Smash Notes
Chris Taylor
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Notes
Austin Next · Can You Engineer Serendipity?
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Why Aren't Sweet Greens the Way of Texas?
Evan Baehr says an experience of Texas made of Sweet Greens and La La Land is not the way of Texas. People moving from the coast into Austin still have to come to know the place itself. Time on the land, including an overnight as close as 30 minutes into Hill Country, is a really important part of that.
The official historian of the state of Texas for the governor describes Texas as a history of fusion. Immigrants bring technologies, trades, recipes, and languages, then come to know the way of Texas. The hard part is the people arriving from the coast. Evan Baehr wants a ranch beside two other pieces that should happen: a downtown core, and Lake Austin, which is the absolute crown jewel. Tr
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Why Does a Small Austin Club Survive Losing Half?
Zac Solomon calls a small rented room probably the most sustainable way to run a community in Austin. He is a little younger and takes very minimal risk. The space is pretty small, and if half the members drop off, the club is still OK. A gigantic pool of people can be onboarded at whatever price point is needed, so Zac Solomon is not going under.
Zac Solomon knows seven other writing clubs and says one more of them should have a clubhouse. Craft clubs, book clubs, accounting clubs, and startup clubs belong in the same picture. Fiesta is quite a large startup community and has no physical space. Zac Solomon says Fiesta probably could add one, and says Fiesta would probably serve the communi
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Why Did a Member Mop the House Floors Unasked?
Zac Solomon is the only employee, and the members already got the picture. The best example that the culture is actually working is a member mopping the floors without being asked.
Applicants have to read writing on the vision, the mission, and what the space should be, plus stories of members. Zac Solomon then asks whether they are still okay with it. They say yes, and they join. A cleaning lady now comes twice a month. The other week, a member took a picture of another member mopping the floors. Zac Solomon says she did it just because she wanted to, or thought the floors needed mopping, or whatever it was. He never asked her. She brought her own mop and did her own thing, and she was not
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Why Do Big Spenders Love the Free Golden Ticket?
Evan Baehr runs a for-profit membership with a very high price and a free version called the golden ticket for extraordinary people under 25. High price point people love the golden ticket people. The early worry was that someone paying an insane amount would be annoyed that a kid gets a golden ticket.
Talking with someone who studied Bohemian Grove closely reaffirmed the pattern. Titans of industry pay a fortune to be part of Bohemian Grove. Creatives and musicians have a separate application and usually come for no fee. Patrons found incredible sources of inspiration and creativity from the musicians and artists. Sometimes an artist stipend in places like Soho came across as a way to put
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Why Is Fridge Starting to Charge Event Hosts?
Chris Taylor says a big benefit of being a Fridge member is throwing events in the space for free once the group is above 10. The member brings the food, the alcohol, and the staff, and where it fits, invites the other members. Programming is now starting to be member led. He still runs a lot of the core programming, and members do things and invite other members.
His early rule kept staffing off the house. The member had to leave the room the way it was found. Nobody knows how to do that. His staff can flip a layout and put it back before morning cowork. A random member cannot, and the worry about whether the room would look right in the morning was stressing them.
He is flipping the rule
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Why Did Less Writing Make a Writing Club Happier?
Zac Solomon says a writing club is really about talking to other people. People use the writing as the excuse for showing up. What they enjoy, and what keeps them coming back, is talking to people.
Over time, Zac Solomon shifted writing clubs toward more talking and less writing, and people got happier. The creative constraint is the space. A packed house is 20 people, so there is no 100 person situation. A person goes to the fridge, grabs a drink, and stands alone in the kitchen until one other person comes in. Ignoring them is too weird, so the two of them talk. The space is too small and the number of people is too small. Zac Solomon has never seen somebody off to the side, weird in the
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Why Refuse Ten Serendipity Locations?
Chris Taylor says serendipity manufacturing is mostly the room. He spends most of his time curating who shows up in a very small 2000 square foot space so the collisions are high quality 90% of the time.
He has been there for 32 years and can put interesting people on a stage, or hold a wine tasting or a poker night, for an intimate group of 30 or 40. He says people overthink events. The hard part is getting the room right. AI helps him research people, and he still knows everybody there. His attitude is human on both sides. Anybody who comes to the store should go forward a little through him or a connection in his network. He calls it hand to hand combat, and he can personally manage it a
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Why Do University of Texas Grads Work in the Bay?
Evan Baehr says top CS students at UT and the Austin companies that want engineers keep missing each other. The students say Austin companies fall short and leave for the Bay to work for a real company. Investors and founders in Austin say they want the best engineers, skip UT, and hire from Stanford.
The UT student then goes to San Francisco and works at a company Joe Lonsdale invested in. The people were already right here in Austin. Evan Baehr calls the 40 acres the 40 acres of quicksand. For people outside UT, parking, getting around, and knowing what is going on feel impossible, and the city lacks town gown connective tissue with the faculty and the students at UT.
The opening is prob
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Why Can a Wild Comment Stay Inside Rosedale?
Rosedale is a physical room Zac Solomon runs for serious, non-dogmatic argument. The project started very niche. Zac Solomon seeded it through X with a lot of newsletters. About a year in, it changed and became much broader. The room itself is broader still.
The wider room filters for how people communicate, the rigor of the discussion, and a non-dogmatic approach. A person can stress-test an idea they do not necessarily believe. Nobody holds them accountable. The talk is not online, so a crazy comment is not held against the person who said it. The room tries to find a deeper truth together.
Filmmakers come in often. Writing is not required unless the person is a screenwriter. The earlier