Exit Interview: NewsUp’s Andrew Schuster moved to Austin

When Andrew Schuster went to SXSW this year, he didn’t have to fly there.
The cofounder of current events quiz startup NewsUp moved to the Texas capital earlier this year, and is expanding the company along with it. He’s working out of space at Austin’s Capital Factory, and is looking to hire developers. Cofounder Coleman Anderson is still in Baltimore, which Schuster said is “absolutely our home base, and I don’t see that changing.”
Schuster, who grew up in Baltimore, has been traveling more and more as part of growing the startup.
“I visited Austin half a dozen times over last few years and really fell in love with the city. As an entrepreneur and musician there are very few cities as well-matched for my interests as Austin is,” he said, adding that the company also has investors in Texas.
The expansion comes after the AccelerateBaltimore alums added a B2B model, where the company provides technology and develops current events quizzes that are used by publishers and media companies. That set up the need to be around big media companies.
“We’ve always had the view that we’re going to start in Baltimore and scale globally,” he said.
The company is embracing the distributed workforce concept full-on. Along with Schuster setting up a presence in Austin, the company is also looking to hire in New York and Los Angeles.
Schuster talked about Baltimore’s “significant progress as a startup ecosystem,” and said the company benefitted a lot from the environment at the Emerging Technology Centers, where he met angel investor Chris Brandenburg and collaborated with other startups. Events like Baltimore Innovation Week and Startup Soiree help further that, he said.
That type of “amazing collaboration happening between different communities,” Schuster said, is also what drew him to Austin. New stuff that results from work between the art and tech worlds, he said, is happening all the time. He said more exchange could help the two cities.
“One of my personal goals here is to build a bridge between Baltimore and Austin. I’m in Austin to learn and participate as much as I am to share what we’re doing in Baltimore,” Schuster said. “There’s a lot that these two cities can learn from each other.”