Weekend Musings – Austin Edition

Downtown Austin

Hello, Happy Saturday and welcome to the very first “Austin Edition” of my Weekend musings. As you may have heard this week, Fashion Metric was selected as one of the 11 startups out of 1,500 applicants. Here’s a breakdown of how this compares to other acceptance rates:

2015 Acceptance Rates

  • Harvard – 6.2%
  • Stanford – 7.1%
  • MIT – 9.6%
  • Yale – 7.4%
  • Princeton – 8.2%
  • Techstars – 0.73%

While this may sound like I’m just blatantly bragging, I’m actually just incredibly proud of how far we have come. Running a startup is 8 million times harder than I thought. What I learned building my domain business didn’t apply and I instantly found that even after working for Sonos for 9 years I really didn’t know a thing about running a startup.

Fast-forward to today and I still don’t think I know that much, but I definitely know a lot more than I did back in 2012. We’re learning more every single day, and like every startup on the planet we’ve had our fair share of low, low, low lows, and high, high, high highs.

Techstars is the #1 startup accelerator in the world and the #2 in the US just after Y-Combinator (see full list).

Top Startup Accelerators

For me joining Techstars is really about two things, amazing mentorship and building lifelong relationships with amazing founders that are going through the same things that we are. Last week alone we met with more VC’s, Angel Investors, and previous founders with multiple exits that I have in my entire life. It’s intense, crazy, insane, we don’t sleep, there are never enough hours in the day, and I am loving every minute of it!

techstars-austin-group

What you see above took place on Monday night, it’s a game called Werewolf which seems to be pretty darn popular in the Austin startup community. On Wednesday we worked all day from morning until night and then had a founders meeting with all the teams at 10:10PM followed by Werewolf until about 2AM. This all happened the day before one of our most important days worth of meetings, yes, you learn to live without sleep quickly.

Also after working from home for the last 5+ years it is a big adjustment to work in an office everyday. That being said I think we were really ready for it, working from home can be isolating and it’s great to be working alongside 10 other awesome startups. It’s also very cool to have an office in the heart of downtown Austin.

Austin Music Scene

While we’ve only been in Austin for two weeks I can tell you that we are both totally in love with the city. We have spent a LOT of time in LA, SF and NYC and I can tell you hands-down that Austin has the best music scene with the most live music anywhere I’ve ever been. I guess that’s why Austin is known as the live music capital of the world!

Okay, so now it’s Saturday at 4:00PM and it’s time to go meet-up with the other founders for an evening event. I hope you’re all enjoying your weekend and hello from Austin!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton