Austin: The Silicon Valley for Creative & Literary Entrepreneurs

Austin Texas is a very cool place. SXSW and an amazing live music scene. The HQ of Whole Foods and a major center of post secondary schools like UT Austin. It gets talked about as a rising tech center which it sort of is. But what is not talked about is that it’s really the center for Conversion Rate Optimization in Digital marketing and in the last decade, Content Creation Entrepreneurs. 

In Austin, it started off as a center for E-commerce and CRO. My friends & Conversion Rate Optimization experts like Peep Laja & Ryan Deiss but also giants like Brian Massey and the Eisenberg brothers. 

But starting in the 2010s onwards, we saw some impressive literary and content creation entrepreneurs show up there. Best selling book authors like Austin Kleon, Ryan Holiday and Tucker Max being most prominent. Others of note: Taylor Pearson, Srinivas Rao, The arrival of podcaster superstars Chase Jarvis, John Lee Dumas, Tim Ferriss and Joe Rogan really put Austin on the map here. This concentration of creative and literary entrepreneurial talent was also what has drawn the up and coming podcasting superstars like Chris Williamson. 

So just like how the San Francisco Bay Area is the place to be if you are in the Software, SaaS or Developer Tools space. Or New York for fintech, media or finance or even fashion. 

If you want to get good you have to go to the center of the network. Great people want to be around other great people. Specifically in their industry and craft.

You literally are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with. The collisions, the random meetings and serendipity that happens when these people are in the same place over a good period of time. This is the cluster effect that Anna Lee Saxenian ascribed to the rise of Silicon Valley as a technological center of technology. 

So if you want to figure out the future and see what the next emerging ecosystems will be, just track where the best and brightest of that sector are moving to. And go there. As I’ve said many times, place matters.