Rushin’ in Austin

Our first full day together in Austin was a full day indeed.

We started at 8am with Christopher Doyle at Billd, chatting about subcontractor financing for How to Lend Money to Strangers, then crossed the city to spend a compelling hour and a half with Garrett Dailey from Lucid Consulting to chat about pitch decks and the psychology behind great ones, before being very kindly hosted at the home of John and Cherie Werner - the minds behind Eventual, Fiesta, and so much more. From there we linked us up with SkyFi’s inspiring Luke Fischer, and while that wrapped up the podcasting side of the day, we weren’t done quite yet, still in a rush we only had time to drop off our bags before heading to a networking session at CapitalFactory, an event from which we had to rush, in turn, to meet up with the Standford Angles and Entrepreneurs in Austin!

Our seventh, and thankfully final, Uber of the day took us back into downtown for Fern Brady’s show and a little bit of downtime. But while we took 7 Ubers, we didn’t get taken by 7 Uber drivers… much to our delight (and a little trepidation), two of our trips were in the full self-driving Waymos. It was an interesting experience, perhaps best shared with someone who can distract you from the fact there’s an empty seat and a ghost steering wheel, but to be honest, other than the odd juddry moment when it tried not to speed while going downhill and pulled in front of an emergency vehicle with its sirens going, the drive was incredibly smooth - but christo will share a full video of it shortly.