The key moments of Josh's life — from a dorm-room first company to the day he opened Capital Factory — and the milestones that built Austin's startup community along with him. The memorial service and other gatherings will appear here as they're announced.
What's on the calendar now. This section updates the moment dates are confirmed — check back, or send anything that belongs here.
Arrangements are being made by Josh's family and the community. The date, time, and place will be posted here as soon as they're shared.
Awaiting detailsThe City of Laredo honored the civilians and officers who saved the five people aboard the plane. The rescuers, by name →
RecognizedThe community he built keeps gathering. Tribute gatherings and CF events will be added here; the live calendar lives at capitalfactory.com/events.
Live calendarExact days are noted where they're on the public record; the rest are marked by year, the way a life’s milestones usually are.
Joshua Baer is born. He would spend fifty years turning curiosity into companies — and companies into a community.
Studying Computer Science and Information & Decision Systems at Carnegie Mellon, he bootstraps SKYLIST from his dorm room — one of the earliest email-marketing companies, built with no outside money. It runs for roughly a decade.
He comes to Austin to work as a software developer at Trilogy — and never really leaves. The city becomes his life's project.
He founds Capital Thought, his product studio, and ships UnsubCentral, its first product, spun out of SKYLIST. The studio's model: build the first version, fast, then hand it to a founding team. See the studio →
The studio builds first products that become landmarks: Bazaarvoice (2005), Rackspace's Mosso cloud (2006), Return Path's Sender Score (2007). In 2008 he debuts OtherInbox on stage at TechCrunch50.
With Sam Decker and Bryan Menell, Josh co-founds Capital Factory — first a summer mentorship program, leading to a demo day, leading to funding. As one obituary put it: from that moment on, he found his purpose. (April 22, 2009 marks its public launch; the exact founding day is pending verification.)
At a table in the historic Driskill Hotel, Josh — then expanding Capital Factory — sat down with the founder of TexasCoworking.com, by then already well underway. Two Austin builders working the same idea from different angles, comparing notes — the connection that, years later, gave this memorial its home.
The portfolio grows: WP Engine (2010), OtherInbox acquired by Return Path (2011), Bazaarvoice's IPO (2012), Pingboard (2013) — alongside dozens of fast bets.
Capital Factory becomes the front door of Texas tech. It expands to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Washington, DC; by PitchBook's count becomes the most active investor in Texas. Josh helps bring Army Futures Command to Austin, writes the Texas Startup Manifesto, and teaches entrepreneurship at UT Austin — an Eisenhower Fellow and Henry Crown Fellow along the way.
His last idea: building for the human and the agent at once. The framework lives on at agentsfirst.dev and across the network.
A business jet bound for Austin comes down on Loop 20 near Laredo. Josh, 50, does not survive; the five other people aboard do, including his young son. How Austin covered it →
One week on, the City of Laredo proclaims a day honoring the strangers who ran toward the burning plane and pulled the survivors free.
A memorial service to be announced — and the scholarships, programs, and habits he leaves behind. The legacy taking shape →
Sources: Texas Monthly, Fortune, NBC 5 DFW, UT Austin Computer Science, the Austin Business Journal, and the community tributes gathered on this memorial. Corrections welcome — if you have an exact date for a milestone, it can be added.
Josh didn't build in a vacuum — he built on six decades of Austin betting on technology. The dates that set the stage, and the coworking wave he became the center of.
Entries marked est. are approximate, pending verification.
Tracor arrives; over the next decade IBM (1966), Texas Instruments (1969), and Motorola (1974) follow. UT opens the IC² Institute in 1977.
The MCC consortium (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation) lands in Austin — the catalyst that turns the city into a tech hub.
A UT freshman named Michael Dell starts what becomes Dell — the template for the dorm-room company Josh would echo at Carnegie Mellon a decade later.
The SEMATECH semiconductor consortium is founded in Austin, anchoring the city's chip industry.
Tivoli Systems (founded 1989, acquired by IBM in 1996), Trilogy Software — where Josh took his first Austin job in 1996 — and the dot-com run that put Vignette on the public market in 1999.
BPI Systems, Inc. (3423 Guadalupe, Austin) built the leading early accounting software for the Apple II and IBM PC — a chief rival to Peachtree — and became the first personal-computer software company in America to go public, an Austin milestone decades before Capital Factory. It was already operating by 1981 (the federal case BPI Systems v. Leith); its General Accounting shipped for the Apple IIe in 1983. (Exact IPO year being confirmed.)
As the recession reshapes work, Austin's first shared workspaces open their doors — and in 2009, Josh opens Capital Factory, which becomes the community's hub.
TexasCoworking.com is established to chronicle and connect Austin's coworking community — the same year Capital Factory opens its doors, and months before that Driskill lunch with Josh. Years on, it would become the home of this memorial. (Its earliest Internet Archive snapshot is January 9, 2010.)
Liz Elam opens Link Coworking (September 2010), growing it into one of Austin's largest coworking brands before her 2019 exit — the first woman globally to sell a coworking company.
Createscape opens in a renovated 1950s bread factory — one of a generation of independent Austin spaces that grew alongside Capital Factory.
Sources: Austin Technology Council, Built In Austin, TSHA Handbook of Texas, and the spaces' own histories. Have an exact date for a milestone — or for a space not listed — and it can be added.