Every March, both the tech and music worlds are consistently buzzing with announcements, news and other happenings in Austin during SXSW. In 2015, Jeremy Gardner and myself decided that an event during SXSW would be the perfect place to make our introduction outside of Silicon Valley.
This Sunday evening, March 15th, Augur will be a part of Startup Debut 2015 at Max’s Wine Dive. Startup Debut is an annual event during SXSW that focuses on the coolest and most disruptive startups, and introduces them to the media!
In the blog title and last sentence, I used the term disruptive, which has become the most overused word to hype a new company in Silicon Valley. The reason we wanted to focus on the word “disruption” to promote our appearance at the Startup Debut event is quite simple, we think that this is the most impressive and interesting project to be built on Blockchain technology to date.
When Jeremy first told me about Augur in January in hopes of getting me to join the team, I was originally not interested and my skepticism was very high. The more I researched and read, the more I became convinced, and shortly thereafter joined the team.After starting, I had the chance to learn about the history and usefulness of prediction markets from someone widely considered to be the leading mind in the field. Dr. Robin Hanson is an old school cypherpunk (same era as Tim May, Nick Szabo, Julian Assange, Hal Finney, etc.) who now is a Professor of Economics at George Mason University, runs OvercomingBias.com, which is one of the most influential blogs in statistical analysis and has in the past worked with Lockheed and NASA. Chatting with Hanson in San Francisco after the O’Reilly Radar Summit was an honor and provided me the last piece of the puzzle in why Augur is truly “disruptive”. Since then, Dr Hanson and myself have become better acquainted, and Augur is
proud to list him as an official advisor to the project.
So on March 15th, Jeremy Gardner and myself will be at the Startup Debut from 6:00 to 10:00 PM, this event is only open to the press and media. If you are a member of the press or media and would like to learn more about Augur and speak to us at Startup Debut, please email me tony@augur.net with what outlet you represent and we will do our best to take care of you. After this we will also be at the Startup Debut Afterparty which will be open to SXSW Interactive Attendees, so stop by and answer questions!We don’t want to leave out anyone who is interested in our project, so if you are in the Austin area for SXSW and want to chat with one of us from Augur, hit us up on Twitter and we will try to set up something so we can chat with you in person (Note: As we will be busy, locations will be near the media event).
Tony Sakich - http://twitter.com/tonyswish
Jeremy Gardner - http://twitter.com/Disruptepreneur
