Dallas Startup Week: It's great to be back in person

Dallas Startup Week has been a pivotal event in the entrepreneurial calendar for as long as we have been here.

It’s gone through a number of iterations and we're proud to sponsor this year's event hosted by the DEC, Capital One, and SMU.

The challenge with these sorts of events is that the connections and collaborations that come out of them are, by default, random. There is also the risk of the same people, saying the same things, year after year.

Given the impact of the lockdown on the community in general, it's great to be back in person. I think that there are new areas of innovation, investment, and focus that are being talked about more and more. The one that resonates the most with us is mental health.

We recently hosted a talk at Global Entrepreneurship Week in Fort Worth about coming back from burnout. This year, we were joined by an extremely talented mental health care professional, Ryan Casey Waller, who in his wildly successful and wildly varied career, has first-hand experience of the challenges facing entrepreneurs as we emerge from lockdown into what some are calling a new world (dramatic!).

There is certainly going to be a new focus on protecting our mental well-being. It is becoming increasingly important to us as an organization and we have a lot of ideas in the pipeline that will help with this.

We’re here at Startup Week as a sponsor, versus an attendee, and it’s an extremely different endeavor. We applaud the work that the DEC continues to do and hope they continue to provide support to the community for years to come.

We sponsored the event; we hosted two important talks (one about mental health and one about venture capital); plus we interviewed 40 attendees.

Rather than generate business out of the event, it’s important to make sure we are providing insight and experience to the community.

Thank you for having us.