The Case for Building Depth Before Breadth
- Michael Bob Starr
- 59 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Why The Paradox Lab Chose Advanced Energy
With the blueprint for The Paradox Lab established, the next decision was no longer structural. It was strategic. What kind of companies should we build?
One of the defining advantages of the venture studio model – and the feature that made it such a good fit for Abilene or any other emerging ecosystem – is that it does not rely on external “idea flow.” Unlike an incubator or accelerator, a studio chooses the types of companies it will build. From the beginning, I understood that this would be one of the most consequential strategic decisions we would make.
The one thing I knew for certain is that I wanted the studio to build where Abilene had an unfair advantage, working on problems with widespread applications. There were several plausible options. Dual-use and defense technology was an obvious candidate, given my own background and the presence of Dyess Air Force Base with its diverse and expanding set of missions, including the future arrival of the B-21 Raider. Agtech also made sense in a region where farming and ranching remain central to the local economy and where land and water management remain enduring challenges. Energy stood out because of West Texas’s proximity to major wind and solar production, along with Abilene Christian University’s emerging role in advanced nuclear research. Rural healthcare was compelling because Abilene serves as the medical hub for the Big Country, creating opportunities to address problems unique to underserved communities. Faith-based and mission-driven ventures had logic as well, given the character of our universities and the city’s deep culture of Christian service and philanthropy.
My instinct was to hedge. Because Abilene had no established startup track record, I believed we should begin with two or three sectors and treat the early years as a learning portfolio. We could test several hypotheses at once, observe where we developed real traction, and then narrow our efforts based on evidence rather than theory. That approach felt prudent. It also felt humble.
The 9point8 team disagreed, and in October 2025, during a Zoom call that proved more consequential than I understood at the time, they challenged my assumptions directly. They acknowledged the uncertainty surrounding Abilene’s undeveloped startup ecosystem, but then made an argument that changed my thinking: the greatest risk to a young venture studio is not choosing the wrong vertical, but trying to operate in too many of them.
They had seen this pattern repeatedly. They described one established studio with eight portfolio companies spread across six different sectors. The companies themselves were performing reasonably well, but the studio was straining under the weight of fragmentation. Their explanation was simple and persuasive. Every vertical requires its own ecosystem of relationships: talent pipelines, thought leaders, corporate partners, academic collaborators, investors, customers, follow-on capital, and eventual acquirers. Studios, particularly new studios, that are spread across too many sectors must build all of those networks multiple times over, which results in a no-win scenario. The studio either underperforms in this crucial networking function, or increases staffing to fill the gap. One path leads to a scattered, shallow, and ineffective effort. The other leads to increased costs and deteriorating economics for the studio’s investors.
That conversation reframed the problem for me. Until then, I had treated vertical selection primarily as a market question: where does Abilene have the best chance to build advantaged companies? Afterwards, I began to understand it as an institutional design question: what level of focus gives a first-time venture studio the highest probability of success? That distinction mattered because it forced me to stop asking where we might experiment broadly and start asking where we could build depth.
Once I accepted the need to choose a single primary vertical, clean energy quickly emerged as the strongest candidate. Several local conditions made it compelling. Abilene Christian University’s partnership with Natura Resources to build a molten salt research reactor gave our region a unique foothold in advanced nuclear innovation. Our congressional district leads the nation in wind generation capacity. Large-scale solar continues to expand across West Texas. Energy also offers a number of subsectors – generation, storage, transmission, grid intelligence, optimization software, infrastructure resilience – allowing us to specialize without becoming overly constrained.
Energy had the added benefit of being legible to local investors. Many of Abilene’s family offices and other active private equity investors built their wealth in oil and gas. They understood energy markets and knew the language of the sector. Still, I had concerns. Would “clean energy” sound ideological or politically charged in a conservative oil-and-gas town? Would that framing create unnecessary resistance?
As I began discussing the concept with local stakeholders, those questions became unavoidable. Regional economic development leaders and investors generally agreed that energy was plausible, but several urged me to pressure-test whether traditional oil-and-gas capital would embrace the broader category. Again and again, however, these conversations became sidetracked by the same semantic debate: what exactly counts as clean energy? Are batteries clean? Is nuclear clean? What about natural gas transition technologies?
Those debates are worthwhile, but they weren't material to the question I was trying to answer. I wasn't looking for a way to parse “good” energy from “bad” energy; I was defining a domain of innovation. Working with the 9point8 team, we began using the term advanced energy instead. It was simultaneously broader and more precise, and better captured what we actually intended to build: ventures that improve how energy is generated, stored, and distributed.
But I still wasn’t sure. The pressure to choose the “right” sector for The Paradox Lab was real. It took someone from outside Abilene to bring me to the tipping point. Around that time, I listened to a Texas Tribune podcast featuring Eric Goff, founder of Goff Policy, an energy consulting firm in Austin. During the conversation, he made two observations that caught my attention. First, 90 percent of the new generating capacity added to the Texas grid since 2021 had come from renewable sources. Second, as of 2024, Texas had surpassed California in total renewable energy production. I sent him a cold email explaining what we were building in Abilene and asking if I could chat with him about it. To my surprise, he responded enthusiastically, and we met virtually a few days later.
Near the end of that call, I asked him a blunt question: was I crazy for trying to build energy startups in a place like Abilene? He answered without hesitation.
He told me to think about the Texas map. Much of the most dynamic new energy production is taking shape north and west of Abilene. South and east of Abilene lies the state’s largest concentration of energy demand. Abilene sits between them – not on the margins, but in the middle of a powerful geographic flow. Add to that the rise of large-scale data centers as major energy consumers, and Abilene becomes something more than just a mid-sized community. It becomes a natural convergence point.
“If I were going to build energy startups anywhere in the world,” he told me, “I would want to build them in Abilene, Texas.”
That conversation did not create the decision, but it transformed it. What had been a tentative conclusion became conviction.
Choosing advanced energy was the first real bet we placed, and the first time our strategy stopped being theoretical and became directional. For the first time, I could see The Paradox Lab not simply as an idea, but as an institution with a clear purpose.
It felt like the hard decisions were all behind me. Everything in front of me was related to executing the plan, something I’d spent a whole career in the Air Force doing. I carried the quiet confidence of a pilot who expected nothing but clear air ahead.
I couldn’t have been more mistaken.