Bones and Soul (1): Building a Startup Ecosystem for the Long Haul
- Michael Bob Starr
- 4 hours ago
- 5 min read
Part I: Bones – Why Building From Scratch Doesn’t Mean Doing It Alone
This essay was originally published on Substack in January 2026. I’m republishing the early Dispatches on LinkedIn to create a complete archive before continuing the series with new essays.
The Abilene Paradox teaches us that groups can go astray when people fail to voice their true preferences. As I’ve worked to help build a startup ecosystem in Abilene, I’ve come to see another paradox at work: “build from scratch” does not mean “do it yourself.” Building an ecosystem isn’t about creating everything locally. It’s about leveraging what already works, building relationships, and establishing structure early so a community’s strengths can find expression. You borrow the bones from proven models and partnerships — then let the soul of the community give it life.
That kind of work is rarely glamorous, and almost never solitary.
That idea isn’t foreign to Abilene. The town itself took shape around borrowed infrastructure, growing where the Texas and Pacific Railway laid its tracks — structure first, then community.
Bones, then soul.
“Building from scratch” is often treated as a test of originality or resolve, especially in places like Texas that prize self-reliance. But in practice, ecosystems don’t fail because they borrow too much structure; they fail because they borrow too little. Durable institutions aren’t invented whole. They are assembled — deliberately — from governance models, operating norms, and relationships that have already been stress-tested elsewhere. Borrowing structure is not about outsourcing judgment. It’s about shortening the path to good judgment.
The mistake many emerging ecosystems make is treating structure as something to be earned later, after momentum appears. In reality, structure is what allows momentum to compound rather than dissipate. Without it, early wins remain isolated, lessons aren’t retained, and each new effort starts from zero. What looks like freedom in the short term often becomes fragility over time. Structure, when borrowed wisely, provides continuity rather than constraint and allows a community’s energy to accumulate rather than reset.
In Abilene, the first real “bone” didn’t come from a new startup organization at all. It came from an existing civic institution. The earliest vision for building a startup ecosystem emerged inside the Abilene Regional Growth Alliance (ARGA), an affiliate of the Abilene Chamber of Commerce established in the 1950s to channel private capital into economic development projects (branded on LinkedIn as Grow Abilene). ARGA mattered not because it was innovative, but because it brought legitimacy, oversight, and continuity — things young ecosystems need early.
Economic development organizations are rarely featured in startup origin stories, but that omission masks an important truth. In places without an established venture ecosystem, credibility and governance often matter before creativity and speed. ARGA provided a neutral convening platform and the institutional patience required to explore new ideas without demanding immediate results. Just as importantly, it allowed early experimentation to occur within an existing fiduciary and governance framework, reducing risk while increasing trust.
By 2023, ARGA’s leadership had grown increasingly concerned about a familiar pattern. Talented entrepreneurs with promising ideas weren’t failing in Abilene — they were leaving it. Without access to early-stage venture capital, founders who wanted to build scalable companies were forced to look elsewhere for opportunity and support. The risk wasn’t just missed startups; it was a steady export of ambition and ability. The initial response was intentionally modest, though it felt ambitious at the time: create a local network of angel investors who could help founders stay, build, and grow in Abilene.
Rather than inventing a new angel network from scratch, ARGA chose to partner with the Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN), a large and active angel investing group based in Austin. From the beginning, this partnership wasn’t about accessing outside capital. It was about education, relationships, and learning how a functioning angel network actually operates. Much of that learning happens in rooms like this — through conversation, observation, and repetition.
CTAN provided something far more valuable than money. It provided a working skeleton. Its governance norms, deal evaluation processes, and investor education practices were the result of nearly two decades of experience. These weren’t theoretical best practices — they were lessons learned the hard way. By embedding locally into CTAN’s existing system, Abilene’s emerging angel community gained access to experience that would have taken years to build independently.
Early on, we assumed the Abilene Angel Network would eventually become an entity that would stand on its own. Independence, after all, is often treated as a marker of success. Over time, however, it became clear that independence was the wrong goal.
The relationships, experience, and connective tissue inside CTAN would have been extraordinarily difficult to replace — and even harder to justify walking away from. Staying embedded didn’t limit what the local network could become; it expanded what it could sustain.
As that investor-side structure began to take shape, another imbalance became obvious. While local funders now had access to borrowed bones, founders did not. Abilene still lacked a comparable framework to support entrepreneurs at the very beginning of their journey — a gap that continued to push some of the most ambitious builders elsewhere. The question became how to support founders locally without importing a model that assumed a mature startup ecosystem already existed.
I looked hard at accelerators and ruled them out quickly. Accelerators work best where startup density, experienced mentors, and downstream capital already exist. They assume a steady pipeline of validated ideas and founders ready to move fast. In a young ecosystem, that pace can be counterproductive, amplifying early mistakes and increasing founder churn — the very dynamic Abilene was trying to reverse.
Incubators, by contrast, can provide scaffolding. They are designed to help founders move from idea to validation, building confidence and capability before pressure to scale arrives. Programs like the Founder Institute (FI) seemed promising. With an international network and several chapters already operating in Texas, FI offered structure, curriculum, and credibility. But incubators still depend heavily on local mentor density — experienced founders who have built companies before.
As CTAN’s managing director, Gary Forni, likes to say, ecosystems need “gray-haired adults with scar tissue.” Abilene, like most emerging regions, simply doesn’t have anyone like that yet.
That constraint forced a deeper rethink. If experience couldn’t be grown locally on the timeline required — and founders were continuing to leave to find it — then experience would have to be imported deliberately. Not through one-off mentorship or short programs, but through an anchor institution capable of embedding experienced operators into the ecosystem itself.
By mid-2025, the question was no longer whether Abilene should support our local, if latent, founders. It was what should come first. Two viable paths emerged, each requiring significant focus and personal effort. One centered on founder education through incubators. The other pointed toward something different — an institutional anchor designed to assemble experience, governance, and venture creation under one roof.
I didn’t yet know what form that anchor would take. Only that Abilene needed one.
Comments