I'll add how I answered this question for someone who sent me an email once. Here goes: I wrote a good Quora answer about just living in Austin in general star

I'll add how I answered this question for someone who sent me an email once. Here goes: I wrote a good Quora answer about just living in Austin in general start of with reading that. http://www.quora.com/Austin-TX/What-should-someone-know-before-moving-to-Austin/answer/William-Harris?srid=X0&share=1 http://www.quora.com/Austin-TX/What-should-someone-know-befo... It doesn't really cover startup life though. I'll get to that. Quora has a lot of other pretty accurate content about Austin so check that out too. - First off let me warn you... sadly Southby is not Austin. SXSW is a festival that happens to happen once an year in Austin but they are completely different things lol. Do not have that as you expectation of how Austin will be. Austin is much sleepier the rest of the year and even during southby you may have noticed that stuff pretty much closes down at 2am - The Austin tech scene is mostly B2B startups, consultant shops, bigger more established tech (think IBM and Dell), the newer shiner (for lack of a better way to put it) companies mostly have smaller encampments here. (i.e Facebook has an office in one of the towers downtown. Apple has a fairly sizeable campus north of town and they are expanding but not much there yet.) - Second checkout these quoras answers they say alot about it. http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Austin-TX-become-the-next-Silicon-Valley/answer/Shon-Bayer?srid=X0&share=1 http://www.quora.com/Why-wont-Austin-TX-become-the-next-Sili... http://www.quora.com/How-does-Austin-compare-to-Silicon-Valley-as-a-place-to-live-and-work-(in-tech) http://www.quora.com/How-does-Austin-compare-to-Silicon-Vall... - O and meetups in Austin... Another thing about Austin is you will meet some genuinely smart people who are good and passonate about what they do... and you'll also run into the types who are "looking for a technical founder" alot too. It sucks that you'll find alot of those at the meetups for more well known languages or frameworks. You'll have to dig deep into more esoteric or cutting edge topics if you really want to meet good technical people here and not just people looking for someone to do it for them. Also just about all of the meetup groups have an online presence just google "[you favor subject] austin meetup" i.e. Austin on Rails is a good one http://austinonrails.org/ http://austinonrails.org/ - You'll definitely also want to look up Capital factory http://capitalfactory.com/ http://capitalfactory.com/ There are a metric ton of startups there. They also have showcases and host a big portion of one of my two favorite Austin events. The Startup Crawl. As matter of fact if you can swing it figure out when the next one of those is and come then. You'll meet a bunch of people in the scene that way... its another big party event much like sxsw but it is much more local so you'll get a flavor of the people actually here.