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As a Houstonion this gives me pause. Houston is a massive economic center by nearly every measure. It is also home to the most diverse county and university in

As a Houstonion this gives me pause. Houston is a massive economic center by nearly every measure. It is also home to the most diverse county and university in the US. There are large successful technology companies here. Yet, Detroit and Dallas (arch enemy of Houston) are getting TechStars before us. Part of the reason we don't attract accelerators like TechStars is the lack of a healthy startup ecosystem. I am NOT saying that the well intentioned community organizers aren't working hard. It's just that most of the VC here goes to Oil & Gas projects. If your tech isn't energy related it won't hit the radar. The technology startup successes I've seen in my 30 or so years here were built inspite of a (nonexistent) local startup ecosystem. Lastly, 9 out of 10 great people I've worked with here have left to go places with more tech opportunity. The talent is voting with its feet. Frankly, I'm done too. I'm on the first airplane out of here once I get my feet under me. I'm sad that it has to be this way. Maybe if I make it rich I'll come back and invest. edit: spelling

jusben1369 12y ago
I guess the question is what makes for a good techhub/incubator. It seems to me embracing of a counter culture lifestyle is the key early differentiator. Certainly the Bay Area once had that. Austin. Seattle. Even Durham NC where I'm based now and is having a (relative) boom rose out of abandoned tobacco warehouses that could afford to support all types of people. I haven't been there in 8 years but I hear Detroit has that going for it now too. Houston with it's established booming energy sector probably doesn't draw in the right type of culture. (Although I have no response for Dallas vs Houston so you've got me there) Sure you need good universities and cheap accommodation etc but it strikes me there has to be something unique and alternative to draw in the igniters of a new hub.
- bluedino 12y ago
  One thing that San Francisco has that somewhere like Detroit doesn't, is the affluent residents with the ability to sustain a service like Uber or startups such as food delivery. Those kind of services are viable to create a startup focused on in SF but not in Detroit.
  - heurist 12y ago
    Startups also don't have to be consumer-oriented, there are plenty of businesses in the midwest that need better tools and solutions than they have.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    I've been told that the suburbs immediately outside Detroit city limits are rich as Croesus.
    - akgerber 12y ago
      Not quite. Here's a huge house right off a lakefront park in just such a rich suburb: http://www.trulia.com/property/3172627452-736-Bedford-Rd-Grosse-Pointe-Park-MI-48230 http://www.trulia.com/property/3172627452-736-Bedford-Rd-Gro... You could buy two of them for the monthly cost of a nice 1-bedroom in SF.
    - phkahler 12y ago
      >> I've been told that the suburbs immediately outside Detroit city limits are rich as Croesus. Yup. Oakland County was once the 4th richest county in the US. Michigan leads the nation in families with second homes. Everyone around here has a second home (cottage, cabin, etc) on a lake from 1-3 hour drive away. OK, not everyone. Part of it is that there are so many lakes that they're relatively cheap. I even knew a guy who bought an entire lake - property was like 100 acres and lake was within that. This cost him less than a two bedroom place in SF.
      - valarauca1 12y ago
        Northern Michigan (extreme north) is dirt cheap. Yes your looking at a 8+ hour drive to get there, but excellent winter sports, and out doors stuff.
        karpodiem 12y ago
        What? What are you start/end points? Northern suburbs (Royal Oak) to Traverse City is 4.5 hours.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Oddly Houston has always been a wildcatter's town. People come here specifically to make money. I promise they're not here for the climate. People here are more entreprenurial than other places I've lived. People here have their own style of counter culture that more resembles a lack of f*s to give. Texans feel like they can do whatever they want. You'd think that would be great for business, and it is, the state and specifically Houston have done great during the recession. However tech just lags here.
  - humanrebar 12y ago
    How do you explain the pushback against Uber then?
    - CoachRufus87 12y ago
      Fyi, San Francisco just sued Uber. The interests of a business community don't necessarily reflect that of a local government.
saryant 12y ago
I have to agree. I love Houston but I left it for San Antonio because the tech scene in SA was much more lively with Geekdom and Techstars. Though I'm now in Boulder I've been keeping in eye on SA and there's a lot of cool stuff going on there, plus the VC activity has really picked up—multiple $1+ million rounds have been announced or will be announced in the next few weeks.
- mgirdley 12y ago
  As a San Antonio VC (GeekdomFund.com), I hope you come back.
  - saryant 12y ago
    Hi Michael.
- avelis 12y ago
  I am a part of the young tech startups in SA and I would also suggest for anyone to come back or give it a look see. I transplanted from SF and find the playing field wide open for new opportunities.
- kgomez 12y ago
  +1 for SA! Thanks for your comments :)
yeldarb 12y ago
I lived in Houston for 6 months a few years ago while my girlfriend was student teaching there. It was so foreign to me that I couldn't find any semblance of a startup community in such a large city.
- saryant 12y ago
  It's there, but it's not young and it's not the sort of tech that you see in SV. If you want to talk to startups building oil pipeline monitoring or healthcare software, it's the place.
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    Pipeline monitoring? Healthcare software? How in the world will anybody ever make any money in oil or healthcare? Seriously, keep in mind that for all of the companies in Silicon Valley that do truly groundbreaking or meaningful things, there are many more startups that fall into one of the following categories: 1. Doomed to failure chasing inane consumer internet ideas that 50 other companies are chasing. 2. Doomed to failure leeching off of other startups, something that won't be viable when the current cycle ends. 3. Doomed to failure pursuing legitimate opportunities that their founders don't have the domain expertise to exploit.
    - saryant 12y ago
      I certainly wasn't trying to disparage either oil or healthcare tech. I grew up around oil and have huge respect for that industry. I think my overarching point was that startups in Houston aren't sexy, they don't get coverage on TechCrunch, but there are people building some solid, necessary products. San Antonio is similar with companies like WellAware raising a $37 million series A for oil field monitoring tech.
davidw 12y ago
FlightAware is in Houston, apparently.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  Yup. I've also never met anyone from there at any community events.
  - davidw 12y ago
    Maybe they're busy working on the company, or going to pilot events :-) I think there's a balance to be struck there: you see some places that are crawling with startup "scene" events and happenings and networking and you wonder how any work gets done. But if everyone stays holed up all the time, that's probably not healthy long term either, in terms of pulling new people in.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
7Figures2Commas 12y ago
> Part of the reason we don't attract accelerators like TechStars is the lack of a healthy startup ecosystem. As an entrepreneur, you do not need a "healthy startup ecosystem" to build a successful company. Let me repeat: as an entrepreneur, you do not need a "healthy startup ecosystem" to build a successful company. If you have a great product or service and are willing to make the effort to get in front of customers, you can build a successful company anywhere. Starting today. I won't argue that the things that come with a "healthy startup ecosystem" (accelerators, venture capital firms, etc.) can't be helpful, particularly to certain kinds of entrepreneurs chasing certain kinds of opportunities, but as a general rule, the people who are going to build successful companies aren't waiting for their cities to become startup hubs. It's simply irrelevant to their ability to execute. > If your tech isn't energy related it won't hit the radar. Any entrepreneur in any industry passively waiting to "hit the radar" is going to be disappointed. If you want attention from customers, investors, media, etc., you almost always have to go out and get it. Ironically, this is even more true in the Bay Area because there are so many companies and there is so much noise. > The technology startup successes I've seen in my 30 or so years here were built inspite of a (nonexistent) local startup ecosystem. Even in Silicon Valley, which has the "startup ecosystem" that is the envy of the world, most startups fail. You just don't see the graves because they're covered by the latest batch of startups. > Lastly, 9 out of 10 great people I've worked with here have left to go places with more tech opportunity. The talent is voting with its feet. While it's easy to get the impression otherwise, lots of people come and go in the Bay Area too. Just because this is the tech capital of the world doesn't mean the grass is greener for everyone.
- ryanmarsh 12y ago
  I think you're agreeing with me. The tech startups that are successful here do so in spite of the ecosystem. We're missing whatever that seed is that gets a healthy community going that would feed on itself and create more successes and make us appeal to TechStars.
  - 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
    No, I think you're placing way too much emphasis on the "ecosystem." Again looking at Silicon Valley, there are exponentially more failures than successes even though it has the ecosystem that is the envy of the world.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Cyranix 12y ago
I'm a Rice University alumnus (Hanszen '07), and your sentiment definitely resonates with me. When I took my first programming job, I had two offers come in at the same time: one to stay in Houston and write Java code for pipeline scheduling, the other to head to Austin and work for a small crummy independent company. Houston has so much going for it, and if I had felt like a vibrant tech startup scene were present, I might have stayed. Instead, I left behind my entire friend group and taking a job that paid half of what the energy industry was offering, purely for the sake of better future opportunities. I know there are some entrepreneurial efforts being made at my alma mater, but overall it feels like a huge missed opportunity. The business school is strongly walled off from the undergrad population, the excellent CS department tends toward the academic side (with rare exceptions like COMP 410/415 [1]), and personally I never saw much of an attempt on the part of the local tech scene to get students integrated. There is the Rice Alliance [2] but it isn't quite the same as an organic grassroots-y scene. [1] http://www.bandgap.cs.rice.edu/classes/comp410/ http://www.bandgap.cs.rice.edu/classes/comp410/ [2] http://alliance.rice.edu/ http://alliance.rice.edu/
mbesto 12y ago
I'm surprised there isn't more healthcare based startups (with underlying tech) in Houston. My understanding is that Houston is mostly Oil&Gas + Healthcare.
yesimahuman 12y ago
Well, both San Antonio (Cloud) and Austin have TechStars programs. San Antonio's exist largely because of Rackspace, and Austin because the city is mature for a startup city. So, Houston either needs that large sponsor or organic growth, of which the former doesn't seem far fetched in the somewhat near term.

jusben1369 12y ago

I guess the question is what makes for a good techhub/incubator. It seems to me embracing of a counter culture lifestyle is the key early differentiator. Certainly the Bay Area once had that. Austin. Seattle. Even Durham NC where I'm based now and is having a (relative) boom rose out of abandoned tobacco warehouses that could afford to support all types of people. I haven't been there in 8 years but I hear Detroit has that going for it now too. Houston with it's established booming energy sector probably doesn't draw in the right type of culture. (Although I have no response for Dallas vs Houston so you've got me there) Sure you need good universities and cheap accommodation etc but it strikes me there has to be something unique and alternative to draw in the igniters of a new hub.

bluedino 12y ago
One thing that San Francisco has that somewhere like Detroit doesn't, is the affluent residents with the ability to sustain a service like Uber or startups such as food delivery. Those kind of services are viable to create a startup focused on in SF but not in Detroit.
- heurist 12y ago
  Startups also don't have to be consumer-oriented, there are plenty of businesses in the midwest that need better tools and solutions than they have.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  I've been told that the suburbs immediately outside Detroit city limits are rich as Croesus.
  - akgerber 12y ago
    Not quite. Here's a huge house right off a lakefront park in just such a rich suburb: http://www.trulia.com/property/3172627452-736-Bedford-Rd-Grosse-Pointe-Park-MI-48230 http://www.trulia.com/property/3172627452-736-Bedford-Rd-Gro... You could buy two of them for the monthly cost of a nice 1-bedroom in SF.
  - phkahler 12y ago
    >> I've been told that the suburbs immediately outside Detroit city limits are rich as Croesus. Yup. Oakland County was once the 4th richest county in the US. Michigan leads the nation in families with second homes. Everyone around here has a second home (cottage, cabin, etc) on a lake from 1-3 hour drive away. OK, not everyone. Part of it is that there are so many lakes that they're relatively cheap. I even knew a guy who bought an entire lake - property was like 100 acres and lake was within that. This cost him less than a two bedroom place in SF.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      Northern Michigan (extreme north) is dirt cheap. Yes your looking at a 8+ hour drive to get there, but excellent winter sports, and out doors stuff.
      - karpodiem 12y ago
        What? What are you start/end points? Northern suburbs (Royal Oak) to Traverse City is 4.5 hours.
ryanmarsh 12y ago
Oddly Houston has always been a wildcatter's town. People come here specifically to make money. I promise they're not here for the climate. People here are more entreprenurial than other places I've lived. People here have their own style of counter culture that more resembles a lack of f*s to give. Texans feel like they can do whatever they want. You'd think that would be great for business, and it is, the state and specifically Houston have done great during the recession. However tech just lags here.
- humanrebar 12y ago
  How do you explain the pushback against Uber then?
  - CoachRufus87 12y ago
    Fyi, San Francisco just sued Uber. The interests of a business community don't necessarily reflect that of a local government.

saryant 12y ago

I have to agree. I love Houston but I left it for San Antonio because the tech scene in SA was much more lively with Geekdom and Techstars. Though I'm now in Boulder I've been keeping in eye on SA and there's a lot of cool stuff going on there, plus the VC activity has really picked up—multiple $1+ million rounds have been announced or will be announced in the next few weeks.

mgirdley 12y ago
As a San Antonio VC (GeekdomFund.com), I hope you come back.
- saryant 12y ago
  Hi Michael.
avelis 12y ago
I am a part of the young tech startups in SA and I would also suggest for anyone to come back or give it a look see. I transplanted from SF and find the playing field wide open for new opportunities.
kgomez 12y ago
+1 for SA! Thanks for your comments :)

yeldarb 12y ago

I lived in Houston for 6 months a few years ago while my girlfriend was student teaching there. It was so foreign to me that I couldn't find any semblance of a startup community in such a large city.

saryant 12y ago
It's there, but it's not young and it's not the sort of tech that you see in SV. If you want to talk to startups building oil pipeline monitoring or healthcare software, it's the place.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  Pipeline monitoring? Healthcare software? How in the world will anybody ever make any money in oil or healthcare? Seriously, keep in mind that for all of the companies in Silicon Valley that do truly groundbreaking or meaningful things, there are many more startups that fall into one of the following categories: 1. Doomed to failure chasing inane consumer internet ideas that 50 other companies are chasing. 2. Doomed to failure leeching off of other startups, something that won't be viable when the current cycle ends. 3. Doomed to failure pursuing legitimate opportunities that their founders don't have the domain expertise to exploit.
  - saryant 12y ago
    I certainly wasn't trying to disparage either oil or healthcare tech. I grew up around oil and have huge respect for that industry. I think my overarching point was that startups in Houston aren't sexy, they don't get coverage on TechCrunch, but there are people building some solid, necessary products. San Antonio is similar with companies like WellAware raising a $37 million series A for oil field monitoring tech.

davidw 12y ago

FlightAware is in Houston, apparently.

ryanmarsh 12y ago
Yup. I've also never met anyone from there at any community events.
- davidw 12y ago
  Maybe they're busy working on the company, or going to pilot events :-) I think there's a balance to be struck there: you see some places that are crawling with startup "scene" events and happenings and networking and you wonder how any work gets done. But if everyone stays holed up all the time, that's probably not healthy long term either, in terms of pulling new people in.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

7Figures2Commas 12y ago

> Part of the reason we don't attract accelerators like TechStars is the lack of a healthy startup ecosystem. As an entrepreneur, you do not need a "healthy startup ecosystem" to build a successful company. Let me repeat: as an entrepreneur, you do not need a "healthy startup ecosystem" to build a successful company. If you have a great product or service and are willing to make the effort to get in front of customers, you can build a successful company anywhere. Starting today. I won't argue that the things that come with a "healthy startup ecosystem" (accelerators, venture capital firms, etc.) can't be helpful, particularly to certain kinds of entrepreneurs chasing certain kinds of opportunities, but as a general rule, the people who are going to build successful companies aren't waiting for their cities to become startup hubs. It's simply irrelevant to their ability to execute. > If your tech isn't energy related it won't hit the radar. Any entrepreneur in any industry passively waiting to "hit the radar" is going to be disappointed. If you want attention from customers, investors, media, etc., you almost always have to go out and get it. Ironically, this is even more true in the Bay Area because there are so many companies and there is so much noise. > The technology startup successes I've seen in my 30 or so years here were built inspite of a (nonexistent) local startup ecosystem. Even in Silicon Valley, which has the "startup ecosystem" that is the envy of the world, most startups fail. You just don't see the graves because they're covered by the latest batch of startups. > Lastly, 9 out of 10 great people I've worked with here have left to go places with more tech opportunity. The talent is voting with its feet. While it's easy to get the impression otherwise, lots of people come and go in the Bay Area too. Just because this is the tech capital of the world doesn't mean the grass is greener for everyone.

ryanmarsh 12y ago
I think you're agreeing with me. The tech startups that are successful here do so in spite of the ecosystem. We're missing whatever that seed is that gets a healthy community going that would feed on itself and create more successes and make us appeal to TechStars.
- 7Figures2Commas 12y ago
  No, I think you're placing way too much emphasis on the "ecosystem." Again looking at Silicon Valley, there are exponentially more failures than successes even though it has the ecosystem that is the envy of the world.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

Cyranix 12y ago

I'm a Rice University alumnus (Hanszen '07), and your sentiment definitely resonates with me. When I took my first programming job, I had two offers come in at the same time: one to stay in Houston and write Java code for pipeline scheduling, the other to head to Austin and work for a small crummy independent company. Houston has so much going for it, and if I had felt like a vibrant tech startup scene were present, I might have stayed. Instead, I left behind my entire friend group and taking a job that paid half of what the energy industry was offering, purely for the sake of better future opportunities. I know there are some entrepreneurial efforts being made at my alma mater, but overall it feels like a huge missed opportunity. The business school is strongly walled off from the undergrad population, the excellent CS department tends toward the academic side (with rare exceptions like COMP 410/415 [1]), and personally I never saw much of an attempt on the part of the local tech scene to get students integrated. There is the Rice Alliance [2] but it isn't quite the same as an organic grassroots-y scene. [1] http://www.bandgap.cs.rice.edu/classes/comp410/ http://www.bandgap.cs.rice.edu/classes/comp410/ [2] http://alliance.rice.edu/ http://alliance.rice.edu/

mbesto 12y ago

I'm surprised there isn't more healthcare based startups (with underlying tech) in Houston. My understanding is that Houston is mostly Oil&Gas + Healthcare.

yesimahuman 12y ago

Well, both San Antonio (Cloud) and Austin have TechStars programs. San Antonio's exist largely because of Rackspace, and Austin because the city is mature for a startup city. So, Houston either needs that large sponsor or organic growth, of which the former doesn't seem far fetched in the somewhat near term.