Tech Bro of the Week: The Standing Desk Rancher

All characters in Tech Bro of the Week are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or grazing, is purely coincidental.

When the pandemic hit, most people bought sourdough starters. Kelton Pryce-Abernathy bought a ranch.

Forty acres outside Dripping Springs, to be exact, with a limestone farmhouse, a stock tank he immediately converted into a "natural plunge pool," and a barn he now uses as a Zoom room. He paid $1.4 million for it in 2021, which his real estate agent described as "a steal" and which anyone who bought Hill Country land in 2005 would describe as "insane."

Kelton is a product manager for a fintech company based in New York. He has never been to New York. He works from the ranch, standing at a $2,400 motorized desk positioned in front of a window overlooking his property, which he describes as "my viewport to authenticity."

"I'm not a rancher," he clarified, which was unnecessary, as everything about him had already clarified this. "I'm a land-based remote worker optimizing for acreage-to-Zoom-background ratio."

In the eighteen months since purchasing the ranch, Kelton has developed strong opinions about the following:

• Cedar: He is against it. He has read one article about Ashe juniper and now refers to cedar as "an invasive monoculture" at dinner parties. He has hired a cedar-clearing crew twice. He has also planted six Japanese maples, which a neighbor gently noted are not native either. Kelton said, "But they're aesthetic."
• Fencing: He spent $22,000 on new fencing after his neighbor's cattle wandered onto his property and stood near his plunge pool "menacingly." The cattle, for the record, were just standing there. That's what cattle do.
• Water rights: He attended one Edwards Aquifer Authority meeting, asked a question about "decentralized water governance," and was met with a silence so profound it could be felt in Wimberley.

Kelton has three goats. He bought them for "brush management" but mostly posts them on Instagram where they have a dedicated highlight reel called "The Herd." He named them Satoshi, Elon, and the third one he lets his daughter name, so it's called Sparkle. Sparkle is the only one that actually eats brush.

His neighbors — actual ranchers, people who have been working this land for generations — are polite about Kelton in the way that Texans are polite about everything, which is to say they smile and then talk about him at the feed store.

Last month, Kelton hosted a "Ranch & Reflect" retreat for twelve remote workers at $350/person. Activities included sunrise yoga, a "pasture walk" led by Kelton (who got winded at the gate), and a taco bar catered by a food truck from Austin. The tacos cost more per unit than a breakfast taco used to cost anywhere in this city.

He has started a Substack called "Hill Country Dispatch" where he writes about land stewardship, slow living, and the importance of disconnecting — posts he publishes from his standing desk using Starlink internet he had installed because regular broadband didn't reach the barn.

When we asked if he'd heard of the Armadillo World Headquarters, he said, "Is that a co-working space?"

We finished our Lone Stars and drove back to Austin. The sunset was free. Kelton would have charged for it.