shawnokeefe.com

Category: Startups

  • Coming Home to a New Role

    Coming Home to a New Role

    Shawn at HICAM.

    I just wrapped up my first week as Director of Membership & Community at HICAM, the Hayes Innovation Center for Advanced Manufacturing. And I gotta say, it feels like coming home. That’s really the best way I can put it.

    If you’re not already familiar with HICAM, it’s a 52,000 sq ft campus in East Austin built for advanced manufacturing, robotics, and embodied AI startups. There’s a serious prototyping space, training programs, and an ecosystem that connects founders to corporations, academic partners, and each other. It’s exactly what Austin’s hardware community has been missing.

    For anyone who’s caught me at H³ ATX or one of the other hardware meetups I help organize, this won’t come as much of a surprise. I’ve spent years connecting hardware founders to the right people, tools, and resources, first through through the accelerators I’ve led, then 0112 Studio, and just by showing up in this community over and over. HICAM gives me a home base to keep doing that work, at a scale I haven’t had access to before.

    Huge thanks to Marcus Metzger, Lorna Nash, Jamie Harkrider, and Cash (the dog) for being so welcoming this first week. I’m looking forward to everything ahead with this crew.

    If you’re building in hardware, robotics, or embodied AI in Austin, or thinking about starting, I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Come find me at HICAM.

  • Two Spots for Transformation in June

    Two Spots for Transformation in June

    Fibonacci sequence

    There’s a type of founder I keep running into. They’ve built something real, technically sound, often impressive, and they’ve been heads-down for long enough that the business stuff has quietly piled up in the corner. Not ignored, exactly. Deferred. There’s a difference, though it doesn’t always feel that way when you finally turn around and look at it.

    I’ve spent the better part of two decades watching this pattern play out in hardware accelerators in New Zealand and Austin, as well as in the product work I’ve done alongside technical teams over the past few years. The engineering problem gets solved. The clarity problem doesn’t. And clarity about who you’re building for, what the product actually is, how decisions get made, tends to matter a lot when you’re trying to go from “thing that works” to “business that works.”

    That’s the gap I work in at 0112 Studio.

    I have two client spots open in June. If you’re a technical founder who’s ready to do the work of actually building and validating the business, not just the product, the 12-week program might be worth a conversation. We work through the stuff that’s easy to defer but you shouldn’t: translating your technical depth into genuine product-market fit clarity, building the systems and habits that hold up as things scale, and making decisions from strategy rather than just urgency.

    One thing I’ll mention because I find it genuinely useful… you walk away with more than a clearer head. You get a structured repo of markdown files, your strategy, your systems, your key decisions, in a format that your AI agents and tools can actually work with. Not just documentation for documentation’s sake. A second brain you can build on.

    This isn’t a coaching subscription. It’s a structured 12 weeks with real outcomes on the other side.

    I’m booking through Proton these days (yes, the encrypted email folks, some cyberpunk habits die hard). You can find a time at 0112.studio/chat.

    If you know a technical founder who might need this, feel free to pass it along.