Startup Events in Dallas

Dallas's first Grok Bot meetup. Grok Bot is a new Cursor/SpaceX product: "AI teammates you can give real work to. Bots can sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work." Come try Grok Bot, see what it can do, and hang out with the Cursor community. Bring a laptop if you can. Best if you download the bot ahead of time: https://x.ai/bot We'll have short talks and demos from people using Cursor & Grok Bot, then open build time. Designers, PMs, founders, developers, anyone curious. All welcome. Sat Sep 19, 10:30am-2:30pm RSVP soon, slots are limited. If you can't make it, update your RSVP so someone on the waitlist can come. Builders get access to a limited pool of Cursor credits and SpaceXAI API credits. The SpaceXAI credits work across Voice, Chat/Text, Image, and Video generation. First come, first served. Thanks to Kiln Preston Hollow for hosting us — a boutique co-working space at The Hill in North Dallas, with private offices, team suites, and co-working for growing teams. Free parking onsite.

TEXAS VENTURE FEST | NORTH TEXAS 2026 Connection. Collaboration. Outcomes. For the third year, The Founders Arena is proud to host Texas Venture Fest | North Texas — and we can’t wait to bring this community together again. This year feels especially important. At a time when so much of business is moving faster, becoming more automated, and happening behind a screen, authentic connection matters more than ever. We need to know who is building, who is investing, who is buying, who is opening doors — and how we can help one another move forward. That is what this evening is about. No pitching. No pitch competition. Just founders, investors, business leaders, universities, ecosystem builders, and friends of innovation coming together to connect, collaborate, and create outcomes. We’ll have light refreshments, plenty of time to actually meet one another, and a special guest speaker to help us kick off the conversation. Texas Venture Fest has always been about bringing the ecosystem together. For our third North Texas gathering, we want to make that connection even more meaningful. Come meet someone new. Reconnect with someone you haven’t seen. Learn what’s being built across North Texas — and leave with a conversation worth continuing. ⭐ TEXAS' SIGNATURE INNOVATION EVENTS: The Lone Star State shouldn’t have lone star founders. The Texas Venture Fest is a day of networking and programming highlighting the ecosystem of entrepreneur support. More than 15 cities simultaneously host this statewide phenomenon, across our small towns and the nation's biggest metropoles, 3,500+ Texans gather to help innovation flourish. This event is part of the Texas Startup & Tech Week (9/28-10/2), the state's flagship innovation week. The sister signature event is the Texas Venture Gala & Forum, the largest convening at the Texas State Capitol & awards dinner in downtown Austin for innovators and investors from across the state.

Design decisions are often framed as technical or evidence-based choices, yet they are ethical choices, too. Whether you are working on digital products or physical spaces, designers routinely make judgments under constraints--balancing standards, stakeholders, company pressures, and competing values. In this keynote, Dr. Colin Gray discusses the most important challenges facing us are not abstract ethical dilemmas but our everyday design decisions. Drawing up extensive research on everday ethics in design decisions, Dr. Gray looks at how values embed routine decisions, our workflows, and everyday experiences. These values are often viewed as "good" design, too. We'll examine research on deceptive or manipulative design practices (also known as dark patterns) across domains, normalization of harm and surveillance, quiet influence of incentives, and how professional judgment shapes what is taught, measured, and rewarded. We'll examine how leaders and educators, sharing work on ethics-based design methods, tradeoffs, responsibilities, and consequences of design decisions. Rather than treat ethics as constraints or exceptions, let's position ethical engagement as what it means to make good design decisions that account for social impact the future of our design profession.