Austin M. Craig
Creating new things in Media, Tech, and Startups
Utah Tech Leaders
In my writing I try to focus on the companies, issues, and people that matter to the Utah tech ecosystem. And the leaders in Utah absolutely matter. One of my favorite articles to write was a two-part series on Utah commercial real estate titan Brandon Fugal, and his abnormal investment in a previously obscure parcel of ranch land. This is the story of Skinwalker Ranch, and it is fascinating. Full disclosure, I definitely have a attraction to high-strangeness. These two pieces have been some of TechBuzz’s best-performing articles.
Funding, Mergers, and Acquisitions
Funding stories are our bread and butter at TechBuzz. When there’s a notable angel investment, series A/B/C/D, merger, or acquisition, we want to hear (and write) about it. I covered the story of Salt Lake City based Finicity finally clearing the DOJ for acquisition by Mastercard. This was actually the story that catalyzed the creation of TechBuzz News. The deal was announced in June, but local press failed to even mention it, despite being worth almost a billion dollars. That’s when we knew there was not only room in the media landscape for TechBuzz, but a gaping hole and real need for thorough coverage of technology and entrepreneurship.
Emerging Technology and Trends
Of the articles I write, there is one style I enjoy more than any other. I love exploring new technologies through the lens of a current and relevant example. I wrote this piece about AI Dungeon, a startup in Utah that generated significant buzz among the Silicon Valley crowd through their use of GPT-3 and OpenAI. If you don’t know what those are, definitely check out the article. It’s powerful technology, and its use in a seemingly simple game can be deceiving. This kind of technology will change the Internet as we know it.
Calling Out Bad Actors
It’s not all good news and PR. Sometimes bad actors need to be called out. While Nikola isn’t properly speaking a “Utah Company”, it was founded in Salt Lake City and the founder attended school in Utah. I wrote this piece about Nikola Motors when founder Trevor Milton was accused of perpetrating an “intricate fraud” that drove their market cap to over $30 Billion. There was more to this story than could fit into our succinct article. It’s worthy of a full exposé book or documentary film in the style of Fyre Festival or Theranos. There’s plenty of shady material to cover, and we wanted to make sure people knew.
