Originally Posted: October 11, 2017
All hands are on deck in D-FW’s bid to land Amazon’s second headquarters. By many criteria, the metroplex — if its cities can embrace partnership instead of competition — comes out a winner. D-FW has the space, the rail network, growing cultural and social capital, and the enabling regulatory environment to compete with other top contenders.
We, however, contend that D-FW is lacking on one front: entrepreneurial tech talent (ETT), which can be defined as technical talent likely to start and scale innovative, tech-driven companies. A recent study by CBRE ranks Dallas fourth in the country, ahead of Chicago, Seattle and Austin, among others, in terms of available tech talent. However, this pool has not translated to significant entrepreneurial talent or startup activity.
A Kauffman Foundation report on startup activity found D-FW to have a 0.30 percent rate of new entrepreneurs, 15th in the country but well behind Austin’s leading 0.55 percent. The total capital raised by the top 1,000 startups in the last 12 months was $65 billion, according to PitchBook Data. D-FW captured only a small slice of the capital with $417 million raised, compared with $1.2 billion for Austin, $1.6 billion for Chicago, $1.9 billion for Seattle and $12 billion for Silicon Valley. D-FW, unlike the other regions, is missing high numbers of ETT — the kind of talent most likely to start high-growth companies. This, of course, is not to say that D-FW does not have great entrepreneurs and tech-driven companies. Most of the area’s tech talent works in large and medium-sized nontech businesses, not high-growth tech companies. READ MORE