Before I share this month’s piece, I need to pause.
This newsletter was ready to go out last week, but after the news that Austin lost Joshua Baer, and putting anything else into the world felt wrong while our community was still absorbing it.
If you are not in Austin, you may not know the name. Here, everyone does. Josh founded Capital Factory, the startup accelerator that became the front door to Texas’ tech scene, and he spent his life helping people leave their jobs and pursue their passions. He died last week in a plane crash on his way home from Mexico. He was fifty.
I have spent more hours in the offices of Capital Factory than I can count. When COVID kept us apart in 2021, Josh and his team kept Start-Up Week alive. I was honored to speak that year on scaling a startup’s PR and marketing, helping founders who zoomed in from everywhere figure out when to train, when to contract and when to hire. That is what Josh built. A place that kept the doors open, literally and figuratively, so the next person could find their way in.
Josh described himself better than anyone else could. He helped people quit their jobs and become entrepreneurs. His life strategy, in his own words: plant lots of seeds, water everyone’s, repeat. He planted thousands. A great deal of what is good about Austin tech grew from seeds he put in the ground.
Thom Singer, whose work I write about below, said it plainly last week. There is a hole in the heart of Austin. There is.
The piece that follows is about the people who build a place’s foundation and show up before anyone asks them to. Josh was one of those people. It feels right to let him stand at the front of it.
Before anyone asked: thirty years in Austin tech
Thom Singer has been doing something important since he took the helm of the Austin Technology Council. He’s been giving Austin’s tech history a container.
His piece on the history of Austin tech, and the work he’s doing through the ATC to celebrate the people who built this city before it was on anyone’s list, is the most useful synthesis I’ve seen of how Austin actually became what it is. What he’s built with the Tech Hall of Fame alone, bringing the old guard and the new guard into the same room, making introductions that should have happened years ago, is exactly the kind of momentum-sustaining infrastructure Austin needs right now.
That’s why I interviewed him for Red Fan’s Under the Tent podcast. I keep coming back to his work because it maps onto something I’ve been carrying for thirty years without quite knowing how to organize it.
I was on those flights monthly.
Boston to Austin. 1993.
I came up as a tech journalist at EDN before moving into corporate communications. So when I started flying the Boston-to-Austin route for Cunningham Communications working for Motorola, I was not a casual observer of what was happening in those cabins.
The editors from Computerworld, PC Week, PC Magazine, and The Microprocessor Report were regulars on those flights. We had the 68000 and PowerPC microprocessor businesses to handle, and they were hot. Chip design conversations were happening two rows back. Launch strategies were being sketched on napkins. Nobody was being particularly careful about what they said out loud.
As a former journalist, I knew to keep my lips sealed. But I was picking up a great deal about the competition.
Austin in 1993 was not the Austin we know today. It was promising and a little sleepy and genuinely its own thing. Cowboy boots were having a moment in Boston at the time, which made people do a double-take when they saw I had already acquired a pair of black snakeskin boots and was on the lookout for someone to teach me two-stepping and skeet shooting after hours.
After a long day of client work I would stop at Ironworks BBQ, grab dinner, and bring it back to the apartment to decompress. Cunningham had people flying in from Boston so regularly that the client recommended we get a company apartment, and we took a place at the Towers of Town Lake. The city was small enough that Z Tejas and Mezzaluna were the restaurants you cycled through when you were bringing press into town for client tours and interviews. There wasn’t much else. That was part of the charm.
Back then Austin was a fraction of the size it is now. The spot was The Oasis, perched 450 feet above Lake Travis, where we’d sit with margaritas and watch the Hill Country go quiet. It felt like a local secret because it mostly was.
I was drawn to the place long before I understood why.
The Acquisition That Taught Me What Communications Actually Does
By 1995, I was flying to Austin for Ketchum, working on something that looked from the outside like a straightforward technology acquisition.
IBM was acquiring Tivoli.
What IBM saw was a software asset. What the market saw was a brand, one with serious equity, a loyal customer base, and a position on the Gartner Magic Quadrant that had been earned over years of consistent execution. The risk wasn’t the deal mechanics. The risk was that IBM, in its enthusiasm to absorb Tivoli into the mothership, would dissolve the very thing that made Tivoli worth acquiring in the first place.
My job was to protect Tivoli and also help IBM understand what they were actually buying.
Not just software. Not just a customer list. A brand identity that had earned trust in a market that was watching the acquisition closely and deciding, in real time, whether to stay or start looking at alternatives. We made the case. The Tivoli brand survived. IBM Tivoli held its market position. The Gartner placement was protected.
I was in my late twenties. I did not fully understand at the time that I was learning the most important lesson of my career: communications doesn’t support deals. At the highest level, communications determines whether deals retain their value.
I have been building on that lesson ever since.
IBM, Microprocessors, and the Inventors Hall of Fame
After Tivoli, IBM recruited me directly.
I was flying from New York to Austin to launch what IBM Research process engineers were pulling off: silicon-on-insulator, the 64-megabit chip, copper interconnect replacing aluminum, and more. Breakthroughs that reset what a microprocessor could do. The three biggest are framed on blue suede in my office to this day: silicon-on-insulator, copper, and the first gigahertz chip. These were the kind of announcements where the press conference itself is a strategic instrument. Where the room you fill, the names on the stage, and the publications in the front row are all doing work that extends well beyond the day of the announcement.
During that chapter, I helped get inventors into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Washington DC, among them Bob Dennard, the IBM researcher who invented DRAM, the memory in nearly every computer ever built, and Mark Dean, who co-created the IBM PC and whose team built the first gigahertz processor. Dean came to Austin to make that announcement, because Austin was where the work was being done. It was mine to launch, and its wafer is the third one framed on the blue suede. I was watching the history of technology get decided and documented at the same time.
Bob was from Terrell, Texas. I got the national press for him as part of the induction, CNN, Investor’s Business Daily, the coverage you would expect for a man who invented DRAM. But I wanted to give him what mattered most to him, so I asked. He wanted his hometown paper in Terrell. So I did that too. It meant talking to his brother, who ran the post office there, and a former teacher, both of whom were glad to help. Of everything written about him, that was the article he framed.
Then came more of the world.
Boston. New York. JPMorgan, where I lived in Hong Kong and oversaw communications across all of Asia Pacific, a role that recalibrates everything you think you know about scale, complexity, and what it means to manage a narrative across multiple markets, languages, regulatory environments, and cultural contexts at the same time.
Every stop added something.
But Austin kept pulling. I had been flying into the city since 1993, and somewhere in those years it had stopped being a route on my schedule and became the fixed point I measured everything else against. I didn’t have the language for it yet. I just knew the direction it ran.
Coming Home to Build
I came back to Austin in 2005.
Not because a recruiter called. Not because the market told me to. Because the city I had been flying into since 1993, the one I had watched absorb the energy of companies like Motorola, IBM, and Tivoli and spin it forward into something larger than any single company, had become the place I wanted to build something of my own.
The first thing Austin asked me to do was teach.
I found myself in front of University of Texas students teaching corporate communications. And somewhere in those classrooms, in the questions the students asked, in the real company problems being brought to me on the side, in the gap I kept seeing between what B2B tech companies needed from a communications partner and what the market was actually offering them, Red Fan Communications took shape.
The students voted me best professor. I took that as a signal to keep going.
What I was building wasn’t a PR firm, but a framework for positioning companies to win before the announcement, before the transaction, before the moment of maximum scrutiny arrived and exposed everything that hadn’t been built yet.
The companies coming to me weren’t looking for press releases. They were navigating funding rounds, acquisitions, market entries, leadership transitions and brand narratives that could break through and establish industry leadership. They needed someone who had been in those rooms before. Who understood that the narrative was either being built proactively or was being left to chance.
I had been in those rooms since 1995.
What Thom Built and Why It Matters
I’ve known Thom Singer for about five years.
Not long after he started leading the Austin Technology Council he recognized something the community needed: not just events and networking, but a coherent telling of how Austin got here. The history had been living in pieces, in the memories of people who were on those early flights, in the origin stories of companies that no longer exist, in the institutional knowledge of people who were about to retire without ever being properly recognized.
Thom started pulling it together.
The Tech Hall of Fame he revived is doing something I haven’t seen done well before in Austin. It’s putting the tenured pros and the up-and-comers in the same room. It’s making the introductions that should have happened years ago. It’s saying explicitly that you cannot understand where Austin tech is going without understanding where it came from, and that the people who built the foundation deserve to be known by the people building the next floor.
That matters more than it might seem.
One of the quiet risks in a city that grows as fast as Austin has is that the institutional memory gets diluted. The new arrivals, talented, ambitious, genuinely committed to building here, don’t always know the names of the people who made it possible for them to show up and find what they found. That’s not their fault. It’s a container problem. The history needed a home.
Thom and ATC are building that home. The Bob Bullock Museum may need to add a new wing soon.
I’ve been telling pieces of this story for years. Thom gave the whole thing a frame.
The Full Circle
This year, Red Fan stepped up as a sponsor of the Austin Technology Council’s Tech Hall of Fame.
It is in our DNA, mine and the firm’s, in a way that goes back to 1993 and the flights and the editors and the snakeskin boots and Ironworks BBQ at the Towers of Town Lake. Thirty years of showing up. On flights, in client war rooms, in UT classrooms, in eighteen years of high-stakes communications work.
Thom writes that real leaders show up before they’re asked. Before it’s obvious. Before the thing they’re showing up for looks like anything.
That describes the people who built Austin across sixty years. It also describes what I have been trying to do since 1993, in this industry, in this city, and at Red Fan.
I have always said I will take coffee with a founder long before they need us or can afford us. The first 9 to 12 months of a company decide more than people realize. The marketing mistakes made in that window are the ones we later have to help undo, and undoing work is harder than building it right the first time. I would rather make sure the knowledge is in the room early than be called in to repair what should never have gone wrong.
We don’t show up after the announcement. We get under the tent before anyone knows the tent is being built. We were doing that work, protecting brand equity at the moment of acquisition, managing narrative at the moment of maximum risk, before most of our clients had companies to protect.
Austin’s best days are still ahead.
Red Fan Communications has been a strategic communications partner to B2B tech companies navigating high-stakes moments for eighteen years. But the work is rarely communications alone. Over thirty years I have built a network well beyond our own walls of trusted partners: lawyers, cybersecurity technical and legal experts, executive coaches, fractional CFOs, HR support, website and brand identity experts, the people you call when something needs to happen and needs to happen right. When we see an issue, we have the relationships and the trust to say what needs to be said and bring the right resource to the table, whether that resource is ours or a partner’s. That is what showing up early actually looks like. Not waiting to be needed. Seeing what a company needs and making sure it gets there, by whatever hands do it best.
