Industry Archives - Startup Economist

The Stack AI Can’t Replace: Why Infrastructure is the Future of Work

Saturday, 30 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Every few months someone publishes a new piece declaring that AI will automate everything, that code is no longer a profession, that “vibe coding” (the practice of describing what you want to an AI assistant and accepting whatever it generates) is now a legitimate engineering strategy. Last week, White House AI & Crypto Czar, David

Published in AI, FinTech, Infrastructure as a Service

8 Comments

Building the Energy Future While the Rest of America Argues About It: America’s Energy Belt

Monday, 25 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Startup ecosystems do not happen at the city level, no matter how many branding exercises a mayor commissions or how many innovation districts get ribbon-cut in the same news cycle. They happen at the regional level, with sector specialization that compounds across geography where varied strengths and weaknesses are found throughout; the people writing the

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Published in AI, Data, Economic Development, Energy

12 Comments

Infrastructure as a Service Builds the Most Defensible Economics; Most Investors Are Looking at the Wrong Companies

Sunday, 03 May 2026 by Paul O'Brien

The most valuable companies right now aren’t building software for end users. They’re building the ground upon which other software stands. Consider that Stripe, Twilio, and Plaid together process a material fraction of the world’s digital economy, and most people couldn’t tell you what any of them actually sell because they don’t sell to you,

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Published in FinTech, healthcare, Infrastructure as a Service

11 Comments

Universities Are Sitting on the Next Great Companies. Here’s How to Launch Them.

Wednesday, 29 April 2026 by Paul O'Brien

You Can’t License Your Way to Commercialization The Texas Innovation Conference & Awards at TCU didn’t change university tech transfer overnight but that’s not a criticism, it’s almost a compliment. What it did was harder and rarer: it put the people who actually need to be in the same room, in the same room, and

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Published in Conferences / Events, Education, Startups

2 Comments

The Entrepreneurship in Texas Biosciences

Wednesday, 15 April 2026 by Paul O'Brien

On the heels of my return from Phoenix Biosciences Core and a talk about the Arizona startup ecosystem, Texas announces ARPA-H funding, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health supporting transformative biomedical and health breakthroughs. It didn’t luck into it with a last-minute pitch deck and a prayer. Four major cities put aside their egos, formed

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Published in Biosciences, healthcare, Regional Development, Texas Startups

29 Comments

Forget STEM, The Future Ready Skills Curriculum is ECPM

Sunday, 22 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Articles and perspectives considering the end of STEM education, given the rise of AI, have been filling my inbox lately. And in fairness and to be clear, STEM professionals are pointing, “of course not, Math will always be a critical skill, and Science is clearly more than an LLM doing research,” no indeed, STEM isn’t

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Published in Education

21 Comments

The Texas Aerospace Space

Friday, 20 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Synonymous with space, Texas is far more than Houston being informed of a problem, and after an incredible tour of Firefly’s rocket facilities in Briggs, Texas, with Space Force Association, I needed to dig in. Texas got into aerospace the way Texas gets into anything: by building a messy, expensive, politically complicated machine that becomes

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Published in Aerospace, Regional Development

1 Comment