Why I'm starting a software founders community in Dallas

Dallas is a big place. Big Fortune 500 companies, big football, big churches, big law firms, big highways, big private equity. It's a city that's very good at being big. It’s Big D.

Underneath all that bigness, there's a whole world of software companies and startups here that almost nobody notices. From startups to scale-ups to very large software companies. And it's getting bigger every month.

For the last six years, I've curated Gregslist Dallas, a running list of the actual software, SaaS, and AI companies in Dallas-Fort Worth. The list is now past 750 software companies in DFW. And that's just the ones I can find. The AI wave is creating more of them every week.

Behind every one of those 750 names is a crazy founder solving hard problems, often without help from other local founders or mentors.

The thing Dallas doesn't have

Every other major city in the world has a real founder community where founders help each other. That’s what a useful ecosystem is. A place where the people actually building companies help each other. Silicon Valley has it. Austin has it. Even cities a fraction of our size have it.

Dallas doesn't. Not really.

We have events, sure. But most of them aren't built for founders. They're built around founders — by the sponsoring service providers, and investors who want to sell to us or fund us. You show up hoping to talk shop with someone who actually gets what you're going through, and instead you spend the night dodging pitches or sitting through a panel aimed at whoever's raising a round. The founders are usually there. They just leave early and don’t come back.

I think part of this is Dallas's DNA. We're a big-company town, and big-company towns are closed and clubby by nature, which is the opposite of the open, who-can-I-help energy you feel in startup-first cities. That culture is great for a lot of things. It's not helpful for serious founders trying to find each other.

I've seen the other version work

I didn't always live here. I left Dallas in 1993 when we sold an early software company (ACT!) to Symantec in Silicon Valley. Then, I was in Phoenix for 23 years, where I built two more big companies. After all that, I ran a SaaS founder community built on exactly one rule: founders first.

That one rule changed everything about how the events felt. When the room is genuinely just builders — no one working it, no one selling — people let their guard down. They trade real numbers. They admit what's not working. They make introductions that actually matter, because there's no angle. I watched founders help each other in ways that no service provider or investor ever could, because they'd lived the same problems.

“The best advice and support I get is from other founders I know.” I hear this all the time, and it’s true. It’s an important part of how founders learn and do hard things.

That's the thing I want for Dallas. Not another networking event. A room that belongs to the founders in it.

So I'm just starting it

I've spent the last 30 years part of building three software companies from startup to global scale, including one that went public. These days, I help B2B SaaS and AI founders all over the world. But the thing I keep coming back to is right here at home: Dallas has all the raw material for a great founder community and none of the connective tissue.

So I'm building Dallas Software Founders as the connective tissue with in-person meetups. As a founder-mode volunteer who sees a problem that no one else will solve and starts working on it. I have no agenda other than connecting founders with each other to build even more successful companies here.

Here's how DSF works. You join the list, and you hear what we're doing. The meetups themselves are invite-only and founders-first — I read every submission personally to keep the room real. Not everyone who joins gets invited to everything, and that's the point. The meetups are awesome because we're careful about who's in it.

Founders at every stage are welcome. Big or small, bootstrapped or funded, AI or SaaS, first-timer or already-exited. The one thing everyone shares is that they're building, or have built, a software company. That's the whole filter.

Come find the others

If you're one of those 750 — or one of the hundreds more being started right now — this is for you. You've been heads-down building, probably without a room full of people who actually understand what that's like. That room is what I'm trying to build.

Dallas has been missing this for a long time. Let's change that.

Connect with me on LinkedIn and let me know how I can help.