Build Order

What if state capitals are not sleepy government towns, but one of America’s most under-appreciate city-growth machines? In this episode, Austin is the entry point for discussion about what makes a state capital successful. Unlike the European model, where political, commercial, cultural, and financial power was often concentrated in the same city, America chose a different path. Capitals were oft...

How did a city better known nationally for music and culture become a place where America keeps trying to build the future of hardware? In this episode, Lauren and Jen trace Austin’s semiconductor history from attracting its first electronics firms, to the Texan political coalition that helped land two major semiconductor consortia in the 1980s, to how those wins put Austin on the national technol...

Build Order’s first ever deep dive opens with Columbus, Ohio. This is a city that is one of the largest in America, and yet is treated like it was recently discovered behind a very large Midwestern curtain. Columbus has many of the ingredients growing cities want: a major state university, relative affordability, a diversified economy, strong logistics infrastructure, and a state government that i...

In this episode, Lauren and Jen, dressed for low Earth orbit if not necessarily broadcast journalism, are joined by Lucy Wu, an Austin-based aerospace professional to trace the geography of the American space industry. The original space economy formed around four major hubs: Cape Canaveral for launch, Los Angeles for aerospace design and manufacturing, Huntsville for propulsion and engineering, a...

A private astronaut built a Shakespeare theater near Lake Austin. Now that strange little piece of land raises a bigger question: what does Austin preserve, and what does it let slip away? The hidden, Elizabethan-style theater that many Austinites have never heard of was built by Richard Garriott — creator of Ultima, private astronaut, medieval enthusiast, and one of the more Austin characters Aus...

The biggest Austin real estate story of the last decade wasn’t Tesla, Oracle, or a sky full of cranes. It was a guy who barely built anything — and then lost nearly all of it. For a few years, Nate Paul, founder of World Class Capital, seemed to own half the city. Not in the traditional developer sense. Not by breaking ground or building tower after tower. But in a more disorienting way: he was yo...

“Wow, you’ve lived here so long! I bet you’ve seen Austin change a lot.” We sure have, and it’s changed in many ways that you wouldn’t expect. Sure, more and more people move in, our city bird — the “crane” — frequents all parts of the city, neighborhoods reshape themselves faster than the maps can keep up. If you zoom out, it all looks like momentum. The kind that suggests there isn’t really a ce...

Austin embodies one of America’s favorite narratives: a successful contradiction. A blueberry in the tomato soup of Texas. A laid-back city with outsized cultural ambition. A government town brimming with students and artists. A place that markets distinctiveness even as it grows to look more and more like other cities in the United States. In our first episode, we look past the clichés to the dat...