Things you learn in Texas: 1. The guy in the F-150 is worth a lot more than the dude in a Mercedes. 2. The small business owner from a state school is smarter than the majority of Ivy League grads. 3. There’s more racism in Connecticut country clubs than in rural honky-tonks. 4. Rednecks are more honorable than investment bankers. 5. The man who looks like he can’t afford the tab could buy the building. 6. They don’t ask for a deck before the meeting. 7. Prep school is where they send the problem kids. 8. If he’s wearing dusty boots, a 2XL Magellan shirt, a gold Rolex, and has a bulletproof case on his iPhone 12, you’ve already lost the negotiation. 9. “How’s business?” is a real question. “What do you do?” is a New York question. 10. Tips are bigger and egos are smaller. 11. A handshake still closes deals that a term sheet would kill. 12. The wealth is in real estate, oil, or a company nobody in Manhattan has ever heard of. 13. Your wife or daughter will never struggle finding help to change a tire. 14. Nobody asks where you went to college. 15. A weekend invitation to their ranch makes you part of the family.

No one dismantled Stoicism quite like Nietzsche did here.

Early takeaways from Austin Deep Tech Week: 1. Austin is a serious f*cking city. SF is still the center of gravity. LA has built an absolute monster around aerospace, defense and industrials. But after spending a few days in Austin, I'm increasingly convinced this city has structural advantages that the coasts underestimate. People I've met here seem to have one primary objective: Build. Heads down. Gas pedal pinned to the floor. Noticeably less obsession with looking important and more obsession with actually making shit work. Deep tech rewards exactly that mentality. 2. Texas being aggressively pro-business isn't some Twitter talking point. It's an actual competitive advantage. Heard versions of this repeatedly from founders and investors this week. Permitting. Regulation. Taxes. Energy. Land. Manufacturing. Expansion. When you're building software, you can abstract yourself away from geography. When you're building atoms, geography becomes part of your cap table. Every additional month waiting on a facility, permit, power connection or expansion is effectively dilution. Texas understand that speed matters. 3. The coastal migration isn't over. SF and LA still have unbelievable technical talent density, particularly at the earliest stages. But the requirements change when a deep tech company starts working. Now you need 100,000 square feet. Power. Testing. Manufacturing. Suppliers. Technicians. Hundreds of employees. Suddenly Texas starts looking a hell of a lot more attractive. And founders here don't seem nearly as worried about convincing talent to follow them as outsiders assume. 4. The next chapter isn't companies moving to Texas. It's companies starting here. Historically the playbook has often been: Coast → prove technology → raise capital → expand into Texas. I think that increasingly becomes: Texas → Texas → Texas. More technical founders will move here before starting the company. More pre-seed and seed companies will originate here. More headquarters will be planted here from Day 1. And that's when the flywheel gets interesting: Talent → startups → capital → exits → experienced operators → new startups. Once that loop starts compounding, ecosystems become very difficult to stop. 5. Austin feels significantly less distracted. There is obviously bullshit everywhere. Startups attract grift like flies to shit. But there's noticeably less keeping-up-with-the-Joneses energy here. Less worrying about who raised what round. Less optimizing for appearances. Less obsession with which VC follows you or which dinner you got invited to. More: Does the thing actually work? That cultural difference matters more than people realize. 6. “But the capital is on the coasts” is becoming a lazy argument. Have you ever heard of a f*cking airplane? It's 2026. If you're building a generational company in Austin and a great investor in SF wants into the round, they're getting on the plane. Great companies don't travel to capital. Capital travels to great companies. Austin already has serious institutional capital on the ground alongside a growing ecosystem of smaller funds. More capital will follow the companies. It always does. 7. Austin increasingly looks built for where deep tech is going, not where venture has been. Deep tech is becoming less about a handful of scientists sitting in a Bay Area lab and increasingly about deploying massive amounts of physical infrastructure. Factories. Energy. Robotics. Defense. Space. Advanced manufacturing. Data centers. Industrial systems. Those businesses eventually collide with the physical world. And the physical world cares about land, power, regulation, labor, logistics and speed. Texas has a lot of all six. SF still has the deepest venture ecosystem. LA has built an extraordinary deep tech machine. But Austin doesn't need to become either of them. It may be building something fundamentally different: A startup ecosystem optimized not just for inventing hard technology — but for actually industrializing it. That's a much more interesting proposition. Came into Austin Deep Tech Week thinking this was an important emerging hard tech ecosystem. Now thinking “emerging” might already be outdated. Ingredients are here. Talent is coming. Capital will follow. Unlike a lot of startup ecosystems I've visited, Austin feels like it actually wants you to build shit here. That's a hell of a tailwind 🏭🇺🇸 Finally - mad props @Andercot, @CaitlinCloud9, @Jason_A_Scharf + many others for putting this together & making this a kickass week!

Still hits the same

After being at SpaceX for 18 months, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to work anywhere else. No one moves faster or is more determined to win than we are. Business is the ultimate professional sport and we’re playing for the championship every single day