Five Years of Building in North Texas: What Works, What's Still Broken

An honest account of five years, from someone who is still glad he came.

I can tell you who will be at the next startup event in North Texas. Not the topic, not the venue, just the people. After five years, I know the room before I walk into it, and so does everyone else in it.

5 years ago yesterday on a hot and steamy Monday evening, I rolled into Frisco to unload at my new place after receiving word a week earlier that I did NOT get the job I was a finalist for as the Manager of Innovation at a certain local entity.

I chose to move anyway, having already made several connections and knowing a fair amount about the DFW ecosystem and the exciting opportunities that existed in North Texas, thanks to friendships with some of the greats: Trey Bowles , Jennifer Sanders , Cameron Cushman , Marco Johnson , Amber J. Yourman , Kendel R.

Shortly after getting settled, I had the opportunity to re-engage with said local entity and was quickly brought on by a consulting firm to help accomplish a rather daunting task: identify and map the startup capital ecosystem across the DFW region. This included researching not only founders and funded companies, but angel networks, venture firms, corporate innovation programs, and a sundry of other ecosystem support organizations across the metroplex.

What I had been told and observed before making the move was quickly confirmed: DFW lacked early stage capital.

Poking Around & Asking Questions

In the midst of the research, I naturally started asking questions. Thanks to the opportunities I had representing Illinois through Startup America, serving as a founding member of Startup Champions Network , and building Startup Peoria and the Peoria Innovation Alliance, I knew where to look, what to ask, and some of the determining factors that tend to surface what is actually going on.

A few things quickly bubbled up.

1. Startups were not in the regional plan. The region's CEDS, or Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy, had recently been updated after a 10+ year gap, and the term itself was foreign to most of the people I was talking to. The document was the bigger surprise. Across an entire regional economic plan, startup appeared one time. Venture appeared one time. Ecosystem appeared twice. That is not hostility toward startups and innovation, that is absence. Nobody wrote us out of the plan, because we were never really in it.

2. There was no wide open front door. Plenty of programs, incubators, accelerators, and support organizations across the metroplex, and places like The DEC Network doing real work to point people in the right direction. What did not exist was anything underneath all of it. No onboarding, no intake, no digital place where the region's resources could coalesce. Getting in still came down to knowing somebody who already knew where to look, which meant the founders who needed help the most were the least likely to find it.

3. The capital was here and sitting still. Enormous wealth across family offices, exited operators, athletes, real estate, and oil and gas. Very little of it has ever gone into early stage ventures, and most of the people holding it have never been given a reason or a framework to consider it.

4. We only told half the story. North Texas talks constantly about corporate relocations and late stage wins, and we have earned that. We have never built much of a story around the early stage side, which is part of why the region does not show up or show well in national rankings for startup activity or early stage investment.

The Part That Works

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this article is a complaint, and I do not have much standing to complain.

Four months after moving, AUTIX® won CodeLaunch Accelerator . The following year we won the Capital One Accelerator as part of DFW Startup Week sponsored by Capital One , and we went on to become a semi-finalist for SEMA Launch Pad. We were also a recipient of the Innovation Fund through the McKinney Economic Development Corporation , and Miguel Esparza (now with the City of Dallas) and Mike Wilkes , who now leads the North Texas Angel Network , made certain that award came with real visibility attached to it and not simply a check.

Ichan Stall over at NTAN eventually came on as an advisor to AUTIX. He moved to the region around the same time I did, and he has been pushing hard ever since to grow angel membership and get more people here interested in early stage investing. He is still pushing.

None of that happens in a bigger, colder market inside of 18 months. The density in North Texas is real, and you can get to almost anyone in this region within two calls. I have leaned on that more times than I can count.

Then There Is The Other Part

Having won just about everything a founder can win in this region, I still could not raise a seed round.

I applied everywhere and took every meeting. I met with the North Texas Angel Network, submitted more applications than I care to remember, and worked the very same rooms I have been describing since the first paragraph.

The answer was almost always some version of the same thing: come back with more traction, come back with more revenue.

Those are Series A questions being asked at seed. A founder sitting at proof of concept ends up evaluated against a bar they can only clear by already having the money they came to ask for.

I do not believe anyone is doing this on purpose. A significant amount of capital in this region was built through real estate, oil and gas, and successful operating businesses, all of which are worlds where you underwrite the numbers sitting in front of you. Applying that instinct to a pre-revenue company is not gatekeeping, it is simply the wrong instrument. The effect, though, is a region that struggles to write its own first checks.

The money I did raise came from an investor in Houston and from close friends and family. North Texas validated the company thoroughly and then let somebody else fund it.

We Wrote The Plan & Then Let It Sit

I should be clear that I am part of this too.

A couple years back a few of us ( Michael Kelly Gabby Everett Chris Watson Ichan Stall ) set out to launch NTX Collective , a regional nonprofit designed to go directly at each of those four gaps. NTX Connect was the digital layer, a place where the region's resources could actually coalesce and a founder could get onboarded without needing to know somebody first. Angel Academy was built to activate the sideline capital and educate new investors on what early stage actually requires. A regional ESI strategy would get entrepreneurship written into the CEDS, alongside a storytelling framework to give the region a coherent narrative it could take national. And an innovation fund was aimed squarely at the space between proof of concept and first revenue, where a disproportionate number of companies stall out.

It stalled. Not because anyone objected to it. Everyone we presented it to agreed with it. We all had day jobs to attend to, and something that everybody supports and nobody owns does not move.

Which is the entire pattern in miniature. Not opposition, just nobody whose actual job it is.

Who This Actually Costs

I had a network, a national track record, and a literal map of every check writer in the metroplex, and my raise still went the way it did. I also had the ability to keep building without the money, which is its own kind of luck and not a strategy anybody should count on.

The founder who has none of that is not getting a no in North Texas. They are getting a maybe for two years, until they run out. They don't write a post about it. They quietly move the company, or they take a job, and the region records nothing at all because nothing visible ever happened.

That is what the gap actually looks like. Not a dramatic rejection, just a slow leak of companies we never knew we had.

What I Would Ask

Three things, none of them particularly big.

• If you write checks in this region, publish your criteria and your stage. Real check size, real expectations. A founder who does not already know you can then determine whether the ask is even worth making.
• If you are sitting on capital and have never done early stage, get educated before you get asked. The gap here is not only money, it is money that understands what it is looking at.
• And NTX Collective is still sitting on my hard drive. I am not relaunching it today. But if you read that description and still think it should exist, I would genuinely like to know who you are.

In Closing

Five years ago I was new here, and a handful of people took the call anyway. That is the whole thing. Somebody let me in before I had done anything to earn it.

So here is the ask that actually matters:

If you are already in the room, take one call this month from somebody you have never heard of who cannot do a thing for you. That is the entire mechanism. It is not complicated and it does not cost anything.

And if you are building something in North Texas and you are not in that room, send me a message. I will take the call.

Onward and upward,

-Jake

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