Austin Next

I had been thinking Austin needed some kind of frontier-tech week when Andrew Côté announced that he was bringing Deep Tech Week here. I reached out almost immediately, and now I’m helping build it.

That gave us the excuse for this conversation, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We are living through a moment when things that recently belonged mostly to science fiction are becoming companies and products you can actually encounter in the physical world. 

That is where Andrew’s perspective gets especially useful. He has moved from engineering physics and fusion into shaping what is essentially a storytelling platform around the people trying to make these futures real. Austin is becoming one of the places where that transition is unusually tactile, where the imagined future is starting to become something you can walk into, touch, and build.

Agenda

• 0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism
• 10:00 Where physics meets economics
• 17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy
• 28:18 The geography of deep tech
• 33:29 Underwriting hard tech
• 39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future
• 46:47 Austin’s factories and permission
• 53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next

Come to Austin Deep Tech Week

The week opens with a hardware showcase at The American Housing Corp on September 21. The Factory Crawl runs September 22–24, with stops including ICON, Neurophos and Emerald Cloud Lab. We close with a nuclear-powered party at the Aalo Atomics factory on September 25.

Explore the full schedule and register

Guest Bio & Links
Andrew Côté: X, Writing, Deep Tech Week

Andrew Côté is an engineering physicist that went from designing superconducting magnets for nuclear fusion to running deep tech week. 

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

The battlefield is changing faster than the systems built to supply it. Matt Willis runs Army FUZE, a roughly $750M portfolio built to get new technology into soldiers’ hands faster. The deeper question is what an institution as large as the Army has to change when technology cycles collapse from years to weeks. 

That means accepting more failure up front, shortening the distance between a problem and a decision, getting real-world feedback before a product is fully baked, and building a system that can keep adjusting as the technology and the mission keep moving.  The question now is whether those changes are durable enough to let the Army operate at unprecedented speed, or whether bureaucratic inertia eventually pulls it back toward the old model. 

Agenda

• 0:00 The new speed of war
• 7:51 Speed, risk, and the 80% solution
• 17:23 Soldiers, marketplaces, and feedback
• 22:22 The tech stack and commercial innovation
• 29:10 New requirements and industrial capacity
• 35:32 Open systems and Operation Jailbreak
• 41:32 Manufacturing and the capital stack
• 46:33 Austin and the defense innovation map
• 52:57 Soldier founders and access to innovation
• 57:13 AI, augmented soldiers, and what’s next

Guest Links and Bio
Matt Willis
US Army PIT: Website, LinkedIn
US Army xTech, US Army SBIR/STTR

Dr. Matt Willis serves as the Director of Army FUZE, leading the Army’s portfolio of private sector engagements through prize competitions (xTech), the Army Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs, the Technology Maturation Initiative (TMI) program, and the Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) program, comprising over $750 million in annual research and development investments.

Previously, Dr. Willis served as the Army Director for Laboratory Management at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology (ASA(ALT)) and held various positions across the Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Dr. Willis earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from Cornell University and both a Master of Science and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

Sesh looks like a consumer brand. 8VC looks like the last fund that would back it. That mismatch is the fastest way to see what Austin is becoming.

Sesh founder Max Cunningham and 8VC's Jake Medwell start with the logic that makes the deal make sense. Sesh holds a legal moat most competitors can't cross for years, and it earns software-like margins on a physical product. From there the conversation opens into a bigger question about where ambitious companies belong, and why more of them are choosing a city that now draws the founders and families betting on that future.

Agenda

• 00:00 What Sesh is
• 06:05 Why 8VC backed a nicotine company
• 10:44 Regulatory timing and the six-year door
• 16:37 Software margins and owning the factory
• 22:01 Who buys this and why the market is growing
• 29:27 Why some companies need SF and others do not
• 34:32 What Austin talent looks like now
• 42:10 The Elon spillover and the coming IPO wave 
• 48:37 Raising kids in the AI age
• 55:07 Safety, schools, and what comes next

Guest Links
Sesh: Max Cunningham, Website, X, Instagram
8VC: Jake Medwell, Website, X

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

A custom board that ran two thousand dollars five years ago now costs fifteen and ships in two weeks. That collapse is why a hundred teenagers flew to Austin to build in the physical world instead of code in the digital. The organization behind it is Zach Latta's Hack Club, the hackathon was created by seventeen-year-old Meghana Madiraju, and Blake Liberman of 021 Ventures is why it happened in Austin. 

The conversation ranges from how that collapse happened to what teenagers do with the agency it hands them, and turns sharper on what threatens it. Underneath the optimism is a real question about who controls the tools of creation, code, energy, and hardware.

The Agenda

• 00:00 What Hack Club Stasis Is 
• 06:28 How Hack Club actually works 
• 13:01 Why hardware, why now 
• 18:05 The case against the credential machine 
• 24:11 Agency and the pressure myth
• 29:33 What's actually worth building 
• 34:38 Open source is quietly closing

Guest Links
Hack Club
021 Ventures

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

Brett Hurt returns to Austin Next for the fourth time, more than any guest in the show's history, to argue that the hardest problem in front of us is psychological. Abundance is already on a clear technological path, and the thing most likely to stop us is the fear center we carried off the savannah.

He walks through the four technologies he calls the Superfecta: AI, robotics, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces, and why they land together rather than in sequence. The stakes are the Great Filter and to make it through to abundance or destroy ourselves. His book lands June 23, and this conversation is the argument it rests on.

Agenda

• 0:00 Love is hard, fear is hijacked 
• 10:21 Cooked food and broken business models 
• 18:04 Mocktails, birth rates, and Bhutan 
• 25:52 Moonshots and the James Webb sublime 
• 30:42 Why aliens would be benevolent 
• 36:13 The Superfecta changes everything 
• 41:52 Capitalism, Chad, and abundance 
• 51:40 Old Austin, wizards, and prophets 
• 58:33 The nuclear math nobody wants 
• 1:02:37 How the podcast made him hopeful 
• 1:11:09 Open source wins the next hinge

Guest Bio & Links

Brett Hurt: X, LinkedIn, Love Conquers Fear Podcast

Love Conquers Fear: Humanity, AI, and the Age of Abundance for All

Brett Hurt is a serial tech entrepreneur, investor, and author. He works at the intersection of AI, leadership, and human values focusing on how society can harness exponential technologies with courage, ethics, and unity.

Hurt most recently co-founded and led data-dot-world, which was acquired by ServiceNow on July 7, 2025. He previously co-founded Bazaarvoice (unicorn IPO) and Coremetrics (acquired by IBM). He also co-leads Hurt Family Investments, which is in 150 startups (12 unicorns) and 50 VC funds. He was named Austin’s Best CEO (Legacy Award) and is also an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow.

Through his Love Conquers Fear holding company, platform, and podcast, Hurt explores how AI and emerging technologies can either amplify fear or help create broad-based human flourishing to eventually reach the Age of Abundance for All. Based in Austin, he’s the author of three books and host of the Love Conquers Fear podcast, which has 60 episodes and counting.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

Austin's counterculture is still the ethos. The next chapter is what gets built on top of it. Karen Blashek, the editor-in-chief of Austin Home Magazine, took over a 21-year-old design publication with no editorial background and turned it into one of the city's most consequential platforms for naming what's already happening.

We ask why Austin's design talent operates one neighborhood away from its tech talent and neither knows the other exists. What the city is telling people and the cultural infrastructure need to make it all compound: storytellers, convening spaces, named districts, and a  patronage layer.

Agenda

• 0:00 Austin Home as civic editing
• 4:22 Why Austin lives outside
• 15:04 Block parties and Old Sixth
• 21:02 Personality vs. values
• 27:07 Ground floors as infrastructure
• 32:10 The public space czar idea
• 37:01 Why Austin is a design capital
• 41:01 Naming districts that exist
• 45:07 Three roles every ecosystem needs
• 53:37 If you don't tell the story, someone else will
• 58:08 The patronage gap
• 1:03:37 Rising stars, the talent leak
• 1:09:50 Tech and culture flywheel
• 1:15:40 Naming what's already here

Guest Bio and Links
Karen Blashek
Austin Home Magazine
Groundup Ideas

Cities and Ambition by Paul Graham
The City That Lingers by Ryan Puzycki

Tokyo is Reinventing the Downtown by Making More Than One by Richard Florida

Karen Zabarsky Blashek is Editor-in-Chief of Austin Home Magazine, a Hearst publication covering the intersection of architecture, interiors, development, and culture in one of America’s fastest-evolving cities. She is also the founder of Ground Up, a creative studio for the built environment. Before returning to her native Texas, Blashek spent 13 years in New York where she led design for Kushner, one of the country's largest real estate developers with projects nationwide.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

Updated re-release. A year ago we left one question unresolved. Where do foundational AI models end and where do the applications begin? Nick Tippmann returns in a fresh epilogue.  A year on, the tension has only sharpened. 

Specificity is the differentiator when inches matter. Nick Tippmann, founding partner of TipTop VC, explains how vertical AI is rewriting the software industry by going deeper instead of wider. From the transition beyond SaaS to the gray zone between foundational models and high-stakes applications, we get into how vertical AI can transform laggard industries and why Austin might lead the race.

The Agenda

• 00:00 Defining vertical AI
• 05:07 Where general AI fails
• 09:36 Vertical AI software, not just chatbots
• 16:44 Pricing logic after the seat model
• 24:04 Underwriting at pre-seed and seed 
• 27:20 Capital intensity and seed-strapping
• 36:48 TAM analysis and the Frontiers Market example
• 41:46 OpenAI's Instacart hire and the gray zone
• 45:55 Austin as a vertical AI hub
• 58:21 Epilogue: Where the models end and applications begin

Guest Links and Bios
Nick Tippmann, TipTop VC

Nick Tippmann is the Founder and Managing Partner of TipTop Ventures, an early-stage venture fund focused on Vertical AI. Before becoming an investor, Nick spent nearly a decade as a founding team member and CMO at Greenlight Guru, where he helped scale the company from zero to category leader with more than 250 employees, tens of millions in ARR, and a nine-figure investment from JMI Equity.

An operator turned investor, Nick now partners with founders building industry-specific AI and software businesses, bringing hands-on experience in go-to-market strategy, scaling, community building, fundraising, and company development. He has also been an active angel investor since 2021, with more than 100 startup investments.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

This was not the episode we planned. Will Johnson, founder and CEO of Gyde, and Alex Cohen, founder and CEO of Hello Patient, came on to talk about innovation in the business of health. Instead it became our off the record conversations, but behind the microphone.

An unfiltered field report on what it actually feels like to build a startup in Austin right now. The talent math, hunting for mid-size office space, the venture culture, Austin vs Miami, the press gap, and the political friction.

All of it from two founders who chose this city, are hiring here, and are naming what needs to change because they want it to work.

Agenda

• 0:00 Why Alex and Will chose Austin
• 5:17 The engineering talent gap 
• 14:10 Who gets hired and the conference hustle 
• 20:58 Miami, Palantir, and competing for wins 
• 26:02 What SF's venture culture has that Austin is still building
• 32:58 Operator density problem and the office gap 
• 41:05 Why selling to Main Street works better from Austin 
• 50:16 More storytellers needed
• 59:16 SXSW's decline 
• 1:05:18 King of Austin for a day

Guest Links and Bios
Alex Cohen: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Hello Patient
Will Johnson: X/Twitter, LinkedIn, Gyde

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

ICON has been telling the same story since 2018. Humanity has a construction problem that solving for regulations and supply-demand incentives alone won't fix. We need fundamentally new ways to build.

Jason Ballard, ICON's founder and CEO, and Will Hurd, the former CIA officer, congressman, and OpenAI board member who just joined as President of ICON Prime, came on to lay out what happens when a non-consensus thesis held for eight years starts to materialize in the real world. The conversation cuts across the full stack, housing, AI, robotics, labor, reindustrialization, and space. The through-line is Ballard's argument that breakthrough technologies are never narrow, that building the technology for a moon base solves the housing and building crisis on Earth.

Agenda

• 0:00 What ICON is building and why shelter is broken 
• 6:40 The regulation stack and ICON as a technology company 
• 11:40 Customer shapes, business model, and the innovation stack 
• 17:10 AI, ChatGPT from the inside, and the case for optimism 
• 23:40 The spoons-and-ditches fallacy and Hurd's regulation inversion 
• 30:30 What is ICON Prime and the barracks crisis 
• 36:40 Military construction, Afghanistan, and expeditionary printing 
• 42:40 The moon base, Olympus, and in-situ resource utilization 
• 49:40 Eight years of the same thesis and software's limit 
• 56:40 Austin's talent gravity and the ICON diaspora 
• 1:00:40 The moon in our lifetime 
• 1:04:40  National security, espionage, and Austin as a target 
• 1:08:40 Laser on the moon, 2028 

Previous ICON Episode with Evan Loomis

Guest Links & Bio
Jason Ballard: X/Twitter
Will Hurd: LinkedIn
ICON: Website, ICON Prime, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube

Jason Ballard
Jason Ballard has dedicated his life to working on big problems in service to humanity, most recently and notably as the co-founder and CEO of ICON, the construction technologies company using construction-scale 3D printing to tackle the global housing crisis and prepare to build on other worlds. ICON has been named one of the "Most Innovative Companies in the World" by Fast Company and recently profiled on CBS’s 60 MINUTES.  Raising $451 million to date in funding, ICON has delivered communities of resilient 3D-printed homes at high-speed and lower cost in the U.S. and internationally and forged partnerships with world-renowned architects, builders and housing organizations missionally aligned to shift the paradigm of homebuilding. In fall 2022, ICON was awarded $57.2 million from NASA to develop a lunar surface construction system that will target humanity’s first-ever construction on another planetary body. In 2019, Ballard was awarded the Austin Under 40 Award in the Technology category. In 2021, Ballard was named to TIME100 Next as one of the emerging leaders shaping the future as well as Newsweek’s America's Greatest Disruptors: Visionaries and Innovators Who Are Changing the World.

Prior to co-founding ICON, Ballard served as CEO of an eco-friendly home upgrade company that normalized sustainable and healthy approaches to home improvement. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Ballard worked at a homeless shelter, in various roles in sustainable building, and as an environmental consultant for ACRT. Ballard is a GLG Social Impact Fellow and served on the Carbon War Room / Rocky Mountain Institute Energy Think Tank. Ballard hails from East Texas and studied conservation biology at Texas A&M University. He also completed a masters program in Space Resources at Colorado School of Mines in 2022. He enjoys astronomy, ultrarunning, chess, comic books, and outdoor activities when he has free time.  He resides in Austin, TX with his four children.

Will Hurd
The Honorable Will Hurd is a former CIA officer and congressman whose career spans intelligence, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence policy, and public service. He currently serves as Division President of ICON Prime, a space and defense tech company and will lead ICON Prime's strategy and government partnerships as the company scales its robotic construction technology across the national security enterprise and beyond Earth.  He is also the author of American Reboot: An Idealist Guide to Getting Big Things Done. Hurd brings deep expertise at the intersection of technology, national security, and governance to his board roles and ongoing policy work.

Hurd began his career serving overseas in the CIA, where he worked to prevent attacks on the United States and disrupt efforts to smuggle nuclear materials into the country. He later held roles at Crumpton Group and FusionX, helping defend critical infrastructure from cyber threats. In 2014, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Texas’s 23rd District, where he served three terms and played a key role in shaping technology and national security policy.

Following his time in Congress, Hurd held leadership roles at Allen & Company and CHAOS Industries. He also previously served on the boards of In-Q-Tel and OpenAI.

He currently serves on the board of directors for Personal.AI, The Aerospace Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and advisory boards of Palo Alto Networks and the Center for European Policy Analysis.

A San Antonio native, Will received a BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. 

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack

Joe Liemandt built Trilogy, recruited 2,000 Ivy League graduates to Austin, and is now running what he considers the higher-leverage version of the same play, K-12 education. Our host, Jason Scharf, brings a perspective no other interviewer has. He is an Alpha School parent, and he uses that to ask the questions no one else has put to Liemandt. What happens when the app breaks mid-rollout, why diagnostic scores terrify new parents, and whether the motivation model survives past year one.

But the bigger story is what Alpha and Austin's growing cluster of experimental schools are doing to the city itself. Families are relocating for schools that do not exist anywhere else. This education frontier is pulling learning scientists, game designers, and startup educators onto the same flywheel. The talent gravity is compounding in two complementary directions. The parents moving in are building and funding Austin's unicorns, and the kids coming out of these schools are the next generation of founders and operators.

Agenda

• 0:00 Intro and the Alpha School model 
• 5:44 Good AI versus bad AI in the classroom 
• 11:43 Diagnostic shock and what gifted students miss 
• 16:04 Motivation and life skills versus vocational skills 
• 21:08 Students making real money with AI tools 
• 23:39 Hiring guides at $100K 
• 26:34 The selection effect and founding families 
• 31:51 Running a school like a startup 
• 36:07 Iterating in public 
• 42:27 Motivational models that actually work 
• 47:01 Teaching kids to fail 
• 49:33 Austin as the education capital 
• 55:02 Education as the 20-year talent pipeline 
• 57:52 Millionaires in high school 
• 1:04:37 What college becomes next 

Guest Links & Bio
Joe Liemandt, Alpha School

Joe Liemandt is principal at Alpha School, a growing nationwide network of K-12 schools dedicated to creating self-driven learners. Using TimeBack™, an AI-driven education OS, Alpha students master academics in two hours per day, allowing them to spend their afternoons developing essential life skills, including leadership, teamwork, and entrepreneurship. His goal is to improve education for 1 billion students over the next 20 years.

In the 1990s, Mr. Liemandt dropped out of  Stanford to found Trilogy, where he developed the first AI product to achieve $1 billion in revenue. He brings decades of experience in AI and technology to transforming K-12 education.

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Austin Next Links: Website, X/Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn
Ecosystem Metacognition Substack