DALLAS — If you have a great startup idea, where do you go? Who do you talk to? What do you need to do to get started?
These are questions that can be answered at the Dallas Entrepreneur Center, an 18-month-old non-profit hub for community and entrepreneurship.
The DEC, as its known, hosted several events for the past five days as part of Dallas Startup Week — that’s certainly not surprising, given the entrepreneurial focus of a center that doubles as a co-working space and resource core.
DEC was created by Trey Bowles and Jennifer Conley, who first met when Conley was helping run an incubator funded by AT&T two years ago.
“We talked about a greater vision of helping anyone with an idea, anyone who was an aspiring entrepreneur, or second or third-time entrepreneur,” Conley recalled. “We wanted to help entrepreneurs that didn’t know where to go, didn’t have access or connections to mentors.”
Before that, Bowles had been traveling around the country with Startup America and saw what made different startup ecosystems tick. He noticed that many had a dense community of startups, and an organization that helped catalyze the growth — something that Dallas lacked.
So, the co-founders moved into a 10,000 square-foot space inside the SoftLayer office 18 months ago. The community response was promising, and this past June, the DEC — also co-founded by Jeremy Vickers, the Dallas Regional Chamber’s director of innovation — moved into a new office in an area of downtown Dallas that Bowles said “needs to be revamped.”
“What better way to revamp the city than to bring in creative, innovative entrepreneurs — and all the while, help people start and grow businesses,” he noted.
Bowles said the DEC “fills a void along the lifecycle of an entrepreneur” and “helps them constantly move forward to a place where they are seeing success.” That means daily hours with volunteer mentors, or hosting 5-to-10 startup-related events per week, or providing affordable office space, or having classes like “Setting up a Business Structure,” or … the list goes on and on.
Startups aren’t expected to stay at the DEC forever — it’s more of an entrepreneur’s pitstop on the path to success, if you will.
“We are a startup point for someone who is looking to get plugged into different resources,” Conley said.
One unique aspect of DEC is its ambassador program, which attracts volunteers from all parts of the Dallas economy — from AT&T to the University of Texas to city government — and educates them on how to work with startups.
“Based on my exposure to the rest of the world, I’ve never seen a community as collaborative as this one here,” Bowles said of Dallas. “Part of the reason we created the ambassador program was to help showcase the startup community at a local level.”
The DEC is part of an emerging Dallas startup community, one that needed a place where connections could be made between entrepreneurs, investors, and everyone else interested in economic development. Bowles said that DEC played a role in building an “organic community” as a result of “positive collisions” happening between different people in the Dallas startup ecosystem, which includes other key organizations like Tech Wildcatters.
The DEC already opened a satellite office in Addison, one of several cities in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex. If all goes well, it’s a pattern that likely will continue. The idea of having a central startup hub in Dallas and pockets of innovation in surrounding cities like Fort Worth, Plano, and Irving — that’s what has a lot of entrepreneurs excited about the DFW startup ecosystem.
But, Conley noted, the focus has to always remain on the entrepreneurs — which is what DEC is all about.
“It’s really a lot of people coming together in the community and saying, if DFW is going to be seen as an entrepreneurial hub, it has to be about the entrepreneurs,” she said. “It can’t just be about the organizations that are helping out. Once we change that mindset, and really understand the landscape of the startup community here — it’s not just about Dallas or Plano, it’s about the entire region.
We’ll start to see more and more people, organizations and programs look at the Dallas market because we’re the fourth-largest metroplex in the U.S. We have more tech jobs than Houston and Austin combined. There’s a vast amount of activity happening here and I think people are finally starting to recognize that.”
