Thank you, and welcome, everyone, to Austin!

Austin is a creative, innovative city, which is a nice way of saying we don’t really care about doing things the way they’ve always been done. In fact, Austin is good ideas become real, even if this idea is so new, so radical, that it would get you kicked out of most cities.

This is what it means to Keep Austin Weird. Austin is where Willie Nelson came to reinvent country music. Austin gave the world a new way to shop for groceries with Whole Foods and a new way to catch dinner-and-a-movie with the Alamo Draft House. We are perhaps best known for our tech innovations. First with Dell, which was born in a dorm room up the road at UT, and now Google picked Austin as the first city outside of Mountain View to test their automated cars.

All of these things I’ve mentioned – Google cars, Alamo Draft House, and Whiskey River – aren’t just new, they’re improved. The point of innovation is to do things in a new way so they work better. And Austin is very comfortable with innovation. That’s why while I immediately took to the Green & Health Homes Initiative. This isn’t just a new way to do home repairs. It’s smarter. It works better. It saves people money. Continue reading →