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Man who died in Texas plane crash was a key figure in seeding Austin's technology boom
Jun 17, 2026
The man who died in this week's crash of a small jet in Texas was a well-known entrepreneur named Joshua Baer who was a successful investor in technology startup companies
The man who died when a small jet crashed on a Texas highway was an entrepreneur well-known in the state for being at the center of Austin’s turbocharged evolution as a technology hub.
Joshua Baer, 50, described himself as an “Austinpreneur,” a reference to the state capital and his enthusiasm for getting people into business.
He founded Capital Factory, which has grown into an important Austin-based venture capital firm supporting a range of technology startup companies, from robots to autonomous ships.
Baer’s LinkedIn page shows him wearing a black T-shirt and pointing at the message: “I help people quit jobs.” His email had a similar handle. Capital Factory's downtown headquarters is among the offices of tech giants like Google.
“Whether you’re in technology or not, there’s a hole in the heart of Austin today,” Thom Singer, CEO of the Austin Technology Council, which promotes the local tech industry, said of Baer’s death.
Baer listed his life strategy as, “Plant lots of seeds. Water everyone's. Repeat.” And people noticed: The Austin mayor in 2023 gave him a key to the city, a symbol of civic honor.
Bryan Chambers, co-founder and president of Capital Factory, said his business partner was a “true super connector.”
Baer was aboard a business jet that crashed Tuesday on a highway in Laredo, Texas, after the pilots reported mechanical problems and requested to make an emergency landing at an airport. His LinkedIn profile said he had a wife and three children. It wasn't known whether three young people who survived the crash were family members.
After graduating from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he created an email marketing business, Baer moved to Austin in 1996 to work as a software developer at Trilogy Inc. He started Capital Factory in 2009 and regularly held business chats with people at a coffee shop.
“My hobby is startups,” Baer told the Austin American-Statesman in 2012. “I don’t watch sports or anything like that. So this is what I do. … I want to be an investor in every great tech company that comes out of Austin. That’s probably unrealistic, but I’m going to try anyway.”
Baer often spoke to high school students and had the title of “entrepreneur in residence” at the University of Texas.
“He was passionate that technology could change the world and make people's lives efficient and better,” Singer said. “And if entrepreneurs did it right, they could make money and help their communities. He believed in those two things.”
Texas U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn said they were saddened by Baer’s death. Cornyn wrote on X that Baer was an “innovative & creative leader in Austin’s entrepreneurial culture.”
https://www.chronicleonline.com/news/national/man-who-died-in-texas-plane-crash-was-a-key-figure-in-seeding-austins-technology/article_dd5ddeaa-378e-5d2f-818d-9c224178ab19.html
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day
June 18, 2026
Possible Supernova Remnant in Galactic Center
Do you see that blue blob to the lower right of the image center? Astronomers think that it shows where a massive star exploded as a supernova whose light reached Earth 1,700 years ago. The image combines optical data from the PanSTARRS telescopes in Hawaii (background stars in red, green, and blue), radio from the MeerKAT telescope in South Africa (large red cloud) and X-rays from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton (shown in blue). The large cloud is a star forming region called Sagittarius C, which is approximately 50 light-years in extent and about 26,000 light-years from Earth. It is located only about 260 light-years from the supermassive black hole in the center of the Galaxy (off to the left of the image). If the blue blob is confirmed to be a supernova remnant, it would be one of the closest ever discovered to the Galactic Center. In this dense region, the deaths of massive stars are connected to the birth of new stars through gas and magnetic fields in a complex way.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT2eRgY2Wn4
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