IMPACT DRIVER
Impact Hub and its CEO are building inclusion in Houston’s startup community
If you’ve paid attention to Houston’s tech community for any length of time, you likely know the name Grace Rodriguez. A selfprofessed serial entrepreneur and social-media presence, she’s been starting businesses here since she helped launch a DJ collective known as the Kracker Nuttz in 1999.
At 46, she’s still at it. Most recently, Rodriguez is co-founder and chief executive of the Houston branch of Impact Hub, an international network of startup accelerators with outposts in more than 100 locations in 50 countries. Impact Hub focuses on helping founders from underrepresented communities, and each operates differently.
Prior to starting Impact Hub Houston, she co-founded Station Houston, one of the city’s highest profile tech startup accelerators, now owned by Austin-based Capital Factory, where she still serves as a mentor to its startup cohorts. She also serves as an adviser at the TMC Innovation Institute.
Oh, and she also co-owns a bar, Dean’s Downtown, where — when it’s not closed under pandemic-related orders fromthe governor — it’s ameeting spot for Houston’s tech and social-media communities.
The Chronicle spoke with Rodriguez about Impact Hub’s mission in Houston, inclusion and diversity in the city’s growing tech community and the challenges it faces as the coronavirus pandemic drags on. The interview was edited for length and clarity.
Q: If you were to explain Impact Hub to somebody who knew nothing about it, what would you say?
A: Impact Hub is a global network of individually owned and operated hubs around the world that operates something like the United Nations, as a federation of hubs. For instance, Impact Hub Houston is a 501c3 nonprofit organization, but Impact Hub Madrid is for-profit. Each one opts into the protocols of the network and the guidelines and pays a fee to be a part of the network. Impact Hub, the company is based in Vienna, Austria.
Q: What’s themission?
A: Impact Hub itself commits to the mission of supporting entrepreneurial solutions towards the United Nations’ sustainable development goals.
Some people call those types of ventures social enterprises, social ventures, impact entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship. (The ventures’ goals) range from no hunger, no poverty, gender equality to industry innovation and infrastructure.
We have found that we need to do a lot more education on those topics. which means we are more program-driven versus space-driven. The vision of Impact Hub is a just and sustainable world where business and profit are in service of people and planet.
Q: Do you operate like other accelerators, where you work with specific entrepreneurs and have startups grouped
into cohorts?
A: Some Impact Hubs do. Then there are some Impact Hubs that are primarily co-working based. We are kind of a hybrid of where we had just recently launched this Accelerate membership, which is not cohort based. It is more ongoing support, but with an accelerator model. We would like to get to the point where we are partnering with, whether it's a diversity fund or a platform where people can raise funding through, to provide them with capital as well, because we understand that's one of the biggest challenges for diverse entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs.
So it's kind of like a hyper-local approach to global change.
Q: What’s an example of an Impact Hub success that you've been proud of?
A: One thing is making sure that more diverse people are on (tech conference) panels. And that our diverse organizations are included in the ecosystem.
If you want a specific example for a startup, there’s Amazing Bond. Varina Rush is a cofounder of Amazing Bond and they support seniors who need care. She came to Impact Hub at the beginning of their journey. They didn't know exactly how to structure the organization, how to grow it, what kind of tech tools that they needed to use.
And through the course of being engaged with Impact Hub, they were tapped into the Acumen Academy’s social entrepreneurship curriculum. We've provided her with a few mentoring sessions, and I would say we’ve given her confidence.
Q: Do you think in general that Houston's technology and innovation community, as is the case with a lot of others around the country, has a diversity issue? Do startups with founders from underrepresented communities get left out of funding?
A: Well, I don't think it's intentional. I've never thought it was.
When we first started Station and I was talking with Bob Harvey from the Greater Houston Partnership, he was explicit that we want to make sure that we have a diverse community, that we are supporting diverse people and startups and organizations, but he didn't know where they were.
It's just hard to find because a lot of it is underground or a lot of it's community-driven. It's by relationships. If you think about a lot of the corporate executives or a lot of the leaders in this space and their networks, those networks probably don't look like Houston, because that's just how they grew and that's no fault of their own.
I spoke on a panel in Austin for the Black Leadership Forum and you had dozens of Black-centered and (Black-)led organizations at this forum.
I said: I challenge every organi
zation in Houston that wants to support entrepreneurs to specifically seek out an organization that is Black-led and Black-centered, and then see how you can partner on something. So with the African American Lawyers Association, how can we work together to hack solutions towards, you know, public safety?
I think that's what I would challenge a lot of the organizations that exist in Houston where there is a lack of diversity in their leadership.
Q: So what have you done to address that?
A: It's not just checking off a box, it's really, “What about supporting people in this community?” Impact Hub Houston is actively working with Baker Ripley because they have great Spanishlanguage programs for entrepreneurs.
We actively work with the Urban League because they specifically have a program for Black entrepreneurs. We work with the East End district because the majority of the businesses in their district, are Hispanic or Latinx owners.
If we can role-model it and we can show other organizations how to do it, I am finding that other organizations will do it, they just didn't know how to start. And I think that we're now we're at a good place where we're actually going to see a tsunami of support.
Q: How has the pandemic and everything going virtual affected both your efforts at Impact Hub as well as the ongoing growth of Houston's technology community?
A: One of the things that was a driving rubric for how we decide on what and how we sell our programs, how we do events for Impact Hub Houston has been: How do we meet people where they are? And that is psychologically and physically.
That's one of the reasons why we partnered with (co-working space) The Cannon, to make sure that we could do programs in places around the city where the candidate locations are. That’s also why we partnered with Baker Ripley, so we can do programs at all of the different Baker Ripley community centers around the city.
Houston has always had this problem of sprawl. And I feel like one of the opportunities that the pandemic presented was now people have to learn how to use virtual, online programs so that they can connect and they can work together and have meetings and learn.
There are a lot of people who don't know how to use tech tools and now they have had to. And one of the benefits of the pandemic has been that we don't have to focus so much effort on doing so many programs a week because now other Impact Hubs around the world are doing programs that we can offer to our members.
Q: How has that worked out?
A: It has definitely hurt all of the happy hours and the social events, which is a big part of Houston's culture, you know? I'm a partner in a bar and we hosted a lot of the Houston tech meetups and it's kind of sad that we can't get together right now, but we can do virtual happy hours.
We just have to rethink how we operate in virtual spaces. How do we still feel connected? It does feel different, but until we can be in spaces together and in ways that are safe for everybody, I don't want have a superspreader event, right?
So until it is safe to convene in physical space, let's get better at doing virtual connections. And if Houston can lead in that, then we will help solve our sprawl problem. And then we can also be a role model for how other large cities like ours or large regions like ours deal with this problem.