Austin is seeing a startup boom. Meet Austin's top VCs, giving Silicon Valley investors a run for the money.
- Austin, Texas, has long been a hub for sales and customer service outposts for some of Silicon Valley's largest tech companies.
- In recent years, the city has seen a revival of entrepreneurship, and with it, venture capital.
- The city's ecosystem was long dominated by Austin Ventures, a major venture capital firm with significant influence over Silicon Valley's traditional VC firms.
- Several Austin Ventures alumni left to start their own firms, which has helped breed healthy competition among investors to the benefit of founders across many industries.
- Here are some of Austin's most notable venture capital firms.
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Austin has yet to land an outpost of popular fitness studio Barry's Bootcamp, but that hasn't stopped venture capital from creeping into the Texas capital.
Once a long-time sales hub, Austin is just as awash in entrepreneurs and venture capital dollars as it is in slow-smoked barbecue and live music venues. The arrival of major tech companies like Amazon and Google has spurred the shift along as entrepreneurial employees leave the mothership to start their own companies, and increasingly find the funding they need right at their doorstep.
"We often get criticized for not thinking big enough," Tom Ball, cofounder and managing director of Austin VC firm Next Coast Ventures, told Business Insider. "Frankly, our job is to make sure entrepreneurs do think big enough. There are instances where there are $1 billion things created here."
Austin's venture capital scene was once dominated by Austin Ventures, the "800-pound gorilla in the room," as Ball described it. Ball said that, because Austin Ventures was the only major investor in town, it put a lot of pressure on partners to find every good deal coming out of the city before founders went to fundraise in Silicon Valley. It was a lose-lose situation, and Austin's startup scene suffered.
"Austin has changed quite a bit relative to the VC ecosystem that's existed here" Silverton Partners general manager Kip McClanahan told Business Insider. "Back in the day, Austin Ventures [was] kind of like the only shop that existed," he explains. "It was sort of a traditional old school firm, raised very large funds and larger funds and over time, fell out of favor."
Today, Austin Ventures is mostly focused on private equity investing, leaving the venture capital opportunities wide open. In fact, many former Austin Ventures partners have formed or joined their own venture firms in recent years, creating what is now a legitimately competitive VC landscape. But this time, investors and entrepreneurs win.