This week is the 20th anniversary of the public launch of AUSTINIST.com, a blog for which I nominally played the role of founding editor. Back in those days it was not unusual for there to exist popular, independent websites filled with news, reviews, opinions and essays written by volunteers!

I was lucky to get the opportunity to be a part of AUSTINIST, mostly because I knew Jen Carlson, one of the main editors at GOTHAMIST, a popular New York news site. I think Jen and I schemed up the idea of launching Austinist and convinced Jake Dobkin to let it happen.

The first person I recruited to write for the site was a woman I knew through my friend Neal Pollack. I knew she was active at UT and wrote for their paper, and she had invited Neal to an event she had helped organize to see Stan Lee speak. I remember asking Neal, who is that friend of yours, the girl who knows all the cool stuff happening on campus? I need her!

Later that week, I bumped into her downtown and we exchanged contact details, and shortly thereafter, Katie Spence officially joined the Austinist founder's list.

After the initial hubbub of launching during SXSW, we set out to really establish Austinist as a voice in the Austin media scene. My approach was to recruit anyone I could who was willing to write for the site. I invited anyone who wanted to join to come out to the downtown Hilton hotel bar to discuss the project.

When we were remembering this the other day, we laughed about how odd a choice that seems now. But back in 2005, the Hilton bar was one of the main spots to meet up with your SXSW friends and it was dark and had seating and booze which were critical factors required for me to be able to present to a bunch of strangers the idea that they should write for my website for free. I wore a vest.

Little did I know that the folks who came out that night would nail the assignment so hard. These were mostly strangers to me, folks who had somehow heard about the blog and were interested in having their say about Austin. I "hired" them all, and we were off to the races the next day.

We were young, we were talented, and we were beautiful. Austinist writers were all of a sudden everywhere, covering music, food, politics, news, business, entertainment, and all of the various aspects of life in Austin. We also became good friends - there were so many Austinist staff happy hours and potlucks and house parties and picnics and concert nights. We threw some truly epic parties as well that only those who attended will ever know about.

All of those early Austinist staffers have gone on to great things - books, records, labels, restaurants and coffee shops, local businesses, and great careers. It is amazing to look back think about all of us 20 years ago, so talented and with so much ahead of us. Shout outs to Katie, Allison, Erica, Emily, Breanna, Justin, Craig, Allen, Matt, Matthew, Michael and Kristina and all the other people who were part of those early days and whose names I can't remember after 20 years.

After just about a year, I recruited Katie away from Austinist for another project - moving with me to San Francisco to (eventually) get married and start our own product design company. We left Austinist in the extremely competent hands of the staff and got the rare joy to watch something you had part of starting thrive and grow bigger than you could have ever managed yourself. The site ran for another 7 years as a home for independent journalism in Austin throughout the '00s and into the teens.