Formally known as Austin Startup Week, Austin Tech Week provides founders, funders, and freelancers the opportunity to meet, connect, and share with one another. This year was my first year in attendance and there were many things about this conference that I liked better when compared to many others. I made a lot of new friends and connections around the startup scene in Austin and learned a lot about sizing markets and strategies to approach fundraising. In this post, I share a bit about my experience, the sessions I chose to attend, and some of my key takeaways from the conference.
Day 1 was a short day for me. With my nutritionist appointment in the morning and therapy in the afternoon, I was only able to make it to a couple of events. After a quick look, I decided to attend some breakout sessions where we split off into smaller groups and talked about specific areas of interest.
Since I showed up to the first session late, I wasn’t sure where I should go. The spaces weren’t marked for late-comers, so I dropped in on one of the smaller groups which wound up discussing BioTech in Austin. While I didn’t have much to contribute, it was interesting hearing about the different opportunities available such as ACC’s BioScience Incubator.
For the second breakout session, I went to the solopreneurship group as it’s very relevant to me. After a quick round of introductions, the facilitators opened the space up to questions and my hand shot up. I was particularly interested in opportunities and tools for non-dilutive funding. Natalie Poindexter (who specializes in this space) pointed us to her website which contains tons of resources for approaching grant writing and Greta, her AI chatbot that can help. I was curious how Greta compared to other solutions, so I decided to compare the results of a few different LLMs. Greta is more succinct and provides more insight than existing models.
Day 2 was filled with a lot of interesting sessions, many of which were geared towards newcomers in the space. I dropped in on a session or two, but the content they were covering were things I had already picked up on over the last couple of months of fundraising.
The one session I was really looking forward to that day was on Micro-storytelling from Sun Yi. For a long time, I’ve struggled to figure out how to leverage social media. In this session, Sun talked about the importance of being open, honest, and authentic. This really resonated with me as I have opened up about my struggles with mental health in recent posts. He also talked about how the type of content you post can impact the engagement with your post. For example, a user on Instagram is more likely to engage with a carousel than read through a long video with small text.
Most of Day 3 for me was spent on fundraising. After spending a couple of months speaking with VC firms and angel investors from across the country, hearing from partners on a panel offered a unique insight into fundraising. I really enjoyed the New VCs on the block panel (composed both of men and women) as they dove into a number of different topics from what they invest in, what the ideal stage is for each firm, their average check size, how they evaluate companies, and so much more. This session really confirmed my experience and frustrations from speaking to incubators amd accelerators, VC firms, and angel investors (but more on this another time).
Day 4 was another short day for me, but I got a lot of value out of the sessions I attended. The first was a diverse panel of partners from both big and small investment firms. They shared a bit about where they see AI going and what they look for when investing in AI based startups. I think many people expect these startups to be developing new solutions but many investors are looking to see how companies leverage AI to build their startups, particularly in the early days of the company.
One speaker talked about approaching things from first principles (something I very much agree with when it comes to startups). I had the opportunity at the end to ask him how to advocate for that when pretty much every investor wants to see SaaS and doesn’t seem interested in anything else. Their advice was to go deep into education mode and try to educate as much as possible. It wasn’t quite the answer I was looking for as it doesn’t address the behavior from the investor side.
Later in the day, I attended a colleague’s session on expanding to international markets. Despite the title sounding very enterprise-y, the content was very much geared toward smaller startups, spanning from the idea phase all the way to those who are established. We learned about Global Chamber, a network of businesses around the world, and how it can help our companies expand into different markets. A particularly useful piece of advice was to consider how your brand can be positioned in any market around the world. “Think global, but start local” was something that immediately came to mind.
Room for Improvement
Every day of the conference concluded with a happy hour, which offered both alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages (super appreciated as someone who struggles with addiction). These happy hours were quite often outside with music, which made it very difficult to hear one another. Additionally, attendees were expected to self-organize and connect. A very simple improvement here would be to offer interest stickers (AI, BioTech, SaaS, Looking for, etc) and table flags to help individuals congregate. We see this at many other conferences to help connect like-minded folks who struggle in overwhelming social situations.
CapitalFactory is a staple amongst the startup community here in Austin, but this event has started to outgrow the space they have available. After Day 1, they stopped allowing standing space in rooms and there were quite often lines of 100+ individuals out the door to get into rooms for talks. Some talks were live-streamed to other rooms in the space, but not all of them. As a result, many folks were unable to attend talks that they were interested in.
Finally, there were a couple speakers that made some rather sexist statements. Many laughed their comments off, but I got up and left. I’ve dealt with people who’ve made those same comments about women in software engineering and I won’t tolerate it anymore. While there isn’t anything I can do about their behavior, I’ve added them to my list of people who I will never take money from.
Despite the desired improvements, I really enjoyed myself at this conference. I learned a lot from experts in the field, reconnected with some folks from previous companies, made a lot of new connections and long term friendships that I look forward to fostering. Until next time. ~ Ciao bella