Themes of the Weekend

VentureWeekend was a smashing success and it wasn’t always clear that it would be. Big props to everyone who participated because at the end of the day, you answered the questions and concerns and you made it happen. Here were the themes of the weekend for me, what the weekend proved, and what this experiment tells us we must do here in Austin.

1. On Friday, 7PM, we were a group of 40+ strangers, sitting and eating awkwardly. 48 hours later, we were an enormous group of friends. The pictures, this blog, and the project we created is a testament to that fact. Name me another scenario (short of war or natural disaster) where you can achieve these kinds of results amongst people from close to a dozen academic disciplines and half a dozen cultures.
2. Can you get 40+ brilliant people in a room and make them do something other than just be brilliant? Can you actually get them to work together, to use each other’s talents and create something?
3. Austin exports talent like a 2nd or 3rd world country. The Computer Science and Engineering guys go to Silicon Valley. The business people go to Dallas, Houston, New York City. The law people go absolutely everywhere. We lose some of our most brilliant people because there is this idea that the biggest opportunities are in other markets.
4. The truth is that few other cities have the mix of creative, technical, and busines talent that Austin has. Being the live music capitol of the world, having one of the greatest Universities in the world, and having a beautiful city makes this city the right place to have the Talent capitol of the world.
5. Through programs like VentureWeekend we can show this wild mix of skilled and gifted people that together we can make Austin into an international city that offers an unparalleled access to talent, opportunity, and entertainment.

These are my reasons for why VentureWeekend rocked and this is my vision for turning Austin into a truly global talent capitol.

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