I lived in Houston for 6 months a few years ago while my girlfriend was student teaching there. It was so foreign to me that I couldn't find any semblance of a startup community in such a large city.
It's there, but it's not young and it's not the sort of tech that you see in SV. If you want to talk to startups building oil pipeline monitoring or healthcare software, it's the place.
Pipeline monitoring? Healthcare software? How in the world will anybody ever make any money in oil or healthcare?
Seriously, keep in mind that for all of the companies in Silicon Valley that do truly groundbreaking or meaningful things, there are many more startups that fall into one of the following categories:
1. Doomed to failure chasing inane consumer internet ideas that 50 other companies are chasing.
2. Doomed to failure leeching off of other startups, something that won't be viable when the current cycle ends.
3. Doomed to failure pursuing legitimate opportunities that their founders don't have the domain expertise to exploit.
I certainly wasn't trying to disparage either oil or healthcare tech. I grew up around oil and have huge respect for that industry. I think my overarching point was that startups in Houston aren't sexy, they don't get coverage on TechCrunch, but there are people building some solid, necessary products.
San Antonio is similar with companies like WellAware raising a $37 million series A for oil field monitoring tech.
