A few days in Austin

I spent a few days in Austin during SXSW. Two things got me there. The first was the launch conference for Solving the World's Greatest Problems. The second was that Lumora was a finalist in Austin Christian University's $25,000 pitch competition, and the winners were announced during the week. A 16-year-old doesn't wander into SXSW by accident. I was invited, and I'm glad I said yes.

The conference had talks on global challenges. Tim Tebow spoke. So did Henry Kaestner and Justin Forsett. The premise is that faith, entrepreneurship, and innovation belong in the same conversation, which sounds like an odd mix until you sit through it. Nobody on that stage treated any one of those three as decoration for the others. They meant all of it.

Capital Factory House was the other half of the trip. The building runs on founders and investors and people in the middle of making something. I heard from people at Palantir Technologies and Lightedge, and I caught Joshua Baer during Meet the Drapers. If you want a fast education in how this industry actually talks, an afternoon there will do it.

Here's the part I actually want to write about. I'm 16. In almost every one of those rooms I was the youngest person there, and it wasn't close. So I mostly listened. That was fine with me. You learn the shape of a room faster with your mouth shut, and nobody there needed my take on anything. I needed theirs.

I've read about the startup world for a while now. Reading gives you the vocabulary. Standing in the room gives you everything else, like the pace of a conversation between two people who both know what they want, or how fast someone decides what they think of you. None of that survives translation into text. (Which is a strange thing to admit in a blog post.)

Thanks to Austin Christian University and Jake Oswald for the invitation. Lumora has work waiting for me back home, which is the good kind of problem. Next trip to Austin, I plan to do a little less listening.