The Place: Mozart’s Coffee

The Cup: Kevin had a meeting before I arrived, so he sipped remnants of a lovely almond milk mocha while I opted for a refreshing glass of iced coffee.

Background: Gee, I’m not really sure where to begin with this one. I first heard about Kevin when I took the Entrepreneurship class taught by Gary Hoover (which, incidentally, is where I met Cup 1, Deep Nasta.) The class was held at Tech Ranch, which Kevin is the founder of. Over my year here in Austin, Kevin’s name has come up in at least a dozen conversations. Then a few months back, Jason Stoddard invited me to a wine tasting event he was hosting at The Red Door, and Kevin was also a guest. We didn’t get to chat much, but I told him about the project and asked if he’d join me for coffee. He agreed to and now, many months later, the stars aligned, schedules cleared and we made it happen.

Kevin is an Austin technology celebrity – everyone in town knows who he is, has benefitted from his expertise or support or has heard him speak about his passions of technology and start-ups. He’s everywhere. I was happily surprised to find him very open, unguarded and willing to share the good, the bad and the ugly. More on all that in just a bit; but first, let’s cover some:

Common Grounds

1. What is the best gift you ever got? A friend who started a winery gave me the third bottle off the first run. The first bottle was for himself, the second for his brother and he brought me the third. It speaks to getting to that moment of taking the peak (talking in climbing terms.)
   
2. What is your guilty pleasure? Chocolate.
3. How did you make your first buck? Collecting and recycling cans. I went to events and organized kids to collect the cans. {Guess he’s always been an entrepreneur.}
4. Where is your favorite place to eat in Austin? Justine’s – for the food and ambiance – and I also like East Side Show Room.
5. What is the best compliment you ever got? In my work with start-ups – that I’ve made a difference.
6. Who was the most influential person in your life? My grandmother – my Mom’s mom. For her quiet, strong presence, and her witness to so much change. She lived on a frontier, and she defines internal strength and caring in a way that I’ve never seen anyone else do on the planet.
7. What would be the worst job for you? Anything with a lot of bureaucracy – a place where I couldn’t change things. I’m always making things better. To be blocked from that would be miserable.
8. What is your favorite way to unwind? Hiking. I’m a mountain and lake kind of guy. As a kid, I went to the forest to purposefully get lost and see how long it took to get back .

As I write this, Kevin is quite possibly sitting atop a mountain in New Mexico, with hiking boots on his feet and clarity in his head. The mountains are where he goes when he wants to think, recharge his batteries and make radical changes in his life. This particular trip to the mountains is about taking time for himself, getting away and unplugging for the first time in over two and a half years.

“The good news is I love my work. But I have to admit, it’s been a forced march at times,” Kevin says of the last several years.

Gifted with a natural knack for technology and a big vision, he’s never satisfied with the current application of a technology. He instead has always found himself imagining its future use.

Kevin tells me he’s very mission-focused and says his work style was certainly influenced by the three and a half years he spent, early in his career, working for Steve Jobs at a computer workstations company called NeXT. It was here that Kevin says he fell in love with start-ups. Kevin says, “I got spoiled to the point where I could never hold a regular job again.”

After leaving NeXT, he went to work for another start-up and was miserable, so he ventured off on his own and began doing consulting work. Although he says it was far from traditional consulting. The stuff he was doing was, as he says, “on the bleeding edge.” Most everything was Skunk Works – projects that were advanced and top secret. Some of his clients included AT&T, the Department of Energy, GE, and Fidelity Investments. His first large consulting client was Dell, where he put that vision to practice and helped Dell get into e-commerce, which was unheard of in 1994 when Kevin first imagined it.

In between projects for his large clients, Kevin found himself back in Austin, surrounded by entrepreneurs with wild ideas. When he’d hear what they were working on, he just couldn’t stop himself from helping them out. There was no way on earth these small players could afford to pay Kevin what his bill rate was. Lucky for them, he wasn’t doing it for the money. He did it because helping entrepreneurs get ideas off of scraps of notebook paper and into real life was what lit his fire. It’s what made the hours holed up in a office writing code for the latest in trading systems, for example, bearable. He lived for these opportunities to help the little guy get an idea off the ground.

In 2003, something changed. Kevin experienced a personal tragedy that would alter his course forever.

A very dear friend of Kevin’s took her own life and the tragedy shook him to his core. He says, “I was ragefully angry about it. In fact, those words don’t even begin to describe how I was feeling. I just could not understand how the world could let this happen. She was young – 23 years old – and had a 1 1/2 year old baby. I was pissed off!”

Kevin met Danielle when they were both taking some personal development (Tony Robbins-style) classes in Dallas. “When I met her, she was struggling. But then she got a lot better. For about eight or nine months, I lost track of her.” Then, he got the news she’d committed suicide.

The news made Kevin reevaluate a lot of things in his life – starting with his work. At the time of his friend’s death, he was working in a start-up and as he looked around, suddenly the political BS didn’t make any sense and this frustration turned into him getting fired/quitting. It was mutual.

Kevin needed time to clear his head, away from everyone, so he headed to the mountains for some snowboarding. It was on the mountain that he decided life was too short and fragile to spend it unhappy. Kevin says, “My face was on the cover of Computer World magazine and I was making more money than I’d ever made. I was a brilliant developer, but I realized it was driving me into a depression. I was really a people person, but I just didn’t understand it at the time.”

He recalled that his happiest times had been while he was helping the start-ups businesses with their plans. He began coming up with ideas for how to organize and focus these entrepreneurs so they could be successful. This thought was the start of the idea that would eventually turn into Tech Ranch.

“I’d grown up with a Protestant work ethic that said, ‘If you’re having fun, then it isn’t work.’ I thought I needed to do the work that was making me miserable in order to do the work that brought me joy,” Kevin explained.

When Kevin came off the mountain and back to Austin, he brought his idea to several mentors and advisors. One in particular, Dr. Betty Sue Flowers, was quite supportive, but she had very specific advice. Her intuition said Kevin should meet with a business man she knew in Chile. When Kevin heard this, he was taken aback. Just that morning, he’d gotten a call from a high school friend he’d seen when he was on his snowboarding trip. His friend knew how bummed Kevin had been and had called to invite him on a trip to Chile. Coincidence? No such thing!

The trip turned into nine months working in Chile with over 1,000 entrepreneurs. From there, Kevin became a lead designer on a web-based program that had him working with 1,500 entrepreneurs in Mexico. Between 2004-2006 he struggled to mentally get his head around the idea for how Tech Ranch would work. As he worked to refine the model, he continued with other pursuits until 2011, when he found himself at the helm of five different start-ups, all pulling in different directions. Something had to change.

As he tells this, I’m reminded of a book I’m reading right now from Gary Keller called The One Thing. The premise is that every successful person or company got that way by focusing on one thing at a time. We’ve been sold a lie about the magic of multi-tasking, when the truth is, it’s the most inefficient way to work and the shortest trip to failure. At the start of the book is a Russian proverb which says,

“If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.”

Kevin realized this for himself and gifted two of the companies, replaced himself as the CEO of another, retained the one he’d had since the start (his consulting practice), and decided to devote 95% of his time, talents and energy to making Tech Ranch a success – thereby making countless other entrepreneurial ventures a success as well.

When I ask Kevin if he’d describe Tech Ranch as a traditional incubator, he says, “Not exactly. I call it an Entrepreneur Development Organization.” From the Tech Ranch website comes this description:

Tech Ranch Austin is an Austin incubator focusing on early stage entrepreneurs who want to launch or grow their tech startup.  Other accelerators search for talent but as an Entrepreneur Development Organization, we help you build talent and become a successful entrepreneur. Our core purpose is to provide startup training so you can accelerate the success of your endeavor and cultivate a collaborative, connected community.

Our Austin incubator environment connects aspiring founders with startup training programs and classes to increase their knowledge while encouraging the continuous transfer of information and insight among the group. The result is increased insight and innovation that has the potential to impact our most critical global challenges.

Kevin sees himself not only as a guide – with ideas, connections and business know-how, he’s also a coach. Kevin explains that so much of an entrepreneur’s success is dependent upon what’s going on inside their heads. He uses his people-reading skills to figure out what’s going on, and helps them get over what’s holding them back. A friend of Kevin’s from college once said to him, “You’re the person who always recognizes the thing a person is avoiding.” It appears his visionary skills go beyond business.

Leaving behind a large salary and job security takes guts. I want to know where this fearlessness comes from, and Kevin shares something that he’s hinted at a few times. He says, “In the 90s, I was suicidally depressed. In dealing with those demons, I became fearless. If I can walk through that, I know I can get through anything.” Kevin goes on to share more about the experience of losing his friend Danielle – perhaps shedding some additional light on just why her death was so infuriating. He says, “You can only recognize emotions in others that you’ve had yourself. That’s what was so hard about losing Danielle. I thought I’d be able to see it coming.” We don’t dwell here, but I can tell he still carries a lot of emotion about this experience and wonder if his gift as a visionary is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing for obvious reasons, but I get the sense that he is disappointed with himself when he misses something.

Once Kevin set his mind to making his vision for Tech Ranch a reality, great things started happening. Slowly at first, but as of quite recently, Kevin really feels that things are taking off. In fact, when I ask him about the most significant thing that’s happened for him in the last 30 days, he says that both internally and externally, they are related to Tech Ranch.

Externally, two weeks ago they expanded and opened up an additional 4,000 square feet. He says the change in the physical structure signified a bigger change that was happening and as a result, the energy in the space and in the people has changed. Internally, it’s the excitement he feels because things are happening the way he predicted they would. He is a visionary, but admits he has a devil’s advocate inside of him that’s always questioning. For once, he’s silent – there’s no arguing, they are on the right path. And it feels great!

I ask Kevin how he’d make his living if happiness were the national currency and, unsurprisingly, he says he’s doing it. He’d help people with their start-ups. “Being an entrepreneur is a transformational journey. I’m not sure the same is true for a business owner.  I guess it may or may not be true for them. But for an entrepreneur, it’s guaranteed. I enjoy being the guide – I guess that’s my archetype, for lack of a better word. I’m a guide.”

What drive him? Kevin says, “It’s knowing I only have a certain number of breaths left. I’m driven to spend as many of them helping people as possible.”

Almost every day, Kevin makes time for mediation. It’s a practice he embraced years ago, but earlier this year he was incapacitated and was forced to sit for an extended period of time. He meditated for three hours. Ever since, he’s made a point to spend 30 minutes a day being still and silent. I ask about the results he’d experienced, and he says he’s able to “access stuff”, and it’s allowed him to push through these past few months. “So, it’s energized you?” I ask. “I have more than enough energy – ‘I can conjure lighting bolts from the sky’ kind of energy. Meditation has allowed me to use that energy for peace instead of war.” Interesting.

In Kevin’s view, the biggest issue facing society today is a sort of blindness. He says, “It’s very easy for two people to argue about an issue and yet be blind to the world changing in front of them. The arguing is an enormous waste of energy. For example, take assault weapons. Both sides argue about the weapons, meanwhile ignoring the larger issue. Not too long from now, those weapons will be replaced by other weapons. No one is solving the real problems – violence and the issues that contribute to that violence. One day people will wake up and realize they were fighting the wrong fight.”

Again, I’m reminded of Kevin’s gift of vision. It is distressing to him that people are fighting about things in the here and now and ignoring the future. I wonder if he’s aware that for most people, they can’t see much farther out than next week. He has an amazing gift and he sees the world through a different lens than most of us. I can only imagine how frustrating this would be for someone like him.

With 30 seconds to address the world, Kevin’s message would be this: “Wake up and get clear about what you’re really standing for and live for it. Then, build a start-up around it. Don’t get caught up in what you see on TV and let it distract you from making an impact.”

What is this visionary most looking forward to, I’m anxious to know. “Three days from now, when I’m sitting at the top of a big rock, with my hiking boots on and I can finally take my first breaths of relaxation,” he says.

We all know what happened the last time Kevin went up a mountain and had time to reflect and gather his thoughts – Tech Ranch was born. After just over an hour with him, I’m convinced of his unique abilities to see beyond the here and now, and envision things not yet imagined by most. I have no idea what he’ll come back down the mountain with this time around, but I know this – it will be new, transformative and will change people’s lives. It’s clear he’d have it no other way.

To stay informed of all the excitement at Tech Ranch and in the world of Kevin, follow him on Twitter or connect with him on his site. Also, visit the Tech Ranch website.