Earlier this year during SXSW, we tried something a little different. We called it the AI Startup Rodeo, brought a bunch of builders together in Austin, and spent the day talking about what was starting to happen at the intersection of AI and Bitcoin. You can check out the full playlist on our YouTube.

There were demos, conversations, people showing unfinished things, people comparing notes, and a lot of the kind of energy you only really get when a room is filled with people trying to make something work.

To be honest, we did not really know what to expect from the first one. The idea had started forming toward the end of 2025, when AI was moving incredibly fast, PlebLab had just moved out of our previous hackerspace, and a lot of us were experimenting with Bitcoin, Lightning, agents, and whatever else we could get our hands on. There was this feeling that these worlds were beginning to overlap, even if none of us could completely explain yet what that would look like.

We were originally talking with Capital Factory about hosting the Rodeo there, but that fell through, so we pivoted and ended up doing it at TCEA.

That uncertainty was probably my favorite part of the whole thing. When we reached out to some of the sponsors we normally work with, more than one of them basically told us nobody in Bitcoin wanted this, as they were focused on stablecoins and other L2’s. And to be fair, nobody really had the answers yet.

People were just building.

But inside the lab, and around Austin’s growing AI builder community, we kept seeing something that felt important, payments were going to matter. If software was becoming increasingly capable of acting on its own, eventually that software was going to need a way to pay, get paid, and move value without asking permission every time.

Bitcoin and Lightning already had some interesting properties for that world.

To our surprise, the first Rodeo worked. Not because we had figured everything out, but almost because we had not. It felt like a different kind of builder conference for Austin, built around people showing what they were actually working on instead of pretending the future was already settled.

So we are doing it again.

On Friday, October 30th, AI Startup Rodeo returns to downtown Austin at Q Branch, this time during Austin Tech Week and, conveniently, right before Halloween. 🎃⚡️🤠

Read the rest on Substack.