Public transit is a challenge in Austin because you get, essentially, 3 months of over 100f daily highs. Anyone who can afford a vehicle with AC is highly incentivized to not take public transit. The experience of 1. having to put on sunscreen everywhere you go, 2. cooking in 100-105f, 3. Transit currently sucks[2] 4. No one wants to invest in infra it appears no one uses... It's a pretty difficult vicious cycle to break. The train on the west side being a notable exception.
Some other rapid fire surprises:
- Tech meetups were far fewer (more crypto and sales like than true communities)
- "Startup" often meant consumer/lifestyle brand than pure tech plays
- Anecdotally, there seemed to be culture kind of negatively reacting to those who wanted to try for more in their life, kinda like holding eachother down, maybe "Crab buckety" in the sense that a lot of people had small dreams, and couldnt understand or support those who had bigger dreams.
[1]: (some of the bigger names do have good pay, but lots of littler names have no clue what a nationally competitive offer looks like)
[2]: Crazy anecdote. One time I flew into austin south airport and was shocked to find an uber to my friend's house was ~$100 when it was normally $40. I was then incensed and aimed to try public transit. That meant i had to take an airport south to main terminal shuttle, wait for a bus that had very poor website and nearly no one could help me with. It did not go to the train line, so it was about a 1 mile walk there. I dragged my bag to the train only to find out they do not run on sundays? What kind of podunk town doesn't run the train 7 days a week? (it wasn't a holiday)
I'm curious what crab bucket community you were part of, that's not what I've seen. I do think capital factory is truly awful at fostering community and takes a lot of energy out of the ecosystem.
The biggest issue Austin has always had is outside of "trilogy mafia" and bazaar voice and maybe now homeaway there isn't really an active investor class, it's was a lot of tire kickers playing investor wasting people's time, even in the era of cheap money I knew many startups that couldn't get any funding until they flew out to CA.
Supposedly a lot of engineers moved here from other states during that period, maybe that's the problem?
idk, I know a lot of artists left, many have come back but not all.
I can speak to this a little. I'm from a Midwestern city and moved to SF and NYC for long periods.
In NYC, LA, SF, you are surrounded by literal billionaires, you walk past (or into) the HQ of Google or Meta or Twitter everyday. You are surrounded by the financial industry, or Hollywood, or the tech giants. You meet people who raised ten million dollars for a startup and that's just a Tuesday for them.
Being around so much success, so many unicorns, so much wealth, you somehow became a bit more optimistic about things and think those things could become possible for you or people you know.
If you spend your entire life in a place where the pinnacle of the local economy is a random agricultural F500 company or some trucking giant or maybe the local research medical hospital is the state's largest or wealthiest employer, you somehow just become a bit less optimistic about moonshots. The idea of the biggest success someone could realistically expect is creating something as big as Kickstarter, or as big as ButcherBox, or a competitor to Wordpress.
In NYC/LA/SF people are more likely to legitimately believe they might create the next Facebook/Twitter. And if you share with others that level of ambition, they might be doubtful but they won't necessarily see you as a fool. In a lot of smaller cities, you'll straight up be seen as a moronic delusional fool by sheer reflex.
But yeah maybe it's because I'm a native Texan but I have never considered taking public transport anywhere. Though that's really the norm outside of a handful of US cities.
And yeah i guess it's fairly central till north austin, and then it cuts west.
Try using caltrain or bart to go to a concert in SF.
A lot of folks i encountered do not think beyond "I need a job" and often they'd have a lot of change resistance that they exert to their circles of people who do want to grow/change.
think of cases like someone tries to upclass their income, the way they dress, the way they eat and then folks around them say things like "You're fine the way you are, why do you feel the need to change?" or "He thinks he's better than others" etc.
Those kinds of comments create a peer pressure to hold back. I found in the bay area there was a lot of folks who only cheered you on. Probably a form of selection bias because a lot of the country's talent/excited folks would go to SF Bay area for that exact scene.
The gravy train may have dried up, but with some realignment (realignment meaning putting off your new boat for a bit so you can pay your skilled machinists, fabricators, etc. more than $22/hour) we can tap back into what we've always been good at, with the resources we have, with the people we have and the resources they have, as long as we do it before everybody who still remembers how to do it dies.
If there are no numbers about the distribution, there can be no evidence of the article’s claim, hence it is useless and meant to evoke emotion.
