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Austin has been caught between the hard science of numbers and the soft science of human decision making for his entire career. It started early with math team, moved to a degree in Sociology, and ended up here at Conserv empowering conservation professionals to do more with data.

Austin spent much of his youth being forced to study. This would later be the cause of a major revolt, and it’s some wonder that Austin graduated from college at all. He spent most of his time in college in the library reading, while he was supposed to be in class. Not a great way to get good grades, but a great way to get an education.

Eventually Austin landed on a career in analytics – a fancy way of saying Austin helped people make better decisions using numbers. Particularly Austin is an expert in Microsoft analytics tools, particularly Power BI. Hats off to Rob Collie and the team at PowerPivotPro for shaping Austin into the well-rounded analytics person he is today.

Austin’s last role before Conserv was as a Partner and VP of Operations for PowerPivotPro, a Microsoft focused analytics consultancy, where he helped grow the business from a handful of people to many handfuls of people – an experience that taught Austin how to handle the stresses of launching a business.

And there’s a direct line from that analytics work to the work happening at Conserv. Analytics is all about figuring what people care about and figuring out how to measure it and what to do with the numbers. It’s that same tension between the hard science of numbers and the soft science of human decision making.

Today Austin serves as the CEO of Conserv, a startup with a mission of bringing better preventive care to more of the world’s 450,000+ art and cultural collections.