PropertyMaps.com Blog

I was browsing around this weekend catching up on a lot of reading and ran across a site that shows a visual of all of the start-upy things going on in Austin. I was amazed at all of the stuff there is to ‘attend’ that is going on in Austin.

Below is the mind-map I am referring to:



After looking it over for a few minutes, it dawned on me, that even with all of these things going on to try and support and foster start-ups, Austin is still very lacking in the consumer start-up success space. I spent the next couple of minutes to try and think of some, er ANY consumer based start-ups that have had successful exits. I racked my brain (and I’m sure I’ve missed some) but this is the best I could come up with:

1. Apartment Ratings – (congrats Jeremy Bencken)

After thinking about it some more, perhaps we’re so caught up in process and programs and support to try and compare ourselves with SV, that all of our energy is wrapped up in that and not in innovating and actually DOING something. There are a lot of really smart people that have started and attend a great deal of these functions, but I can’t help but wonder, what if all that energy was spent on creating the next idea these entrepreneurs have and not just talking about it?

For a city with so many driven and smart people, surely we can do better than this. Can’t we? Let me be clear, I’m not criticizing people for creating these groups or those that attend them, just an observation on the plethora of things there are to be involved with in Austin as an entrepreneur, when we all know how much effort you have to spend on your company just to get it off the ground.

Please leave additions to this list in the comments and I’ll update the post.