Great cities aren't declared.
They're constructed.
Private quarterly events for the people who Austin's next chapter depends on.
What is actually scarce
The more someone builds, the more careful they become with their time, their name, and their attention—and the smaller the set of rooms they'll walk into.
That caution is sound, and it is isolating. The people best equipped to be useful to one another are often the least likely to ever meet. The usual remedy is to join something — a mastermind, a members' club, a network with a curriculum and a fee. Most people decline, and not because the people in them are wrong.
The format is what's wrong. What's scarce is simpler than any of it: a few people worth knowing, in a room where nothing is being sold, on an evening that asks nothing of anyone afterward. That is the whole of what Austin Forward organizes, and it is the whole of what it intends to be.
The form it takes
Three hours, once a quarter, in a private home. A special guest in dialogue for half an hour, and the rest of the evening left to our guests to enjoy each other's company.
Austin has never had trouble attracting people
Between 2020 and 2023 an extraordinary number of accomplished people moved here. A great many have since left. Asked why, they rarely mention taxes or traffic or the summers. They say a version of the same thing: they never found their people.
That is a failure of connection, not of place. A city can buy attention; it cannot buy attachment. The people easiest to attract are also the easiest to lose — they arrive without obligations, and they can leave without cost.
Someone who feels rooted behaves differently. They fund schools their own children may never attend, they back founders they met at a dinner, and they take the long view on a place they expect to grow old in. That is the difference between a city people pass through and the city that we're building.
Texas is the second-largest economy in the US and is first in new business formation.
Austin is among the five fastest-growing cities nationwide.
But none of that is why anyone stays.
Twelve people who chose to stay
Austin Forward was started by twelve people who moved to Austin, fell in love with it, and chose to stay here and invest here. If you don't live in Austin (yet), we hope the same happens for you. We operate as an initiative of PEF (Post Exit Founders), the global community of people who sold companies they founded.