Tag: Business

Is Austin the Next Silicon Valley?

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This past week it was hard to tell if the folks braving the heat in downtown Austin were Pokemon Go players or NewCo Austin attendees. While searching for our next session, I started talking with another NewCo attendee, a young woman who recently moved to Austin. She graduated from an elite university, had gotten her first real job at a start up back East, and was lured to Austin because she heard from a friend there was a really good “scene” in Austin. Not a music scene or social scene, but a start-up scene.

Mellie Price, Executive Director of Technology Innovation at the Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin and Brian Monahan, NewCo Co-Founder at the NewCo Austin Kick Off

The pumping Sonos system that hits you entering the lobby of the Capital Factory and the frenetic swirl of earnest young people coming and going in Austin’s signature incubator makes it obvious that something cool is going on. But aside from the energy and the talent, NewCo Austin — produced by Capital Factory — showed that there are some true world-changing companies being built.

Flush with a $14M series A, the rock star team at Data.World is building the GitHub for linked, open data sets. Hungry Planet is leveraging innovation in LED lighting to revolutionize indoor farming. The Dell Medical School is the first tier 1 medical school to be launched in 50 years, and they are leveraging that opportunity to link to the innovation ecosystem in ways that will surely inspire the rest of the world.

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Jimmy Guterman

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Photo TEDXBoston

NewCo lost a colleague and a friend last week, and our team is still reeling from the news. Jimmy Guterman was our Executive Editor, but he was also our staff conscience, our questioning cynic, and our artful wit. Every day we’d wake up to his cheery puns and collegial encouragements on Slack — he worked on the East coast, most of us work in California. Jimmy wrote our Daily newsletter, which has grown by the thousands since he took it over. Each morning I’d be greeted by a cheery message from Jimmy: The Daily is in, with a link to the draft. And every day I’d begin to edit it, then find it needing nothing more than a quick check for typos — and even those were rare. Jimmy had found his voice in the Daily, and readers were responding.

But rather than eulogize him here, which others will do far better than we could later this week (he was a fixture amongst not only technology and business journalism, but also music criticism and production), we thought we’d publish some of the thoughts our team posted upon hearing of his passing. We’ll miss you Jimmy. You left too soon, and our world is diminished. We wish peace to your family and your loved ones.

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NewCo Five — How technology disrupted the truth

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The NewCo Five collects the five most important stories for the NewCo economy that our editors found over the past seven days

Photo by: Japanexperterna.se

1. How technology disrupted the truth … and can bring it back (Katharine Viner, The Guardian)

2. Facebook says Facebook’s lack of diversity isn’t Facebook’s fault (Georgia Wells, Wall Street Journal)

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A Deficit of Idealism: Tim O’Reilly on the Next Economy

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“The obligation, and the self‑interest of every company is to build a robust society.”

Tim O’Reilly has made studying the near future his full-time job, despite the fact he’s also in charge of a major technology publishing business, a venture investment firm, and countless conferences and events, all of which bear his name. All of his endeavors spring from a relentless curiosity around what the “alpha geeks” are doing — he’s something of a technological dowser, always looking for the next spring of fresh thinking. I was honored to be Tim’s partner in the Web 2.0 Summit conference for nearly ten years, and during that time I came to not only appreciate his unique brand of thinking, but also his desire to truly push the tech industry forward.

Given that tech is now driving change across all sectors of the economy, it’s in no way surprising that over the past few years, Tim has turned his attention to a scope larger than technology itself — to government, policy, and the global economy. His Next:Economy Summit explores all these issues and more each Fall. For the third edition of the Shift Dialogs, Tim stopped by the Nasdaq studios and we riffed for nearly an hour. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation — you can watch the video, which is edited down for length, here as well.

You recently told me that technology is in a crisis of trust. Can you unpack that for me?

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NewCo Five — Fewer clouds provides more evidence that climate change is underway

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The NewCo Five collects the five most important stories for the NewCo economy that our editors found over the past seven days

Photo: Ulrika

1. Turns Out That Fewer Clouds in the Sky Is Bad for the Climate (Eric Roston, Bloomberg)

2. Google’s free Wi-Fi might come at great cost to privacy (Nick Pinto, Village Voice)

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Brad Smith, President Microsoft: The Full Shift Dialogs Transcript

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“I think we’ve all learned.”


As part of the NewCo Shift Dialogs, I had a chance to interview Brad Smith of Microsoft. You can watch the video here, but because we had to cut it down for time, many fascinating portions of the conversation did not make it into the video. Below is the full transcript, with light editing for clarity.

As president you don’t have product responsibility, but you have a lot of corporate responsibility. It seems to me that you’re responsible for the kind of company that Microsoft is going to be, what it wants to be in the world. You have to understand input from the outside, listen to the needs of the inside, and bring the two together.

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NewCo Five — Zenefits is making it up to investors

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The NewCo Five collects the five most important stories for the NewCo economy that our editors found over the past seven days

Parker Conrad, CEO of Zenefits. Photo by JD Lasica.

1. Scandal-plagued unicorn Zenefits is making it up to investors by increasing their share and cutting its valuation (Katie Benner and Mike Isaac, New York Times)

2. Low wages are bad, but they’re not killing white men (Tim Fernholz, Quartz)

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NewCo Festivals

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Six Hidden Gems to See at NewCo’s Fifth Annual Bay Area Festival 2017


This coming February, we’re excited to celebrate the 5th anniversary of the Bay Area NewCo festival. Over 150 NewCo’s — from established players to scrappy startups — will open their doors and show how they’re transforming industries and shaping the future of business. While it’s certain that sessions at Slack, LinkedIn, Uber, and Pinterest will sell out early, here are six less well known, but truly fascinating companies I’m particularly excited to see. Read more …

Bay Area Companies in the Spotlight


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