About this podcast
Austin is building the new tech, cultural, and intellectual stack. The region is a living laboratory to answer a single question: How do you build a global innovation superpower?
Host Jason Scharf dissects innovation from the individual to the ecosystem. From the soundstage to the data center to the fab, we decode the mechanics of Austin's innovation ecosystem.
As Atoms, Bits, and Intelligence converge, we explore how Hard Tech scale, digital velocity, and creative density collide. This is an audit of the future. We map the physics of the flywheel so builders and investors can navigate the chaos.
Episodes
The newest 20 of 185 episodes
- Can You Engineer Serendipity? · 1 h 16 min · Episode 185Serendipity generally looks accidental. These three builders spend a lot of time trying to make it happen. Evan Baehr of Arena Hall, Chris Taylor of Red Fridge Society, and Zac…
- The Future Is Actually Starting to Happen | Andrew Côté, Deep Tech Week · 57 min · Episode 184I 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…
- The Army Is Adapting to the New Speed of War | Matt Willis, Army FUZE · 56 min · Episode 183The 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…
- What This Unlikely Deal Shows About New Austin | Max Cunningham (Sesh) & Jake Medwell (8VC) · 59 min · Episode 182Sesh 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…
- Live from Hack Club Stasis: The Teenage Hardware Frontier Lands in Austin · 40 min · Episode 181A 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…
- Love Conquers Fear: The Last Barrier to Abundance Is Our Own Fear | Brett Hurt · 1 h 12 min · Episode 180Brett 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…
- Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen Blashek, Austin Home Magazine · 1 h 15 min · Episode 179Austin'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…
- Revisited: How Specificity in Vertical AI Rewrites Industries | Nick Tippmann, TipTop VC · 1 h 4 min · Episode 178Updated 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…
- What Building in Austin Actually Feels Like Right Now | Will Johnson & Alex Cohen · 1 h 11 min · Episode 177This 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…
- The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from Austin | Jason Ballard & Will Hurd, ICON · 1 h 12 min · Episode 176ICON 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…
- Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent Flywheel | Joe Liemandt, Alpha School · 1 h 12 min · Episode 175Joe 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…
- We're Living Through the Cyberpunk Era of War | Jim Rebesco, CEO, Striveworks · 52 min · Episode 174Directed energy weapons, autonomous drones, and combat AI agents are not just real. They are deployed. Jim Rebesco, cofounder and CEO of Striveworks, breaks down what's driving…
- Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones · 1 h 2 min · Episode 173The hype that landed on Austin in 2021 was correct and at the same time ahead of the curve. Nait Jones, serial founder and former a16z partner who arrived in Silicon Valley in…
- The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos Carvalho, President, University of Austin · 1 h 12 min · Episode 172American universities stopped optimizing for students a long time ago. The University of Austin was built as a direct counter to that failure. Carlos Carvalho, its president…
- Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor, Silverton Partners · 48 min · Episode 171The decision to bootstrap a business or raise venture capital is not just financial. It is physics. You are choosing which system to operate within, which rules will govern your…
- Patient Capital in the Age of the $10B Seed | Brian Smith, S3 Ventures · 52 min · Episode 170The current venture market is defined by a dangerous decoupling of capital from reality. While the industry chases $10B seed valuations and trillion-dollar infrastructure bets…
- The Semiconductor Moment for the Mind · 1 h 7 min · Episode 169The market is mispricing the human brain. Some Investors view Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) and other neurotech as the next iteration of the medical device, a slightly better…
- Combat as the Minimum Viable Product | Cix Liv, REK · 1 h 3 min · Episode 168Cix Liv challenges the Silicon Valley consensus that humanoid robots belong in the warehouse or the battlefield. By explicitly rejecting the “Terminator” military arbitrage and…
- Is The Venture Capital Model Broken? | Andrew Romans, 7BC · 52 min · Episode 167The venture capital model of the last two decades, characterized by the "30-minute rule" and the race to a quick IPO, is obsolete. We are witnessing a fundamental decoupling of…
- Zachary Levi | Can Austin Build an Ark for Human Creativity? · 1 h 23 min · Episode 166How do we nurture and protect the most human endeavors of creation and discovery? Zachary Levi joins us to discuss calling, technology, and a creative Ark in Austin. We move from…
