There was a lot of talk at the Texas Labs Venture Expo today about whether Austin should strive to be the next Silicon Valley, as Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently suggested.
In late April, Gov. Perry told an audience of business, technology and higher-education leaders, “The questions before us are these: how close is Texas, specifically Central Texas, to becoming the nation’s next high-tech hub – and what do we have to do to get there? How do we create the culture of entrepreneurship that has made Silicon Valley what it is today?”
In his keynote, Bob Metcalfe, professor of innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, said it was a laudable goal but that Austin shouldn’t be competing with Silicon Valley – instead the two locales should be learning from each other.
Others have been more dismissive of Perry’s suggestion. The director of the McCombs School of Business’s Texas Venture Labs and host of today’s expo, Dr. Rob Adams, for instance, wrote in an op-ed published in the Austin-American Statesman that Austin should just concentrate on being Austin.
“The quality of life, education, cost of living and culture of Austin are no match for the Valley,” Dr. Adams wrote. “The world sees Silicon Valley as a start-up promised land, but the world doesn’t want to copy it. It wants to copy Austin.”
Today, at the conclusion of the expo, Dr. Adams reiterated his stance. “I do a lot of international work on economic development, getting economies going, and most of the time they want to be more like Austin, where the quality of life is better, cost of living is lower, [and it’s a] more business-friendly climate,” he told me. “So I think Austin needs to be like Austin not Silicon Valley.”
Certainly, the presentations today didn’t come with the slick, spit and shine that we’ve come to expect from the sexy start-ups in Silicon Valley – and the sums of money being sought by the entrepreneurs were nothing in the order of the likes of the $41 million pre-launch funding round enjoyed by the Valley’s photo-sharing service Color. But the big ideas were there – and some of them were potentially world-changing. Alafair, for instance, showed off a durable, malleable, and easily applied film that can help heal medical adhesions with remarkable efficacy. “When we opened up that rat, rainbows and unicorns flew out,” joked the presenter, a neurologist, recalling how well an early test case worked. Alafair will be tapping into a market that exceeds $1.2 billion annually, by the way.
But we’re here to talk about wireless. And that might just be where Austin can almost keep pace – if not outshine – its Silicon Valley counterparts in years to come. The city already has a burgeoning mobile scene, with companies such as Mutual Mobile, which builds iPhone apps for Google Inc., and Ricochet Labs, makes a trivia game, Qrank, based here, and it is also home to wireless talent such as Ted Rappaport, who started the Wireless Network and Communications Group, a wireless research center at UT.
There are also exciting start-ups on the wireless service side, as proven today in a presentation by a company called Wibole (say it “vibely”), which promises to improve network strength for data downloads without the need for additional infrastructure by using ‘multi-hopping’ technology.
As Dr. Adams says, “We’ve got the technology base here – now it’s just a question of getting the companies up and going. But there’s certainly plenty of domain knowledge inherent in the geology.”
That doesn’t make Austin the next Silicon Valley, but it’s another rock solid reason for tech entrepreneurs to stick around.
Would you like all your dreams to come true? Follow Marc Speir on twitter @truthorcon.
