10th Houston cohort named to early-stage accelerator

ready to grow

Meet the 10th cohort for gBETA Houston. Photo via gener8tor.com

National venture capital firm gener8tor named its 10th Houston cohort this week, which includes startups focused on innovative tableware to substitute teacher operations.

gBETA Houston offers startups and founders with a non-equity seven-week program that features intensive concierge coaching and access to a network of investors and partners. The founders will pitch their ideas on Oct. 24 at 6:30 p.m. at the Esperson Building.

"Each cohort shows us how innovation evolves and thrives," Muriel Foster, gBETA Houston director, says in a statement. "The Spring 2024 gBETA Houston cohort embodies creative brilliance and unyielding ambition."

The five companies named to gBETA were chosen based on their growth potential and investor readiness. They include:

  • BrainBuffet, an AI-powered platform that has already created over 250 courses to refine its personalized learning algorithm that builds customized courses that feature curated content, YouTube videos, quizzes, and progress tracking
  • Colorfull Plates, a tableware startup that creates durable, vibrant products that aim to streamline family meals and encourage children to try new flavors. It has generated $300,000 in revenue without outside dilutive funding.
  • The Parent Teacher Collaborative, a web- and mobile-based platform that aims to improve student outcomes by building strong collaborative partnerships, growing parent-teacher organizations and better managing school events. It's worked with five Houston-area communities and has raised over $144,000 in grant and contract funding since April 2023.
  • Kinfolk, a user-friendly mobile application that creates a digital time capsule of family traditions, memories and cultural heritage. It has over 50 beta-testing customers.
  • SubSpark, a mobile and desktop app that allows school administrators and teachers to post available openings for substitute teachers. The Houston-based LLC is currently beta-testing its apps with one Houston-area private school.

The five companies joined the spring 2024 cohort and the rest of the Houston gBETA network.

gBETA is supported by Downtown Houston, the City of Houston and the Downtown Redevelopment Authority. The program has accelerated 45 Houston companies since its launch in Houston in 2019. It was launched by a $1.25 million grant to be paid out over five years.
From Your Site Articles
Pitch decks in San Francisco and New York tend to be simpler. Getty Images

When it comes to meeting with investors, a simpler pitch deck is better

On deck

There's something about California pitch decks that Houston companies can learn a thing or two from. Most of them are simpler and highlight those few key points that really show a company might be a success. Simpler, in this case, is good.

However, the investor pitch deck doesn't get you the investment, the deck gets you the meeting. And when an investor is considering a company to meet with, they don't want to comb through scientific detail before getting to know the entrepreneur. It's the entrepreneur who we want to talk to. We want to see and hear their ability to communicate the complex information.

The simple pitch deck is crucial for the entrepreneur to get that initial meeting. It forces the entrepreneur to showcase their best and most important key metrics. Then, it's the entrepreneurs live performance is the real key to attaining an investment.

In Houston — and in other more conservative towns — we tend to see pitch decks that have a lot more information density on each page. It ends up being a traditional business plan, but in landscape orientation instead of portrait orientation.

A lot of more traditional investors in cities like Houston must prefer this additional detail in the deck, right?

Perhaps, but the trend I see is that cities where more venture capital dollars are raised (seed-stage and otherwise) tend to have simpler pitch decks for that initial outreach. San Francisco's are simpler than New York's. New York's are simpler than Austin's. Austin's are simpler than Houston's. And so on.

Maybe I am wrong to recommend having the simpler pitch deck in an environment where there are fewer investors and fewer deals. However, when the simpler pitch deck can be made by cutting away parts of the longer more complex one, shouldn't entrepreneurs be able to create this pitch deck? The process is boiling down the core message, and who doesn't want to work on that?

Work on that elevator pitch and work on that short pitch deck. Of course you need to detail, but sometimes you need the simplicity.

------

Mark Friday is an associate leading venture capital investments at Houston-based Cathexis Holdings LP.

From enlightening talks to anniversary celebrations, here's where you need to be in January. Getty Images

Updated: 10 can't-miss innovation events for January

Where to be

Houston's innovation community is starting 2019 strong with plenty of business professional events.

If you know of innovation-focused events for February, email me at natalie@innovationmap.com with the details.

1. How to Start a Startup with Roberto Moctezuma, founder & CEO of Fractal River

Thinking 2019 is the year you finally turn your business idea into a startup? Station Houston wants to help. It's free to attend this discussion lead by Roberto Moctezuma, the founder and CEO of Houston-based Fractal River, an advisory firm. The talk will focus on identifying problems, determining market needs, learning important metrics, and more.

The event is from 6 to 7 pm on Tuesday, January 8, at Station Houston (1301 Fannin St., Suite 2440).

Learn more here.

2. January U.S. Oil & Gas Blockchain Forum Luncheon

For the first event of the year, the U.S. Oil & Gas Blockchain Forum is focusing on how blockchain can help the energy industry. Guest speakers are Andrew Bruce, CEO and founder of Houston-based Data Gumbo, and Rebecca Hofmann, blockchain strategist at Equinor.

The luncheon is from 11:30 am to 1:30 pm on Tuesday, January 15, at the Equinor Auditorium (2107 CityWest Blvd). Tickets to attend are $50.

Learn more here.

3. Salesforce Essentials Workshop: Houston

Attention small business owners: Salesforce has a workshop designed for you. Learn about the platform and how it can help your business strategy over lunch.

The workshop isn Tuesday, January 15, from noon to 2 p.m. at The Cannon (1336 Brittmoore Road) and is free to attend.

Learn more here.

4. Society of Petroleum Engineers Women-in-Energy Congress

Energy industry ladies take center stage of a full-day event focused on women in oil and gas. Susan Dio, chairman and president of BP America, will deliver the keynote address before the rest of the day's panels and presentations begin.

This event is January 18, from 8 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., at the Houston Community College West Houston Institute (2811 Hayes Road).

Learn more here.

5. Houston Startup Demo Day

Three Houston startups will present their product and business plan at The Station's monthly demo day. The companies and judges are still being determined, but the event details are finalized.

Hear the pitches on Wednesday, January 23, from 6 to 8 p.m., at Station Houston (1301 Fannin Street, Suite 2440). The event is free to attend.

Learn more here.

6. NRLC Workshop: Pitching Part 2: The Physical Pitch with Beth O'Sullivan

If you thought you were pitch perfect, think again. Beth O'Sullivan, a management senior lecturer at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Business, is giving a free lecture on the art of pitching your company. The Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship is offering the event.

The lecture will be from 4 to 5:30 pm on Wednesday, January 23, at the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (6100 Main Street Cambridge Office Building, Suite 130).

Learn more here.

7. Women Entrepreneurs Pitch Party at The Cannon

Calling all angel investors — The Cannon Ventures would like to introduce you to a few female entrepreneurs this month. InnovationMap is a media partner for the event, and the goal is to generate connections between the entrepreneurs and potential investors.

The event takes place on Thursday, January 24, from 6:30 to 9 p.m. at The Cannon (1336 Brittmoore Road).

If you're an interested investor and would like to attend, email Jake Askew at jaskew@cannonventureshouston.com.

8. Oil & Gas Happy Hour Hosted by OGGN + The Cannon

Grab a beer and some bites at Oil & Gas Global Network's monthly happy hour — this time in collaboration with Houston-based The Cannon.

Join oil and gas professionals at The Cannon (1336 Brittmoore Road) on Tuesday, January 29, from 6 to 9 p.m. Tickets are $10 for this happy hour event, and proceeds go to Redeemed Ministries, a local charity to help human trafficking victims.

Learn more here.

9. Station Houston 3.0 and Launch Party

As Station Houston officially becomes a nonprofit on January 1, and, in preparation for its move to the Midtown Innovation District, the organization is revealing Station Houston 3.0 to start 2019 with. The free event is Wednesday, January 30, from 6 to 8 pm at Station Houston (1301 Fannin St., Suite 2440).

Guests can mingle until the short program and announcement, which is followed by light bites. Station will also be showing off Houston's first VR Lab and its new space.

Learn more here.

10. Inaugural meeting of the Houston Industrial Digital Transformation & IoT Meetup

Calling all digital and tech innovation leaders in oil and gas or utilities — there's a new group for you to join. The Houston Industrial Digital Transformation and IoT Meetup formed to bring leaders of industrial innovation together for collaboration and so that they can learn from each other's digital transformations.

The inaugural meetup is from 6 to 8 pm on Wednesday, January 30, at ChaiOne HQ (9 Greenway Plaza, Suite 850). It's free to attend.

Learn more here.

Whether you're pitching your startup in a competition or for capital, here are some expert tips. Getty Images

4 secrets to being pitch perfect from a startup founder

Down pat

One of the things our team at EllieGrid is most famous for is pitching. We have pitched our smart pill box in over 20 business plan competitions, on television, radio, and to so many investors that I have lost count. I can't remember what our first pitch was like but I know it has certainly evolved overtime. You could even say that we A/B tested some of our methods.

When you first organize your thoughts, you want to consider the basics, so before I give my advice, consider these tried-and-true tips.

  • Get to the point — say what your company is in the first 10 seconds
  • Know your audience
  • Shorter usually means better
  • Keep numbers to a minimum
  • Have a clear ask

In order to save you a little time, here are some of the of the lessons I learned the hard way to help you perfect your pitch.

Don't pitch. Tell a story.
I am going to let you in on a little secret: most people don't want to hear your pitch, especially if yours is not the first they have heard that day. Put yourself in their shoes, do you really want to listen to someone ramble on about facts and figures? Chances are, no. Instead, tell a story. Use engaging voices and set the scene. Recall your creative writing classes from high school and how you should mention what it was like in terms of feel, smell, taste, etc. and don't use generic adjectives such as "too small" or "the old way was hard."

People remember how you made them feel
What is in it for your audience? Is it wealth, power, fame, praise or glory, and/or pleasure? It might sound obvious to make this point when pitching, but I suggest you write out your pitch and highlight exactly where you say what is in it for them, maybe even more than once. Making the audience feel like you are caring about their desires and engaging them in conversation will help you be more memorable.

Come full circle
My favorite technique in any pitch or speech is if the speaker can connect the closing back to something they said at the beginning of their pitch. I enjoy this because sometimes the speaker will leave a question unanswered and then reveal how their solution is the answer in a creative way. This keeps your listeners engaged and connects the pain to your solution. Watch a few TED talks and you will see what I mean.

Pitch to a kid
This is probably the best advice I can give because it is a surefire way to make sure your pitch makes sense to a wide range of listeners. This also forces you to leave out jargon and filler words that you think might make you sound fancy like "innovative" or "disruptive" but actually make you sound like everyone else.

------

Regina Vatterott is the COO and co-founder of Ellie Grid, a Houston-based company reinventing medical devices. Read more about Regina here.

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

---

This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

  • Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
  • Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
  • Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
  • Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

  • No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • No. 105 SLB
  • No. 120 Baker Hughes
  • No. 125 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 158 NRG Energy
  • No. 176 Targa Resources
  • No. 185 Chevron
  • No. 195 Halliburton
  • No. 223 Coterra Energy
  • No. 229 Waste Management
  • No. 235 Exxon Mobil
  • No. 250 Kinder Morgan
  • No. 257 Quanta Services
  • No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
  • No. 285 Sysco
  • No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
  • No. 318 Camden Property Trust
  • No. 333 EOG Resources
  • No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
  • No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
  • No. 401 Crown Castle
  • No. 408 Phillips 66
  • No. 500 APA
View All Listings