Written by Melissa Repko, Staff
Writer
October 13, 2017
Joshua Baer is a startup evangelist, but for years he’s focused
on one Texas city: Austin. He’s founder and chief executive of Capital Factory,
a startup hub in downtown Austin that mentors entrepreneurs, offers co-working
space and has an accelerator program for young companies. In August, he announced he’d expand his focus to Dallas and Texas’
other major cities to strengthen the state’s reputation as a
great place for startups.
As leader of Capital Factory, Baer has helped connect
entrepreneurs, investors and clients. Capital Factory has become one of the
most active startup investors in the state. It’s also become a destination for
notable visitors to Austin, including President Barack Obama, Obama Defense
Secretary Ashton Carter and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
As part of its expansion plan, Capital Factory is allowing
startups from all over Texas to participate in its accelerator without
relocating. Its Dallas program is based out of the Dallas Entrepreneur Center.
Baer said he chose to expand to Dallas first at the urging of Ben Lamm, a
Dallas entrepreneur and CEO of chatbot startup Conversable. Lamm used to live
in Austin and has employees in both cities. A few Dallas-area startups had
already snuck into Capital Factory’s program, too, Baer said.
Baer recently spoke about the early days of Capital Factory and
why the time was right to expand. His answers have been edited for brevity and
clarity.
How did you become interested in
entrepreneurship?
I always knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I remember very
clearly sitting outside the fraternity house my freshman year of college, as I
was about to pledge a fraternity and someone who ended up becoming a lifelong
friend asked me: "Why are you here? What do you want to do when you
graduate?" He reminded me recently that I turned to him and said: "I
don't really know what I want to do, but I think I want to be an entrepreneur.
I think I want to work for myself."
My family members are all entrepreneurs. They're not big,
successful business people. They're not tech entrepreneurs. They owned small
shops or retail stores. My father was a wedding photographer. But he worked for
himself. ... It made it possible and accessible.
Why did you feel Austin needed a place like the Capital Factory?
It's funny to say that because it's so different now than it was
eight or nine years ago, but back then there just was nothing going on. I got
to Austin in 1999, which was the end of the first dot-com boom. The mid-1990s
were a pretty payday in Austin. There were a lot of VCs and money going there.
Then, like everywhere else, it was hurt by the crash and everybody left. I got
there in the middle of the party and then, pretty quickly, the party ended.
Suddenly, there were very few resources to help entrepreneurs, and we didn't
have the robust ecosystem that we have now.
I reached out to Paul Graham at [Silicon Valley-based] Y
Combinator and said: "Looks like what you guys are doing
is awesome. Why don't you come to Austin?" At the time, they were in
Boston and the Silicon Valley. And they said,
“Sorry, we're not coming to
Austin anytime soon.” So I reached out to TechStars [another
startup accelerator in Boulder] and Brad Feld and said: "Brad, you guys
should come to Austin. Austin is a great market. Austin and Boulder have so
much in common." Brad was super nice but he said "Hey, we're not
doing that anytime soon." They now actually are in Austin because it's
many years later. ... But at the time, they weren't coming. They weren't
interested. So I thought: "If nobody else is going to do it, OK, fine.
I'll just go do it."
You recently announced plans to expand Capital Factory to other
cities in Texas. Why is the time right for that, and what do you hope to
achieve?
If you are a startup that expands geographically, where you sell
in a city and then you expand to another city and another city, which a lot of
startups do, it's hard and it's risky. In Texas, you can have a home base in
one city and operate in four of the 11 largest cities in the country from
that one base because you can get to all of those other cities within a day.
That's a really compelling value proposition.
It was also the right time for Capital Factory because, while
our work will never be done in Austin, I think we have achieved our initial
core goals of really creating an Austin community and a sense of momentum and
energy that's ready to be shared with the rest of Texas.
What advice do you give aspiring
entrepreneurs?
If you want to start a company, you have to become an expert at
something. A lot of people think they're just going to come up with some great
idea out of nowhere. That's not usually how it happens. Usually the people who
start companies are an expert at something.
The second thing is to meet a new person every day, but more
generally, to talk to as many people as possible. A lot of entrepreneurs' first
instinct is to keep everything to themselves, to be really quiet, to keep it a
secret, but nothing happens if you don't talk to anybody. And the last thing
is: opportunity comes from activity. So if you're stuck, do something. You are
going to learn a lot more. You are going to figure out what's right or what's
wrong faster by doing it rather than sitting around thinking about it.
JOSHUA BAER
Age: 41
Hometown: Born and raised in
Nashua, N.H.; lives in Austin
Education: Bachelor’s in computer
science from Carnegie Mellon University
Personal: Married with three
kids
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