Austin’s First Deep Tech Week Starts Today

Welcome to Austin Founders Feed, your weekly rundown on the people, companies, events, and opportunities shaping one of the most exciting business scenes in the country.

This week, we are looking at Austin’s first Deep Tech Week: six days of factory tours, hardware showcases, investor events, and meetups spotlighting the city’s growing robotics, energy, defense, biotech, and advanced manufacturing ecosystem.

Let's get to it.

Ken & Warren

Starting today, some of Austin's most interesting factories, labs, and hard-tech companies are opening their doors.

Deep Tech Week is coming to Austin for the first time, September 21–26!

If you haven't heard of it, Deep Tech Week is a decentralized conference series focused on the physical technologies "building the science-fiction future": robotics, energy, defense, manufacturing, biotech, space, and more.

There's no convention center and no single main stage. The organizers curate the calendar, while companies, investors, and labs across the city host the events, tours, demos, and hardware. Deep Tech Week has now drawn more than 61,000 attendees across 470+ events around the world.

Austin joining the circuit is another signal of what we've been covering all year: between Amazon's new robotics factory, UT's national robotics center, and companies like Base Power, ICON, and Aalo Atomics, Austin's hard-tech ecosystem is quickly becoming one of the most robust in the entire country.

Registration for the curated Factory Crawl closed Sunday evening, but there are still events happening across Austin throughout the week.

If you're a founder, investor, engineer, or just curious about the companies building the physical future in Austin, this is probably a good week to get out of the house.

Explore the full Austin Deep Tech Week calendar →

Reply and tell us which events you're hitting.

Jami and Andrés
Founders, People ATX

Founders ask us this all the time. Usually the round of funding has just closed, or a board member or somebody they respect has told them that a role should be added. The round finally closes and it’s a good day, worth celebrating, and then a lot of pressure comes with it. And there is a question you have already answered before you even ask it. Who do I hire first?

But look at what that question already assumes. It assumes that it is time.

So before we talk about who, we like to ask three questions.

What needs to be true at six months, at 12, at 18, because this person was there? If you can write those things down, then it may be time to hire. If you cannot write them down, that does not mean the pain is not real, because it usually is. It means you would be hiring someone to take the pain away instead of hiring them to do the work, and a job description written while you are in pain almost never comes out right.

Hiring a full time person is only one of several options, and it tends to be the most popular choice. A better question is what you are trying to get done over the next six to 12 months, instead of who should sit in a seat for 40 hours a week. Sometimes the answer is a fractional executive who can do senior level work for you for two or three months. Sometimes what you need is a few hours a month of good senior judgment from an advisor who has real equity, a path into the seat later, and a reason to care how it turns out. And sometimes the answer is that the hire can wait a while longer, and getting to that answer early is worth more than filling a seat quickly.

The people you hire early set the pace for everyone who comes after them. So think about what you want this company to look like three years from now and whether this person gets you there, especially right now, when the work itself keeps changing while you are still interviewing. If you design the role around only what you need today, it will already be out of date by the time the offer goes out.

That is the test. And the best time to run it is before anything is open, when there is nothing to sell you. A coffee, a look at the plan, an argument about whether that VP role is real, so you already know who to call when it is time.

One more thing about doing this in Austin. The town feels small, so it is easy to assume that everybody knows everybody, and they do not. The running club has no idea who is at the Young Chamber, and the padel people and the Capital Factory people pass each other on the street and never meet. There is plenty of talent here. The question is who is connected to it.

And there is something nobody explains to founders. The best leadership recruiters are consultants first, and you can build that relationship long before there is a search. It costs you nothing, because you do not pay a recruiter to think about your business. The retainer starts when the search starts, and that is when you decide whether the paid part is worth it to you.

Come talk with us before you need us at peopleatx.com. Our 2026 Talent Report is at peopleatx.com/report.

Check out the full version of the column here.

When Conley Miller was 15, he started going to the gym because being out of shape was one of his biggest insecurities.

He had been bullied, so after school he started showing up every day: running, using the machines, and slowly turning fitness into something much bigger than a way to get in shape.

Eventually, Miller earned his CrossFit Level 1 and personal training certifications. During COVID, he enlisted in the Texas Army National Guard infantry. But before basic training began, a warehouse accident tore every ligament in his right knee. A year of rehab followed. He recovered, still made it into the military, and carried one lesson forward: don't quit when the original plan stops working.

That became useful when he started building FitLocal.

Miller came across a rental-property marketplace and wondered whether the same model could work for personal trainers: let people discover trainers nearby, compare profiles and pricing, and book directly.

He committed roughly $35,000 to building the first version. Then the project got much bigger.

Miller moved from San Antonio to Austin, met the team that would help him build the company, including producer Chris and co-founder Robert, and turned the idea into FitLocal, a marketplace for finding and booking in-person personal trainers.

But before clients would use it, FitLocal needed gyms and trainers.

Their solution was Meet the Trainer.

Instead of walking into gyms and pitching software, Miller's team offered to create content about the gym and its trainers first. They filmed their stories, promoted them, built the relationship, and then introduced FitLocal.

Today, roughly 50 gym locations across Austin and San Antonio are participating. The consumer app has officially launched and generated 121 downloads so far.

The company is now doubling down on that strategy with FitLocal TV, producing local fitness content to promote the trainers and gyms on the platform. FitLocal also recently closed its first seed round, backed by angel investor Rob Bundy.

Now, Miller has an ambitious target: get all 450 gyms in Austin onto FitLocal, along with 100 active trainers and 1,000 active clients.

FitLocal is hosting its Austin launch party on October 15 from 6–8 p.m. We'll share the RSVP details once they're live.

Deep Tech Week arrives in Austin this week, bringing founders, researchers and investors working across robotics, space, defense, energy, biotech and advanced manufacturing to the city. So why Austin?

Five numbers help explain it:

Austin is developing something deeper than a traditional startup ecosystem. The region increasingly has the full stack needed to build hard technology.

Until next time,
Austin Founders Feed

Ken & Warren