Dear Readers,
It is with great joy that I welcome you back to the pages of foundingAUSTIN magazine!
If you’ve been with us since we launched in 2016, you may notice that things are a little different around here – first and foremost, that the magazine’s pages are now digital and we have completely revamped our online presence. If you’re new to the foundingAUSTIN community, we’d like to welcome you and give you a brief introduction to the magazine’s history.
I am an Austinite and serial entrepreneur. For me these two qualities go hand-in-hand, since Austin has earned a formidable reputation as one of the most innovation-friendly cities in America and home to a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem. I am passionate about creating companies and opportunities, and have always been an entrepreneur, founding a handful of startups and businesses in various industries.
One of my ventures is a boutique wealth management company, where I mentor and educate my clients so that they can meet their financial goals. Over the years, I saw families put forth great effort to invest in their children’s college education. Time and time again, folks would work hard so that they could allocate up to $100,000 towards college. Even with this considerable amount of funds set aside, many of these young adults would emerge from their experience in college with enormous debt, similar in size to a mortgage, and a large percentage of the recent graduates wouldn’t even use their college degree in the workforce.
At the core of this investment in college education is a desire to create space, instruction, and inspiration for young adults to discover themselves and determine what unique value they want to bring into the world. This is a great and necessary motivation – but in my experience, the 4-year college education system is not set up with an appropriate amount of guidance or leadership to help kids or their parents know how to make the most of their college education and leverage it to create the life that they want. There just aren’t many reliable resources that communicate the vast amount of options available to people who are looking for their purpose.
While I think that a college education is necessary for many (if not most) people, every good investment requires due diligence and research in order to mitigate risk. Putting $100,000 towards a degree before knowing which path you want to take in life means that college can be more like a gamble than an investment. I wanted to provide a resource that could help folks explore their options and discover their unique passions so that their investment in college, or any other self-development path, had less risk associated with it.
The best way to learn how to do something is to ask someone who’s done it already. So, I began interviewing the successful business owners in Austin so that I could learn about their experience starting their companies. I fell in love with the process from the first interview, and was amazed to hear about the individual paths that each of the entrepreneurs took which mirrored my own experience as an entrepreneur. These business owners didn’t sugarcoat their stories – they told me all of it, the good, bad, and ugly. They shared their failures, and explained how they turned those failures into successes.
I had always felt very isolated in my entrepreneurial journeys – I thought I was the only one who was experiencing challenges, and was ashamed of the mistakes that I had made. But hearing from my fellow Austin entrepreneurs turned that preconceived notion on its head, and I realized that I had found my people – people who had experienced similar challenges, successes, and inspirations as me, and shared my outlook on life. These people wanted to contribute in a unique way, and I found their stories to be equal parts instructive and inspiring.
I wanted to share these stories with the world, and compile them into an ‘idea magazine’ where young people or anyone interested in taking a walk down the less-traveled path could find the real stories of the entrepreneurs in Austin, and with them find community, information, and inspiration. I hoped that these stories would empower like-minded individuals and give them permission to follow their passion and make mistakes along their way to success.
The first issue of foundingAUSTIN compiled these stories and launched in 2016, and we continued sharing Austin entrepreneurs’ stories in a quarterly released print magazine. These releases occurred in tandem with live events and I prioritized making the magazine a beautiful, high-quality collector’s item style coffee-table book that was worthy of the stories contained in each issue.
At the end of 2019, I began to reconsider this distribution model. Every industry is constantly changing, and media especially evolves at a fast pace in the modern age of digital content and information-saturation. I launched our sister company, founding_media, to share stories through podcasts, and was exploring other ways to modernize and revolutionize foundingAUSTIN when the pandemic reached the United States in early 2020.
Like most businesses, foundingAUSTIN has faced a myriad of challenges throughout the past two years in the wake of COVID-19 and its economic impact. Cash flow issues and shifting customer needs are just a couple of the challenges that the magazine faced, but one important thing that the lockdowns and disruption gave me was the chance to pause. I was able to shut things down, and take time and space to slow down and really think deeply about how I wanted to approach the magazine’s reset.
I knew prior to COVID that I wanted to focus more energy and effort into our digital presence so that we could connect with a wider audience and increase the value that the magazine provides to its readers and the businesses that it profiles. Over the past 18 months we have restructured many aspects of the business and are proud to have launched this beautiful new website where the same types of stories will live accompanied by audio-video clips and photos.
This is a new chapter in foundingAUSTIN’s story, and we know that 2022 starts a new chapter for many businesses in Austin as well. During the pandemic I was able to reach out to my network of entrepreneurs and deepen my relationships with them, learning many survival techniques and getting a true understanding of the necessity of pivoting in business in order to survive. This inspired me and strengthened my love for Austin’s entrepreneurial community, and I am excited to share stories of how other businesses also used the pandemic to slow down and adjust, turning the challenge of COVID-19 into an opportunity.
If there’s one thing that I have learned over the last couple years, it’s that we can get through anything as long as we are willing to evolve. We’ve all had to evolve and make serious changes in the last couple of years, and our goal as a magazine in this new phase of our development is that we will be a powerhouse resource for Austin’s entrepreneurs and anyone interested in the entrepreneur’s journey. Previously we focused heavily on profiling the entrepreneurs that make Austin such a great place to live, work, and play, and we will continue to showcase these profiles in our Illuminate section. We’ve also added three new sections: Inspire, which will share stories of how entrepreneurs have taken challenges and followed them to successes; Restore, which will cover everything about the lifestyle of the entrepreneur; and Elevate, which will provide didactic educational pieces to benefit green and seasoned entrepreneurs alike.
While we hope to provide inspiration, education, and uplifting content to the community, we also encourage you to write to us. If you have a story you’d like to share, a question about entrepreneurship you’d like answered, knowledge about media you want to pass along, or any other feedback for foundingAUSTIN, please reach out to us. We’re always open to working together and expanding the value of the service that we provide to Austin and beyond.
I know how valuable foundingAUSTIN’s stories are to the community because of how people have responded to the magazine in the past, and we want to continue to be a publication worthy of the amazing stories we have the privilege to share. I hope that it goes without saying, but we deeply appreciate all of our readers and your continued support.
I love entrepreneurs because they are creative, open-minded, passionate people who are eager to share their knowledge with others. Teaching is one of my primary passions, and I hope to educate others so that people can get to their dreams faster, more efficiently, and with more success. foundingAUSTIN is honored to share the incredible stories of Austin’s entrepreneurs and their triumphs, hardships, and what they’ve been through to bring unique value to our community.
I hope that you continue to enjoy foundingAUSTIN’s stories, and we look forward to hearing from you. To a happy, healthy, and prosperous year full of innovation and storytelling!
–Dan Dillard
Find foundingAUSTIN on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
