Unite Texas startups, distinct new ideas and ventures, and opportunity
Texas, USA
Joined May 2016
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Applications are open for the @twuniversity Center for Women Entrepreneurs program's Austin cohort.
linkedin.com/posts/cweaccele…
Texas Startups retweeted
Excited to join the conversation at AcceleratorCON, Oct 23, in New York.
🎟️ I have 10 FREE Founder tickets
Use PAUL100 while they last. Then PAUL25 saves you 25% on any pass.
👉 Ticket: luma.com/tuwo7wrd
📖 View article
Texas Startups retweeted
I felt small today. Large scale transformers are indeed, quite large.
Come check it out on Oct. 26th in Austin!
luma.com/d7nq0c24
Texas Startups retweeted
$2B in portfolio exits so far this year. Exciting times for our small venture firm.
Texas Startups retweeted
Networks decide who gets funded, which startups survive, and which regions compound.
New Research: Network Economies are the Competitive Moat Causing Success
Texas Startups retweeted
Just wired angel investments into two incredible founders building amazing companies…
More to come next week
Texas Startups retweeted
What happens when the thing your profession gets paid to produce becomes nearly free?
Translation already lived through it: the industry survived, but pricing compressed, workflows changed, junior work eroded, and value moved.
Here’s what comes next.
Texas Startups retweeted
42 years ago, I started @Dell with $1,000 in my dorm room. Today, I’m deeply honored to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. 🇺🇸
Thank you @POTUS. This honor belongs to the incredible teams, partners and customers who made it possible.
The best is yet to come.
Keep building 🚀
.@POTUS presents the National Medal of Science to Sergey Brin, @JensenHuang, @elonmusk, and @LisaSu, and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation to @MichaelDell and @satyanadella.
Texas Startups retweeted
Mark Cuban says if he were 20 today, he'd skip venture capital entirely.
His reasoning: a $100K/month AI consulting business for small businesses beats chasing a 0.1% VC lottery ticket.
The math is brutal and obvious once you say it out loud.
Most founders spend years grinding for a shot at diluted equity, a 10-year exit, and a 95% failure rate. Cuban is pointing at a different path — one where AI tools let a 20-year-old build real cash flow fast, without giving up ownership or control.
The contrarian insight isn't "consulting is underrated." It's that the AI moment has made consulting scalable in ways it never was before. One person can now deliver what used to take an agency.
$100K/month is $1.2M/year. Profitable from day one. No board. No cap table. No begging for a Series A.
That's the business Cuban wishes he'd had access to at 20.
Texas Startups retweeted
That’s my face when I'm asked why I network so much.
What I’m thinking is, "how is yours not? This matters."
I’ve helped kids try to start their careers, and I’ve watched friends I love try to find their next job after doing great work for years. They’re talented and they work hard and they aren't connecting with people.
So, I did some research for my work with startups. The ones that built real networks succeeded 89% of the time, and the ones that didn’t succeeded 17% of the time. It wasn’t about money. It was about people, and it’s the same for a company, a city, and every one of us.
A network isn’t luck. You build it one conversation, one introduction, one “how are you doing?” at a time, and it pays you back for the rest of your life.
The article is here: paulobrien.substack.com/p/am…
The full paper is free to download here: academia.edu/178592776/Netwo…
And if someone you care about is struggling right now, introduce them to someone. It might change everything.
🤖 Made with AI
Texas Startups retweeted
Forget Silicon Hills. Forget an American Shenzhen.
The Texas Diamond is where frontier tech is invented, financed, built, & deployed. 🤠🚀🦾
🤖 Made with AI
Texas Startups retweeted
The Texas Triangle will see the biggest economic expansion in the US over the next ten years.
Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio.
Nothing else groups like this:
- low cost of living
- high quality of life
- ample and relatively cheap land
- no state income tax
- central location
- good weather
- diverse economies
- business and regulatory friendly
- good education & healthcare
- Giga Texas + Terafab + Bastrop
The suburban and rural areas will also benefit massively from technological and cultural shifts:
- work from anywhere
- self driving cars, no traffic
- transportation: drones, flying cars
- food delivery improvements (not just TexMex and BBQ anymore)
- AR/VR/AI in education
- decreasing social isolation
- influx of talent and high-caliber people
- patriotic, pro-American, homogenous culture & values
Texas Startups retweeted
Things you learn in Texas:
1. The guy in the F-150 is worth a lot more than the dude in a Mercedes.
2. The small business owner from a state school is smarter than the majority of Ivy League grads.
3. There’s more racism in Connecticut country clubs than in rural honky-tonks.
4. Rednecks are more honorable than investment bankers.
5. The man who looks like he can’t afford the tab could buy the building.
6. They don’t ask for a deck before the meeting.
7. Prep school is where they send the problem kids.
8. If he’s wearing dusty boots, a 2XL Magellan shirt, a gold Rolex, and has a bulletproof case on his iPhone 12, you’ve already lost the negotiation.
9. “How’s business?” is a real question. “What do you do?” is a New York question.
10. Tips are bigger and egos are smaller.
11. A handshake still closes deals that a term sheet would kill.
12. The wealth is in real estate, oil, or a company nobody in Manhattan has ever heard of.
13. Your wife or daughter will never struggle finding help to change a tire.
14. Nobody asks where you went to college.
15. A weekend invitation to their ranch makes you part of the family.
Texas Startups retweeted
The US government will give your startup up to $1.55M and take 0% equity.
@NSF's America's Seed Fund is open again after Congress reauthorized it in April.
Three tracks:
- Phase I: up to $305K to prove the idea
- Phase II: up to $1.25M to build it
- Fast-Track: up to $1.55M, both phases in one go
Who can apply:
- US-based startups with 500 or fewer employees
- 51%+ owned by US citizens or permanent residents
- Not majority owned by VCs
- All the work done in the US
How it works:
- Send a 3-page Project Pitch first
- NSF invites the best ones to submit a full proposal
- Next full proposal deadline: Nov 4
Phase I funding rates have run about 10 to 20%. It's work, but nobody takes your cap table.
Application link 👉 seedfund.nsf.gov
Bookmark and tag a tech founder who needs this.
Texas Startups retweeted
Fascinates me how many banks and lenders happily try to use Ecosystem and Community Builders, as a vehicle to reach founders, without paying to support them.
Here you are, a profitable business, wanting to sell to the audience and influence we have, and you pretend your service is unique and something we should want to promote for you.
Here's how this works.
We build the community and put the work in to help founders. You PAY to support that because you want to sell to them.
Your loan is not help. It's a product that costs them money.
There is no middle ground. You either financially support because you have the means or you're a predator and deserve to be harshly criticized for pretending you're a noble service to society because you sell a financial product.
Texas Startups retweeted
I've encountered what seems like a wildly disproportionate number of young founders who were homeschooled. What's fascinating to me is how little direct research exists on it.
We have substantial research suggesting that homeschooling can foster autonomy, self-direction, creativity and internal locus of control. We separately have extensive entrepreneurship research showing that many of those same characteristics predict entrepreneurial behavior.
A tiny 2017 study connected the two. But I can find remarkably little serious research asking the obvious question: Are homeschoolers actually more likely to become entrepreneurs? Is anybody else seeing this?
If they are, we may be looking at something considerably more important than an alternative educational model. We may be looking at an educational environment that unintentionally produces the skills our students need most.
Texas Startups retweeted
I got on a call with @seobrien last week.
As soon as we got on the call the potential partner said 'Paul, I am glad that you were able to join this call. I have an LLM project set up with all of your work'.
Be so indispensable that people in your space are building projects around your work.
Texas Startups retweeted
The deal could bring strong returns to investors in Austin. bizjournals.com/austin/news/…
