Hacker News Reader

Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

Fort Worth is not a hip microcosm of California in Texas but it is about to leave Austin in the dust. They have been growing at similar rates for about the last 20 years but Austin is slowing down and growth in Fort Worth continues to accelerate. Fort Worth is scheduled to be the first to reach 1 million residents out of Jacksonville, Austin, Seattle, and San Jose.

If you ignore the non-numerical trend nonsense the writing has been on the wall for more than 5 years based on raw data commonly available to everyone.

View on HN

> it is about to leave Austin in the dust

Overall as a city, most likely.

As a tech hub in TX? Absolutely not.

DFW doesn't have a concentrated enough operator scene. Tech isn't just software, it's also sales, PM, marketing, pricing, VCs, etc. And that doesn't exist in DFW or Houston.

If you said Richardson or Plano, it might be understandable due to the Telco industry and UTD, but Ft Worth just doesn't have it.

I disagree. If you are talking about startups that could be true because tech startups are greater 50% financial operations.

Houston continues to have more Fortune 500 companies than any other US city after New York. If you group Plano, Irving, Frisco, and Dallas together then Dallas might take the top spot from New York.

I've previously product managed F500 accounts HQed in the Central Sales zone.

Most of their engineering is located outside the US, and whatever staff they do have is augmented by staffing/contracting companies. You have to remember EDS and Professional Services was basically invented by Ross Perot in Dallas back in the 70s.

The only large dedicated F500 software dev teams I can think of in DFW (not Ft Worth) are C1 and JPM, and most of that is sustaining engineering.

Schlumberger does some cool HPC/ML stuff but their footprint is relatively small compared to the larger market.

The "1 million residents" is based on arbitrary administrative boundaries within a single metropolitan area. San Francisco also has < 1 million people when measured this way. It is also weird to put San Jose on the list since it is the main city of literal Silicon Valley.

Except for Jacksonville, all of those other cities dwarf DFW in venture capital investment, which is a much more relevant metric than population.

If that were true then economic health indicators would indicate the Bay Area is drastically, like orders of magnitude, more economically healthy than the DFW area. Not only is that not the case there is every reason to believe the contrary.

> Fort Worth is scheduled to be the first to reach 1 million residents out of Jacksonville, Austin, Seattle, and San Jose.

San Jose had over 1 million residents in 2020, the population declined.

And it has emporium pie, which I assume is the reason for all the growth.

(They have really, really good pie if you're in the metroplex. I go every time I visit family there.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com