Hi Brett. I appreciate your perspective and it continues to draw out what the article was about.
Secondly, I believe it is imperative to have an investment ecosystem that works well the city in order to prosper. You cannot have one [investors] without the other [pro-innovation city council]. Otherwise you have pressure placed on companies like HomeAway to move out.
Look at what the city council did to run HomeAway out of town. I won’t be surprised if they [HomeAway] run back to the safe zone of another city west of here. It was so bad in fact that tweeted:
This doesn’t do well for companies like Favor. No matter how well an on-demand company does, our city council may not welcome them even if they support over 1,000 jobs in the city.
Lastly, there are over 1,500 startups in Austin and the two biggest VC’s fund 11–20 deals a year. Combine that with the other few funds that do 3–5 deals a year and less than 3% of seed-stage companies will get venture funding each year. Even with angel investors picking up slack, that means entrepreneurs have to go out of the city for 90–97% of the funding.
And therein lies the problem.
