It was the fall of 2008 and I had just started working on OtherInbox a year prior. There wasn't a startup community in Austin - just one group called Bootstrap Austin that met monthly and had a handful of real entrepreneurs there like Brett Hurt and Neelan Choksi.

Y Combinator and Techstars had started a year before and as soon as I heard about them I wondered why Austin didn't have anything like that. I remembered back to my days at Trilogy University in 1999 and the Survivor-style bootcamp that we went through and combined that with some advice from Brad Feld to design the initial program and structure.

The first person I talked to about the idea was Bryan Menell, because he ran the popular Austin Startup blog and was a good friend. The next person I talked to was Brett Hurt but he was laser focused on Bazaarvoice and suggested I talk to Sam Decker. The three of us became the first Capital Factory Directors.

We planned the program and recruited the mentors in January and February and then launched officially in March, 2009 – right before SXSW.

One of the first events we held to meet entrepreneurs was an information session at Conjunctured, the only co-working space in town at the time and the place where all of the cool kids hung out.

Jason Cohen, Ian Clarke, and Marc Yagjian all attended as mentors and there were probably another 20 or 30 others including the Infochimps.

Josh Baer and I had been discussing how several people had been talking about creating a program in Austin similar to Y Combinator, but nobody seemed to actually be taking any action.
At a tech event that we were both attending one afternoon, Josh was on his laptop and showed me two Google Docs that he was working on. One of them was the financial model that eventually became the 20/20 plan where we gave each company $20,000 in cash and $20,000 in services. The other was the initial mentor list.
We made a list of every person we knew in Austin that we thought would be a good mentor. It had to be someone who had founded a company, helped it grow over time, and eventually had a successful exit. We felt that experience in the entire lifecycle was vitally important. Next we took the list and stack-ranked it with the most desired mentors at the top of the list.
At some point, we divided up the list and started calling from the top down until we had 17 more who said yes. Those 17 mentors plus Josh, Sam, and myself were the 20 that made the first program happen.

In March of 2009 in the midst of SXSW, Brad Feld (of Tech Stars) agreed to meet us in Josh's office at the Omni to talk about our vision for Capital Factory. I had never met Brad before, only read his insightful blog posts. I don't think Josh had ever met him in person before either. What followed was amazing.
Most people would be protective of their ideas, secret sauce, and key insights that made their program so successful. Not Brad. It was like he gave us a 2-hour master class on how to create a successful startup accelerator program. We just took notes and soaked it all up.
The top 3 things we should do first. The list of things we should absolutely not do. The things we'll be tempted to do that we shouldn't. How to structure the schedules, the importance of pitch practice.
I would venture to guess that he saved us a lot of embarrassment and heartache, and the companies from that first class were the direct beneficiaries of his wisdom.