Tonight's TiE meeting
Tonight TiE had its second distinguished speakers series talk. This time Angelos Angelou and Jimmy Treybig spoke about what 2009 and Beyond held for Austin. Most of Angelou's talk was driving with the rear view mirror with the usual historic data, some anecdotes, and then a few quantitative prognostations about 2009, like 2300 new jobs will be created this year in Austin. But no real insights. It was more like trying to learn to coach a sport by reading the box scores.
I gave him an opening and he muffed it. He had shown how the Professional Services job category is one of the three major job categories in Austin and how it was growing. He had also bemoaned Austin's lack of a strategic view in giving incentives to companies for moving to Austin. Jimmy Treybig had said that a new company should not plan to do R&D and Manufacturing in the US, they couldn't turn a profit. So I asked Angelos how we could parley the professional services cadre we had in town for economic growth, especially since they have a higher average income than most other job categories. Well, he only answered with some definitional information but no real insight.
My answer would have been that the goal has to be wealth accumulation, the rest, job creation for example, flows from that. To me wealth is accumulated the quickest by integrators selling innovative services or products. Those people need the professional services to be in the city they headquarter in. Jimmy Treybig had earlier said that there were innovative ways that his companies were using to convert earnings into cash. So what I propose could be turned into a source of cash to fund startup innovators.
This is where Door64 enters in. While professional services like lawyers are tight, there is another category called other services. It includes many of those people who have been laid off and can be the program managers, marketing specialists, and manufacturing/quality control, etc., people that those innovative integrators need to manage the potential of their innovation and assure winning.
What do you all think?
