Many cities want to be “the next Austin.” Cities send delegations here to tour our office parks and ask what’s in the water. Wrong question. The water’s fine, but that’s not the secret.
The secret is boring, and most cities don’t want to hear it: Austin didn’t become a tech hub because of tax incentives or even good weather (have you been here in August?). It became a tech hub because a handful of people decided, decades before anyone was using the phrase “ecosystem,” that they’d rather collaborate than compete. There was a vibe that together a better economy could be created.
Austin is the best case study for what to do (and some what not to do) as a growing community.
The Playbook Nobody Wrote Down
George Kozmetsky. Carol Thompson. Bill Cunningham. Pike Powers. (and many more people). If you are not from Austin and don’t recognize those names, that’s kind of the point. They weren’t building personal brands (although locally many were very well known). They were hosting coffee meetings, introducing strangers to each other, and treating “who else should you talk to” as a more important question than “what can you do for me.”
There’s no manual for this. No city council can legislate it into existence. You can’t buy it with an incentive package. It gets built one unglamorous conversation at a time, by people willing to go first, give first, and not keep score.
That’s the part most cities trying to replicate Austin get wrong. They fund the accelerator and skip the coffee. Or one organization or person tried to own the whole process.
Networking Is Not a Verb You Do at a Cocktail Party
Networking is not collecting business cards. It’s not the follow-up email nobody reads. It’s not showing up to an event, working the room for twenty minutes, and calling it “relationship building.”
Real networking is closer to gardening than hunting. You’re not going out to bag a contact. You’re planting things you may not see the benefit of for years. The Austin founders who became lifelong friends, co-founders, or angel investors for each other didn’t meet in a pitch meeting. They met because somebody who didn’t need anything from them made an introduction anyway.
If your city’s version of “networking” is a monthly mixer with a cash bar and no follow-through, you don’t have a network. You have an event calendar.
The Health Argument Nobody Uses in Economic Development Pitches
Here’s a stat that should show up in more city council presentations: people with strong social ties have meaningfully better odds of long-term health outcomes than people without them. We talk about “talent retention” like it’s a spreadsheet problem. It’s not. People stay in cities where they feel connected. They leave cities where they feel like a badge number.
Burnout in tech is not a mystery. It happens fastest in places where everyone is competing for the same jobs, the same funding, and the same attention, with no support network to absorb the hits. Austin’s edge was never that its founders worked less hard. It’s that they weren’t doing it alone.
What Your City Can Actually Do
You cannot copy-paste Austin’s culture. But you can copy the mechanism, which is simpler than people want it to be:
- Stop optimizing events for attendance numbers and start optimizing for follow-up conversations.
- Find the people in your city who already connect others for free, and put resources behind them instead of around them.
- Make “who should I introduce you to” a habit at every level of leadership, not just something junior staff do at check-in tables.
- Reward collaboration publicly. Competitive cultures don’t become collaborative because someone gives a speech about it. They change because collaborative behavior gets visibly rewarded.
The Austin Technology Council exists to bring people together. Community as infrastructure, not decoration. The cities asking “how do we get more startups” are usually asking the wrong question. The better question is “how do we get more people willing to help a stranger for no immediate return.” Solve that, and the startups follow.
Austin didn’t get lucky. It got patient, and it got generous, before either of those things paid off.
That’s replicable. It’s just not fast, and it’s not free of ego. Which is exactly why most places skip it.
The problem now is that people we see as leaders often do not like to show up at local events. They want private curated gatherings with others just like them. But that undermines how a community grows. If your city wants the best future, the community needs to live by these word “Real Leaders Show Up”. (they do not need to show up at everything, but they should show up often as some things).
Thom Singer is a keynote speaker on connection, community, and business relationships, and CEO of the Austin Technology Council.