Bob Michaels

Bob Michaels has been part of Austin’s music fabric since 1988, cutting his teeth in the famed Austin bands the Rave and Slippery Fish. He plays lead guitar with the confidence of decades on Austin stages, and off them he has spent just as long out in front of the technology that carries music to people.

On stage, Bob brings restraint, feel and a deep generosity to his playing, always in service of the song. His friendship with Rik goes back to the years when the Rave and Dirty Oliver worked the same circuit, a rivalry that eventually became brotherhood.

He was building websites in Austin by 1994, before HTML was even a standard, including early sites for Ray Benson and Asleep at the Wheel and for Jimmie Vaughan. In 1995, while he was still a working guitarist running his own live sound, he put the first live music internet stream from Austin on the air, out of Steamboat on 6th Street, the same club Jumptrain would soon headline. The webcasts caught the attention of Mark Cuban’s AudioNet, and through the Broadcast.com partnership that followed, Bob produced more than 100 live shows, among them Willie Nelson, Barenaked Ladies and Dickey Betts.

The decades since read like a tour of the web’s biggest shifts. He built Dell’s worldwide trade compliance system and holds U.S. Patent 7,373,346 for the security architecture behind it. He led enterprise web work for more than 40 universities, including Texas A&M, the University of Texas and Emory. He spent 11 years as Web Accessibility Officer for the Texas General Land Office, and after Hurricane Harvey he built recovery.texas.gov, the first CDBG-DR/MIT disaster recovery website, whose Best Known Practices HUD published as a development model.

Today he is the CEO of Trinzik, the AI company he co-founded with his brother, John Michaels. The leadership team is Bob as CEO, John as COO and Rik as Chief Business Officer. As Web & AI Systems Architect, Bob also built Trinzik’s entire production AI platform himself. He works the way he plays: hands on every step, nothing left to chance. Read the full record at bobmichaels.ai.

To Rik, Bob is far more than the band’s lead guitarist. He’s a partner and a leader, on stage and at Trinzik, and one of the rare people who has been early to every big change in how music reaches an audience.