Venture Dallas 2024 Kickoff Spotlights North Texas as a Thriving Hub for Entrepreneurs: ‘This Is the Best Time and Place To Be’

Inside the sprawling, cowboy-chic Texas Barn at the Perot family’s Circle T Ranch in Westlake, an elite group of investors, founders, and key stakeholders gathered last week for an exclusive VIP event kicking off the 2024 Venture Dallas business summit.

Texas hospitality in all its forms was on display.

Ross Perot Jr. was ushering around Christopher Darby, global head of venture investments at alternative-investment giant Cerberus, pointing out and explaining to Darby various photos on the venue walls.

A three-piece band cranked out country-and-western songs like “Neon Moon.” Startup stars including Skip Howard of Spacee, ByteTrail’s Brenda Stoner, Dennis Cail of Zirtue, and Health Wildcatters’ Hubert Zajicek mingled with the crowd.

While some guests bellied up to a long wooden table groaning with chili, chips, and gourmet deli meats, others posed for photos outside the front door with a couple of very large, very patient Texas Longhorn cattle.

The friendly, casual atmosphere encouraging conversation and connection continued as the event segued into a 30-minute “fireside chat” on the Barn’s raised stage.

Sharing their thoughts with the attendees were Venture Dallas Co-Founder and Board Chair Aaron Pierce; Perot, who’s founder and chairman of real estate development powerhouse Hillwood; and Anurag Jain, founder and managing partner at early-stage venture capital firm Perot Jain.

“If you’re in this room, you’re not a normal person,” Perot told the crowd. “You’re driven to succeed, and you’ve got a dream about a company, you’ve got a vision of a better life, you’ve got a vision for a better world. That’s what drives this country, and that’s really what drives this city.”

‘Celebrate the culture of entrepreneurship’

The sprawling, cowboy-chic Texas Barn at the Perot family’s Circle T Ranch in Westlake was the setting for last week’s Venture Dallas Summit kickoff. [Photo: Grant Miller Photography/Venture Dallas]

Pierce, a partner at Perot Jain, had started the conversation by saying the Venture Dallas conference—held this year on Oct. 30 at SMU’s George W. Bush Presidential Center—has “come a long way” in five years. It was founded to turn Dallas into a premier innovation hub and has made good progress—area VC funding has doubled in five years, to $1 billion, for example—but “mission critical” goals remain, he said.

“Access roads to entrepreneurship” here such as incubators and accelerators need to be expanded, and entrepreneurs still need more mentors, advisors, and funding. It’s also important, Pierce said, to “celebrate the culture of entrepreneurship. Not just the successes, but the journey. Dallas is the best place in the U.S. to build a company, scale a company, and raise a family.”

Next, Perot recounted his origin story as the son of legendary entrepreneur H. Ross Perot, who single-handedly started the technology-services industry by founding Electronic Data Systems. After selling EDS to General Motors for $2.5 billion in 1984, Perot went on to start a new company called Perot Systems. Ross Jr. took over leadership of Perot Systems after his father stepped down in 2000, and nine years later the company was sold to Dell for $3.9 billion.

Ross Jr. and his longtime business partner Anurag Jain founded the Perot Jain VC firm in 2014, a decade after the two had begun working together. “I said, ‘Anurag, I’m doing all these things, and we’ve got all these great entrepreneurs coming in, and they’ve got great ideas,’” Perot recalled. “But I don’t have anybody focused on it. Why don’t you help me focus on it? That’s when we started Perot Jain and our venture capital program. It all goes to Anurag and his spirit and his vision and his drive.

Ross Perot Jr., Aaron Pierce, and Anurag Jain at the Circle T Ranch kickoff event for Venture Dallas last week. [Photo: Grant Miller Photography/Venture Dallas]

Today, Jain said, Perot Jain has 70 portfolio companies, in fields ranging from AI and fintech to mobility and robotics. Because he’s always looking to invest in early-stage startups with emerging technology, Jain said, a couple of years ago he’d compiled a list of seven trends driving future innovation.

While those trends generally haven’t changed much since 2022, he told the attendees: They’re durable—some have been adapted faster, or slower, but they are the same trends. Jain then briefly reviewed the seven trends:

On Longevity: “Humans are living longer. In fact, a guy walked up to me and said, ‘Can you survive another 20 years?’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘If you survive another 20 years, you’re going to live 50 more.’ That’s where technology is going to make human longevity possible. … What does it mean that more and more old people are on the planet? They’ll consume more, they’ll travel more, they’ll live in different locations.”

On AI: “Artificial Intelligence has gone faster than I expected in the last two years, but it’s still the same trend. We’re making things faster, and we’re also changing the value that we put on things. Five or 10 years ago to make a call to India it was $4 a minute.Today it is almost zero, right? The same thing is happening in AI, where, for example, the price of content creation has gone to almost zero. Other use cases will come as well.”

On Energy: “Other sources of energy will arrive. If you’re going to Mars, you need a way to create electricity … Hydrocarbons are really going to be still needed. We don’t see the price coming down, but over a long period of time there will be multiple sources of energy to power the needs on our planet.”

On Mobility: “This is THE mobility center — the Mobility Innovation Zone [at AllianceTexas]. Data, people, and things will move faster, better, cheaper, and cleaner. We still think there’s room on drones and moving things on the ground, moving things in the air, all different kinds of movement—including movement of data. Movement of data, by the way, is becoming more and more and more important. How do we move data in a more secure fashion?”

On Materials Science: “Materials science is changing the world. You can manufacture things in different form factors in different places. You can manufacture on the moon to go to Mars. The whole way we look at materials science is changing, and that will change how we package and deliver products to customers.”

On Population Movement: “150 million people in the world are immigrants today, and that’s growing by 20 or 30 million people a year. That’s one trend. If you look underneath that, populations are changing. The Western world and China are getting older. South India is getting younger. So you see these bubbles of population around the world, which means different places will consume things differently around the world, and you as a company, have to plan for that.”

On Supply Chains: “Supply chains will get more resilient. Guess what—two years later, they’re still getting more resilient. But they haven’t gotten there yet. You hear about ‘China plus one,’ ‘China plus two,’ where people are moving supply chains in different parts of the world, and those will have implications for the U.S. economy in particular.”

At the Venture Dallas Summit kickoff event at Circle T Ranch, Aaron Pierce, Ross Perot Jr., and Anurag Jain took part in a fireside chat. [Photo: Grant Miller Photography/Venture Dallas]

Switching topics, Pierce next asked Perot to comment on political trends and the U.S. election, which would take place seven days later. Perot replied that, no matter what happens, “We’ll get through it. We’re going to move forward. The United States is the strongest country in the world. If you’re in the U.S., you’re in good shape; if you’re in Texas, you’re in great shape!

“People talked about threats to democracy, but I looked at the 2020 election and thought, wow, look how strong our institutions are, look how strong the democracy was,” Perot said. “Socialism does not work. Heavy tax, heavy regulation fails over and over again, and history has proven that. In our country we have 50 laboratories we can study. Which states are working, which states are not? The American people are moving to low tax, low regulation states. They are leaving high-tax, high-regulation states.

“DFW generated more jobs last year than 46 states,” he continued. “We forget how strong this region is. We’re adding a million people every seven years, and the entrepreneurs that are coming in are phenomenal.”

Attendees at the Circle T Ranch kickoff event for the Venture Dallas Summit last week. [Photo: Grant Miller Photography/Venture Dallas]

Investing in the community

To close out the event, Pierce asked Perot and Jain to offer their best advice to all the aspiring entrepreneurs in the room.

“If you’re an entrepreneur, you never give up,” Perot said. “You’ve got that dream; you’ve got that passion. Don’t give up. You’ve got to be doing something that you really love and, if you love it, you’re not going to give up.”

Jain agreed, but added that “we also have to solve the community’s problems as we grow our companies, and we need to build that into our framework. Aaron [Pierce] and I have a deal now where when we set up a new company, where we incubate companies, we ask them to set 5% of the stock aside to help the community.

“So, if we’re building an AI company, we’re investing in people to learn AI in that community so they can come work for us. Different people would have different needs. The community will get stronger if you can keep the larger picture and the larger stakeholders in mind.

“From my perspective, this is the best time and place to be,” Jain concluded. “The incremental cost of setting up a company is near zero. Infrastructure is available for you to use for a fraction of the cost. Computing is available for a fraction of the cost. People are available for a fraction. You can Uber people; you can Uber anything at this point in time. It is only your imagination that matters. There couldn’t be a more exciting time to be around.”