Pitch Party

Dallas business summit to feature college students in Shark Tank pitch

There will be no sharks nor Mark Cuban.

Photo via Wikipedia Commons

A new business summit launching in Dallas is being hailed as a dream event for entrepreneurs.

It's called "Changing The World For Good - The 2023 SMU & GSV Mission Summit," and it's a three-day event from May 22-24 with big names and big ideas.

Leading businesses, investors, educational innovators, and entrepreneurs will convene for an inspiring three days of panel discussions, creative huddles, and company presentations designed to bring business + ideas + financing together.

The event was created by GSV and builds on the tradition of an annual summit that GSV holds with Arizona State University. "GSV" stands for “Global Silicon Valley,” an investment platform that has invested in businesses such as Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Palantir, and Spotify.

In addition to host university SMU, partners in Dallas' inaugural Mission Summit include Hoque Global and American City Business Journals.

GSV’s work in Dallas also includes a partnership with Hoque Global in the development of SoGood in Downtown Dallas and an Innovation District at its core. SoGood is a master-planned urban community adjacent to the Famers Market, Deep Ellum, the Cedars, and Fair Park just south of Interstate 30.

Student pitch
One especially inspiring element of the event is The Texas Cup, a Shark Tank-like competition in which students from Texas universities will present business ideas and compete for funding.

Students will give live pitches before a panel of judges. Finals will take place Wednesday, May 24, at the Varsity room at SMU Hughes-Trigg Student Center at 3140 Dyer St, and promise to be a one-of-a-kind live event emceed by Gina Miller, FC Dallas VP of Communications.

The pitches will come from 12 finalists among 100 students who competed statewide from pretty much every DFW college or university: Dallas College, Dallas Baptist University, Paul Quinn College, SMU, Tarrant County College, Texas A&M, TCU, TWU, University of Dallas, UNT, University of Texas at Arlington, University of Texas at Dallas, and UT Southwestern.

Judges include executives from Goldman Sachs, Mt. Vernon Investments, Interlock Partners, CDX Advisors, Artemis Agency, and Hoque Global, who are co-hosting the event. They'll consider criteria such as the market, business model, the inspiration, and what kind of impact it'll have.

Three winning pitches will receive funding from SoGood by HG and GSV. Every participant will receive a free “pitch practice” session with the world’s top vocal coach, Roger Love, plus a free ticket to the Summit, and the chance to rub elbows with other mission-minded entrepreneurs.

“This is a dream event for entrepreneurs, to be able to see great ideas win support to become a reality,” says Hoque Global CEO Mike Hoque in a statement.

Participants leading the Summit include:

Clark Hunt, CEO, Kansas City Chiefs
Robert Kaplan, Former President and CEO, Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas
Avery Johnson, Partner, Avery Capital
Jennifer Chandler, Managing Director, Bank of America
Michael Sorrell, President, Paul Quinn College
Michael Moe, founder of Global Silicon Valley and
Co-Author of the best-selling The Mission Corporation
Elizabeth Loboa, Provost, Southern Methodist University
Mike Hoque, CEO, Hoque Global
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt and Oklahoma First Lady Sarah Stitt

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Jobs report

Texas ranks among 10 best states to find a job, says new report

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

You have a better chance of landing a job in Texas than in most other states.

If you’re hunting for a job in Texas amid a tough employment market, you stand a better chance of landing it here than you might in other states.

A new ranking by personal finance website WalletHub of the best states for jobs puts Texas at No. 7. The Lone Star State lands at No. 2 in the economic environment category and No. 18 in the job market category.

Massachusetts tops the list, and West Virginia appears at the bottom.

To determine the most attractive states for employment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 34 key indicators of economic health and job market strength. Ranking factors included employment growth, median annual income, and average commute time.

“Living in one of the best states for jobs can provide stable conditions for the long term, helping you ride out the fluctuations that the economy will experience in the future,” WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo says.

In September, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Texas led the U.S. in job creation with the addition of 195,600 jobs over the past 12 months.

While Abbott proclaimed Texas is “America’s jobs leader,” the state’s level of job creation has recently slowed. In June, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas noted that the state’s year-to-date job growth rate had dipped to 1.8 percent, and that even slower job growth was expected in the second half of this year.

The August unemployment rate in Texas stood at 4.1 percent, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. Throughout 2025, the monthly rate in Texas has been either four percent or 4.1 percent.

By comparison, the U.S. unemployment rate in August was 4.3 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2025, the monthly rate for the U.S. has ranged from 4 percent to 4.3 percent.

Here’s a rundown of the August unemployment rates in Texas’ four biggest metro areas:

Austin — 3.9 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth — 4.4 percent
San Antonio — 4.4 percent
Houston — 5 percent

Unemployment rates have remained steady this year despite layoffs and hiring freezes driven by economic uncertainty. However, the number of U.S. workers who’ve been without a job for at least 27 weeks has risen by 385,000 this year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in August. That month, long-term unemployed workers accounted for about one-fourth of all unemployed workers.

An August survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York showed a record-low 44.9 percent of Americans were confident about finding a job if they lost their current one.

This story originally was published on our sister site, InnovationMap.

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