Glen E.Ellman
TechFW - the 23-year-old small business technology incubator on Fort Worth’s Near Southside - is moving ahead with ambitious goals for the new year, including significantly expanding the number of startups it supports annually, increasing and diversifying the ranks of the nonprofit’s Cowtown Angels angel investing group, broadening private sponsorship, and exploring a rebranding that reflects a growing client base and partnerships across North Texas.
Significantly, TechFW this winter hired a longtime public affairs and development executive, Brandy O’Quinn, to serve as TechFW’s new assistant director and No. 2 behind Hayden Blackburn, the executive director. O’Quinn (pictured, courtesy photo), who joins the fulltime payroll Jan. 2, most recently led the successful fundraising for The Dash, the new Fort Worth electric bus circulator that connects downtown to West 7th and the Cultural District.
TechFW this winter rolled out a new partnership with the University of Texas Southwestern Office of Technology Development in Dallas and LaunchBio, a Dallas nonprofit. The partnership expands TechFW’s ThinkLab startup accelerator to Dallas, and could end up accounting for the new clients TechFW wants to bring on in 2021 – depending on whether those firms decide to move from the accelerator to TechFW’s longer programs.
“We’ve got history,” Blackburn said in an interview. “It’s a great time to look at where we head next.”
The moves aim to help raise TechFW’s profile, relatively low for having incubated Encore Vision, an eyecare products company its founder sold in 2017 for up to $465 million to Alcon Labs. Robust incubators and accelerators are seen as a key piece of the entrepreneurial infrastructure that Fort Worth wants, to elevate the 13th largest city’s ability to build and retain next-generation businesses, create high-paying jobs, and draw and keep talent.
“Entrepreneurs may launch their company and their technology in Fort Worth, and then they leave,” said O’Quinn, who describes her new duties as building and fostering TechFW’s existing relationships and forging new ones, and – on the higher level – helping the organization and city in their quest to “create a climate of innovation.”
The Near Southside, home to TechFW, has created a welcoming foundation for such businesses, O’Quinn said. “It’s a true renaissance in the sense that people feel free to be who they want to be. They’ve created a sense of community, and that’s what innovators like.”
As a consultant and head of her firm Urban Strategies of Texas in Fort Worth, O’Quinn secured funding including $4.2 million for Dash’s buses. She was previously the public affairs senior manager for the Blue Zones Project Fort Worth well-being initiative, president of the Camp Bowie District public improvement district, and director of local business development for the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, where she participated in the creation of the Fort Worth Business Assistance Center.
“Twenty two years later, I get to come full circle and play a small part in this,” she said.
TechFW’s goals for the new year include:
- Increasing the number of startups it supports at any given time to 40, from the current 30. TechFW will run two cohorts of eight startups apiece through the Dallas ThinkLab program in 2021; some number of its ThinkLab firms emerge from the accelerator and move to TechFW’s longer-term programs each year.
- Grow Cowtown Angels membership to 70 members from the current 52, and raise the number of women in the membership to 20-25 % from the current 11;
- Grow corporate sponsorship, long a weakness of TechFW. The eventual goal is 11-14 % of revenue from the current 7 %; and
- Consider rebranding TechFW
In the partnership with UT Southwestern and LaunchBio, TechFW will bring ThinkLab program to Pegasus Park, a 23-acre, 550,000-square-foot mixed-use biotech hub and campus in Dallas that the J. Small Investments real estate firm and Lyda Hill Philanthropies are building and will open in 2021. The building will include a conference center and shared wet labs.
The first ThinkLab cohort at Pegasus Park will begin Jan. 26. To be eligible, applicants must be working on proprietary technology or a process with high barrier to entry.
TechFW has had Dallas clients in its Fort Worth programs. It occupies an unusual niche in the Dallas market, in that it doesn’t take equity in its clients’ firms, Blackburn said. “We have a unique value proposition,” Blackburn said.
Recession is also a good time to expand entrepreneurship programs, Blackburn and O’Quinn said. “During a recession, you will see an increase in entrepreneurship,” she said. “A global pandemic is no different. Unemployment increases. People look to create and innovate or innovators see problems in the world and want to address and provide solutions.”
TechFW opened 2020 with a push to expand the number of women in the membership of the organization’s Cowtown Angels group. But COVID-19 put a quick stop on the rollout of the Angels’ new Women in Wealth initiative in the spring.
“We’re going to resurrect that” in 2021, first with virtual events and then, hopefully, live ones, that draw women investors and entrepreneurs, Blackburn said.
Of TechFW’s 30 clients, 47 % are women-owned, Blackburn said. One of TechFW’s board members, Laura Baldwin, is a national board member of Golden Seeds, an angel network focused on women-led firms. “We’re really trying to neutralize as much bias as possible,” Blackburn said.
Since TechFW launched the Cowtown Angels in 2012, members have individually invested less than $25 million in 46 companies. Eight of the companies have closed. The angels, whose members make independent decisions and do not invest together as a group, have had two successful exits - Encore Vision the first. Nine Angels invested in that company.
“It’s really a great opportunity for someone that has disposable income that would like to invest and work with an emerging founder,” O’Quinn said.
Tech FW is looking to expand its budget on multiple fronts. The planned increase in clients adds program services and fees, 30 % of 2020’s budget of under $600,000 - $900,000 including the in-kind value of the office space the City of Fort Worth donates to Tech FW in the James E. Guinn complex on the Near Southside.
As much as 47 % of the budget comes from partnerships with universities, including the UNT Health Science Center and University of Texas at Arlington. TechFW also has a partnership with TCU. After corporate sponsorship, ticket sales to events makes up the remainder of the TechFW budget.
In its plan to bump up corporate sponsorship, TechFW is honing its elevator pitch on the long-term benefits of being in on the ground floor of the startup space. For one, Whitley Penn, the Fort Worth-based audit and tax firm, is a longtime TechFW sponsor, supporting the Cowtown Angels, Tech Nest education series, and annual Impact Awards.
“We had a great session with two (Whitley Penn) team members that was about valuations; that recording will be rewatched by companies in the future,” Blackburn said. He calls increasing corporate sponsorship and engagement “a key to balance our revenue.”
“We’re the frontline in the first stages of many high growth companies,” he said. “It’s so much better to be front of mind when innovators are developing something in their garage. If they hit the home run and they scale over the next five years, they think of you first.”
TechFW and its board are exploring rebranding.The organization’s partnership with UT-Arlington and its EpICMavs entrepreneurship program is seven years old. UNTHSC is a founding sponsor and has wet labs it dedicates to use by TechFW clients. The new Dallas partnership raises the stakes.
The TechFW name “doesn’t capture the essence of who we are from a regional standpoint,” Blackburn said.
At the same time, TechFW doesn’t want to throw Fort Worth over the side in any rebranding. “This is where our headquarters is,” O’Quinn said. “The City of Fort Worth is our birth parent, but we’re grown up now.”