Austin at the Center of the Next 50 Years - With Heather Brunner

So you then moved on to coming, talking about coming to Austin and getting involved with tech.

You of course came with Anderson Consulting, but you talked then about your time at Trilogy.

And I thought that what you talked about, about Trilogy, both in this talk, and I've heard you talk before about, you know, Joe plucking you out of one thing and putting you into another job that you had no experience with and saying, I believe you can do it.

I want to talk a little bit about how Trilogy and that era, there were other companies, how it really shaped the Austin of today.

And you kind of, you know, gave tribute to several people who, you know, are now, there's a whole bunch of you who came out of Trilogy who are now CEOs here in town.

So talk about that era.

Yeah.

And I know that Joe Lamont has received a Hall of Fame award from ATC, and he so deserves it.

I mean, Joe is just such an incredible thinker, business genius, somebody who just really believes in the potential of everyone.

And is just willing to kind of push people out of their comfort zone.

And again, as I mentioned in my talk, I think that Austin had a real true inflection point when Joe took the strategy of hiring the top 1% of technical talent from the top schools in North America and both Canada and US and bringing and attracting that talent to Austin, which has become huge.

You know, just I think just incredible, you know, base of leaders who have gone then to go build, run some of the world's largest companies and also build companies here, as well as, you know, whether that's, you know, Chris Himes, who you know, was, you know, the VP of engineering, global engineering at Trilogy, who was one of my help, helped me when I needed to kind of take on a broader role at Trilogy when I was, you know, like Joe did, like, hey, Heather, I see what you're doing here.

I want you to take that same, what you're doing with sales and service for customers.

I want you to own product and engineering.

And I'm like,

I remember you telling that story.

It's like product and

engineering.

Engineering.

That was my first time to really go across as I'd grown up as an executive through owning the customer, owning sales, owning service and implementation of projects and software.

And he's like, I want you to take that same approach you take there and take it to product.

And again, Trilogy being known for being such an iconic place for exceptional technology talent.

I'm like, how am I going to do that? And so I had to approach it with a lot of humility and ask for a lot of help.

And Chris Himes was... you know, just a vital partner to me.

And again, Chris is somebody, again, who's passed cross later.