The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Austin Reed was a full-time musician in Bali in early 2020, living paycheck to paycheck, composing, recording, doing whatever creative work came his way, when the world shut down and his Brazilian friend Mateos texted him from another country to say he had just been robbed at gunpoint. Laptop gone. Rent money gone. Everything gone. Austin did not offer sympathy. He sent two hundred dollars, told Mateos to pick up a cheap laptop on Facebook, and opened an Upwork profile. Five days later they had a seven hundred dollar WordPress job. They split the money. Then they took another. Then Mateos quit his job and the whole equation changed, because now if Austin messed something up, his best friend did not eat.

What followed was two years of broke in foreign countries, cancelled flights, a divorce, nine months without landing a single project after pivoting to Django, three couples sharing a four hundred and fifty dollar a month house in Ecuador, and a mother with a freezer full of lamb chops in Colorado who kept Austin alive between gigs. He never had a plan. He had a bias toward action and a refusal to accept that where he started had anything to do with where he was going.

Today Austin runs Horizon Development, a fifteen-person AI and software agency he has built while living across twenty-six countries. The team works with entrepreneurs and businesses to automate processes, enable AI to do real operational work rather than just chat, and build the kind of leverage that lets a small team punch far above its weight. He has a gym in his house, a personal trainer who comes to him, a wife he met while running from an Ecuadorian divorce, and a tattoo on each arm. One says focus, consistency, improvement in Japanese. The other says be so optimistic that you are delusional. He is still adding to the second one.

This episode is for anyone who thinks starting with nothing is a disadvantage. Austin built his first dollar with two hundred and a laptop in a global shutdown. The nothing was the point.