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Is it Austin that lost its luster, or all that low interest capital funding is gone so startups are drying up in general?
by surge 3y ago
Is it Austin that lost its luster, or all that low interest capital funding is gone so startups are drying up in general?
- johngossman 3y agoMy question too. Having lived in Seattle it seems like every time tech boomed there were stories about it becoming the next SV and every time there was a general tech recession there were stories about how it had failed to become the next SV. This article seems very anecdotal and some of the anecdotes contradict each other: Austin has become too crowded and expensive, so companies are moving back to California; Austin doesn’t have a big enough “scene”, so one company is moving to Tulsa?
- alephnerd 3y agoIme, the Austin startup and tech scene is BizOps and SalesOps SaaS driven. This isn't too surprising as CS, Sales, and PS teams for most major companies have clustered in ATX. There is deep tech stuff but it ends up leaving for the bay in order to scale. That said, it's a strong regional hub and def 3rd best after the Bay and Seattle. Cloudflare, Crowdstrike, IBM, and Oracle's investment in ATX will help it massively
- peanuty1 3y agoYou think Austin is a bigger software/tech hub than NYC?
- alephnerd 3y agoAbsolutely. The network is much stronger in Austin over NYC, and there is a better established pipeline between the ATX scene and the Bay plus Seattle. Also, I've found Texans operate on a similar wavelength as other West Coast folks. And you can't discount the absolute behemoth of a pipeline UT Austin and IBM Austin is - something that no university in NY-NJ can compete with (come at me salty Rutgers and Columbia bros /s) Austin is big enough that you can have a self sustaining ecosystem, but small enough that you can still experiment. On top of that, there are enough early career PMs, Sales, SWEs in the area to get startups off the ground. I've also found the NYC scene to be immature and piggybacking off European/Israeli founders trying to build a US beachhead due to American VCs. I simply can't think of a recent major IPO from an organically grown NYC tech startup. Spotify was large, but largely built out of Sweden.
- awill88 3y agoYes? Isn’t that implied by “losing its luster,” considering the publisher and audience of the article? I think it goes on to talk about the relationship to venture capital and local govt. so it’s more than a general thing?
- mitchellst 3y agoThis. Lived and worked in Austin tech 7 years. This article is all about startup funding, plus it quotes one unicorn whose home base / frame of reference was Houston, not another tech hub. Austin was always a great place to build a tech career if you, for example, had a family. The talent pool is great but, in my experience, has a lower risk tolerance (read: prefers bigger and more established companies) than SF. So if you're evaluating by startup formation or funding, sure, the Bay was and remains in the lead. And as that stuff dries up, it's going to dry up faster in Austin, because the culture in Austin always had a slant toward optimization over disruption. For the big SF/Seattle-based companies, Austin seems like a cheap second city. For a Houston-based startup, Austin seems like an expensive second location. And for a new startup trying to take risks and go big, the Bay is just set up better for it. I don't see this as losing a luster. I see it as... very little change at all.