What Texas Venture Fest 2026 Still Needs: A Panel of Idea People
DANIEL Silva · 2026-10-01
I'm the vice president of entrepreneurship and innovation for city of Brownsville. My daily activity is coming up with programs that we can help our local community grow, invest in our downtown areas, help businesses that need access to resources, and break down barriers. That way, you can be successful. A busy week looks like hosting an event, preparing for the start of another cohort for one of our programs, and engaging with the community.
That is the job description, and it is also the reason I went to the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation Texas Venture Fest 2026 with something of my own in mind. I'm an aspiring entrepreneur, and I wanna be able to create a network and have people that I can interact with and try to show them my product to get a little bit of validation. You spend enough of your week building the room for other people that you forget you are allowed to walk into it yourself.
Who did I actually meet there?
So I met this guy. His name is Drew Lentz, and he's setting up a DJ booth. We talked about what he's doing for his daily activities and how he's freeing up time by some cool resource that he's now activating. It's an online actuator that pulls information from the Internet, in relation to a device or a service that's being utilized at the time, and it helps gather additional resources.
That is the sort of conversation you do not get from a program application or a scheduled meeting. Somebody is setting up equipment, you ask what they are working on, and you come away with a way of thinking about freeing up time that you had not considered before. Texas Venture Fest 2026 put me next to him, and I would not have met him otherwise.
What would I change for next year?
I think we would need to have a panel with a couple people with ideas like this so that way you can energize all those who are trying to come up with creative ideas so they can be entrepreneurs themselves.
The conversation with Drew happened because I wandered over and asked. Most people at an event like this will not do that, and the ideas stay inside the heads of the few who are already comfortable talking. Put two or three of those people on a panel and everybody in the room hears what I heard by accident.
Do this
- Add a panel to the next Texas Venture Fest with a couple of people working on ideas like the online actuator Drew Lentz described.
- Pick panelists who can explain how they are freeing up time in their own daily work, not just what they have built.
- Use the panel to energize the attendees who are still trying to come up with creative ideas, rather than only the ones already pitching.
- Keep the informal space where exhibitors are setting up, because that is where the useful conversations started for me.
- Give aspiring entrepreneurs in the room a way to show their product and get a little bit of validation.