3 Houston innovators to know this week

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This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Amanda Ducach of SocialMama, Sam Newman of Little Red Box Grocery, and Gina Luna of GP Capital Partners. Courtesy photos

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from investment to femtech — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Amanda Ducach, founder and CEO of SocialMama

Amanda Ducach, founder of SocialMama, is gearing up for a total rebrand and new product launch. Photo courtesy of SocialMama

For years, Amanda Ducach has been collecting data from the users of her social networking app, SocialMama. Now that data is fueling the AI of the new platform and a whole new phase of the company.

"When you have a compatibility-friendship-based product, you have crazy amounts of data. We could have went and sold that — like an unethical company and like a lot of companies we've unfortunately seen do recently. Instead, we used the data to improve our product to create positive health outcomes for our users," Ducach says.

Ducach share more of what she's working on ahead of the launch of the new platform and what it's been like starting and running a consumer-focused app in Houston on the Houston Innovators Podcast. Click here to read more and stream the episode.

Sam Newman, founder of Little Red Box Grocery

Equitable access to services is integral to the vitality of all communities. Photo courtesy

In a recent guest column for InnovationMap, Sam Newman, founder of Little Red Box Grocery, writes of how around 40 million Americans, including five million Texans, live in food deserts. Startups have an opportunity for impact.

"Equitable access to services is integral to the vitality of all communities. Good food, secure housing – it doesn’t just nourish bodies and minds, it can spur new investment into our neighborhoods and prove once and for all that manmade deserts of any kind do not have to exist if we let imagination and innovation prevail. If there was ever a time to prioritize access – and action – it is now," he writes. Click here to read more.

Gina Luna, partner at GP Capital Partners

GP Capital Partners is a part of a new initiative to provide training and job placement for future cybersecurity professionals. Photo courtesy

Houston-based private credit and equity investment firm GP Capital Partners has teamed up with LP First Capital, a private equity firm with offices in Austin and New York, to form National Cyber Group. The new entity, headquartered in Washington, D.C., will provide foundational IT certification training, job placement resources, and more, according to a news release.

Gina Luna, managing partner of GP Capital Partners, says this is a huge opportunity for Houston, as the city's tech jobs continue to grow, and the city continues to be a major hub for tech talent.

"There are many Houston companies that need well-trained, qualified cybersecurity analysts and many hard-working Houstonians that would find a career in cybersecurity an attractive path to better opportunity for themselves and their families. National Cyber Group can provide both, which is certainly good for Houston," she says. Click here to read more.

Equitable access to services is integral to the vitality of all communities. Photo by Erik Scheel/Pexels

Founder: Inflation is creating a barrier to healthy food access, affordable housing for Houstonians

guest column

Approximately 40 million Americans, including five million Texans, live in food deserts. These are communities with low access to fresh and healthy foods and high access to unhealthy alternatives, where a trip to the grocery store is oftentimes a tradeoff between convenience, cost, and choice. Everyone deserves (indeed, needs) good food access, yet current market offerings are not designed to satisfy demand.

And food is but one part of a tapestry of disparity – which includes among other things health and wellness services, digital connectivity, debt and access to credit, and housing insecurity – that disproportionately impacts historically marginalized communities and leaves residents vulnerable to greater risks. These issues, long-standing though they are, have become more acute with inflation, as the cost of everything goes up and wages lag.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, the price of food that people eat at home rose 10 percent in the last year. At the same time, the cost of rent in Houston also increased 10 percent last year - Houston now ranks in the top 50 most expensive cities in America for renters. Across Texas, rents are up 30 percent in Austin, 11 percent in San Antonio, and 17 percent in Dallas-Fort Worth last year. When tenants face a rent increase it hampers their ability to move, because even if they are working, it can be a challenge to pay the lump sum of a new first month’s rent plus a security deposit. This is a huge barrier for our neighbors living paycheck to paycheck.

Whether it’s rent or the price of eggs, families are being squeezed, and in order to bridge this widening chasm – the Market Gap and Equity Gap – we need to embrace fresh solutions for all who live in service deserts. Fortunately, new organizations are coming to the fore in a targeted and meaningful way:

Tech start-ups such as Providers and Forage are empowering low-income households with greater access and insight on how and where to use food stamps.

At the community level, New York-based Wellfare is leveraging density and community knowledge to run a direct-to-door food subscription model for low-income households. And here in Houston, my organization, Little Red Box Grocery, will soon be launching a reimagined community store, designed to bring the benefits of good food access + health to Houston’s Food Deserts.

Yet when it comes to the wellspring of uncertainty, so much flows downstream from unstable housing it is hard to overstate its importance on family stability. If a landlord increases the rent, some renters can certainly move, but others have no choice but to pay up as they cannot afford the upfront costs required to find alternative housing. And the more one spends on housing, the less there is for life’s other many necessities… including food.

Fresh food access and housing insecurity are intertwined challenges that we must meet head on. Fortunately, companies like Rhino are helping solve one of renters’ biggest financial hurdles – the up-front cash required for a security deposit – with security deposit insurance. This gives renters a low-rate policy as affordable as $5 per month for an apartment renting for $1,000 per month. Some property owners in Texas are already accepting it as an alternative way to secure an apartment.

The benefits of this kind of arrangement are easy to see. People can put money that would otherwise be locked away in a security deposit into savings, pay down debt, buy groceries for their family in a manner that improves home and community health and well-being. One could even start a business, or pursue a degree. The point is that it frees up home economics to be used in a manner most efficient for that family.

And services such as this should help level the playing field. In a recently released survey of renters, renters of color were more likely to pay a security deposit than white renters and they paid $150 more on average in the security deposit than white renters. Renters of color also submitted more applications and paid higher application fees than white renters.

Equitable access to services is integral to the vitality of all communities. Good food, secure housing – it doesn’t just nourish bodies and minds, it can spur new investment into our neighborhoods and prove once and for all that manmade deserts of any kind do not have to exist if we let imagination and innovation prevail. If there was ever a time to prioritize access – and action – it is now.

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Sam Newman is the founder of Houston-based Little Red Box Grocery bringing the benefits of good food access to Houston’s Second Ward.

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Elon Musk's SpaceX is about to make its debut on Wall Street

Money Moves

Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX will make its debut on Wall Street Friday, June 12, and both institutional and retail investors are expected to gobble up the 555.6 million shares going up for sale at $135 apiece. Musk, already the world's richest man, could become its first trillionaire.

SpaceX is likely to become the biggest IPO ever, with proceeds of around $75 billion. SpaceX hopes to become the first company to send people to Mars. In fact, part of Musk’s future compensation depends on SpaceX eventually establishing a colony of at least 1 million people on the red planet.

Why SpaceX is going public now

In a video conference on Musk's social media platform X, he told JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon that people have suggested for the last 10 years that he take SpaceX public. He's doing it now because the company plans to put 100,000 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit. Deploying AI data centers in space is a “massive new growth base and you need capital for that,” he said.

Going public provides access to the capital that SpaceX needs. But it also exposes it to more scrutiny from shareholders and more regulatory oversight. That includes filing quarterly financial reports, which critics say incentivizes short-term thinking over longer-term planning and creates unnecessary costs for a company. Securities regulators are currently soliciting public comment on a proposal to require public companies to file the financial reports only twice every year.

How the IPO impacts the company

Musk will hold the majority of a special class of shares, giving him control over decisions related to company strategy, finances and personnel. On the latter, because of his ownership of most of these Class B shares, the only person who can fire Musk as CEO is Musk.

The company credits Musk with being the “driving force” behind its growth, innovation and success. But what happens if Musk is no longer in the picture? SpaceX warns that the loss of Musk could disrupt its ability to execute its strategy as well as hurt its “reputation and relationships with customers, partners and other stakeholders.”

The company also warns that finding a replacement with the same skills and experience as Musk would be time-consuming, if not nearly impossible. As Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote Wednesday, “At the end of the day Musk is SpaceX and SpaceX is Musk.”

What could make or break SpaceX

Currently in the test phase, the gigantic reusable Starship rocket is key to SpaceX realizing Musk's ambitions. Much of the commercial space business hinges on SpaceX developing Starship’s capability to be fully reusable and hearty enough for a quick turnaround between flights. If that doesn't happen, SpaceX warns that putting data centers and satellites in space will take longer and cost more money, meaning it risks customers bailing on the company.

Analysts say that by pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX has established a clear lead on competitors such as Blue Origin, led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Starlink satellite business competes with, among others, AST SpaceMobile – which is relying on a SpaceX rocket to send its latest generation of satellites into orbit next week.

The prospectus filed last week says SpaceX’s biggest potential market is the sale of business-oriented artificial intelligence products designed to transform how people get work done. It’s an opportunity SpaceX predicts would be worth $22.7 trillion if it could somehow dominate rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft in a highly competitive industry. But the prospectus shows no clear path to profitability for the xAI business, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year.

Why Wall Street is paying attention

If the SpaceX IPO is as successful, the stock could quickly join the Nasdaq 100, a widely followed index that tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies in the composite. That's important because some popular funds, such as the $460 billion QQQ exchange-traded fund, mimic the index and will automatically buy whatever is listed in the index.

Nasdaq recently changed its rules to allow select companies to enter the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 trading days.

S&P Dow Jones Indices, on the other hand, is sticking to established and more traditional thresholds that will not allow SpaceX or other companies with gargantuan IPOs faster entry into its S&P 500 index. That means even high-profile companies will still need to wait for their stocks to trade a full 12 months before they can enter the index.

Companies want to be in the S&P 500 in particular because it's arguably the most important index on Wall Street, with trillions of dollars either mimicking it exactly or benchmarked against it. Vanguard's VOO fund that tracks the S&P 500 has roughly $950 billion invested in it, for example.

NASA unveils Artemis III astronauts at Johnson Space Center in Houston

To the moon

NASA on Tuesday, June 9, revealed the crew for its Artemis III mission, the next step in the space agency's plan to eventually land astronauts on the moon.

The announcement came two months after Artemis II's record-breaking trip around the moon that surpassed the distance record of Apollo 13.

NASA's Randy Bresnik, Frank Rubio, Andre Douglas and the European Space Agency's Luca Parmitano won't fly to the moon or land on the surface. Instead, they’ll orbit Earth while practicing docking their Orion capsule with two lunar landers.

“To the Artemis III crew, we wish you Godspeed on the journey ahead,” said NASA administrator Jared Isaacman.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin are racing to deliver the lunar landers. The two-week demo is targeted for 2027. Blue Origin suffered a recent setback when its massive rocket exploded during an engine-firing test on the launch pad in Florida, shaking nearby homes and illuminating the sky with an orange fireball.

NASA's Jeremy Parsons said the setback is a learning opportunity and that the space agency is confident Blue Origin's rocket will be ready in time.

NASA's Artemis program aims to return astronauts to the moon's surface for the first time since the 1970s. A recent revamp of the program announced by Isaacman aims to fast-track it similarly to the Apollo era, adding the upcoming spaceflight around Earth before eyeing a lunar landing in 2028.

“We are certainly humbled as a crew to be able to be your crew that executes this Artemis III mission in space,” said Bresnik, Artemis III commander.

Added Douglas, mission specialist: “My brain — it is going a mile a minute right now. But my heart, it is so warm. It is so full."

In May, NASA awarded hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts to four companies, including Blue Origin, to build landers, rovers and drones for a future moon base. Isaacman said the goal of the moon base is to lay the foundation for a Mars expedition.

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