Pioneering Houstonian launches innovative online marketplace for outdoor equipment

A MOUNTAINOUS ACHIEVEMENT

Everest will sell products from more than 1,000 U.S. manufacturers. Photo courtesy of Everest

Houston businessman Bill Voss has forever found his zen through his lifelong passion for the great outdoors, but there’s one aspect that was making him positively furious: the shopping.

Burned out with driving to brick-and-mortar stores, standing in long lines, and dealing with dreaded returns, Voss turned his necessity into invention and launched Everest.com, a new shopping/lifestyle marketplace and community platform that links active-minded customers to more than 1,000 U.S.-based merchants and retailers.

By utilizing what it describes as “state of the art” artificial intelligence, the company aims to create the largest marketplace on earth for the outdoor recreation community, covering activities such as hiking, camping, biking, rock climbing, winter sports, water sports, team sports, fishing, hunting, kayaking, rafting, and road and trail running.

Voss’ timing is sound: Current industry estimates suggest consumers spend $700 billion in outdoor recreation, with less than 20 percent of those sales transacted online. Towards that end, Voss plans to increase his sellers to 10,000 by 2023.

Everest members can also enjoy perks through a program dubbed Caliber, which provides its members with several exclusive benefits including free shipping, advance sales, travel benefits, big discounts on gear, and — a plus these days — discounts on fuel. Voss notes that the site’s core values are pushing U.S.-made products and giving back; Everest will have nonprofit and conservation partners.

CultureMap caught up with the active Voss on the heels of his Everest launch.

CultureMap: Congratulations on the launch. Essentially, have you created an Amazon for the outdoors crowd — but with a sense of community, too?

Bill Voss: We started Everest.com to create the first online marketplace with the sole focus of offering outdoor enthusiasts retail goods for purchase from merchants across the country who offer domestically made goods.

In our experience, people who love the outdoors also appreciate the concept of community. At Everest, we want to bolster that community by giving local businesses a wider sales reach, contributing to local and national charitable organizations, and asking everyone in our community to share the story of their “Everest.”

We’re taking a fairly segmented market and bringing it together into one community-focused ecosystem. We call that ecosystem Everest.


CM: What Houston spots have most inspired you? And have you visited Everest yet?

BV: I’m a fisherman at heart. I have been fishing the Gulf of Mexico since I could hold a fishing rod. There is nothing I’d rather do than spend a whole day on the water casting, trolling, or remembering many epic fights reeling in a big one.

So naturally, I love Galveston, Kemah, etc. and being so close to the Gulf is a huge reason why I love Houston. The city itself may be a major metropolitan area, but it is full of so many parks and recreation areas that are great to walk through when you need to escape the sounds of the city for a bit— which Houston really doesn’t get enough credit or exposure for.

Houston has an amazing outdoor community with so many choices to support it — it’s hard to pick just one activity that ranks number one.

I do have plans to visit Everest actually! I am arranging a trip with two brothers that have made it to the top more than anyone else and they assure me it will be an amazing trip.

CM: Clearly, you’re an avid outdoorsman. Is it correct to say that Everest was inspired by frustration and hassle of bouncing to other sites and stores?

BV: Exactly! I found myself doing just that and it’s infuriating. I’d be visiting multiple stores, going through multiple checkouts, and waiting on multiple boxes to arrive — and sometimes dealing with multiple return scenarios. So, I set out to fix it — for all of us.

I grew up fishing, spending hours on the water with my dad. To me that’s one of the best parts of any outdoor activity, the quality time spent with the people you love. I don’t think you get the same experience if you’re sitting around a tv screen together, and you certainly don’t get it if you’re spending hours on your computer trying to track down the perfect beginner fishing rod for your daughter. Time is precious, and the endless toil of gear compilation eats into those few available hours we have to spend together.

By aggregating thousands of outdoor brands and gear retailers and centralizing them into one marketplace, we’re allowing our users to hop on, find everything they need, and check out easily. We’re just getting started but, within the next two years, we hope to add even more sellers and products along with more community offerings.

Being out on the water showing my kids how to bait a hook or how to find a school of fish, those are the memories I hope they take with them. With Everest, it has been important to me to help make those kinds of experiences easily attainable for everyone and the people they love.

CM: Speaking of other stores, do you plan to go head-to-head with the REIs and Sun and Skis of the world? Or Amazon?

BV: I get this question all the time and I love it. As to the first two, definitely not. We’re a marketplace, we’re here to help companies like REI and Sun and Ski, who can participate as sellers and reach new customers.

The difference is that our members can pick up everything they need, from multiple retailers, in one cart, with one easy checkout option. Many of the big names already spotlight and sell products on Amazon — they can do the same with Everest. We are a community of like-minded outdoor loving enthusiasts that have been looking for a niche marketplace to serve all of us.

Think of what Chewy did in the pet industry — we are doing the same thing for those that love the outdoors. Amazon has to be everything to everybody. We don’t, and we don’t want to.

CM: Do you see Everest ever creating brick-and-mortar stores?

BV: Wonderful question. The beauty of Everest is we are still a young company with options to consider. But remember, one of the main tenets of Everest is supporting our sellers. We are not looking to get into a situation where we are competing directly with them.

However, we’d love to one day open a shop selling Everest sweatshirts and swag in downtown Houston. It would be so fulfilling to see the outdoor community wearing Everest branded clothing and putting Everest stickers on their gear in the future.

The bottom line is, we are sprinting as hard as we can in hopes of waking up one day as a true disruptor, household name, and eternal brand.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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Houston Methodist awarded $4M grant to recruit head of Neal Cancer Center

new hire

Armed with a $4 million state grant, the Houston Methodist Academic Institute has recruited a renowned expert in ovarian and endometrial cancer research to lead the Dr. Mary and Ron Neal Cancer Center.

The grant, provided by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, enabled the institute to lure Dr. Daniela Matei away from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. There, she is the Diana Princess of Wales Professor in Cancer Research and chief of the Division of Reproductive Science in Medicine.

Matei will succeed Dr. Jenny Chang, who was hired last year to run the Houston Methodist Academic Institute.

At the Neal Cancer Center, located in the Texas Medical Center complex, oncologists work on innovations in cancer research, treatment, and technology. The center opened in 2021 after the Neals donated $25 million to expand Houston Methodist’s cancer research capabilities. It handles about 7,000 new cases each year involving more than two dozen types of cancer.

U.S. News & World Report puts Houston Methodist Hospital at No. 19 among the country’s best hospitals for cancer care, two spots below Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston sits at No. 1 on the list.

Matei’s research related to ovarian and endometrial cancer holds the potential to benefit tens of thousands of American women. The American Cancer Society estimates:

  • 21,010 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and 12,450 women will die from it.
  • 68,270 women in the U.S. will be diagnosed with endometrial cancer, and 14,450 women will die from it.

Matei is leaving Northwestern in the wake of widespread cuts in federal funding for medical research. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has canceled or frozen tens of millions of dollars in grants for Northwestern, the Wall Street Journal reports, and the university has been plugging the gaps with its own money.

“The university is totally keeping us on life support,” Matei told the newspaper last year. “The big question is for how long they can do this.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Matei’s $5 million NIH grant supporting 69 cancer trials has been caught up in the federal funding chaos, so Northwestern stepped in to cover trial expenses such as nurses’ salaries and diagnostic procedures.

Trial participants include some patients with rare, incurable tumors who are undergoing experimental treatments aligned with the genetics of their condition, the newspaper says.

“It’s certainly a life-and-death situation for cancer patients on these trials,” Matei said in 2025.

Matei is among the beneficiaries of more than $15 million in grants approved February 18 by CPRIT’s board. The grants went toward recruiting five cancer researchers to institutions in Texas.

One of those grants, totaling $1.5 million, went to the University of Houston to recruit Akash Gupta, a research scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. The remaining grants went to recruit scientists to The University of Texas at Dallas and The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

Rice University lands $14M state grant to open Center for Space Technologies

on a mission

Rice University’s Space Institute soon will be home to the newly created Center for Space Technologies.

On Feb. 17, the Texas Space Commission approved a nearly $14.2 million grant for the Rice project. The Center for Space Technologies will target:

  • Research and development
  • Technology transfer and innovation
  • Statewide partnerships
  • Workforce development training
  • Space-focused education programs

The goal of the new center “is to fulfill an articulated need for research, workforce development, and industry collaboration,” said Kemah communications and marketing executive Gwen Griffin, chair of the commission.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, a Friendswood Republican, authored the bill that set up the Texas Space Commission.

Since being authorized in 2023, the commission has funded 24 projects, with Rice and Houston-area companies accounting for nearly $75 million in grants to back space-related initiatives.

The grant to Rice brings the TSC's total investment to $150 million, fully committing the entire state appropriation from the Texas Legislature in 2023.

Other local companies that have received grants over the years include Aegis Aerospace, Axiom Space, Intuitive Machines, Starlab Space and Venus Aerospace.

The commission also awarded $7 million to Blue Origin earlier this month. See a list of the 24 awards here.

Waymo self-driving robotaxis have officially launched in Houston

Waymo has arrived

Waymo will begin dispatching its robotaxis in four more cities in Texas and Florida, expanding the territory covered by its fleet of self-driving cars to 10 major U.S. metropolitan markets.

The move into Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, Florida, announced Tuesday, February 24, widens Waymo's early lead in autonomous driving while rival services from Tesla and the Amazon-owned Zoox are still testing their vehicles in only a few U.S. cities.

In contrast, Waymo's robotaxis already provide more than 400,000 weekly trips in the six metropolitan areas where they have been transporting passengers: Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Miami, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas.

Waymo operates its ride-hailing service through its own app in all the U.S. cities except Atlanta and Austin, where its robotaxis can only be summoned through Uber's ride-hailing service.

The expansion into four more markets marks a significant step toward Waymo's goal to surpass 1 million weekly paid trips by the end of 2026. Without identifying where its robotaxis will be available next, Waymo is targeting a list of eight other cities that include Las Vegas, Washington, Detroit and Boston while signaling its first overseas availability is likely to be London.

To help pay for more robotaxis, Waymo recently raised $16 billion as part of the financial infusion that puts the value of the company at $126 billion. The valuation fueled speculation that Waymo may eventually be spun off from its corporate parent Alphabet, where it began as a secret project within Google in 2009.

Although Waymo is opening up in four more cities, its robotaxis initially will only be made available to a limited number of people with its ride-hailing app in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando before the service will be available to all comers in those markets.

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