The state of Startup Texas is in a fever of activity.
In the last week and through mid-September, half a dozen accelerators have either announced new classes of entrepreneurs or are hosting their pitch days as the newly fledged startups seek funding and customers. Half of the programs did not exist just a year ago.
I wondered what might be driving the noticeable uptick in the various organizations aimed at boosting Texas startups. Interviews with a group of entrepreneurs and investors didn’t yield any one reason; they all agreed that a variety of factors such as migration from other startup hubs is helping create a groundswell of activity. (And similar growth seems to be happening around the country in places like Colorado, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.)
“I think it’s a combination of people like myself, in their 30s and 40s, who have had success and see what has worked and what hasn’t,” says Blair Garrou, an Xconomist and co-founder and managing director of Mercury Fund, a Houston-based venture capital firm. “So, in Houston we wonder why aren’t there more resources so that entrepreneurs can build what’s needed?”
“There are a number of people who are coming to Houston and leaving corporate jobs wanting to start their own companies and looking for resources to do that,” he adds. “If the help isn’t there, they build it themselves.”
I could see that, in part, when I attended demo days for two new Houston organizations—Houston Health Ventures and The Ironyard. Held at Start Houston, itself a relative newcomer to the startup scene, the pitches offered a peek at perhaps the earliest stage of local entrepreneurs’ ideas.
Those demo days were exactly the sort of activity planned by Apurva Sanghavi and Gaurav Khandelwal when they founded Start Houston as a co-working space two years ago. “I want to put Houston on the map for technology startups,” Khandelwal told me last year.
David Franklin, who founded Houston Health Ventures as a health IT accelerator this summer, moved to Houston from southern California, where he had been an angel investor in medical startups. “In my personal case, I’m pooling learning from the West Coast with seeing the opportunities in Houston. It’s crazy to think we have the world’s largest medical center … and we see a little bit of a void in the health IT and medical investing space.”
Franklin, along with two Houston entrepreneurs, in May also founded a venture fund that will invest in IT startups and created the Texas Collegiate Regional Center at the University of Houston.
Meanwhile,
