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Austin Next

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

technology management

All Episodes

76:56

Can You Engineer Serendipity?

Austin Next ·

2026/10/07

Serendipity 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 Solomon of ATX Writing Club are building very different physical communities in Austin. We get into fast and slow serendipity, how rooms get curated, why members need roles, and where AI can help without replacing human judgment.Along the way, the conversation turns into a jam session as they actively steal each

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56:48

The Future Is Actually Starting to Happen | Andrew...

Austin Next ·

2026/09/16

I 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 I’m helping build it.That gave us the excuse for this conversation, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We are living through a moment when things that recently belonged mostly to science fiction are becoming companies and products you can actually encounter in the physical world. That is where Andrew’s perspective

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56:06

The Army Is Adapting to the New Speed of War | Matt...

Austin Next ·

2026/09/10

The 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 faster. The deeper question is what an institution as large as the Army has to change when technology cycles collapse from years to weeks. That means accepting more failure up front, shortening the distance between a problem and a decision, getting real-world feedback before a product is fully baked, and building a

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58:42

What This Unlikely Deal Shows About New Austin | Max...

Austin Next ·

2026/07/16

Sesh 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 and 8VC's Jake Medwell start with the logic that makes the deal make sense. Sesh holds a legal moat most competitors can't cross for years, and it earns software-like margins on a physical product. From there the conversation opens into a bigger question about where ambitious companies belong, and why more of them are

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40:08

Live from Hack Club Stasis: The Teenage Hardware...

Austin Next ·

2026/06/30

A 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 physical world instead of code in the digital. The organization behind it is Zach Latta's Hack Club, the hackathon was created by seventeen-year-old Meghana Madiraju, and Blake Liberman of 021 Ventures is why it happened in Austin. The conversation ranges from how that collapse happened to what teenagers do with the

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72:39

Love Conquers Fear: The Last Barrier to Abundance Is...

Austin Next ·

2026/06/18

Brett 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 already on a clear technological path, and the thing most likely to stop us is the fear center we carried off the savannah. He walks through the four technologies he calls the Superfecta: AI, robotics, quantum computing, and brain-computer interfaces, and why they land together rather than in sequence. The stakes

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75:59

Austin: From Counterculture to Culture | Karen...

Austin Next ·

2026/06/11

Austin'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 design publication with no editorial background and turned it into one of the city's most consequential platforms for naming what's already happening. We ask why Austin's design talent operates one neighborhood away from its tech talent and neither knows the other exists. What the city is telling people and the

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64:43

Revisited: How Specificity in Vertical AI Rewrites...

Austin Next ·

2026/05/21

Updated 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 epilogue. A year on, the tension has only sharpened. Specificity is the differentiator when inches matter. Nick Tippmann, founding partner of TipTop VC, explains how vertical AI is rewriting the software industry by going deeper instead of wider. From the transition beyond SaaS to the gray zone between foundational models

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71:46

What Building in Austin Actually Feels Like Right Now...

Austin Next ·

2026/04/29

This 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 health. Instead it became our off the record conversations, but behind the microphone. An unfiltered field report on what it actually feels like to build a startup in Austin right now. The talent math, hunting for mid-size office space, the venture culture, Austin vs Miami, the press gap, and the political friction

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72:05

The First Thing Built on the Moon Will Come from...

Austin Next ·

2026/04/23

ICON 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 fundamentally new ways to build. Jason Ballard, ICON's founder and CEO, and Will Hurd, the former CIA officer, congressman, and OpenAI board member who just joined as President of ICON Prime, came on to lay out what happens when a non-consensus thesis held for eight years starts to materialize in the real world. The

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72:18

Reinventing School Is Accelerating Austin's Talent...

Austin Next ·

2026/04/15

Joe 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 host, Jason Scharf, brings a perspective no other interviewer has. He is an Alpha School parent, and he uses that to ask the questions no one else has put to Liemandt. What happens when the app breaks mid-rollout, why diagnostic scores terrify new parents, and whether the motivation model survives past year one

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51:57

We're Living Through the Cyberpunk Era of War | Jim...

Austin Next ·

2026/03/24

Directed 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 this moment, and the second and third-order effects most people aren't tracking yet. AI can't be bolted onto legacy systems and expected to perform. It demands a blank sheet of paper. New design philosophy, new economics, new operational infrastructure. The old model of pitching a PowerPoint and billing for

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62:11

Innovation Ecosystems Are Inherited | Nait Jones

Austin Next ·

2026/03/18

The 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 2011 at the Web 2 moment and moved to Austin during the pandemic, argues that the fundamentals have now caught upJones traces what he calls a spiritual succession. A direct genealogy from Arthur Rock's invention of venture capital through Fairchild, Intel, Dell, and UT research into the current generation of robotics,

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72:36

The Western Canon in the Age of Vibe Coding | Carlos...

Austin Next ·

2026/03/11

American 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, brings a statistician's precision to the diagnosis, tracing the causal chain from dropped standards to credential collapse while building an institution with no tuition and no government money, staking its survival entirely on student outcomes 20 years out. The conversation moves from the financial architecture of a

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47:57

Bootstrap vs. VC: Speed Costs Control | Rob Taylor,...

Austin Next ·

2026/02/19

The 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 company, and whose incentives will shape your options at every inflection point. Rob Taylor has lived both realities. He spent years building venture-backed companies, raising millions in institutional capital. His brother Chris bootstrapped a company for 20 years and owned nearly 100% at exit. They sold their

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51:50

Patient Capital in the Age of the $10B Seed | Brian...

Austin Next ·

2026/01/21

The 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, Brian Smith and S3 Ventures are executing a "Discipline Arbitrage." They argue that the real returns in AI will not come from the massive CapEx spenders, but from the application layer that solves boring, regulated, enterprise problems. This episode audits the structural risks of the current AI wave and explains why

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67:33

The Semiconductor Moment for the Mind

Austin Next ·

2026/01/14

The 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 stent or a more advanced catheter. This is a category error. As Matt Angle (Paradromics) and Connor Glass (Phantom Neuro) articulate its not a product, its the next modem.The parallel is the internet in 1993. We are moving from a low-bandwidth, text-based era of biology into a streaming, high-fidelity era. This shift

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63:02

Combat as the Minimum Viable Product | Cix Liv, REK

Austin Next ·

2025/12/10

Cix Liv challenges the Silicon Valley consensus that humanoid robots belong in the warehouse or the battlefield. By explicitly rejecting the “Terminator” military arbitrage and the “Jetsons” domestic servant model, REK validates a new thesis: entertainment is the only sector where the reliability is acceptable and economically viable. The discussion dissects the unit economics of robot combat, the “context window” required for mainstream sport adoption, and why American “lawyer culture” is

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51:49

Is The Venture Capital Model Broken? | Andrew Romans,...

Austin Next ·

2025/12/03

The 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 capital from geography and a restructuring of how liquidity is manufactured. In this episode, Andrew Romans of 7BC Venture Capital argues that we have entered a new era where geopolitical friction is forcing a renaissance in hard tech, hedge funds have permanently altered the growth stage, and the "Series A" playbook

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83:38

Zachary Levi | Can Austin Build an Ark for Human...

Austin Next ·

2025/10/01

How 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 one’s life mission to concrete plans for land and film incentives. The central question of our time is whether we ride the AI tsunami or get swept under it. Highlights00:00 Opening and Zachary Levi’s journey to Austin05:53 Calling vs discovery13:48 Build the ark and fix Hollywood25:13 Community, work, and

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