I had been thinking Austin needed some kind of frontier-tech week when Andrew Côté announced that he was bringing Deep Tech Week here. I reached out almost immediately, and now I’m helping build it.
That gave us the excuse for this conversation, but the rabbit hole went much deeper. We are living through a moment when things that recently belonged mostly to science fiction are becoming companies and products you can actually encounter in the physical world.
That is where Andrew’s perspective gets especially useful. He has moved from engineering physics and fusion into shaping what is essentially a storytelling platform around the people trying to make these futures real. Austin is becoming one of the places where that transition is unusually tactile, where the imagined future is starting to become something you can walk into, touch, and build.
Agenda
- 0:00 Austin’s takeoff and cowboy futurism
- 10:00 Where physics meets economics
- 17:12 Industry, AI and abundant energy
- 28:18 The geography of deep tech
- 33:29 Underwriting hard tech
- 39:21 Ambition and the sci-fi future
- 46:47 Austin’s factories and permission
- 53:53 Orbit, beamlines and what comes next
Come to Austin Deep Tech Week
The week opens with a hardware showcase at The American Housing Corp on September 21. The Factory Crawl runs September 22–24, with stops including ICON, Neurophos and Emerald Cloud Lab. We close with a nuclear-powered party at the Aalo Atomics factory on September 25.
What is Austin Next?
Austin is building the new tech, cultural, and intellectual stack. The region is a living laboratory to answer a single question: How do you build a global innovation superpower?
Host Jason Scharf dissects innovation from the individual to the ecosystem. From the soundstage to the data center to the fab, we decode the mechanics of Austin's innovation ecosystem.
As Atoms, Bits, and Intelligence converge, we explore how Hard Tech scale, digital velocity, and creative density collide. This is an audit of the future. We map the physics of the flywheel so builders and investors can navigate the chaos.