[chao-]

Couldn't decide whether to respond to you or to bglazer above, but I particularly agree with the "any major city"/"large Southern cities" part in both of your posts. If this were 2009, I wouldn't have as many charitable things to say about anywhere outside SF (or maybe Seattle or Austin), but five years makes a world of difference.

I can speak most intelligently to Texas' large cities, as I spend a lot of time traveling between Houston, Austin and Dallas. Back in 2010 or 2011, you might find two tech (or tech startup) events going on in a particular week. Now all three places have 2-3 events happening on any given night, and you can hardly choose which you want to go to, or if you want to spend the night just hacking and getting shit done (because that matters too!).

An example: In order to help run an event for Houston's Lean Startup Circle this past Thursday, I had to skip a talk at a startup speaker series and miss the launch party of Texas Medical Center's new Healthcare Accelerator.

Austin, has a better reputation (or just visibility?) on HN, but if you're comparing for places to live long-term, I wouldn't necessarily put it above Houston or Dallas in any absolute sense. My honest take is that tech in Austin feels more visible and "Valley-like" because of how small Austin is. Technology is simply larger in terms of percentage.

[ubercode5]

Do you have any resources to discover some of the events that you are referring to? I'm currently in Houston (albeit a bit south) and would love to find out more.

[chao-]

Absolutely. For historical reasons (not worth rambling about), a lot of Houston's early startup "scene" was organized via Facebook group, and somewhat remains so to this day.

Single biggest resource is the Startup Houston blog/site [0], followed by the Houston Startups Facebook Group [1], and the Startup Digest calendar [2], both of which are linked to from Startup Houston. The calendar can be a bit cluttered, so working with the Lean Startup Circle [3], I help compile a monthly, semi-curated list of events that gets sent out to anyone who subscribes to "organizer announcements" within Meetup.

Plans are in the works for a unified calendar/feed for Houston's many, many Tech meetups, which currently have no central point of organization. Example of what I mean: there are 2 (or 3?) Python meetups, 3 separate UX meetups, and while there is a broader "Functional Programmers" meetup, the Clojure folks have their own separate one in addition.

Lastly, the three major coworking spaces inside the loop [4, 5, 6], as well as the SURGE seed accelerator [7] all put on good events. Not all of those events reliably make it onto the startup calendar, as each has its own little calendar page, but that's being worked on as well.

[0] http://startuphouston.com/

[1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/houstonstartups/

[2] https://www.startupdigest.com/digests/houston

[3] http://www.meetup.com/leanhouston/

[4] http://www.starthouston.com/

[5] http://www.platformhouston.com/

[6] http://whitespacehou.com/

[7] http://www.surgeaccelerator.com/

[aedifico]

Truthfully, I've been near oblivious to Austin or Dallas as potential solutions. Thank you for enlightening me!