Meeting of the Minds in Austin
Austin, like the internet, flattens the hierarchy
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Hey Growers 🌱
I just spent the weekend in Austin for Tesla Con.
It felt like one long day. Just a vibe non-stop :)
Amazing people coming together around Tesla and Austin. I mobbed around with a 10 person squad and feel super inspired by the people and conversations.
Let’s dive into it!
The First Tesla Con: Tesla’s Biggest Supporters and Investors
The reason I flew in was because Gali was presenting and facilitating Tesla Con and the homies Jfilche and Lfilche were going.
Gali helped MC Tesla Con with Anuarbek and he also gave an awesome presentation about how Tesla is just getting started.
Tesla Con was led by a distributed group of Tesla experts who were able bring in some of the best communicators and analysts of Tesla on the internet.
People like Rob Maurer (200K YouTube, 175K Twitter)
and Dave Lee (200K YouTube, 200K Twitter).
The internet is the true validator of determining the best analysis of Tesla.
It’s NOT Wall St. analysts publishing private reports.
The speakers there represented the best opinions of Tesla because they have been validated by the internet.
It’s amazing seeing people build their careers like this.
This trend of both creator and analyst will only continue to happen across new companies, for example, Jackson covering Palantir from Palantir Vision.
One of the most amazing parts about Tesla Con was how it brought a bunch of likeminded people together who have all gone on a similar journey following Tesla which changed their personal lives.
I met and reconnected with a few of these people like Jack Massry, Saad Ahmed, Adam Jonah, and Andy.
While the audience was a group of Tesla Maxi’s, it was emotional to see how many people’s lives were changed because of Tesla. Both financially and a sense of hope in humanity through renewables, EVs, and robotics.
Gali also facilitated a great panel with Meet Kevin (1.8M YouTube, 250K Twitter) and Ross Gerber (225K Twitter and $2B AUM for his financial advisory shop).
It was good to hear Ross, Kevin, and Gali reflect together on how crazy the Tesla journey has been and where we go from here.
I invited Nasjaq who covers deep tech startups (1M Tik-Tok, 70K YouTube, and 10K Twitter), to attend Tesla Con since he was in town for the main Cyber Rodeo event.
People follow Nasjaq for his educational videos on the startups building the most innovative technologies in the world.
Nasjaq and I met one week prior from an intro by Eric at Praxis. S/O to Eric and Praxis.
Nasjaq has a lot of the same interests as me with deep tech investing. I watched some of his content and instantly new we would be homies.
I’m super glad we got to meet in person and talk about how to improve our species at scale.
Beyond the main event, the highlight was having a squad of young ambitious people who grabbed dinner and drinks together.
One of those people was Matty Mogul who is pioneering garlic dip through a startup called Toom.
Matt has been grinding on Toom for over 10 years and told me he never once thought about quitting despite many setbacks.
This type of perseverance and belief in life is rare.
Matt also ripped it on the pickle ball court. All this to say, I am extremely bullish on Matt as an entrepreneur.
There was also Matt’s friend named Noah who sold his company Dream to Playboy for $30M in 11 months.
We also BBQ’d at Joe Markman’s place who is Gali’s and Jfilche’s friend from Seattle who ran a company called Lake Defense Force which recently sold.
Joe’s friend Lauren was there who is just started making content.
All that say - there were some interesting people there!
Part of life is just putting yourself in the right place.
It might sound trivial, but going to events and different cities to meet people can greatly accelerate what is possible in your life.
As cheesy as it sounds, weekends like this past one for me, have changed my life.
While it’s not always clear at the moment, you have the feeling about the future.
If you enjoyed this post about Austin, you might like my previous posts:
Thank you for reading! 🌱
Aidan
Sounds awesome! I love Austin. I hope you head back there for Consensus in June as our entire team is hosting an event