Research Plans

Ben Baldazo

Ben Baldazo Research Plans (Plan Page)

Houston Entrepreneurship

Startups of Houston Interactive Maps - The Whole Process

Start-Ups of Houston (Map)

Use Google Maps to find Longitude and Latitude

• Document how to work Geocode.py and what might go wrong

Put through R code to make an interactive map

• Finding and Documenting the processes required to run the R code may be necessary
• Works on Carto and looks really cool
• We do eventually need to have a plug in and a Carto account so that we can post this on the Wiki

Accelerator Quality Issue Brief

Houston Accelerators (issue brief)

Factors to look at

• Value Added
  • How to look at this though?
• Market vs Non-Market
  • Philanthropic funding?
    • If Non-Profit: Propublica will document contributions
    • If for profit: call?
  • Founded Bottom up? or Top down?
    • See if it was founded by a group or individual with actual industry connections (online or phone)
• Location
  • Proximity to resources
    • We may have to update the startups in Houston map for this
• Available Resources (we should generally be able to call or find this on website, these should be things they brag about)
  • Flex Space
  • Events
  • Co-Working
  • Connections/Mentorship
    • This can also have a judged value based on Mentor/Connection perceived experiece
  • Funding (This may be hard but if they offer their own VC we can check through SDC)
  • Userbase
• Leadership/Experience qualifications (Linkedin, profiles on their own websites, other bios)
  • Have they driven a startup before or been in backseat
  • What other qualifications do they have
• Criteria from the Acc Rankings (as long as we have portfolios then we can use SDC for this)
  • VC funding history
  • IPO
  • Acquired
• Any other reviews possible
  • Other articles (Xconomy, Houston Chronicle, etc.)
  • Info from actually calling the accelerators (Putting a list of questions up on the discussion for Houston Accelerators (issue brief)
  • perhaps reviews from startups themselves
    • Could look specifically into startups that have gone through multiple accelerators hopefully we have phone numbers on File:HSM10.xlsx

Jake Silberman

Jake Silberman Research Plans Plan Page

Leveraged Buyout Innovation (Academic Paper)

• Finalize Hazard Model
  • Determine best regression model (Cox or something else that makes more assumptions)
  • Determine finalized variable set
  • Predict based on model
• Match LBO and non LBO companies based on hazard model predictions
  • Generate buckets, i.e. break down by industry, decade, etc...
  • Determine metric for matching
• Integrate new patent data
  • Create stocks of patents
  • Add in patent assignment data
• Analysis of control group and study group for first results
  • Refine matching if necessary
  • Test for endogeneity/other issues
• Lit review for variables
  • Revise preexisting regression variable write-up and reformat it to appropriate academic paper form

Venture Capital (Data)

• Do final correct pull of SDC Data (just include IPOS)
• Clean data, throwing out duplicate names and only take most recently invested one
• Rank cities by venture capital on different metrics, either in SQL or Excel
• Write up issue brief

Shoeb Mohammed

Shoeb Mohammed Research Plans Research Plan page

Short Term

• Create a listing on the wiki for all software developed at McNair center. - Completed
• Build a Linux box to run the crawler. - Completed

Long Term

• Optimize/re-design the 'Matcher' software. In particular, speed-up fuzzy matching and possibly re-structure the code to make usage easier.
• Develop the crawler. Try to begin with code that Dan has. - Completed

Side Tasks

• If possible, redo the patent parser (previous coded by Kranti) to also pull in Patent Citation data.

Veeral Shah

Veeral Shah (Research Plans)

James Chen

James Chen (Research Plans)

Ariel Sun

Ariel Sun Research Plans (Plan Page)

Hubs (Academic Paper)

• Hubs
  • Get scorecard system completed Hubs: Mechanical Turk
  • Mechanical Turk for potential hubs Mechanical Turk (Tool)
  • Matched identified hubs to CMSAs

• VC table
  • Waiting for patent data to be fixed to join to VC table
  • Import VC data to STATA
  • Hazard rate model
  • Diff-in-diff

Todd Rachowin

Todd Rachowin Research Plans (Plan Page)

1. Short-Term = Hubs List (Hubs: Mechanical Turk)
   1. Creating a comprehensive list of potential hubs
   2. Determining the best variables for the scorecard
   3. Building "filters" for automating the collection
   4. Running and auditing of the automation
   5. Collecting the remaining manual data

1. Long-Term = Everything Else
   1. Hazard Rate Model (determine proper one, run it, etc.)
   2. Diff-Diff

Gunny Liu

Gunny Liu Research Plans (Plan Page)

Week VII

7/11 thru 7/15

• Finalize Twitter Webcrawler version Alpha, discuss roadmap ahead with research fellows
• Expand semantic mediawiki capabilities on our wiki and provide documentation for existing data structures
• Configuration of data transfer of startup data from local to wiki wrt Ben

Week VIII

7/8 thru 7/22

• Alpha Exploration & development of existing Google Maps API script
• Advanced development of Twitter Webcrawler to populate McNair databases
  • Input: previously documented mothernodes and entrepreneurship buzzwords
• Advance development of Eventbrite Webcrawler to populate McNair databases
  • To integrate with Google Maps API to provide updated mapping of active entrepreneurship events in Houston

Week IX

7/25 thru 7/29

• Alpha Exploration & development of Techcrunch API
• Alpha Exploration & development of Facebook API

Week X

8/1 thru 8/5

• Advanced development of all API scripts to populate McNair databases

Week XI

8/8 thru 8/12

• Last day of summer internship: 8/8