Start-Up Guide (Issue Brief)

McNair Project

Start-Up Guide (Issue Brief)
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Under Houston Entrepreneurship umbrella.

Abstract

Every entrepreneurship ecosystem consists of a delicate balance between innovative thinkers, ambitious business owners, market forces and entrepreneurship institutions. The entrepreneurship institutions, ranging from accelerators and incubators to hubs and co-working spaces, provide key services to aspiring entrepreneurs. After founding a start-up, entrepreneurs require every possible edge they can get in order to maximize their idea's potential. Houston, the largest city in a state with little venture capital, stands in a position to change the narrative of Texan entrepreneurship. Through an analysis of the major entrepreneurship institutions located in Houston, the McNair Center has complied a guide for start-up entrepreneurs, academics, and policy makers to help navigate and better understand the options, successes and failures of the Houston entrepreneurship ecosystem. For this qualitative and quantitative analysis, each institution must provide a "program" for entrepreneurs and their start-ups to enroll in and go through. The qualitative analysis consists of few key parts, namely what the institution considers itself, the services provided by the institution and the entrepreneurship experience level of the institution's directors. The quantitative analysis investigates how many start-ups that participated in an institution's program received venture capital, were acquired, or exited in an initial public offering (IPO). Other considerations such as repeat dealings with venture capital firms, founding date of institution, non-profit status, and quality of venture capital firms dealt with were noted in the data.

Institutions

In order for an entity to be considered an institution for this project, it needed to be located in Houston, provide some kind of "program" for enrollment by start-ups and entrepreneurs, and had to have an easily accessible and published list of all companies which have participated in this "program." All data was collected from institution websites, thus the type of institution, services provided, skill level of directors, and list of cohort companies which have been through a "program" are all self-reported. Data was then aggregated across the board.

Houston Accelerators

An accelerator is a “fixed-term, cohort-based program including mentorship and educational components, that culminates in a public pitch event, often referred to as ‘demo-day’” (Cohen and Hochberg, 2014). The mission of an accelerator, often a non-profit entity, is to provide early stage start-ups with resources, mentorship, and networking needed to gain access to venture capital funding. On average, cohorts stay with an accelerator for 3 months cumulating with a pitch to several venture capital investors. (Fehder and Hochberg, 2014)

Houston Incubators

Incubators “shelter vulnerable nascent businesses, allowing them to be stronger to become independent” (National Business Incubation Association). Incubators serve as a temporary space for start-ups to develop in their early stages. Unlike accelerators, there is no formal curriculum, cohorts, or duration of stay. Residents of incubators pay fees for both rent and services, and are not offered the breadth of resources found in an accelerator. (Fehder and Hochberg, 2014)

Other Houston Institutions

Station Houston (Hub)

Emily,

Looking forward to seeing you this evening. Stats below. Also, copying in Brad and Mary Lynn from the Rice Alliance who mace have interesting Data, as well as Ed Egan from the Baker Institute at Rice.

Provided some data points from an array of angles below; hope this is helpful.

JR

- Station member companies have raised just under $20 M in funding since March 2016 - Station now boasts over 75 members - Station member Arundo Analytics recently clothes on a $4.9 million funding round - Station closed its seed round of funding - there are other companies currently going through diligence to exit, but I can't provide any details regarding any of those deals - TMCx posted that Johnson and Johnson is making a larger investment in the digital health space in the city - the Texas Workforce Commision has recently made changes to their requirements for coding academies which has resulted in most platforms halting their recreational platforms. I can expand on this as needed - you may want to take a look at what's going on with HP enterprise as I believe they recently had a restructuring if you want to comment on one of the larger enterprise companies here in town - Alert Logic filed their S1 earlier this year towards going public in 2017 - Meshify acquisition in the news - Houston launched company Virtuix raised over $7 million in crowd funding recently, however the team relocated to Austin earlier this year - Kemal Farid, founder of Merrick systems which was one of the Larger software exits in the O&G industry some years ago closed on his first fund which is a Houston/Silicon Valley investment vehicle - $160 M fund - You can search Joe Martin articles for recent funding activities

Quantitative

Percent of Portfolio to Receive Venture Capital

 Session Details
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  2              Custom Report: VCall (Columnar) - Save As:
                 C:\SDC\4.0.3.1\Platinum\USR\VCall.txt

 Billing Ref # : 1964678
 Capture File  : riceuniv.1964678
 Session Name  :