Tom Foster

Award-Winning Writer, Editor, and Content Strategist. Based in Austin.

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COLUMNS & SHORTER FARE

Whether it's writing columns and commentary, covering news events, or doing short profiles and lifestyle pieces, I strive to bring the same level of polish to my short-form work that I do the lengthier stuff. Sometimes quick pieces can be as much fun to write—and read—as the best long, slow ones.   

Bloomberg Businessweek •

Dutch Bros and the Great American Sugar Rush

It’s not yet noon on a November weekday in the far-eastern suburbs of Phoenix, and the crew at the Crismon Road location of Dutch Bros Coffee is gearing up for what’s sure to be a wild afternoon. Two days ago on TikTok, the drive-thru-only chain announced a merch drop timed to a holiday it invented called National Passenger Princess Day, using Generation Z’s favorite term for someone who leaves the driving to others. The staff has almost tripled its usual head count to handle the expected surge,...
Bloomberg Businessweek •

The Silicon Valley Skin-Care Brand Biohackers Are Obsessed With

Amid snail slime serums, pulsed-light hair removal gadgets and Korean sunscreens on TikTok, a new kind of skin-care product is making the rounds. In one video, a white-coated scientist pipettes pink liquid into vials. In another, on Instagram, a woman with glittery ombre nails unboxes black-and-white bottles filled with futuristic youth serum. “Welcome to your skin-health and longevity journey,” the packaging reads.If the pitch sounds more Palo Alto than Paris, that’s because it is.
Texas Monthly •

Michael Dell’s Son Raised $1 Billion to Upend the Texas Energy Market

One late September afternoon, a couple of men in a bucket truck arrived at the blocky white former Austin American-Statesman building, just off the South Congress bridge over Lady Bird Lake, and got to work installing a new sign. Piled at the base of the wall were the giant Gothic letters of the old newspaper logo, faded but still iconic. Up went a new name in its place—“Base,” in a sleek black font, presented with that familiar tech-world assurance that today’s inscrutable label will soon be obvious to all.
Texas Monthly •

How a Tiny Group of Believers Turned a Dying Cotton Town Into a Storybook Refuge

It was the July Fourth parade that sold Ryan and Katie Grametbaur on Martindale. There were people on horses and lawnmowers and tractors. Kids on bicycles with streamers. A Model T Ford. The route consisted of two passes down a single block because that is the entirety of downtown Martindale—but what a block. On both sides of Main Street, a half dozen restored redbrick buildings made for a picture-perfect time warp to late-nineteenth-century Texas, and people came in from all around Caldwell Cou...
Texas Monthly •

Something to Brag About

Are there hammerheads? Blacktips? How big do they get? Do you ever catch them? My son, George, is ten years old. Neither of us has ever fished off the Texas coast, so he can’t stop asking questions as our boat makes its way out via the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway from Goose Island State Park, in Rockport, into Aransas Bay and its various extensions for a daylong angling adventure. Our guide, Johan Coombs, navigates his 24-foot Haynie bay boat toward our first stop, off the tip of Rattlesnake Isla
Texas Monthly •

Electrifying Performance

Kevin Emr was bouncing from company to company as a product development engineer in Dallas when he got a call about a dream job he didn’t know he wanted. He had been a car enthusiast for as long as he could remember—the kind of boy who could identify any vehicle by the shape of its taillights, the kind of teenager who got his first job in a mechanic’s shop. The Houston native chose his college, the University of Texas at Arlington, because it offered a motorsports program, and imagined a career
Texas Monthly •

Lucifer's Glow

Alexandra Mathews remembers the time when she was a fourth grader in San Antonio, back in 1991, and her class created a mock magazine. Each student had to interview someone. Her choice: Estée Lauder, the self-made cosmetics magnate, who happened to be a friend of Alexandra’s family. Lauder was in her eighties at the time and had risen to the status of international icon. Time magazine would go on to name her the only woman on its list of the twenty most influential business geniuses of the
Texas Monthly •

An Oasis in the News Desert

Joe Warner manned the office’s patio grill on a drizzly morning in November, flipping burgers for the sixteen new employees who’d soon break for lunch after their first few hours of corporate orientation. A managing editor for Community Impact, a chain of local newspapers headquartered in Pflugerville, outside Austin, Warner, with his fellow editors, was about to receive an infusion of talent for a team of about sixty journalists who cover several dozen towns and neighborhoods in and around
Texas Monthly •

How a Single Machine Revolutionized the Fresh Flour-Tortilla Game

Aaron Escamilla remembers growing up around the family business, just as his dad did before him—working in the parts department, labeling boxes, and so on. The CEO of San Antonio–based BE&SCO, a producer of machines that make tortillas, 41-year-old Aaron took over from his dad three years ago, in 2019. Apart from a brief stint flipping burgers at Whataburger one summer, this is the only company he’s ever worked for. On a sparkling late-summer morning, Aaron and vice president Stephen Reynosa ta
Texas Monthly •

The Quest to Turn a San Antonio Landmark Into a Destination Restaurant

In the classic metaphysical thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus, a wooden vessel has its planks replaced one by one as they wear out, and the question is whether the end product is the same boat—and if not, at what point it became a new one. The same could be asked of the San Antonio building that sits at the corner of Avenue A and Grayson Street just north of downtown and that, beginning in September, will be the home of a wildly ambitious new restaurant, eight years in the making,
Texas Monthly •

From Flea Market to Fortune

Omair Tariq climbed into his gleaming black Tesla Model S one Friday this summer, cued up a ballad by a Pakistani pop singer, and drove from his minimalist white office in prosperous West Houston to the gritty Greenspoint neighborhood, on a mission to explore the links between his past and his present. The founder and CEO of Cart.com, a tech start-up that’s raised nearly $400 million in venture capital, Tariq sold jewelry with his wife some twenty years ago out of flea markets in this northside
Texas Monthly •

This Texan Aims to Resurrect the Woolly Mammoth to Save the Planet

Ben Lamm has always come off as the type of tech super-entrepreneur whose creations might either save humanity from itself or destroy us all. Or at least that’s how he’s styled himself. His corporate headshots tend to show him, wavy hair flowing past his shoulders, with dramatic lighting and, say, a spaceship in the background. His companies’ websites have the feeling of sci-fi movie posters, and his enthusiastic monologues tend to hurtle from trillion-dollar ambitions to UFO research to carbon-
Garden & Gun •

A Treasure-Filled Texas Farmhouse

I always wanted a library–slash–dining room,” says Jill Brown, who owns a housewares shop in Houston. “I always wanted to eat and entertain among books.” Perched at her ebonized mahogany Napoleon III table in a corner lined with shelves of art tomes, an Hermès scarf casually tossed around her neck and a spread of cheeses and crusty breads laid before her, Brown exudes the unmistakable air of someone who has spent a fair share of time in Europe. This three-bedroom country home northwest of the c
Garden & Gun •

Texas Double Take

“Certain times of year, when you walk outside these walls, you better have your head on a swivel,” says Ryan Seiders, one half of the founding duo of the coolers-and-camping-stuff company Yeti. He and his brother Roy, the other Yeti founder, are ambling around the twin hunting lodges they had built at Paloma Ranch, a seventeen-thousand-acre spread of mostly raw land they bought a few years ago in far South Texas, a couple of hours south of San Antonio and minutes from the Mexican border.
Inc. •

'A Growth Industry Like I've Never Seen'

"There's a lot that goes on behind the cookie banner," says Kabir Barday, the founder and CEO of OneTrust. He's talking about that now-ubiquitous pop-up on websites that lets you know the site is collecting data on your visits and activity in order to personalize your experience--or sell your information to third parties. The cookie banner is perhaps the most visibly identifiable sign of his company's software, but the real work is the invisible machinery churning away behind that banner. Atlanta-based OneTrust, which landed at No. 1 on this year's Inc. 5000
Inc. •

How Russian Trolls Are Using American Businesses as Their Weapons

Koch's Turkey Farms sits on 300 acres in a hilly part of Pennsylvania at the southern edge of the Pocono Mountains. For four generations, since 1939, the Koch family has been raising turkeys there. In the 1990s, the company became known as an industry pioneer for its humane practices and the clean diet that its turkeys eat. It sells around a million turkeys each year, 30 percent of them in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Like that of all farms, Koch's Turkey's business rises and falls largely accord
Texas Monthly •

A Bootstrapper Hits His Stride

Paul Hedrick got the idea to start a Western boot company in, of all places, Greenwich, Connecticut. After growing up in Dallas, he went off to Harvard and, like a lot of smart young people with analytical minds, started a career in management consulting. At 26 he was working for a private-equity firm in Greenwich and traveling across the country to meet with entrepreneurs in all kinds of fields—a candy company in Chicago, a dental implant maker in Denver, a restaurant chain in Dallas. He starte
Inc. •

Why Outdoor Voices, Apple, and America's Coolest Entrepreneurs Want to Be in Austin

Just a few blocks from a forest of glassy new skyscrapers, including the tallest residential building west of the Mississippi, about 70 young women in yoga pants (and a few men) dance and stretch to a Cardi B song on an impossibly green lawn. At the head of the group stands Tyler Haney, the 30-year-old founder and CEO of Outdoor Voices, who uprooted her New York City athleisure e-apparel company to  relocate to Austin in 2017. "All right, everyone! Woo!" Haney shouts before leading the crowd in
Inc. •

Kendra Scott Hit Rock Bottom Before Building a Billion-Dollar Jewelry Empire

"When I started this, I had people tell me I had to get out of Austin and move to L.A. or New York City to be a legitimate fashion brand," remembers Kendra Scott. "But something in my gut told me to stay." Smart move: Scott's eponymous jewelry and lifestyle company is now valued at $1 billion, and she still owns a majority stake. That kind of success was unimaginable for Scott as recently as 2009, when the financial crisis almost killed her company. She founded the business in 2002, designing j
Inc. •

Sure, Self-Driving Cars Are Smart. But Can They Learn Ethics?

Stefan Heck, the CEO of Bay Area-based Nauto, is the rare engineer who also has a background in philosophy--in his case, a PhD. Heck's company works with commercial vehicle fleets to install computer-vision and A.I. equipment that studies road conditions and driver behavior. It then sells insights from that data about human driving patterns to autonomous-vehicle companies. Essentially, Nauto's data helps shape   how driverless cars behave on the road--or, put more broadly, how machines governed
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