Author - Cameron Cushman

November 29By 0 CommentsRead more...

Breaking Down Barriers to Business in Fort Worth

“Would you be interested in making Fort Worth your 21st city?”  Alex Montgomery from the Institute for Justice (IJ) replied with an excited but cautious tone and said, “I’ll have to check with a few folks, but yeah, I think we can do a deep dive in Fort Worth.”   We had just seen a presentation of IJ’s Barriers to Business Report, research that compared the processes, costs, steps and bureaucracy involved in starting small businesses in 20 US cities and then provided actionable recommendations on how to make it cheaper, faster and simpler to start a business. The only city in Texas...

November 15By Comments OffRead more...

5 Things You Should Look for in a Cofounder

Starting a company is hard. For most people, starting a company is probably the hardest thing they will do in their entire lives. And, as much as we think about Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg starting the companies that made them into billionaires, they had cofounders and founding teams around them  every step of the way.   There is a common myth of the “solopreneurs” but in reality, most companies start with more than one founder. And yet, according to research cited in Noam Wasserman’s The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink A Startup, 60-65...

June 28By 0 CommentsRead more...

An Indicator of Innovation: SBIR Grants

Innovation can be hard to measure. One way to track it is through Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the US government. The number of SBIR grants awarded in Fort Worth is far below the level it needs to be for our community to foster an innovation-led economy. Recommendations on how to address this issue are included.

May 3By Comments OffRead more...

Startup Champions Network Wrap-up Durham, NC

From April 4-6, members of the HSC Next team attended the Startup Champions Network conference in Durham, NC. This group convenes twice a year to collaborate on this burgeoning career field of entrepreneurial ecosystem building as an economic development strategy.  At this Summit, the content was focused heavily on DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion). The Durham, NC, entrepreneurial ecosystem has done an incredible job supporting DEI initiatives. The leading ecosystem resource organizations are all bought in on the concept and it defines their approach to economic development and ecosystem building. It is baked into their approach from the start as opposed to...

February 23By Comments OffRead more...

5 Things to Know About the New Techstars Accelerator in Fort Worth

As you may have seen in the news recently, Fort Worth is now the home of a Techstars accelerator program that will bring startup companies to Fort Worth to help them grow and bring innovations in physical healthcare. This is big news for Fort Worth as our city was the largest city in the country that did not have an accelerator program like this, which invests directly in the companies and recruits the best of the best companies from around the world. But, accelerator programs are not well-known in our area. And, Techstars has not had much of a presence in...

March 9By Comments OffRead more...

Fort Worth is Coming for you, Albuquerque!

As we have discussed previously on this blog, Fort Worth is now the 13th largest city in the country, but it ranks 40th in early stage funding when compared to other US cities. In this post we will explore how Fort Worth compares to these cities in a variety of other metrics, plus we will discuss some reasonable targets we could set to move up in the rankings. Our team analyzed early stage funding using Pitchbook, the proprietary research tool that focuses on early stage investment data, to see where Fort Worth ranked compared to the top 50 largest cities (by...

February 18By Comments OffRead more...

Growth of 40,000+%? (Yeah, you read that right)

Each year, Inc. Magazine puts out its list of the 5,000 fastest growing companies in America. Think of it like the Forbes 500 (largest US companies) for startups. To be on this list is prestigious and it means your company is doing something right and growing at warp speed. In 2020, the #1 company on the list -- the fastest growing company in America (OneTrust) -- grew at an astonishing 48,377 percent over the last three years. Yeah, that’s hyper growth. But how did local companies do? Where did Fort Worth-based companies come out on this list? How did we do...