Introducing Breyer Capital Austin
I am proud to announce that Breyer Capital has opened a new office in Austin, Texas.
I personally will be spending significant time in the city, investing in new opportunities and working alongside longtime friends and colleagues. Breyer Capital’s Silicon Valley presence remains as important as ever, and at the same time, Austin offers a remarkable new frontier of opportunity.
When I graduated from Harvard Business School after graduating from Stanford, I was one of a small number of classmates who made the decision to move to Silicon Valley. Over the next three-plus decades, I have been privileged to be a small part of the region's transformation into a technological marvel. I am grateful to have played a role in the ecosystem’s growth and I strongly believe that Silicon Valley will continue to play an outsized role in technical innovation.
With that said, Austin today resembles a globally fascinating and fast-advancing geographic hub. Austin has attracted, and will continue to attract, an impressive pool of creative and dedicated women and men. This vast pool of talent and ambition is contributing to a remarkably robust climate of innovation. I’ve spent a lot of time in Austin over the years, personally as a lover of film and music, as well as professionally. Despite the fact that this is a historically tough moment for our nation and the world, Austin’s future, from my perspective, has never been brighter.
I first fell in love with the city in the late 1980s and I got to know it more intimately as a Dell Board Member. Over the years, I’ve invested in a number of Austin-based technology companies, and this year in 2020, I was proud to back Swivel and Ojo Labs. Remarkable individuals such as Michael Dell and fellow investors such as Mike Maples have been longtime friends in the city, and have helped me better understand Austin’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. I hope that over the next decades, Breyer Capital will have greatly accelerated and deeply assisted our Austin portfolio, made up of changemakers and pioneers.
One of the reasons I am especially optimistic about Austin is the recent influx of talent to the city. Of course, only two weeks ago, Elon Musk and Tesla announced plans for a $1.1 billion dollar assembly plant in Travis County. At the same time, leading individual entrepreneurs and companies such as Facebook, Apple, Google, and Oracle hope to add thousands of jobs in Austin and Texas. In addition, many companies I know in technology and financial services hope to add significantly more investments and jobs in the not too distant future.
Some of the best founders I’ve backed in Silicon Valley started their careers at large companies. I predict that many founders and innovators will gain valuable experience working for exceptional companies in Austin and then stay in the city to build something themselves.
I’ve also become extremely impressed with UT Austin’s many entrepreneurial and technical programs and leaders. The University has a history of attracting great minds, like my friend Michael Dell, and I expect that university students, post-docs, and professors in IT and the healthcare/ biosciences will found and join transformational companies in Austin.
If you’re an innovator/entrepreneur/venture capitalist/investor building something exciting in Austin, we hope to hear from you. Breyer Capital is here to stay, and we humbly look forward to playing a role in helping Austin and Texas entrepreneurs achieve extraordinary things in the near and long-term future.
