Dallas Office Hours

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. "We’re so excited to host North Texas Venture Fest at Kiln, Dallas’s beautiful new coworking space, and bring founders, capital, business and civic leaders together in a place built for connection. We’re especially honored to welcome Michael Phillips, COO of T.D. Jakes Enterprises, whose work with the Good Soil Movement is creating meaningful access to capital, technology and growth for thousands of entrepreneurs. As The Founders Arena enters its next chapter, we’re excited about the global opportunities ahead and continuing to connect innovation from around the world to real commercialization opportunities in North Texas." --- The Founders Arena’s CEO, Pamela Cytron 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 ha

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.