I have a lot of conversations about the economy. In conference rooms, in government offices, at accelerator demo days, at city halls from Austin to Zagreb.
Most of them end the same way: everyone in the room nods, someone says, “this is exactly what we needed to hear,” and then little changes. We need to ask why. As I considered who to talk to about Startup Ecosystems with first, of course the mind turns to the press or perhaps a notable startup influencer, one thinks of book sales and reach, but that’s not why I wrote and published; I wrote for me, from my experience, and for my community. So, when I ran into Thom Singer, CEO of the Austin Technology Council as we supported friends during SXSW, the answer was obvious, I want to talk to my home, I want the first questions to come from a leading voice of the Austin tech community, and I want my experience here to resonate first. The host of the Austin Tech Connect podcast sat down with me to talk about the book on Startup Ecosystems: Understanding Why Startups Thrive and Ecosystems Fail, he didn’t let me get away with easy answers, and I didn’t offer any.
Press play here, listen, and read on about why this matters.
Why Fix Startup Ecosystems
The Austin Technology Council has been holding Austin’s tech community together since 1992. ATC began as the Austin Software Council, founded by Dr. George Kozmetsky and the Austin Technology Incubator, as a grassroots effort to bring together entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, and civic leaders to support software startups and grow the tech community. Kozmetsky, for those who don’t know him, was one of the co-founders of Teledyne and the dean of UT Austin’s business school, not exactly a hobbyist. The ATC that Thom Singer now leads is the institutional successor to that original deliberate act of community design, and it’s part of a continental network: TECNA — the Technology Councils of North America, a federation of more than 60 highly collaborative technology councils and trade associations in the US and Canada that, in turn, represent more than 22,000 technology-related companies in North America.
This is for whom the book was written, regional leaders steering tech policy such as Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies‘ Dean Miller, Christina Fox from TechAlliance of Southwestern Ontario, and Technology Association of Iowa‘s Brian Waller. It was written for people like Sara Fraim, Deon Gordon, Kara Lowe, Chris Berry, Yvonne Pilon, Kelly Schulz, Larry Williams, Jennifer Young, and Michael Schutzler; yes, that’s a list dropping names but it’s intentional, these are the people who, alongside Thom Singer, are helping shape policy affecting the economy through technology, and I published to optimize that for entrepreneurs. These are the people I want you to connect with and support while they support us.
I raise this because the central argument of Startup Ecosystems is that ecosystem success is almost never accidental and almost always structural. The problem is never effort, and the problem is rarely intention; the problem is design. ATC got the design right early. Most cities are struggling to figure it out, and yet, we know what to do; we’ve learned what to do.
Thom opened our conversation by asking me what prompted the book: why now, why this, why put my years of this work into print. The answer is in what I wrote when the book launched: every city I’ve walked into with a whiteboard and a room full of earnest people asking the wrong questions, every founder I watched optimize for applause instead of customers, every policy meeting where the metrics were designed to avoid the truth rather than reveal it; all of that found its way into Startup Ecosystems. The book I wrote is the book I needed twenty years ago when I was the person in those rooms trying to figure out why the stated goal and the actual outcome kept diverging so dramatically.
This is not the kind of startup book that tells you to hustle harder or believe in yourself until the market cooperates because when we’re honest about the fact that almost all founders will fail, we need to set aside encouragement and address the causes of that. What I wrote is closer to what one early reader described as “an operating manual,” specifically: an architectural examination of why startup ecosystems fail structurally along with what to do differently.
I get in trouble in some rooms and standing ovations in others. Both reactions confirmed the thesis.
One of the threads Thom and I pulled on in the interview is something that connects the book to two others that have landed recently, and that I think belong in the same conversation. The first is Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. Duckworth is a University of Pennsylvania psychologist whose research established, empirically, what most people in entrepreneurship claim to already know but consistently fail to practice. As she put it in her TED Talk (which has been viewed tens of millions of times and is worth rewatching if you haven’t revisited it recently), “one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn’t social intelligence. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years.”
The startup world applies Duckworth to founders, and reasonably so. What almost nobody applies it to is the ecosystem itself. The organizations that build durable innovation infrastructure (tech councils, accelerators, incubators, economic development bodies) are not gritty. Most of them are optimized for annual funding cycles, press releases, and metrics that can be achieved without fundamentally changing whether startups thrive. The ATC, having operated since 1992, we find exceptions to that. The organizations that are not still around in three years, five years, ten years after their launch press release was written? Those were enthusiasm dressed up as grit. Duckworth’s research is blunt about the distinction: “enthusiasm is common; endurance is rare.”
The second book is Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love by Bill Gurley, which I have to disclose I have a personal appreciation for; Gurley is Texan, UT Austin MBA, Benchmark general partner, and a person whose thinking I’ve followed for years. I’ve written about him and his intellectual influence on how I think about venture markets isn’t something I’m shy about. Gurley’s research shows that 6 in 10 people are likely to regret their career choice years down the road. Family pressure and a broken education system push too many young people onto a conveyor belt where the destination is a small subset of idealized “safe” jobs.
The culmination of Gurley’s decade-long project to unpack the components of success, Runnin’ Down a Dream identifies six principles to flourish in your chosen career: the antidotes to career regret – Chase your curiosity, Hone your craft, Develop mentors in your field, Embrace your peers, Go where the action is, and Always give back. Go where the action is resonates differently when you’ve spent two decades watching founders try to build companies in ecosystems that were not designed for them to succeed in. The best founders eventually leave those places. They move to Austin, or New York, or to wherever the density of capital, talent, mentorship, and peer networks is high enough to actually compound their effort. Too many founders stay and wonder why it’s so hard, so we’re here to answer that.
Gurley and Duckworth, read together, make the same argument from two directions: the individual who succeeds is the one who finds the thing they are genuinely obsessive about, commits to it with marathon-length stamina, goes to where the best peers and mentors are, and builds the relational infrastructure to make that commitment sustainable. Substitute “startup ecosystem” for “individual” and the argument doesn’t change. What Thom Singer has built at the ATC, and what TECNA represents across 60-plus member organizations, is exactly that peer infrastructure; the ecosystem equivalent of Gurley’s principle that embracing your peers is one of the six non-negotiable foundations of sustained success.
I’ve been asked before what I think most people get wrong about Austin specifically. I’ll give you the same answer that drove the book: Austin’s success is frequently cited as inspiration for other cities and almost never correctly diagnosed as a model. People see the outcome and try to replicate the surface, the coworking spaces, the startup week, and the announcement about being the next Silicon Valley (a phrase that should be retired by ordinance at this point), without understanding the decades of accumulation of deliberate design decisions that made Austin’s ecosystem structurally different. Austin’s innovation economy today is the result of collaboration between organizations like ATC, S3 Ventures, the Chamber, Austin Technology Incubator, Triton Ventures, LiveOak Venture Partners, Founder Institute, AngelouEconomics, IC2, Silverton Partners, Opportunity Austin, The University of Texas, and thousands of visionary contributors. You can’t replicate that in three years. You can, however, understand what it is and start building the right thing with the right time horizon; which is precisely what Startup Ecosystems is designed to help with.
The book doesn’t tell Austin it has nothing to learn (that’d be both comfortable lie and a ridiculous assertion of any city). It tells every ecosystem, including Austin, that complacency is the mechanism by which successful economies stall. If we’re being frank, some of Austin’s messages have been a little disjointed from reality; the brand of “Austin” can exceed the realities on the ground. I’ve said that before, intentionally provocatively, because that’s the kind of conversation that makes an ecosystem actually function rather than merely perform. A community that can’t have that conversation is a community on its way to becoming a case study in my second edition.
The Thom Singer I spoke with on Austin Tech Connect has been writing books about relationships and networking, running ATC, and hosting a podcast that has put him in conversation with an enormous range of people who are building Texas; he came to the interview with genuinely curious questions and that’s what I wanted first. Singer has had a long career promoting community, collaboration, and conversations, and his podcast has featured interviews with over a thousand business leaders, focused on discovering how the most successful people get farther across the gap between potential and results. That framing, the gap between potential and results, is essentially the same problem Startup Ecosystems is trying to solve at a regional level. Potential is not the scarcity. Design is.
If you are a founder in Austin, or anywhere else, trying to understand why your ecosystem does or doesn’t work for you, go listen to the episode. If you are an investor who has ever sat in an economic development meeting wondering whether any of this activity actually produces better outcomes for the companies you’re backing, you too, it’s right here. If you are a policymaker or economic development professional who is still measuring success in jobs announced rather than companies that survived their fifth year, definitely go listen to the episode, and then maybe sit with the discomfort of what that implies about the metrics you’re currently using.
The book is on Amazon. The episode is on Austin Tech Connect. There are rooms full of nodding heads still out there. The question is whether you want to be in it, or whether you want to understand why it keeps producing the same outcome.
