. My network did not know. It was one friend who found out, and came, and said what I was doing was too important to stop.
Networks are wide and they are cold. Fires are small and they are warm.
That is not a metaphor I reached for. It is the actual difference between a list of people who know your name and the two or three who would show up. Everything I have built since 2003 has been an attempt to manufacture more of the second kind.
What I believe
Five things, held stubbornly.
These are not values on a wall. They are the reasons I turn work down.
Bridges over business cards
A connection you can't act on is not a connection. The work is moving the entrepreneur, not the contact detail.
The answer already exists
All the world's problems have already been solved somewhere. The job is connecting the solution to the market that has the problem.
Trust before transaction
In Austin the first question is what are you building, not what's your valuation. That order is the whole advantage.
Entrepreneurship is not an individual sport
I tried to do it alone. One ranger, one riot. It was the most expensive wrong idea I have held.
I see it; the Ranch builds it
I am not an expert at your business. I am an expert at this process.
Facts, for a program
- Founder and CEO, Tech Ranch Austin — 6,500+ entrepreneurs, 42+ countries, 750+ solutions deployed
- BSEE with honors, University of Texas at Austin, 1990
- Three and a half years at NeXT under Steve Jobs
- Built the first internet banking application in the world
- Built the e-commerce engine behind Dell's first $2 billion in online sales
- Consulted on the early design of the Lean Canvas
- Fifth-generation Texan; has lived in Boston, Chicago, Guadalajara, the Bay Area, Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio and Santiago de Chile