Station Houston: Month One in the Books in Transforming Houston!

Dear Houston Innovation Community,

Wow!!! What a month! March 2016 is in the books — our first month as an operating company!!! Our doors are now open to serve and build the community, and with that, our doors are seeing more and more traffic each day. As I’m anxiously anticipating the El Clasico match (that’s Barca and Real Madrid for all of you non-football fans), I thought I would share some thoughts and impressions from our first month of business activities.

We begin April with a total of 52 members from 30 different companies — which is simply awesome. We continue to gain validation of our thesis that there is a gap in our Houston innovation ecosystem seeking a common access point to launch technology companies as our number of members increase each week. The diversity of our members simply makes each day at the Station, interesting and fun…especially as members like Devin Baptiste start busting out his mandarin during a US China Innovation workshop and we welcome more and more “corporate refugees” and millennials who are joining our movement to change the world. This highlights the point that our members are the real story of Station Houston — their backgrounds, passions, visions and personalities make each day a new adventure — which is exactly what makes each day awesome!

Perhaps one of my favorite examples come from my initial and unplanned meeting Diane Jooris from OnComfort. Over a short period of time, we see her and her co-founder, Joowon make real progress with their startup. So far, we’ve been able to help them connect with an advisor (Scott Schneider, another one of our members) to help them with their business launch, as well a highly impressive intern, Daniel, who Grace and I met at the career fair at TMCx a few weeks back. Oncomfort is leveraging VR to improve the quality of care and the experience for oncology patients, and in listening to Diane’s inspiration, drive and first-hand experiences in working with patients during her time at MD Anderson and beyond, it’s clear that her vision can impact thousands, if not millions of lives while providing extremely valuable business benefits to hospitals adopting their technology. This is what I believe Station Houston is all about.

The stories continue, the collisions seem to occur more and more regularly, and with greater impacts. We’ve just seen one of our members recently secure significant funding; another member hired a developer they met at an event held at Station; we’ve helped connect another member company with a prospective lead investor, where they’ve just completed their second meeting this week and are embarking on a series of pilot projects; and perhaps most notably, one of our members is in the early stages of building his business plan for an idea so big, I may have left an indention in the wall from the whiplash of first learning of it. The stories go on, the collisions have greater force…and this is our first month!

Another interesting observation is meeting entrepreneurs in the community for the first time, who have software companies with annual sales of $5 M, $10 M, $16 M. Software companies we didn’t know existed, but have come through our doors to learn more about Station Houston and more importantly, how they can help. These entrepreneurs see the importance of our movement for the community, as well as their ability to identify talent to help their businesses continue to scale. More collisions, more opportunities to build density…

We’re beyond words grateful to the amazing cast of mentors who are committed to the community. Mentor office hours are now occurring daily, where the feedback our team hears from our members about these sessions is amazing. Our events and workshops calendars are starting to take form, as we continue to work with the community to produce events that cater to the innovation community, including our members. Station Houston is also seeing more meetups taking place at our digs, which has been fun to meet more and more people in the community, as well as open our doors to people whose passions and actions are making a difference.

An example was meeting a REAL flight director from NASA (I’ve taken the title of Flight Director at Station Houston, but Chris is a bona-fide flight director for the ISS), who attended a Civic Hackathon — thanks Jeff — along with his son, Patrick, a high school student whose passionate about software development who cares about the community and attended the event because he wants to be a positive force in shaping our today as well as our future…how awesome is that!?!?!

So what do we expect over the next month? We’ll add capacity to meet continued interest of the innovation community so more entrepreneurs can call Station Houston home. We’re also be installing phone booths as some of our members have requested dedicated areas to field more private phone calls. We’ll also host our big member / mentor match-up where on April 20th, hosting a social to let all of our members and mentors get to know each other better, while announcing some tools and processes to enrich our mentor office hour experiences. Finally, we’ll be announcing dedicated times each week for tours of the Station for prospective members and groups who would like to learn more about our vision, mission and how to get involved.

Before concluding, Grace (#GRod), Chris (#Root!) and I are so grateful for everyone who serves as an extension of our team and who shares in our vision to increase high-tech startup density and build a more collaborative and accessible community to do so. We’re especially grateful to Peggy, Astrid, Melissa and Jose who believe in this mission and are getting their hands dirty to be part of the solution. We’re also grateful for our support and partnership with Kirk Coburn and SURGE as it is no coincidence that 177 West Gray is the home of Station Houston (for now…) where entrepreneurs continue to be [email protected]! Kirk continues to be a vocal leader for how we set a vision for our city, which we share and are actively working to realize — thank you!

Let me wind this down now as kick-off is on the horizon — our favorite word at Station Houston is AWESOME. We strive to build an awesome experience for our members; we believe our members’ passions, for what they do and why they do it are awesome; and we believe the people in our city are awesome — so come visit us.

March 2016 in the books — be back with more in a month!

JR

Flight Director

Station Houston

02-April-2016