Ben Baldazo (Research Plans)

Ben Baldazo Research Plans (Plan Page)

Houston Entrepreneurship

Startups of Houston Interactive Maps - The Whole Process

Start-Ups of Houston (Map)

Use Google Maps to find Longitude and Latitude

• Document how to work Geocode.py and what might go wrong

Put through R code to make an interactive map

• Finding and Documenting the processes required to run the R code may be necessary
• Works on Carto and looks really cool
• We do eventually need to have a plug in and a Carto account so that we can post this on the Wiki

Accelerator Quality Issue Brief

Houston Accelerators (issue brief)

Factors to look at

• Value Added
  • How to look at this though?
• Market vs Non-Market
  • Philanthropic funding?
    • If Non-Profit: Propublica will document contributions
    • If for profit: call?
  • Founded Bottom up? or Top down?
    • See if it was founded by a group or individual with actual industry connections (online or phone)
• Location
  • Proximity to resources
    • We may have to update the startups in Houston map for this
• Available Resources (we should generally be able to call or find this on website, these should be things they brag about)
  • Flex Space
  • Events
  • Co-Working
  • Connections/Mentorship
    • This can also have a judged value based on Mentor/Connection perceived experiece
  • Funding (This may be hard but if they offer their own VC we can check through SDC)
  • Userbase
• Leadership/Experience qualifications (Linkedin, profiles on their own websites, other bios)
  • Have they driven a startup before or been in backseat
  • What other qualifications do they have
• Criteria from the Acc Rankings (as long as we have portfolios then we can use SDC for this)
  • VC funding history
  • IPO
  • Acquired
• Any other reviews possible
  • Other articles (Xconomy, Houston Chronicle, etc.)
  • Info from actually calling the accelerators (Putting a list of questions up on the discussion for Houston Accelerators (issue brief)
  • perhaps reviews from startups themselves
    • Could look specifically into startups that have gone through multiple accelerators hopefully we have phone numbers on File:HSM10.xlsx