Congratulations to Bryan Menell for landing an interview with Fast Company about Austin’s startup ecosystem, as well as the background contributors to Austin being a great place to start a company.

I’ll boil it down to what I think matters most:

1. Great quality of life.
2. Abundant educated workforce
3. Abundant housing
4. Access to funding
5. Great ecosystem to support entrepreneurs (especially first-timers) and startups

Great quality of life is in the eye of the beholder- some like Austin for the weather (and some hate it), some like Austin for the music (and some hate the noise), some like it because it is “Weird” (and some hate the weirdness), some like the abundant water recreation (and some people prefer dry land).  Some people even like UT sports events!  (And some really really don’t)  Almost everyone likes the food in Austin.

The point is, there’s something for everyone, and usually more than one something. I think the quality of life in Austin retains people who otherwise might move: when they get laid off, when they pursue another job opportunity, etc.  In fact many people return to Austin after flirting with the Bay Area or Boston.

Bryan’s list of startups only scratched the surface.  What I find interesting about Austin is the diversity of businesses that have been started: furniture,  groceries, consumer websites, enterprise software, chips, food and beverage firms, ad firms, music venues, ticket sales, music promoters, manufacturing, biotech, batteries, green building.  And I’m still just scratching the surface still.  I think you get this diversity in Austin because of the background support for entrepreneurship, and the willingness of the workforce in Austin to bet on startups and work in them. Well that, and because you can work at a startup and then play with your band at the Saxon Pub.

The news this morning in Austin (besides the chill wind blowing here today) is that BMC just bought local startup Phurnace.  Additional coverage from Austin Startup and Redmonk.    There are a few friends and former colleagues over there, and I wish them well at the new firm!  There have been a flurry of IPOs and (mostly) acquisitions in Austin lately, which will hopefully presage a new round of interesting startups growing up in our town.

A funny thing happened the other day on the way to the hotel.

I’m commuting to San Francisco for a really interesting application of BPM technology to customer service scenarios for a company that doesn’t sell product – they sell an experience – a process, if you will – to both sellers and buyers of certain goods.  Just working with a company that thinks of their process as their product is refreshing enough, and makes this a very interesting project to me.

Because this project is in San Francisco, there’s really no need to have a rental car to drive around.  Its about $45/day for parking, and if you don’t mind walking a few blocks, and taking BART up from the airport, everything is essentially walking distance.  On Monday I had plans to meet up with an old friend from Stanford, who coincidentally also worked with me at our first employer, Trilogy.  With plenty of time to spare I was walking from the customer’s office to my hotel, which takes me past the headquarters of Vast, where several other friends from Austin and Trilogy work.  As I walk by, I notice an old colleague in the window, so I knocked and he invited me in and we had a great conversation about life, business, the future.  Along the way another gentleman in the office walked over and asked if we could give him some feedback on a pitch he was planning, to promote a creative-commons approach to user-data management.  And we then spent the next 30 minutes hashing out what this meant in the context of Facebook, iTunes playlists, and other types of user-generated content that, he contends, users should have the right to port, move, export, share. The next day he was headed to a conference to try out these ideas on a broader, critical audience. I was really impressed by the depth of thinking on the subject, and how well he could turn our questions into opportunities to clarify the pitch. Good stuff.

After that conversation, I headed back up to the hotel, and met my old friend for dinner.  We walked right past Vast again on the way to the restaurant, and had a good 3-hour discussion over dinner at Town Hall Restaurant (highly recommended, I might add).

I relay this story not because it is that relevant to the world of BPM, but because it touches on something immensely important – the value of your network.  The odds of me running into someone and having such an educational discourse on identity and user data management in the new world order is pretty low outside of the Bay Area.  And coming into contact with new and different ideas and perspectives is part of what makes the software scene so vital in San Francisco.  I’m convinced that at least part of that is due to the “walkability” of the city.  Although you can get similar effects in any city with good gathering spots – be it a coffee shop, a burrito joint, or a local pub.  And in South Bay, it isn’t so walkable, but there are great meet-up spots like Hobee’s, and clusters of companies in Palo Alto or in other parts that provide this same walking-distance effect.  But it isn’t just a story about the network effect in the Bay Area.  After all, the folks I was meeting up with are transplants from my current home town, Austin.  The power of networking in software circles in Austin is pretty incredible to me.  Very small degrees of separation, and a high degree of willingness to share, cross-hire, cross-promote.  Even tighter than the Austin network, that Trilogy Alumni network is quite cohesive.

If I may offer some perspective that 15 years in the business world has given me… Building your network of valued friends, coworkers, colleagues, peers – this is part of the process of building a career.  It is so important to nurture the people you are connected to, and to be open to the opportunities, insights, and perspectives they will offer you over time.  If your old firm doesn’t have an alumni network or mailing list, start one.  I’ve been managing one of these lists for 8 years now, and the personal satisfaction has far exceeded the investment of my time.

Also, when you travel for work as much as I do, you get a chance to refresh your relationships in person, and not just over email and phone and twitter.  It is so important to take advantage of those opportunities.  Meeting with my old friends and colleagues and hearing about their lives and careers is part of what recharges me and inspires me to keep working on the vision of bp3 – “a business process company”.  It’s also part of what helps you establish place and belonging when you are away from home for too long.

I just want to take a moment to thank good friends who take time out of their lives to meet with me on short notice – or even when I just knock on their window passing by – and please allow me to return the favor and entertain you in Austin, Texas if your travels bring you our way.

Several sources have reported and commented on American Airlines‘ decision to end the Nerd Bird, an iconic flight (if ever there was such a thing) between Austin and San Jose, the respective tech capitals of Texas and California. This direct flight has tied these two tech communities together in ways that are hard to explain, but a quote from the Statesman’s article today does an admirable job if you read between the lines of these statistics:

In 1996, Fast Company magazine surveyed passengers on one Nerd Bird flight and found that 75 percent carried a laptop, 56 percent carried a pager, 52 percent carried a cell phone and 12 percent carried a personal digital assistant. Thirty-five percent said they took the flight at least once every two weeks, and 58 percent had a favorite seat.

If you take a minute to think back to your life in 1996, I think you’ll realize how remarkable these statistics are.  I was one of these laptop-toting high-tech travelers back then, but even I didn’t have a cell phone yet.  And in 1996, you might pay $1000 for 16MB (yes, MegaBytes) of RAM in your laptop… Laptops were not cheap.  I flew the route so often that I recognized the crew and pilots more often than not, and many of the passengers.  One pilot’s friendly banter got a little stale when he woke me up with the PA system to tell us that if we looked out the left side of the plane we could see the grand canyon… on a clear day.  It was cloudy.

The Austin-American Statesman drew 44 comments to their posting online, most of them irate or reflecting disbelief.

The official line is that the route is unprofitable.  Although I don’t fly the route regularly anymore, I’ve never been on this flight and not had every seat filled.  I think the level of frustration expressed in the comments reflects the common sense most consumers would apply to this problem:  if you’re flight is full, and you’re not making money, raise your prices.  I think, instead, AA is looking at their system-wide profits and they see removing this flight as a way to increase utilization on Austin to Dallas flights that aren’t all filled to capacity, as well as Dallas to SJC flights that aren’t filled to capacity – in other words, this change is likely not about the AUS->SJC flight.  It is likely about the other network effects of the change.

But all is not lost.  While there is now no direct flight to the San Jose Airport (SJC), it seems ripe for Southwest to start running that route given that they are both the largest carrier in and out of Austin (in terms of flights and passengers), as well as the largest or second-largest carrier out of San Jose (in terms of flights and passengers).  And in the meantime, JetBlue flies a great flight between Austin and San Francisco (SFO), with 2 spacious seats on each side of the aisle, a DirecTV tv on every seat, and brand-new planes.  The only problem is that they need to add a second flight per day – currently they only run an evening flight from AUS to SFO, and a morning flight from SFO to AUS, which cuts down on travel options if you originate in Austin.

I used to fly American quite a bit out of Austin, and one of the big reasons was that they provided a lot of nonstop flights, plus the ability to get almost anywhere through DFW.  However, over the years the numer of nonstop flights offered by American actually decreased, while the total number of nonstop flights from Austin has increased (reaching a peak of 39 out-of-state nonstop destinations in 2008).  A few of those flights have been cancelled since then, so the number might be 35 or so now.

But as American has pulled back from direct flights, others have stepped up.  For example, American cancelled their direct flight to Seattle (adding 2 hours to a 4 hour flight by switching in Dallas).  But Alaska Air has picked up that route.  American cancelled direct flights to Boston when the tech bubble burst.  But nonstop flights picked up on JetBlue, using the same great Embraer jets that JetBlue flies to San Francisco.  My next trip is a nonstop flight from Austin to Baltimore on Southwest. There were reasonably priced flights on American and Continental, but they required layovers in Dallas and Houston, which add 2 hours to flight time with no extra value for the traveler.  I just believe the future of flying from Austin will be nonstop flights, and American (and Continental) are going to miss out on the growth in travel in and out of Austin by pulling back from their direct flight commitments.

There are just a few software companies in Austin that, if you worked there, will ensure that you are well-networked with most of the current software companies in Austin.  Vignette is one of them.  Everyone knows someone who worked there, and the network among Vignette alumni is pretty good. I’ve worked with a number of Vignette alumni who were top notch, including our own Greg Harley.

I first saw the mention of the acquisition on the Austin Startup blog.

SXSW (south by southwest) is in effect in Austin, from the 13th to the 22nd. The early parts of the event are dedicated to ideas and groups that have attached themselves to the original musical festival later in the week. There’s SXSWi (SXSW interactive), there’s a almost a whole week of movie screenings, there’s a BarCamp session, and too many other events to list in any one place.

OneSpot, a local Austin company, has a SXSW news widget. Unfortunately the title of this widget doesn’t conform to our page width, but I’ll still include it here for those who are interested, along with any other SXSW links that come up that look interesting. One of the things I find interesting about SXSW is that it continues to evolve, starting from pure music, then films, and then interactive (software)… and as it evolves to include more startup-related activities, it continues to reflect the ethos of Austin.

So Austin has set up a great site called the Austin City Connection.  The front page is a little tough to navigate, I have to admit, but I link to some of the pages within the site and check back periodically to see what’s changed.

One of these pages buried on this site is a map of local businesses and of local business districts where local businesses are strongly represented.  Right now that includes the districts around South 1st Street (pictured below), East 5th Street, East 6th Street, East 11th-12th streets, Guadalupe, and North Loop Blvd.  Its complete with different icons for art, automotive, health, construction, eateries, engineering, laywers, real estate, retail, service, etc.  There are a few obvious omissions still (South Congress anyone?) but I really like the treatment of each area rather than just trying to look at one map of all of Austin at once.

Buried at the bottom of the page is a set of links for “all business types”, which lets you see the whole Austin map with businesses of that type highlighted.  And sure enough if you click on Consulting, there we are in the northwest quadrant of the map, although you have to zoom in to see us because in this view we’re buried right under Red Velvet Events, which is in the same building with us:

It seems like a great investment any city can make in their community, at very little cost. By focusing on business districts, the site focuses more on the way people shop – hitting several places in one area, rather than jumping around from one area to the next. Cities do so much to promote big business (tax incentives, tax rebates), it’s nice to see the city doing something to promote local providers of all kinds