The Hill Country Venture Fest has announced that its October 1, 2026, student pitch night will take place at Mason's historic Odeon Theater, a venue with deep roots in the community. The festival, recognized as the 2025 Texas Venture Fest of the Year by the Texas Venture Alliance, invites rural Hill Country students to present their business ideas to real judges in front of a supportive audience.
The choice of the Odeon Theater is central to the festival's mission. Built in 1928 on Mason's courthouse square, the Odeon bills itself as the longest continually operating theater in west Texas. It sits within a National Historic Register district and has hosted premieres of films like Old Yeller and Savage Sam, both based on books by Mason native Fred Gipson. "A local kid's story once went out to the whole world from that stage," said Milton Jordan, festival organizer. "On October 1, our students step onto the same boards and pitch what they want to build. That's not a metaphor we invented - it's the history of the room."
The Odeon remains a working theater, showing first-run films four nights a week, and underwent a restoration in 2019 that modernized seating and sound. Its intimate size is a feature for pitch night, ensuring that students present to a full, close room where every seat feels like the front row. The festival's promise to rural students has always been that the stage is here - not a hundred miles away in a city built for someone else.
The Hill Country Venture Fest is free to attend and free to enter. It is co-hosted by townie.ai and SimpleEDO.ai, organized by Katie Milton Jordan since its inception as a single-campus event in Kerrville in 2023, and is part of the statewide Texas Venture Fest network. Reservations are available through hillcountryventurefest.com and close August 28. Due to the theater's limited capacity, seats are first come, first served and may fill sooner.
