Houston 2035: War for Talent, Personalized Textbooks, & More

Houston 2035

Are you ready for the Smackdown in H-town?

The hunt for engineering talent by technology companies is brutal and two tech company CEOs—Gaurav Khandelwal at ChaiOne and Shion Deysarkar at Datafiniti—will bring their experiences on Houston’s strengths and weaknesses at the upcoming Houston 2035 conference May 21.

In 2013, Deysarkar decided to move his company to Austin from Houston because getting talented engineers proved too difficult. Khandelwal, however, is literally a poster boy for Houston’s potential: He is featured in the Greater Houston Partnership’s “City With No Limits” campaign touting the city’s virtues in billboards across town.

That discussion (all in good fun, but meant to be insightful), and more, will take place at TMCx next month, where we are bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors for an all-day conference aimed at tackling the promise and potential pitfalls of growth in Houston in the decades to come.

Get your tickets and learn more about Houston 2035 here.

We’ve posted our Houston 2035 agenda online today, featuring local innovators in healthcare, life sciences, and energy, as well as education, design and architecture. For example, Rich Baraniuk, who created at Rice University Openstak, the world’s largest textbook, will highlight how technology will enable us to personalize curriculum and teaching resources. Naomi Halas, at Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics and the Rice Quantum Institute, will discuss how her research is creating opportunities in energy beyond oil and gas.

We’re complement these local innovators with some great out-of-town voices and perspective, among them: Bill Aulet from the MIT Center for Entrepreneurship, Andrew Salkin with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, and Michael Wilson from Healthcare Highways in Dallas.

It’s going to be a great day; registration is open. We hope to see you there.

 

Author: Angela Shah

Angela Shah was formerly the editor of Xconomy Texas. She has written about startups along a wide entrepreneurial spectrum, from Silicon Valley transplants to Austin transforming a once-sleepy university town in the '90s tech boom to 20-something women defying cultural norms as they seek to build vital IT infrastructure in a war-torn Afghanistan. As a foreign correspondent based in Dubai, her work appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Newsweek/Daily Beast and Forbes Asia. Before moving overseas, Shah was a staff writer and columnist with The Dallas Morning News and the Austin American-Statesman. She has a Bachelor's of Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and she is a 2007 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. With the launch of Xconomy Texas, she's returned to her hometown of Houston.