Dear family and friends,

As we have in prior years, we are sending this end-of-year letter instead of mailing holiday cards.  Instead, we’ve made a large donation in your honor to the Anti-Defamation League (unfortunately antisemitism continues to be on the rise).  If you haven’t read my newest friend Noa Tishby’s book on Israel, it is a real treasure.  It isn’t just about Israel (although that would be enough given its title and importance), it is also about Western values and the value of democracy itself.

2022 was an incredible year in so many ways but it was also a rollercoaster (if you let it be).  From a market that was at a peak at the end of 2021 to rising inflation, a rising Fed funds rate to try to combat it, the shocking Russian attack of Ukraine, but also with many truly amazing technological breakthroughs, including at data.world, and beautiful moments of humanity (including Ukraine’s improbably successful resistance) - wow, what a year it was!

For Rachel, this was a capstone year as a senior at Westlake High School.  Post the worst of Covid, it was her first year of being in love and having a long-term boyfriend.  She started her jewelry business, Radiant Jewels (check out @radiantjewelsco on Instagram), and finds so much joy in making her jewelry and marketing it.  A typical weekend for her is spending 10 hours making jewelry and another 4-8 hours selling it at jewelry pop-ups all over Austin.  Of course, the biggest milestone for her was being accepted at her chosen university, Tulane.  The level of joy that brought her, and us for her, was truly a moment that Debra and I will never forget as parents.  I wrote about it on Facebook here.

For Levi, this was a year of transitioning from Alpha back to the Eanes school district, which is the best public school district in Texas.  He’s really thriving there and especially adept at robotics.  He literally learned the entire robotics language they teach there in one day.  He also tested at the 99th percentile and is now in their Gifted and Talent (GT) Program.  He’s constantly programming at home and pushing himself to learn new skills.  I have no doubt that he has an amazing future ahead and he brings so much joy to our family - he has such a sweet heart, combined with his drive.  While we will miss Rachel when she heads off to Tulane in the fall, we are happy that Levi will be in our home for another 5.5 years (not that we are counting or anything, huh?).  2023 will be a big year for Levi, with his Bar Mitzvah in June in Jerusalem.  We can’t wait for this big moment for our “little guy” (he’s 5’9” now at age 13 and growing fast).

For Debra, we are almost completely done with our home renovation and the final product looks terrific.  It’s been a journey, and I would never recommend you remodel your home (especially your kitchen) while you live in it, on top of during a historic pandemic with supply chains seized up as a result of it!  But it feels good to be done, for sure.  She continues to love hiking and we went to Mallorca in May to celebrate our 50th birthdays on an amazing hiking trip with family and dear friends.  She also hiked in the Blue Ridge Mountains and Switzerland.  We vacationed in Italy (Sicily, yes - it seems like “The White Lotus” is following us around), Costa Rica, and Telluride.  She’s also been working hard on a project that I can’t yet tell you about but it is exciting.

For me, data.world was a very exciting journey this year.  I may be most proud of the fact that we were named in the top three companies to work for in Austin.  We raised a $50 million Series C led by Goldman Sachs and they’ve been a truly exceptional partner for us on so many fronts.  I was surprised when their CEO, David Solomon, named me as one of their “Most Exceptional Entrepreneurs” for 2022 in October.  We won many new customers at data.world, across many verticals (including new ones), and announced our European expansion plans (we already have so many customers in the UK without having an office there).  I’ve got an incredible executive team and am especially excited that Stephanie McReynolds, Richard Yonkers, Mineo Sakan, Lofan Leung, and Daniel Shah joined our team.  It was also very special to promote Tim Gasper to be our Chief Customer Officer - he’s been with us for 3.5 years and is truly exceptional.  I also finally published the second, expanded, and much better edition my book, “The Entrepreneurs Essentials”, in conjunction with David Judson as a terrific co-writer and dear friend.  It is available on Amazon and, like the first edition, for free online.  I’m gotten much joy from entrepreneurs reading it and telling me how much of a difference it is making for them.  With Hurt Family Investments, in partnership with Debra, we had a record level of investments, which I wrote about recently on LinkedIn and Medium.  It is so much fun to work with entrepreneurs as a “hobby” while also being an entrepreneur myself, as my primary vocation.  I’m really amazed at how ambitious Austin-based entrepreneurs have become overall and will be writing about that more in 2023.  I talked about Austin’s progress on the Austin Next podcast.  I continue to be dedicated to my workouts and reached a goal of 23 minute daily straight-arm planks.  I’ve decided to not try to reach higher minute goals on that and instead mixed it up by varying my planks between elbow and straight-arm to increase the difficulty level and also not make my total daily workouts take more than one hour.  I wrote about my workout in this four-part series on health if you would like to adopt aspects of it for your 2023 fitness goals - it’s very efficient and effective.

On the philanthropic front, we were very proud to see the Hurt Family Tennis Center open at the JCC.  This was a nine-year project in the making.  The summer program for tennis sold out in a week and the demand has been kind of unbelievable.  We thought it was going to be a success for the community and the JCC but… wow!  We get so many messages from people enjoying it and it has led to a record year of new memberships for the JCC, which is so important for their success as a non-profit.  This brings us a lot of joy as we follow in the footsteps of so many others that have inspired us in their helping evolve Austin.

On the political front, I have to say that I’m in the minority of those reading this, perhaps, but I’m overall happy with the Biden Presidency.  Heather Cox Richardson lays out the accomplishments of 2022 and the geopolitical landscape extremely well in this distillation.  Bret Stephens also lays out the geopolitical landscape in a more balanced fashion, should you be questioning if we’ve converted from Independents to Democrats (we remain proudly Independent).  Both articles are well worth your time reading as you reflect on 2022.  We remain proudly involved in AIPAC, No Labels, and Leadership Now, which are all very bipartisan causes.

As far as 2023, it’s going to be an incredible year!  It will be challenging from a business perspective with this challenging macro environment, but I’ve seen this movie before with the dot-com bust followed by 9/11 and the Great Recession during my Coremetrics and Bazaarvoice years, respectively.  I love a good challenge and feel like our data.world team is well prepped for it.  Innovation overall for humanity has ramped up to new heights with major breakthroughs in solar and fusion energy, artificial intelligence (OpenAI or DeepMind, anyone?), the wonders of the James Webb Space Telescope in action, and so, so much more.  We are doing our part at data.world with over 60 patents now and are well poised in our industry.  Our family milestones coming up in 2023 of Rachel starting at Tulane, Levi’s Bar Mitzvah, and Debra and I celebrating 27 years of marriage in June are going to be huge highlights.

With much love and hope for your prosperity and happiness in 2023,

Brett, Debra, Rachel, and Levi