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Paul Mitchell hair products. Patron tequila. These are the products and brands that most people associate with John Paul DeJoria, the self-made billionaire whose extremely modest beginnings taught him the value of hard work and persistence. But JP – as his

Starting a business is exciting, but it often comes with many risks and uncertainties. For most entrepreneurs, having a trusted resource when problems arise can often be the very element needed to achieve game changing success. “Ask the Expert”, our biweekly

Background reading: Angel Investors v. "Angel" Investors Friends and Family Rounds California, and particularly Silicon Valley, is its own world as far as early-stage startup investing goes. The reasons for that aren't complicated: because so much of the "angel" money swirling

Background reading: Bad Advisors: The Problem with Localism Ask the Users Navigating Referrals in a Connected Startup Ecosystem A noticeable theme over the past 2-3 years is the “cross pollination” of startup ecosystems. By that I mean that the traditional zero-sum

Guest Contributor: Beth Casey Starting your own business is never easy. Among the plethora of other decisions, you must also consider how best to market yourself. Today, the name of the marketing game is digital. Statista reported that there were over

I am a Fort Worth mom with four young children, but as a digital business owner I am an old-timer. I started my first online business more than a decade ago, and now I am running my fourth online business.

Sponsored by Egan Nelson The market for early-stage emerging tech corporate lawyers ("startup lawyers") has for a long time been bifurcated in the following way: on the one hand, you have massive law firms with hundreds or thousands of top-tier lawyers,

Guest contributor: Michael Martin The popularity of solar power continues to grow daily in the states. According to Pew Research, 89% of American adults believe we should deploy more solar. Why? The quality of Solar power is getting better and cheaper every

Guest Contributor: Cameron Cushman, Director of Innovation, UNT Health Science Center Have you ever been on a pub crawl? What about a pub crawl for startups? What about a pub crawl, in spaces where startups hang out that features local startups?

Sponsored by Egan Nelson LLP Executive succession, particularly involving the Founder CEO, can be a tense time in the history of a startup.  But not always. In fact, in my experience working with VC-backed startups across Texas and elsewhere, there are many

Guest Contributor: Cameron Cushman Last week I traveled to Istanbul, Turkey, to represent the United States at the 10th Annual Global Entrepreneurship Congress (GEC), a gathering of about 2,000 entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial community builders from 170 countries. I joined six other

As an avid golfer, I often draw parallels between the sport of golf and business. As you may know, the goal in golf is to limit the number of shots you take. From a business perspective, this translates to being

Sponsored by Egan Nelson LLP One unfortunate, and somewhat unique, aspect of startup ecosystems is that they have a large power/experience imbalance between parties doing business with each other. On the one hand, you have seasoned, well-connected investors who close multiple

This is a guest post by Dale Gilliam. Dale is the CEO of Troubadour Research & Consulting.  Troubadour offers strategy consulting, analytics, and market research for startups, capital investment firms, and marketing consultancies. Dale can be found on Twitter @data_modeler and

This is a guest post by Melissa Olsen. Melissa is the marketing director for Morbie.com and its sister sites, and is currently based in Fort Worth with her husband and four kids. Connect with her through Google or Twitter. If you would like to write

This is a guest post written by Clarissa Redwine (@ClarissaRedwine).  Clarissa runs UNT’s Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization and is organizing TEDxUNT.  She also co-curates Startup Digest Dallas, Startup Weekend Denton, and LittleDOCC. Denton | Hacker Hordes and Entrepreneurs LittleD has always been a

The following is a guest post by Kenneth Johnson. Kenneth lives in Frisco, is a freshman in college, and is working on his fourth company. If you're interested in writing a guest post for LAUNCH DFW please contact us. My Perspective

This guest post was written by Linda Nguyen, cofounder of YoBelly, a food/restaurant recommendation app . Linda participated in the first House of Genius event. HoG is a monthly event that brings together "brilliant, diverse groups of people to focus their

This is a guest post by Ryan Roberts of Roberts Foster LLP covering his thoughts on the recently released SAFE financing documents released by seed accelerator Y Combinator. Roberts Foster LLP is a LAUNCH DFW Community Champion. A Primer on the

This is a guest post by Sammy Abdullah, cofounder of the Dallas Angel Network. Every time I first meet with an entrepreneur, at some point I’ll hear a permutation of the following sentence: “what we’re looking for are strategic angels that

This is a guest post by Trey Bowles (@TreyBowles) Trey is cofounder and CEO of the Dallas Entrepreneur Center (aka The DEC) in Dallas. Bowles also serves as an adjunct professor at SMU teaching Social Entrepreneurship and a Startup classes in the

This is Part 2 of How to Raise Angel Funding in DFW by Mike Ivey. Click here for part 1. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Like any well researched 2-part article, let me start with a few corrections

For one very short week, Tech Wildcatters, in collaboration with The Dallas Entrepreneur Center and Startup Texas, held a contest for DFW startups. Three lucky startups would receive tickets to attend the GROW Conference in Vancouver this August! GROW provides

You don't want to have a lack of a trust fund get in the way of your goals of owning a business, but most startups take more than what you have in savings. Exploring various lines of credit, instead of

Mike Ivey is the cofounder of Modern Message. His company recently announced that they just closed a $300,000 funding round raised entirely from North Texas Angels. This is part 1 of a 2 part series detailing what they did wrong. ————————————————————————————————————————-               http://www.gapingvoid.com/ Fundraising can be a soul-crushing,

We created LaunchDFW back in 2009 to be THE place for all things startup related in DFW. We have several new projects we're working on (plus a couple surprises) to ensure that we continue to deliver on that mission, and it's

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  OKLAHOMA CITY, OKLA. (June 5, 2013) – VentureSpur, the seed fund and venture accelerator with offices in Oklahoma City and Dallas, announced its 2013 VentureSpur Finalists today. The 16 Finalists were the top teams chosen from among nearly

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FORT WORTH, Texas (June 5, 2013) – TECH Fort Worth has launched TECH Talk – Texas Style, twice-weekly radio programming for technology startups and entrepreneurs. Programming can be accessed at www.blogtalkradio.com/texastechtalk. “We will talk about technology startups, focusing on

Every month, we see a headline that reads something like, “TV is Dead. Technology X Will Completely Disrupt the TV Business Model.” Yet here we are. Although somewhere between 15-20% of Americans say that they are going to drop or

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE FORT WORTH, Texas (May 29, 2013) Members of the Cowtown Angels, a program of TECH Fort Worth, have invested $620,000 in Wisegate Inc., the largest investment to date for the Fort Worth-based angel network. This is also

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE For more information: Darlene Ryan

Starting a new business has never been a more viable or more intelligent option. As technology has proliferated through our society, small businesses ranging from crowdsourcing musicians to boutique app developers have exploded. But there's one thing that hasn't changed:

By Michael Walsh – Founder Cariloop, HealthSparx, Health 2.0 Dallas You ever been in one of those situations where you know you’re supposed to do something but have no idea why?  You trust your gut, so you go for it, but

  By: Jon Eggleton, turnstone The coasts are by no means the only places where innovation is thriving. According to a report commissioned by the Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights, 5.7 percent of the country’s angel investment deals

Think that starting a new business always requires a large upfront cash investment? Think again. In fact, even if you have available funds on hand, depleting your financial resources on a startup business may not be the best strategy. With

This is a guest post by GI Sanders, Co-founder and CEO of Fancorps.   The Dallas startup and technology communities gathered yesterday for one of the more anticipated events in the local scene. Techwildcatters, Dallas' only startup accelerator, presented it's 2012 Pitch

The mudbugs are in season and it's time for CoHabitat’s 3rd Annual Crawfish Boil (map)! The fun starts at 5! The CoHabitat Boil is a great way to meet a lot of great people (entrepreneurs, developers, creatives, to name a few)

Gary Vaynerchuk rolled into Dallas last Wednesday for "Gary Vee in Big D!" and was greeted by 500 enthusiastic DFW fans. The event, a mini-conference that Gary keynoted to promote his New York Times' best-selling book The Thank You Economy, took

The idea is pretty simple: get a crowd of people together drinking beer at a cool place and listen to people quickly talk about stuff they know and like to talk about. That’s the basic idea of Ignite events, a