I found out this morning that Josh Baer died last night.
He was on a small plane heading back to Austin from Cabo. It had mechanical trouble and went down near Laredo, on a highway, a couple of miles short of the runway. Five other people on board survived. Josh did not. He was 50.
I’ve been sad all morning. One way I deal with being sad is to hide in my computer, which is mostly what I’ve been doing today.
Many people in the startup world knew Josh as the founder and CEO of Capital Factory, the center of gravity for entrepreneurship in Austin and, really, all of Texas. The local press is calling him the godfather of Austin’s startup scene. He earned this reputation, one founder at a time, for more than two decades.
Some time in 2007, before Capital Factory was Capital Factory, Josh came to Boulder for a day, we sat down for a couple of hours, and I told him everything we were doing with this new thing called Techstars. When Techstars later opened an accelerator in Austin, it ran out of Capital Factory’s space – the two communities literally under one roof. That was Josh. He kept score of the good turns, not the grievances.
Our paths crossed in other ways. Josh built an email company called OtherInbox that signed up millions of users. At the end of 2011, Return Path – a company I was on the board of – acquired it, and for a few years Josh ran OtherInbox as a Return Path subsidiary out of Austin. I used OtherInbox for years and loved it.
I eventually became an investor in his fund. We would have lunch when he came through Aspen in the summers. He sent me relentlessly cheerful emails, every one signed “Yeehaw” with a little robot, pitching me his latest fund, his newest founder, and his next big idea. I told him once that I enjoyed getting spammed by him. I meant it.
The last thing we did together was the smallest, and maybe my favorite. Josh built a nonpartisan, open-source tool called Texas Votes – you spend five minutes answering questions about what you care about, and it builds you a personalized ballot for Texas elections. He invited me in as a contributor on the GitHub repo, we sat down and did some Claude Code together, and we talked about extending it to other states. My contributions were minor beyond cheerleading.
I have spent a lot of my life thinking and writing about startup communities. I wrote a whole book on the idea that a great entrepreneurial ecosystem is built by the entrepreneurs who lead it, take a long-term view, and give first.
Josh was that idea made real.
He built one, in a city the coasts did not take seriously for a long time, and then he helped it spread across an entire state. When people showed up wanting to do something in Texas, including me, his answer was always some version of the same question: How can I help? He gave first, constantly, without keeping a tab.
Last year, in an email thread about potentially bringing Techstars back to Austin, Josh wrote a line I keep coming back to today. He said, “I want to be Brad when I grow up.”
Josh, you had it backwards. You were already doing the thing I had spent years writing about, and you were doing it as well as I ever did. Yeehaw, my friend.
My heart is with his family, his team at Capital Factory, and the enormous community of founders in Austin and across Texas who woke up this morning to an inbox that will never again have a “Yeehaw” from Josh in it, and to a room where nobody is going to ask “How can I help?” the way Josh did.
When Josh and I had a meal together in Aspen, it was always at Little Ollies. Amy and I are going there for dinner tonight to celebrate and remember Josh.
Rest in peace, Josh.