🚀RocketNetwork

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 20:00:46 +0000

Howdy Rocket Networkers!!!

Hope you're getting a real Labor Day weekend…the kind where the laptop stays shut and the grill does the talking.

Enjoy it. September in H-town is popping, and it RN is here to help you plan it out..

🔐 HOUSTON, CYBR.SEC.CON IS COMING UP

If you work in tech, AI or infrastructure — or you'd just prefer the bad guys didn't ruin your Tuesday — block off the middle of the month.

CYBR.SEC.CON. takes over the George R. Brown on September 15–16, and it is not a small one. Thousands of security professionals. 100+ experts on stage. 200+ exhibitors. 10+ tracks, plus hands-on villages and workshops with the researchers, students and vendors who actually keep the lights on.

Go to level up your career, harden your company, find new tooling, meet customers — or just to work out what the heck is happening in security right now.

🎟️ Use code RKTNTWK-15 for 15% off — GRAB YOUR TICKET

📅 September 15–16, 2026
📍 George R. Brown Convention Center — Downtown Houston

Cybersecurity isn't getting less important. Might as well know the people shaping where it goes. 🔐

🤖⚡ AI + ENERGY = VERY HOUSTON

Our friends at Houston AI Club just handed Rocket Network subscribers a code. Not a 10%-off-and-feel-nothing code.

50% off the EnergyAI Users Group Annual Conference. Half price. 👀

It's the inaugural one, and the room is stacked — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Aramco, Halliburton, SLB, NOV, NVIDIA, Google and Dell on stage all day, talking about what's actually running in the field versus what's still a pilot deck. If you've watched what Houston has been doing lately, this is where a lot of it is happening.

📅 Monday, September 28
📍 Thompson Houston — 1717 Allen Parkway

🎟️ Use code HAI50 at checkout — REGISTER HERE

Heads up: first 100 people only. Then it's gone.

Big thanks to Houston AI Club for looking out for the community. 🚀

🚀 HOUSTON, WE'RE HACKING

Rocket Network is an official media partner for the first-ever AITX Community Hackathon at POST Houston. My recommendation is short: go.

No PhD required. No three co-founders. No quantum AI for nuclear fusion. Show up and build something.

Come solo, bring up to three friends, or arrive with nothing and find a team at the kickoff. Apps, agents, dev tools, automations, or something nobody saw coming. Supabase is sponsoring and you can use them for the backend, but there's no required stack and no required theme.

Every team submits at 7. Judges pick three. Those three present to the room.

📅 Saturday, September 19 — doors 9:00 AM, hacking starts 10:30, winners at 8:30 PM
📍 POST Houston

Come with an idea. Come looking for one. Come looking for a co-founder. Just come build.

🎟️ REGISTER →

⚡ MEANWHILE, HOUSTON HAS TWO ENERGY WEEKS

Two. Same city. Same week. Nearly the same name.

Houston looked at its energy week and said, "you know what would make this better? Another energy week." 😂

Choose your fighter:

🥊 Houston Energy + Climate Startup Week — Sept 14–18
🥊 Houston Energy & Climate Week — Sept 12–18

Both are real, both are good, and between them there are founders, investors, operators, and roughly a hundred events.

My take? Merge them. One city, one massive week, everybody bouncing between events instead of picking a lane. Easier to navigate, and it would feel twice as big.

Until somebody puts me in charge of the calendar — choose your fighter. Or do what we're doing and go to both.

🚴 ONE MORE THING: BIKETOBERFEST NEEDS SPONSORS

Biketoberfest is getting close and we're looking for a few more companies who want in.

The deal is simple. You support the event, we make noise about you: a shoutout in this newsletter, exposure across our LinkedIn community, and your logo on the official Biketoberfest shirts.

And the money isn't going in our pockets. Proceeds go to three nonprofits:

❤️ 🚲BikeHouston
💙💛 HTX4Ukraine
❤️ RedM

Good cause, good people, good visibility. If your company wants a piece of that — and a logo on a shirt people will actually wear — hit reply and tell me you're in. I'll send the details.

cheers,
- oleg 👊

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P.S. Know a Texas company doing something insane? hit reply.
Got a founder friend who needs to hear this? forward them this email. let's raise Houston's tech game together.

At Rocket Network, we do the dirty work for you, curating Houston's tech scene so you spend less time scrolling and more time building. Want to be featured or sponsor? Hit reply.

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, September 8

💻The Technology Leadership Advantage Series — The Ion (12:00–1:00 PM)

Ram Prasad of Delence on why AI programs stall. His framing: most companies have a collection of AI projects, not an AI strategy. Built for CEOs, VCs and boards.

🚀Design Your Business Backwards — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

Blue People's Tech and Tequila Talk, with Taylor Golden. Start at the life you want and work backwards to the business model. Tequila included.

Wednesday, September 9

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)

Masterclass Wednesday, then two days of conference. Digital twins, automation, data-driven ops and decarbonization across upstream, midstream and downstream — built for the people actually deploying it, not pitching it.

🚀Cup of JoeY | Sugar Land — Houston Marriott Sugar Land (8:30 AM)

The southwest edition. Coffee, founders, no agenda.

🚀How to Start a Startup — The Ion (5:00–6:30 PM)

Heath Butler on whether your idea is actually viable before you go looking for money. Investors will ask the same questions, so you may as well hear them first.

💻Houston Linux User Group — Sesh Collective (6:00–9:00 PM)

Thirty years running. Home tinkerers and career sysadmins in the same room, getting each other unstuck.

Thursday, September 10

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11) - DAY1

🚀Woodlands Innovation Network — Parkwood Two, The Woodlands (2:00–3:30 PM)

The north-side innovation crowd. Worth the drive if you build anything above the Beltway.

🏥TMCi Happy Hour — Medical Device Labs @ TMC (4:00–5:30 PM)

Entrepreneurs, investors and the TMC Innovation community, plus a look inside the device labs.

⚡💻Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup — Second Draught (5:30–8:00 PM)

No stage, no slides, no panels. Upstream operators and the people selling them AI and IoT, talking honestly over a beer. Vendor-light by design.

💻Out in Tech Houston Monthly Mixer — Second Draught (7:00–8:30 PM)

The Houston chapter of the largest LGBTQ+ tech community. Second Thursday, free, allies welcome. Same room as Upstream, straight after.

Friday, September 11

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)- DAY@

🚀Cup of JoeY | Ion — Ion Houston (8:30 AM)

The flagship, in the Ion lobby. Start with the why, not the job title.

💻🌶️AI Circle Houston — The Ion (9:30–11:00 AM)

Weekly Friday morning for people actually shipping with AI. Agents, AI-native products, tooling, and what broke last week.

SCORE Office Hours — The Ion (10:00–11:30 AM)

Free one-on-one mentoring from people who have already run the business you are trying to build.

🚀NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Licensing NASA tech, or partnering with Johnson Space Center. Walk-ins welcome. Come with a vision, leave with a partnership.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

The weekly founder roundtable runs right after Joey. Bring your ask.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn’t exist on the web. It’s for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Slush 100 €500,000 handed to one team on stage in Helsinki, zero equity taken. The largest equity-free prize any startup competition has ever paid. Open to anything founded in 2023 or later that has raised under €10M and is still seed or earlier. You do need a Startup Pass to be selected, so factor that in. Closes September 7, so today is the day - APPLY

Fast Forward 2027 Accelerator $25,000 in unrestricted funding, three months of mentorship and a Demo Day in front of hundreds of social impact investors. For tech nonprofit founders in the US. Closes September 7 at 11:59 PM PT - APPLY

Her Agenda Breakthrough Grant $5,000 to one woman entrepreneur, now in its third round. Her Agenda started this on their 17th anniversary and has funded a founder every cycle since. Short application, no revenue floor. Closes September 18 - APPLY

Skip’s $10,000 Grant One $10,000 grant, open to any US entrepreneur or small business owner over 18. No revenue floor, no industry filter, and the application is genuinely short. Skip has paid out to more than 2,000 businesses so far. Closes September 18 - APPLY

Camelback Fellowship $40,000 unrestricted, a dedicated 1:1 coach for 16 weeks, and an alumni network that has raised over $50M between them. For early-stage founders building in education or conscious tech. Hybrid, so you only travel for the kickoff and graduation. Closes September 18 - APPLY

TWU StartUP Grant $5,000 for Texas woman-owned startups, funded by the state legislature. You do not need any affiliation with Texas Woman’s University to apply. The money goes toward one specific project you name in the application, so have quotes ready. Closes September 23 - APPLY

Character Labs $200,000 for 5%, wired on the day you are accepted with no milestones attached. Five weeks run by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, the Design Sprint guys, and the whole program points at one thing: product-market fit. Software startups incorporated in the US, 15 companies max. Closes September 23 at 11:59 PM PT - APPLY

Techstars Spring 2027 $220,000 to join one of the Spring 2027 accelerators, plus mentorship and lifetime access to 11,000+ founders and investors. This one takes equity, unlike most of the list, but it is the most established name here. Closes November 18 - APPLY

Entreprenista Evolve Grant $5,000 to one woman founder, from Entreprenista and IT Cosmetics. You need a US business, woman-owned or woman-led, at least a year old and doing $100,000 or more a year. Closes November 30 - APPLY

The Amber Grant Three $10,000 grants every month for women-owned businesses, plus three $50,000 grants at year end drawn from the monthly winners. One application covers all of them, including the startup track if you are still pre-revenue. There is a $15 fee - APPLY

America’s Seed Fund (NSF) Up to $2 million in non-dilutive funding, and the NSF takes zero equity and zero IP. Deep tech across AI, energy, medical devices, robotics and semiconductors. They fund about 400 companies a year and accept project pitches year round, so there is no deadline to miss - APPLY

Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Up to $300,000 unrestricted over three years, plus a DRK partner sitting on your board for that whole stretch. For social enterprises with real proof they move the needle for underserved communities. Applications open year round - APPLY

Claude for Startups Up to $100,000 in Claude API credits, no equity taken. You need to be founded in the last four years with institutional funding, and Claude has to be central to what you are building. Name your investor when you apply. The form takes two minutes and it is rolling - APPLY

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

_{Disclaimer: The content in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by any sponsors. All opinions and information are those of the author and not of the sponsors or affiliated organizations}.

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 20:14:32 +0000

Happy Sunday, Rocket Networkers!!!

Before You Dive Into Events...you might want to know that Paris Hilton made TIME's AI List. The Guy Who Builds the Chips Didn't.

Ask a hundred people to name the most influential person in AI, and most of them land on Jensen Huang. His Nvidia chips power basically every frontier model on the planet. TIME asked itself the same question and came back with Paris Hilton.

Not a joke… The 2026 TIME100 AI list dropped August 26, and within hours the reveal post had over a million views. Almost none of them were congratulations.

Huang made the list three years running. This year he got swapped out for Nvidia's sustainability chief. Demis Hassabis, a man with an actual Nobel Prize, lost his spot to DeepMind's "Chief AI Readiness Officer."

Zuckerberg, Pichai, Nadella? Gone. Musk was the only Magnificent Seven CEO who survived the cut, joining Sam Altman and Anthropic's Amodeis on the list.

Meanwhile, the new additions read like a Hollywood call sheet: Paris Hilton (for her deepfake-legislation advocacy, to be fair), Ben Affleck, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Bernie Sanders. One AI engineer joked he'd bite his own cat if anyone on the list could explain a loss function. (I can’t explain it either, so that’s why I’m not complaining about not being on the list. 😂)

Wild? Sure. But everyone's missing the main point: the outrage and the list are answering two different questions.

TIME made a judgment call about what "influence" means in 2026. Read generously, the list is a thesis: the people who matter most in AI right now aren't the ones building its capabilities; they're the ones wrestling with the fallout. Energy. Labor. Policy… Who owns your face.

And that's a defensible take! Deepfake laws and creator-rights fights will shape how billions of people actually experience AI, whether or not the people behind them can explain a loss function.

The problem? TIME never said any of that out loud. No explanation or definition of influence. Just editorial hooks wearing a title that promises "The 100 Most Influential People in AI."

Readers showed up expecting a map of who's driving the technology and got a map of who's responding to it.

Okay. NOW to the events… still deciding and will be attending some of the events below, but for sure Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: Teaching agents to pay, and Startup Circle Houston — The Ion…

Also, we have a few seats left for the first Founders Anonymous coming up on Sept 9th! Apply to join!

cheers,
- oleg 👊

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LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, August 31

🚀🌶️Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: Teaching agents to pay — POST Houston (5:00–7:00 PM)

The AITX crowd takes on agent payments. How you let an AI agent actually spend money, and what breaks when you do. Free.

🏥HealthTech, MedTech Startups, Investors, Innovators Networking — AvantGarden (7:00–10:00 PM)

Sixty-second pitches, then open networking for digital health, medical devices and AI in medicine. 21 and up, one drink at the bar.

Tuesday, September 1

🚀Cup of JoeY | Fulshear — L3 Craft Coffee (8:30 AM)

The far west edition. Coffee, founders, no agenda.

🌶️Design Your Business Backwards — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

Blue People’s Tech and Tequila Talk. Most founders build first and hope freedom shows up later. This one starts at the end and works backwards.

🚀How to Start a Startup — The Ion (6:00–7:30 PM)

Heath Butler on whether your idea is actually viable before you go looking for money. Investors will ask the same questions, so you may as well hear them first.

💻Houston Unity Meetup: First Official Gathering — Reality COLLAB at HCC Central (7:00 PM)

Houston’s Unity developers finally get an official group. Unity 7, XR workflows and ArcGIS on the agenda. Free parking in HCC lots 13 and 14.

Wednesday, September 2

🚀Cup of JoeY | Bellaire — Cedar St. Cafe (8:30 AM)

Southwest side edition. Same format, different room.

🚀Buying and Selling Businesses — The Ion (5:30–7:00 PM)

Lenny Saizan on what actually happens when you sell or buy a company. The unglamorous mechanics most founders learn too late.

💻🌶️AI-Powered Analytics with Power BI MCP Server and Claude — Virtual (7:00 PM)

Sunil Kadimdiwan wires Power BI to an MCP server and points Claude at it. A live look at what MCP does to a data stack.

Thursday, September 3

🚀Cup of JoeY | The Cannon - West — The Cannon West Houston (8:30 AM)

West side edition, inside The Cannon.

🚀Entrepreneurship Roundtable with OPEN — The Ion (11:00 AM–1:00 PM)

A facilitated table, not a panel. Emerging founders, established entrepreneurs and corporate intrapreneurs on what building actually takes.

🚀🌶️AI Operator Spotlight: Houston’s Top AI Leaders Open Their Playbooks — The Ion (5:30–8:00 PM)

The big one this week. Chuck Yates on building Collide, and Charles Jessup on rolling AI out to roughly 100,000 people at Raytheon. What broke, what surprised them. Free, free parking, 45 minutes of open networking.

Friday, September 4

🚀Cup of JoeY | Ion — Ion Houston (8:30 AM)

The flagship is back in the Ion lobby. Start with the why, not the job title.

💻🌶️AI Circle Houston — The Ion (9:30–11:00 AM)

Weekly Friday morning for people actually putting AI to work. Networking, then a focused session on one practical topic.

Welcome to the Ion: An Introduction and Tour — The Ion (10:00–11:00 AM)

Wade Pinder gives the tour. New to Houston, or never actually been inside? This is the way in.

Rice Tech Transfer Office Hours — The Ion (10:00–11:30 AM)

Bring an idea or a company and find out what Rice research you could license.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

The weekly founder roundtable runs right after Joey. Bring your ask.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn’t exist on the web. It’s for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Claude for Startups Free Claude credits and priority rate limits if you are venture backed. Name your investor when you apply. Rolling, and worth doing before your next burn conversation - APPLY

FEATURED EVENTS

WANT TO SPONSOR? REPLY TO THIS EMAIL

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: TBD

Objections: Handled, Deals: Closed. — 9/8, Westside

AI Operator Spotlight: Houston’s Top AI Leaders Open Their Playbooks

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 19:59:00 +0000

🤙Aloha Rocket Networkers,

Before You Dive Into Events... A 29-Year-Old From Germany Just Made $182K Off a Website With One Button

Last Tuesday at 11:08 PM, a 29-year-old indie hacker from Germany named Jonathan Wilke (@jonathan_wilke) pushed a side project live and went to bed like it was nothing.

Four days later: 1 million+ visitors and $182,187 in revenue.

The site is outbid.lol, and the entire product is one rule. Pay more than the startup above you, and you rank #1. No ads, no API keys, no algorithm to game. The rank IS the bid.

That's it…That's the whole product!

Here's what happened since launch night:

$182,187 in revenue as of this weekend (new spots start at $5)
$15,000 is the current top bid, and #2 is sitting at $14,028, just $972 behind
Enough traffic to break his analytics provider mid-week. He had to switch tools just to keep the counter running.
Someone offered $100K to buy the site. He kept the board.
10+ copycats appeared in the first 24 hours.

And this is the part that should be framed in a museum: some of the copycats are now paying to be listed on the original board. Jonathan is charging his own clones for exposure. Clone #45 paid $501.

None of this is new, by the way. The Million Dollar Homepage pulled the same trick in 2005. Jonathan just rebuilt it for the AI-startup era, shipped it solo, and let founder egos do 100% of the marketing. Every bid war became a screenshot, every screenshot became traffic, and every visitor was a potential bidder.

He's not slowing down either. This morning he launched outbid.lol/today, a daily board that resets at midnight, so you don't need $15K to get seen. You need $5 and good timing.

The takeaway for every founder reading this at their desk: he didn't raise money, didn't build a moat, and didn't write a line of AI. He found something people would fight over in public and put a price on the fight.

Your weekend project doesn't need to be smart. It needs to be shareable.

Okay. NOW the events…

I hope to see you all next week for Luminate by LUMINO, especially at Builder Breakfast on Friday! Grab your spot here.

ALSO, we have a few seats left for the first Founders Anonymous… apply to join!

And… as always, don’t forget to check the FEATURED EVENTS AND💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE section!

cheers,
- oleg 👊

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LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, August 24

🚀Entrepreneurship Roundtable with OPEN — The Ion (11:00 AM–1:00 PM)

A facilitated table, not a panel. Emerging founders, established entrepreneurs and corporate intrapreneurs talk through what it actually takes to build and scale. Free unless you want the $20 lunch.

Industrial Growth Series: Why Great Industrial Companies Stop Growing — The Ion (12:00–1:00 PM)

Jada Powell on the moment referrals and reputation stop producing new business. For owners and commercial leaders in energy, manufacturing and field services who have hit a ceiling.

🚀FIESTA: Lilie Lightning Talks — Liu Idea Lab at Rice (6:00–8:00 PM)

Rice kicks off FIESTA week with rapid-fire talks from the Lilie community. Short, sharp and free.

Tuesday, August 25

🚀Cup of JoeY | Downtown — The Innovation Hub (8:30 AM)

The downtown edition of Houston’s founder coffee. Start with the why, not the job title.

🌶️💻RoarCon 2026 — The Ion (Tuesday through Thursday)

Liongard takes over the Ion for three days on asset intelligence, misconfigurations and keeping a live system of record across your whole IT stack. Runs August 25 to 27.

🚀Latino Founders Forum – Houston — The Lymbar (5:00–7:30 PM)

The monthly gathering for Latino founders, operators and investors, back at The Lymbar inside the Ion District. Free appetizers and cocktails while they last. Open to everyone.

🚀FIESTA: 2026 Summer Venture Studio Demo Day — Duncan Hall at Rice (6:00–9:00 PM)

Rice’s summer cohort pitches what they built. Healthcare, AI and advanced manufacturing teams, all in one room.

💻How Do I Use AWS S3 for Real Projects? — Improving Houston (6:00–8:00 PM)

Franklin Lobb holds every active AWS certification and he is walking through vector buckets, mounting object storage as a file system and querying metadata with Athena. Up to $200 in AWS credits for everyone, food and swag if you show up in person.

🚀CONNECTED — Commissioner Rodney Ellis’ Community Building, 2787 El Camino (6:00–8:00 PM)

Harris County opens the doors for a straight networking night. No panel, no program. Meet people, see what happens next. Free, RSVP through the county form.

Wednesday, August 26

🚀Cup of JoeY | Mission Control Coworking (8:30 AM)

Midweek satellite for the Clear Lake and Bay Area crowd.

🚀Space City Bootstrappers Monthly Hang (10:00 AM)

An unstructured work-and-hang for founders, aspiring founders and early startup employees. Bring a laptop, get something done, see what everyone else is building. Headphones on means leave me alone.

🚀CPG Houston Happy Hour — Gristworkz (5:00–7:30 PM)

Monthly happy hour for CPG brands, retailers and the people who supply them. New venue this month.

🚀FIESTA: First Pitch Open Mic Night — Liu Idea Lab at Rice (6:00–8:00 PM)

Never pitched before? This is the low-stakes room to do it in. Grab the mic and try the idea out loud.

🚀🌶️Illuminate 2026 Opening Night: VIP Red Carpet + Immersive Experience — Greater Heights (7:00–10:00 PM)

Lumino opens Illuminate with a red carpet, a champagne reception and a walk through immersive galleries before the founder vision talk. Cocktail attire, and registration needs host approval.

Thursday, August 27

🚀Cup of JoeY | The Woodlands — First Cup Coffee Co (8:30 AM)

North-side founders, this is your morning.

🚀🌶️Illuminate Day 1: The Lumino Launch + Builder Summit — The Ion (8:30 AM–6:00 PM)

The big one. Three keynote acts covering past, present and future of Lumino, industry breakouts for nonprofit, hospitality, coaching, startup and payments, then a happy hour with the Ion’s first-floor restaurants.

Industrious Coworking Day: Summer Series — Industrious at the Ion (8:30 AM–5:00 PM)

Free coworking for the day with breakfast, snacks, tours and a 4:00 PM happy hour. A cheap way to test-drive a desk.

🏥🌶️BiteLabs Digital Health, AI & Innovation Summit — TMC Innovation Factory (10:00 AM–5:30 PM)

A full day of AI in biotech, healthcare AI ethics, hiring panels and a healthtech shark tank, plus pitches from the BiteLabs fellowship. Free, and the waitlist is already deep.

Do You Actually Own What You Built? — Industrious at the Ion (11:00 AM–12:00 PM)

The IP firm upstairs answers the awkward question over lunch. Your code, your brand, contractor work, AI output. Bring the question you have been avoiding.

🌶️How to Start Using Claude Like Your Employee — Virtual (11:30 AM–12:30 PM)

Pandora Hodges of Sharpline Sales and NBDA on handing real work to an AI assistant instead of just asking it questions. One hour, online.

⚡Energy Mavericks Book Launch — Greentown Houston (5:30–7:30 PM)

Claudia Molina launches Energy Mavericks, built on her career plus interviews with 20-plus leaders driving change across the energy sector.

💻🌶️Cursor Meetup Houston (6:00–8:30 PM)

Houston’s Cursor crowd gets together. If you are building with AI in your editor all day, these are your people.

🚀Expectation vs. Reality: Are Houston’s Incubators and Accelerators Moving the Needle? — Improving (6:00–8:30 PM)

Houston Innovation Commons runs a participatory problem lab, not a panel. An honest look at whether the programs actually work. Food and drinks provided.

💻TTT Houston: Smarter Testing with Property-Based Testing — Improving (6:00–8:00 PM)

Nate Custer demos Bombadil, an open-source tool that wanders your web app on its own and finds the bugs nobody wrote a test for.

💻The Innovation Hub presents: An AI + Cybersecurity Conversation — Downtown (6:00–9:00 PM)

Where AI helps defenders and where it hands attackers new tools. Practitioners talking straight.

NASA Tech Talks: Rice’s Space Humanities Initiative — The Ion (6:00–7:00 PM)

The monthly NASA slot at the Ion, this time on Rice’s new Space Humanities Initiative. Free.

Friday, August 28

🚀Illuminate Day 2: Global Impact + Partner Breakfast — The Ion (8:00–11:00 AM)

Illuminate closes with breakfast, a live recording of Talks with Big Z, and tables from nonprofit partners. The Cup of Joey community is folded into this one.

Heads up: the regular Friday Cup of Joey at the Ion is canceled this week. Illuminate has the lobby.

NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Every other Friday, NASA Johnson experts sit down with founders on licensing NASA tech and building in commercial space. Walk up or sign up.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

The weekly founder roundtable runs as usual. Bring your ask.

🚀Founder’s Couch — The Innovation Studio, 801 Travis (1:00–3:00 PM)

A filmed conversation with Houston founders, and the audience gets to ask questions. Tickets are paid this round: $25 on the couch, $10 in the audience, free to volunteer or stream.

Sunday, August 30

💻Houston Code & Coffee — Improving (10:00 AM–12:30 PM)

Low-pressure Sunday morning for coders and the code-curious. Bring a laptop and a project, or just bring yourself.

🚀TechWalk | Houston — Museum District (11:00 AM–12:00 PM)

A walk in the park instead of another happy hour. Tech and SaaS folks, fresh air, real conversation. Free, and the exact meeting spot comes with registration.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn't exist on the web. It's for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Money Moves Summit Pitch Competition $10,000 split three ways, with $5,000 to the winner, at the Money Moves Summit in Dallas. Open to any woman-owned US business, including ideas still at the napkin stage. One catch: you have to buy a summit ticket before you apply, and post a 60-second pitch reel. Closes August 30 - APPLY

The Amber Grant Three $10,000 grants go to women-owned businesses every single month, and past winners range from bakers to scientific inventors. Heads up: there is a $15 application fee. This round closes August 31 - APPLY

HerRise Microgrant $1,000 every month for a business that is at least 51% women-owned with under $1M in revenue, built for under-resourced women entrepreneurs. $15 fee. Closes August 31 - APPLY

SXSW Pitch 2027 The Austin stage where alumni have gone on to raise over $22 billion. Launched after January 2024 and raised under $10 million? You qualify. Early bird entry is $105 through September 13, then the price jumps - APPLY

Secretsos Small Business Grant $2,500 for a US-registered business run by someone 21 or older. Applications do not roll over between quarters, so get in this one. $15 fee. Closes September 30 - APPLY

Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation The big one: up to $300,000 in unrestricted funding over three years, plus a DRK partner who takes a board seat and roughly $500,000 worth of hands-on support. Built for early-stage organizations solving a real social problem at scale. Applications are open year-round, so there is no deadline to miss - APPLY

Skip $1K Instant Grants Skip hands $1,000 to US entrepreneurs in drawings that run every few days. No deadline to miss. Enter once and keep rolling into the next round - APPLY

Claude for Startups Free Claude API credits and priority rate limits for startups under four years old with institutional backing. No equity taken and no deadline. Apply any time - APPLY

Ganas Ventures, $100K Checks Lolita Taub writes $100K pre-seed and seed checks into community-driven startups across the US and Latin America. This one is an investment, not a grant, and the pitch form is open to everyone. No warm intro needed - PITCH

28+ VC Funds for Early-Stage Founders Raising right now? Lucas Pols put together a free list of 28+ funds writing early-stage checks, sorted by focus from AI and deeptech to CPG and climate. Bookmark it before your next outreach sprint - VIEW THE LIST

FEATURED EVENTS

ILLUMINATE 2026 by Lumino — AUG 26–28: red carpet opening night in the Heights, then two days at the Ion

Founder's Couch

TechWalk | Houston, 8/30

ROARCON 2026

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Latino Founders Forum – Houston (Aug)

Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: TBD

Objections: Handled, Deals: Closed. — 9/8, Westside

FACTS!!!

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:00:01 +0000

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Hola Rocket Networkers,

I’m pleased to announce…that

BIKETOBERFEST 2026 IS ON THE CALENDAR

Bikes. Beer. Block party. A few hundred Houstonians who'd rather ride through Midtown than sit through another panel.

Thursday, October 1 @ 5:30 PM
The Ion, 4201 Main Street

We're kicking off Biketober... Houston's unofficial bike month... with an after-work ride followed by good times on the Ion Plaza. Registration is open now.

Free to attend. Every dollar raised goes straight to local nonprofits. Not overhead, not a vague "community fund." Actual organizations doing actual work!

Want to sponsor? Hit reply. We've got room for brands that want their logo in front of Houston's founders, operators, and investors while doing something that matters.

Bring your bike. Bring a friend.

If you care about building a business and creating impact (instead of picking one), clear your calendar. Lumino is launching, and they're doing it big.

ILLUMINATE 2026 — LUMINO'S OFFICIAL LAUNCH

Illuminate 2026 — two days at The Ion.

Day 1 — The Launch Experience | Thu, Aug 27 | 8 AM–5 PM

This isn't a conference, it's a launch. Three keynote acts — Past, Present, Future — tracing Lumino's story and where Local Conscious Commerce is headed. Live platform demos, industry breakouts, speakers across AI, payments, health, and nonprofit innovation. Closes with a happy hour with the first-floor restaurant partners.

Day 2 — Global Impact Partner Day & Breakfast | Fri morning at The Ion

The personal close to Illuminate. Coffee at 8, seated breakfast at 8:30, then a live recording of Talks with Big Z — Lumino CEO Zachry "Big Z" Godfrey and guests on how everyday commerce becomes measurable community impact. Creator and partner conversations plus nonprofit tabling until 11. Breakfast's on them.

Grab your spot here.

And… as always, don’t forget to check the 💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE section!

cheers,
- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, August 17

🏥Foundations of Cancer Therapeutics Commercialization — Virtual (starts 10:00 AM)

Five-day virtual crash course from the Gulf Coast Consortia on moving cancer therapeutics to market, with speakers from TMC Innovation, the Greater Houston Partnership and UTMB. Runs through Friday.

Tuesday, August 18

🚀Female Founders & Friends — Sesh Coworking (9:00–10:30 AM)

Sesh’s monthly morning meetup for women building businesses. Friends welcome too.

💻The Technology Leadership Advantage Series — The Ion (12:00–1:00 PM)

Lunchtime session on why leadership, not technology, is the real competitive advantage at high-growth companies.

🚀🌶️Bayou City Startups August Happy Hour — The Post Beer and Wine Garden (5:00–7:00 PM)

Founders, funders and operators unwinding in the Heights. Strict zero-pitching policy, just real conversation.

💻🌶️Beyond the Chat: Designing AI Workflows with Pydantic AI — Improving (6:00–8:00 PM)

PyHou is back. Brian Newman walks a real invoice-processing build from messy document to typed output, and shows where an LLM earns its keep versus where plain Python should stay in charge. Lightning talks after.

🌶️AI for Product Managers: Building Your AI OS & Second Brain — ProductTank Houston (6:00 PM)

Ashish Tripathi on getting past copy-paste prompting and building an actual AI operating system for discovery, strategy and customer insight. For PMs, founders and analysts.

Wednesday, August 19

🚀Cup of JoeY | Bay Area Houston — Space Center Houston (8:30 AM)

Morning coffee and connections for mission-driven entrepreneurs, Bay Area edition.

🚀Cup of JoeY | Richmond-Katy — Day 6 Coffee Co (8:30 AM)

The west-side satellite of Houston’s favorite founder coffee.

🏥🌶️Ambient AI in Healthcare — Industrious (6:00–8:00 PM)

First edition of Evening Rounds, a new monthly healthcare innovation gathering on the signals, stories and opportunities shaping healthcare.

💻🌶️Agile Meets AI: Real Industry Experiences in Human-AI Collaboration — Improving (6:00–8:00 PM)

Agile Leadership Network Houston on what actually happens when AI lands inside delivery teams. Planning, testing, knowledge management, governance, and where human judgment still wins.

Thursday, August 20

🚀Houston Startup Speedrun — The Ion (9:00 AM–7:00 PM)

Wade Pinder runs ten back-to-back 50-minute sessions covering the whole founder journey in one day. Drop in for one or stay for all ten.

🚀💻🌶️AI Camp: Agentic AI Meetup with Google — 801 Travis St, 17th Floor (5:30–8:00 PM)

Houston AI Club and Google go deep on agentic AI and LLMs. Technical talks, Q&A and networking, food included.

🚀🏥Tech Transfer Thursdays — The Ion (5:30–7:00 PM)

Rice’s Office of Technology Transfer teams up with Baylor and Houston Methodist to launch a monthly series connecting university innovations with founders and investors. August focus: digital health.

💻Houston Linux User Group — The Ion (6:00–8:00 PM)

Monthly gathering for Linux pros and the Linux-curious. Trends, training and networking.

Friday, August 21

🚀Cup of JoeY | Ion — The Ion (8:30 AM)

The Friday flagship. Start your Friday with Houston’s founder community.

🚀ENRG HTX — The Ion (8:30–10:00 AM)

Free monthly peer group for entrepreneurs running 10-to-250-person companies on EOS. Training, problem solving and networking.

🚀💰Startup Pitch Workshop — Sesh Coworking (9:30 AM–3:00 PM)

South Loop Ventures and investor Clarence Bethea on the psychology behind investor yes and no. $34 gets you five hours, lunch and a year of the What VCs Won’t Say course.

🚀Mapping Houston’s Innovation Ecosystem — The Ion (10:00–11:00 AM)

Wade Pinder walks a live mind map of who funds, mentors and builds in Houston. A great first stop if you’re new to the scene.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

The weekly founder roundtable right after Cup of Joey. Bring your ask.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn't exist on the web. It's for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Startup World Cup, Tulsa Regional Pitch in Tulsa on September 24 for a shot at the global finale in San Francisco and its $1,000,000 investment prize. Any industry, any stage, based anywhere, and the regional winner gets a $5,000 travel stipend. Applications close August 20, so move fast - APPLY

HerRise Microgrant $1,000 every month for a business that is at least 51% women-owned with under $1M in revenue, built for under-resourced women entrepreneurs. $15 fee. Closes August 31 - APPLY

Skip $1K Instant Grants Skip hands $1,000 to US entrepreneurs in drawings that run every few days. No deadline to miss. Enter once and keep rolling into the next round - APPLY

Claude for Startups Free Claude API credits and priority rate limits for startups under four years old with institutional backing. No equity taken and no deadline. Apply any time - APPLY

THIS GOT ME 🤣🤣🤣💀💀💀

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 20:05:46 +0000

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Hi friends,

1) FOUNDERS ANONYMOUS

Jesse Martinez and I are hosting something new… and it's the room I wish existed when things were quietly falling apart.

It's called Founders Anonymous: private, off-the-record conversations for founders. In person. No recording, no posturing, no "crushing it."

Here's the truth. Slack doesn't cut it. Your advisors have an agenda. Your friends don't get it. Sometimes you need a room where you can say the thing out loud… the thing that's heavy, unclear, or quietly breaking -- and walk out lighter than you came in.

What it is:

Fully confidential — nothing leaves the room
Facilitated — not free-form, not therapy, not a mastermind
Real conversations with founders who've been there

We kept it small on purpose, and there are a few spots left. Reply to this email, and we'll get you into this one, or the next.

2) If you care about building a business and creating impact (instead of picking one), clear your calendar. Lumino is launching, and they're doing it big.

ILLUMINATE 2026 — LUMINO'S OFFICIAL LAUNCH

Illuminate 2026 — two days at The Ion.

Day 1 — The Launch Experience | Thu, Aug 27 | 8 AM–5 PM

Day 2 — Global Impact Partner Day & Breakfast | Fri morning at The Ion

Grab your spot here.

3) MY FRIEND WANTS TO BE THE MRBEAST OF TECH

He didn't ask me to plug this. I'm doing it anyway…

His first video just dropped: Burn 5M Fable Tokens. Win €200. Yes, that's the actual premise. It's ridiculous, it's fun, and it's exactly the kind of unhinged energy tech YouTube needs.

Go watch it. First subscribers get bragging rights when he blows up.

4) ROARCON 2026

If you're serious about where AI, automation, and security are taking the MSP world, this is where that conversation happens… and it's happening right here in Houston.

RoarCon 2026 | Aug 25–27 | Houston, TX

Liongard's exclusive conference for MSP leaders who are done with visibility for its own sake. Every session runs through one question: how do you operationalize AI in a way that actually works at scale? Trusted data, a real intelligence layer, and teams with the authority to act on what they know.

And it's intentionally small. Rotating boardroom sessions, small-group dinners, one-on-one time with people actually doing the work. No keynote bloat. No sales theater.

And… as always, don’t forget to check the 💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE section!

cheers,
- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, August 11

🚀🌶️💰Mercury Fund Day at the Ion: How Legacy Software Giants Are Going AI-First — The Ion (3:30–7:00 PM)

Heath Butler hosts Mustafa Ali (Growth, Twilio), Zafir Khan (Product, Meta) and Salim Gheewalla (Founder, utilITise) on what actually changes when you rebuild the product, the pricing, and the team around AI. Office hours by application, then a fireside chat and a happy hour at Second Draught.

🚀💻AI Tinkerers Houston: August Meetup (5:30–8:00 PM)

Technical demos on agentic workflows and generative AI from local builders. Screened, demo-first, no sales pitches — apply to attend.

🚀Cup of JoeY — Puttery, featuring the HRVCC (6:00 PM)

An evening edition for once, not a morning one, with the Houston Rockets Venture Capital Community joining in. Mini golf and purpose-driven networking.

🦄💰Women in Tech, Fintech, AI, Startups — Networking & Elevator Pitch (7:00 PM)

Structured networking plus an open elevator-pitch floor for founders and operators. Ticketed at $30.

🚀Houston $ales Community: DOs & DON'Ts in $ales (7:00 PM)

Seymur runs a working session on sales fundamentals for founders and reps — what to do, and what to cut, when you're building a pipeline from scratch.

Wednesday, August 12

🚀Cup of JoeY — Sugar Land, Houston Marriott (8:30–10:30 AM)

The second-Wednesday Fort Bend edition, in the Marriott lobby. Founders, innovators and career builders, purpose over pitches.

🚀DT&I: Designing for Enterprise Tools (6:00 PM)

Arturo Barrera on designing back-office, ops, and internal tools well enough that employee experience actually improves customer experience.

Thursday, August 13

🚀🌶️The Woodlands Innovation Network — Amegy Bank, The Woodlands (3:00–4:30 PM)

Matty Beckerman, founder and CEO of IR Code, on the computer vision tech behind the next era of visual infrastructure and commerce. Hosted by The Woodlands Area Chamber with Houston Exponential.

🌶️🏥Pints & Prototypes — TMC Innovation Factory (4:00–5:30 PM)

TMC Innovation's medtech networking evening, supported this month by Medtronic with a guest speaker on their journey through the medtech scene.

⚡💻Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup — Second Draught, 4201 Main St (5:30–8:00 PM)

No stage, no slides, no panels. Upstream operators, engineers, founders and digital leaders over beer and pizza — the informal side of oil and gas going digital.

🦄💰FirstCheck 201: Smart Angels Do Smart Deals — online

Part two of the iCUE angel series. Where you stop learning about investing and start making your own invest-or-pass calls with structured criteria behind them.

🤓💻The Future of Engineering, with Ode — online

Eddie Siegel, co-founder and CTO of Ode (the Anthropic, Blackstone and H&F joint venture) on where engineering is heading when the job becomes deciding what to build and orchestrating agents. Approval required.

Friday, August 14

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Ion (8:30–10:30 AM)

The flagship. Friday-morning open networking for Houston founders and startup lovers.

🚀🌶️💻Hands-On Workshop: Build Your Own Reusable AI System — The Ion, Room 31 (8:30–10:30 AM)

Social Media Breakfast Houston with Kami Huyse and Jennifer Texada. You build a working Smart Card live, so you stop starting from scratch every time you open ChatGPT or Claude. Bring a laptop and a real task. Breakfast included.

🚀SCORE Office Hours — The Ion (10:00–11:30 AM)

Free 1:1 mentoring from SCORE's volunteer expert business mentors. It's the second Friday of the month, so extra partners are on site this week.

🚀NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Back on the biweekly rhythm. Licensing NASA technology, partnering on human spaceflight capability, and building out Houston's commercial space sector. Walk up or sign up ahead.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion, Lobby (10:30–11:30 AM)

Founders, teammates, experts and newbies of Greater Houston startups — right after Cup of Joey.

Saturday, August 15

🚀Cup of JoeY — POST Houston, Pistachio's Coffee (8:30–10:30 AM)

The third-Saturday edition inside POST. Entrepreneurs, creatives, students and community builders, no agenda beyond good coffee and real conversation.

💻Houston Robotics Group @ TX/RX Labs (2:00 PM)

Monthly meetup at Houston's biggest makerspace for anyone building robots — hobbyists, students and professional engineers alike.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn't exist on the web. It's for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Blueprint by The Engine (Fall 2026) Eight weeks of free, no-equity training for researchers turning a Tough Tech breakthrough into a company. Grad students, postdocs, and lab teams across the US and Canada welcome, and you don't need a company, customers, or revenue yet. Virtual Fridays from Sept 11, in-person showcase Oct 29 in Cambridge. Closes Aug 16, so this is your last week - APPLY

iF Social Impact Prize A €100,000 prize pool split across startups and organizations making life measurably better. If your work moves the needle on even one UN Sustainable Development Goal you can enter, and it's open worldwide. Free to apply, but your project needs a real design angle. Closes Aug 19 - APPLY

Coefficient Giving The big one: grants running from $100,000 all the way to $10,000,000 for teams building where AI meets global health. Reviewed on a rolling basis, so earlier is better. Closes Aug 21 - APPLY

Social Shifters Global Innovation Challenge Multiple awards of up to $15,000 for young founders already delivering social or environmental impact on the ground. You'll need to be 18 to 30, actually running the thing, and tied to a UN Sustainable Development Goal. Free coaching comes with the application. Closes Aug 31 - APPLY

Cypher Pilotathon Startup Showcase The pitch track closed, but showcase spots are still open for the Sept 15 event at The Post right here in Houston. Built for teams in critical minerals, grid and distributed energy, industrial decarbonization, or the future of industrial work. Last year 70+ startups ran 50 matchmaking sessions with industry buyers. Free to apply, closes Sept 8 or when spots fill - APPLY

Secretsos Small Business Grant $2,500 to one small business owner, awarded quarterly. You need to be 21 or older with an active business registered in the US, and they care more about your story and how you'd spend it than about a polished business plan. Heads up: there's a $15 application fee. This quarter closes Sept 30 - APPLY

Skip $1,000 Instant Grants Several $1,000 grants handed out at live drawings twice a week, every week. US-based and 18 or older, no purchase and no long application — answer a few questions and you're entered in the next drawing. You can win once every four months. Open now, nothing to miss - APPLY

America's Seed Fund (NSF SBIR/STTR) Up to $2M in R&D money with zero equity taken, for deep-tech startups in all 50 states. AI, energy, robotics, medical devices, and plenty more. Project pitches are rolling, so there's no deadline to miss - APPLY

Claude for Startups Free Claude API credits, priority rate limits, and a founder community, for companies founded in the last four years. Any early-stage founder can apply, and VC-backed teams get a bigger credit pool. Rolling - APPLY

Google for Startups Cloud Program Up to $200K in cloud credits over two years if you're seed to Series A, or up to $350K if you're AI-first. Still pre-funded? There's $2K to get an MVP off the ground. No equity, open anywhere, rolling - APPLY

IgniteHTX Pitch Competition (BakerRipley) Up to $5K in prizes for founders across Harris, Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Montgomery counties, plus free pitch coaching and workshops on the way there. Check the page for the next cohort's dates - APPLY

FEATURED EVENTS

ROARCON 2026

AI Product Design and Distribution: Lessons from Building at Scale

The Woodlands Innovation Network — Matty Beckerman on computer vision THURSDAY, AUG 13 AT AMEGY BANK

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Latino Founders Forum – Houston (Aug)

Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: TBD

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:00:00 +0000

You want the right creators. You're also the bottleneck.

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So it doesn't get done. Or it gets done badly.

partnerUP fixes both. You guide the brief, and the AI reaches creators at a scale no person could, then scores every single one by fit so only the right matches reach you. It handles the contracts, the payments, and the performance tracking from there.

You get the creator program a big brand would build, without the team a big brand would hire.

Your first two matches are on us.

Start with two free

Hola Rocket Networkers,

Two things on my radar this week

Candid Intelligence just moved from SF to Houston, and they're throwing a hackathon.

They packed up San Francisco and landed here, which tells you where they think the next decade happens. AI needs power. Power needs AI. So they're putting 30 builders in a room on Saturday, Aug 8 (10 AM–8 PM, Museum District) to hack on it.

Build anything at the AI + energy intersection: agents, copilots, dashboards, automation. No energy background needed — if you can build, you're in. Solo or teams of 3, food covered, $1,750 in cash prizes, live demos, no slides. Backed by Quiet Capital, Schneider Electric Ventures, and Yann LeCun. Capped at 30, approvals rolling.

Welcome to H-Town, y'all.

Houston Energy + AI Hackathon

What else is interesting?

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button / ...

and …

Buzz has been on my radar… folks keep sending it to me. It’s Block's free, open-source Slack + GitHub replacement where AI agents work in the same channels as your team, each with its own cryptographic identity and a trail back to whoever authorized it. Apache 2.0, self-host or use Block's hosting, zero seat cost. Still early (no mobile yet), but if you're paying for Slack and GitHub and wondering where agents fit, it's the cheapest experiment on the board.

Don’t forget to check the - 💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE section!

cheers,
- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, August 3

🚀💻Code4Y'all: AI Built It. Does It Actually Work? — Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave (7:00 PM)

A hands-on workshop on the part nobody talks about: reviewing AI-generated code before you ship it. Bring a laptop and a project that works but might be hiding something. Pizza and sodas on Improving.

Tuesday, August 4

🚀Cup of JoeY — Fulshear, L3 Craft Coffee (8:30–10:30 AM)

Far-west satellite of the Friday Ion staple, out on FM 1093 for the Fulshear and Katy crowd.

🚀🌶️CEOs: Build With AI, Exit With a Premium — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

Blue People hosts David Lopez for a no-BS session on which AI capabilities buyers actually pay a premium for, and how to kill founder-dependency before you go to market.

₿Houston Crypto Meetup #38 — The Cannon, 1334 Brittmoore Rd (5:30 PM)

An evening on blockchain and web3 with live Q&A, co-hosted by Houston Crypto, Houston Blockchain Alliance, Event Horizon Capital, BitAngels, and CryptoEQ. Free, with free parking outside.

💻SEIP Demo Day — The Ion (6:00–8:00 PM)

Rice Summer Engineering Innovation Program interns demo the projects they built all summer. Open to the public, network with the partner companies.

Wednesday, August 5

🚀Cup of JoeY — Bellaire, Cedar St. Cafe (8:30–10:30 AM)

Inner-loop satellite edition. Same purpose-over-job-title format, closer to home if you are west of 610.

💰Angel Investing 101: FirstCheck — Investor Foundations — The Ion, Conference Room 032 (5:30–6:30 PM)

iCUE USA on the mechanics of early-stage investing — how capital actually flows, how returns are generated, and whether this asset class belongs in your strategy. Free, approval required.

🚀🌶️💻Summer Venture Studio Preview Day — The Ion (check-in 3:30 PM, starts 4:00 PM)

Nine Rice student companies pitch what they built this summer — edge AI for surveillance, wearable haptics for defense, AI patient intake, RL environments. Hosted by the Ion District with Rice Alliance and Lilie.

💻OpenClaw Houston Weekly AI Meetup — Roast & Brew, 931 W 19th St (6:30–8:30 PM)

Free weekly hangout in the Heights. Bring a laptop and an API key and they'll install OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent, on your machine in the first 15 minutes. Then coffee, networking, and an open floor.

Thursday, August 6

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Cannon West Houston (8:30–10:30 AM)

Coffee and open networking inside one of Houston's biggest startup coworking hubs on Brittmoore.

10 Guiding Principles for a Winning Marketing Strategy — The Ion (4:00–6:00 PM)

Hands-on workshop on customer targeting and growth frameworks. Useful if your go-to-market is still vibes.

🚀🌶️💻Houston AI Club August Meetup — 801 Travis, 17th Floor (6:00–8:00 PM)

"We Have AI at Home" — Mason Tang on learning smarter with AI, Erin Coe on running a household with it. Houston's largest AI community, free validated parking, food provided.

🌶️💰AI Tech & Startup Night — Hearsay Market Square (6:00–9:00 PM)

Nomad Global Hub brings its 23-city format to Houston: curated networking, then live 7-minute founder pitches with audience Q&A. Deliberately kept small.

Friday, August 7

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Ion (8:30–10:30 AM)

The flagship. Friday-morning open networking for Houston founders and startup lovers.

💻Cybersecurity Circle — The Ion (9:00–10:30 AM)

Supportive weekly circle for people entering, transitioning into, or rebuilding a cybersecurity career.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion, Lobby (10:30–11:30 AM)

Founders, teammates, experts and newbies of Greater Houston startups — right after Cup of Joey.

💻Optimizing LLM Inference Serving — Houston Machine Learning, online (2:00 PM)

Under the hood of production LLM inference: what actually happens between a request landing and the first token streaming back, and the real bottlenecks in the systems layer. Zoom account required, link posted the day before.

Saturday, August 8

🚀🌶️💻⚡Houston Energy + AI Hackathon — Museum District (10:00 AM–8:00 PM)

Thirty builders, one day, $1,750 in cash prizes. Grid data and interconnection queues provided, or bring your own idea. No energy background required — hosted by Candid Intelligence. Capped and approval-based, so grab a spot early.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn't exist on the web. It's for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Grow Getter Grant (Startup Grind x HubSpot for Startups) $2,500 and a spotlight for one founder who is already in motion, talking to customers and testing channels with whatever they've got. They're scoring clarity, traction, founder-market fit, and how specifically you'd spend the money. US or Canada, under $2M raised, free HubSpot for Startups membership required. Closes Aug 7, winner named Aug 14 - APPLY

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Houston AI Club August Meetup

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK
👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 20:11:43 +0000

How owning AI deployment expands your career

Across product, ops, and CX teams, a new kind of role is taking shape: the person responsible for making AI actually work, day to day. In this roundtable, three people living this shift share what it's really like: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin's Dave Lynch. You'll hear how they carved out these roles, what the job looks like across industries, the skills they'd hire for, and the challenges they're tackling right now.

Watch the full conversation on demand.

Watch now

Hola Rocket Networkers,

Before we get into it: what's your BBQ spot?

Serious question. Pick one from the poll below, or reply with your own answer if your spot didn't make the list.

Mine is Pinkerton's. I have thought about it more than I've thought about some of my business decisions, and I stand by it.

Also, Terry Black's is finally landing in Houston. Big build on N. Shepherd in the Heights, and it's been "coming soon" long enough that I stopped holding my breath. I like Terry Black's when I'm in Austin. But let's be honest: Austin doesn't get to walk into this city and act like we don't have our own thing going. We've got plenty of great spots.

So convince me...Reply with your pick and why. Best answer might just get a free lunch out of it.

⭐ FEATURED EVENT: Building the Moon Base

Rockets are our whole thing around here, and the Ion is a pretty great launchpad for yours.

They're hosting Shatel Bhakta, the principal systems engineer for NASA's Moon Base. Not a panel. Not a fireside chat about "innovation." An actual guy whose actual job is figuring out how humans live at the lunar South Pole.

He'll walk through what NASA has to solve to make that stick, how he got there, and what the next generation of aerospace engineers needs to bring. He did his grad work in space architecture right here at U of H, which is a degree I didn't know existed.

If your startup problems feel heavy this week, go listen to someone who has to worry about permanent shadow and lunar dust. Perspective is free.

RSVP here →

Building the Moon Base

💸 MONEY ON THE TABLE: $2,500 for one early-stage founder

Startup Grind and HubSpot for Startups are funding founders who are already moving. Not the ones polishing a deck. The ones talking to customers and running experiments with whatever they've got.

Winner gets: $2,500 and the spotlight to go with it.

What they want:

One sentence on who you help, what you solve, how you make money
Real traction: paying customers, active tests, lessons you actually learned
Founder-market fit, the reason it's you
A specific plan for the cash. Vague loses.

To qualify: under $2M raised, venture-backable, HQ'd in the US or Canada. You'll need a free HubSpot for Startups membership, no card required.

Apply by August 7th. Winner announced August 14th.

Apply now →

What else?

See more opportunities BELOW in the 💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE section!

One Tuesday, I will be torn between AITX Houston, Claude Workshop, and Latino Founders Forum… Don’t miss Founder's Couch on Friday! I will be there; come say hello.

cheers,
- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, July 28

🚀Cup of JoeY — Downtown, The Innovation Hub (8:30–10:30 AM)

The downtown satellite of the Friday Ion staple — same purpose-driven open networking at 801 Travis.

The AI-Ready Small Business Lab — Sesh Coworking (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

The LGBTQ+ Chamber's hands-on lab for moving beyond "trying AI tools" to building systems that actually run your business.

🚀🌶️Latino Founders Forum — The Lymbar, Ion District (5:00–7:30 PM)

Monthly gathering for founders, operators, investors, and creatives. Free appetizers and cocktails while they last, and the room is open to everyone.

🚀🤓💻AITX Houston Monthly Meetup — POST Houston, Suite 1420 (5:30 PM)

"Flipping the SaaS Script: Service as a Software" — workshop plus live demo of an AI sales tool, then hands-on building with the room.

🚀🌶️Claude Workshop: AI Workflows That Work — The Ion

The Houston Claude Community's kickoff event (1 of 3 leading to the Sept 25 hackathon), co-hosted with Impact Hub. Currently full — join the waitlist.

Wednesday, July 29

🌶️CPG Houston Happy Hour — Spindletap Brewery

Houston CPG brands, retailers, and service providers get together off 59 North. First round is on the hosts, the connections are on you.

🤓💻OSS Hackathon: RefactorFirst, AI, and You — Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave (6:30–8:30 PM)

Houston Java Users Group hands-on night with Jim Bethancourt: use RefactorFirst plus free AI tooling to open a real pull request on an open source project before you leave. Fork your repo beforehand. Pizza at 6:30, talk at 7.

Thursday, July 30

🚀NASA Stories at the Ion: Building the Moon Base — The Ion, Forum Stairs (8:30–10:00 AM)

Moon Base Principal Systems Engineer Shatel Bhakta on the challenges of building an enduring presence at the lunar South Pole. Free.

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Woodlands, First Cup Coffee Co (8:30–10:30 AM)

North-side satellite edition for the Woodlands/Spring crowd.

🤓💻Rice Summer Engineering Innovation Demo Day — The Ion (6:00–8:00 PM)

Final team presentations from Rice's 10-week program where students tackle real-world challenges with AI, digital engineering, and Industry 4.0 tech.

🤓💻How Do Founders and Technical Operators Find and Assess One Another? — Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave (6:00–8:30 PM)

A Houston Innovation Commons problem lab, not a panel: structured conversation on how founders and technical operators actually find, trust, and size each other up in this city. Food and drinks provided.

🚀Teaching startup leaders the importance of communicating their magic quickly in this doom-scrolling world

Friday, July 31

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Ion (8:30–10:30 AM)

The weekly Friday-morning open networking staple for Houston founders and startup lovers.

💻Cybersecurity Circle — The Ion (9:00–10:30 AM)

Supportive weekly circle for people entering or transitioning into cybersecurity careers.

🚀SCORE Office Hours — The Ion (10:00–11:30 AM)

Free 1:1 mentoring from SCORE's volunteer expert business mentors.

🚀NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Biweekly office hours bridging Houston's innovators and startups with NASA expertise.

🚀Startup Circle Houston 💫 — The Ion, Lobby (10:30–11:30 AM)

Founders, teammates, experts and newbies of Greater Houston startups — right after Cup of Joey.

🌶️Founder's Couch — Innovation Studios, 801 Travis (1:00–3:00 PM)

A public podcast/talk show: 14 founders, builders, and mentors in honest, unscripted conversation. Full — join the waitlist.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

(This section doesn't exist on the web. It's for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)

Cypher Pilotathon & Startup Showcase Skip the pitch and bring a real pilot to energy and industrial buyers at The Post on Sept 15. Built for pilot-stage teams in critical minerals, grid and distributed energy, industrial decarbonization, or the future of industrial work. Free to apply. Pilot submissions close July 30, showcase-only stays open to Sept 8 - APPLY

Galaxy Grants $4,250 in straight cash to one woman-owned business, from the nonprofits Galaxy of Stars and Hidden Star. You need to be a US-based woman or minority-owned business, and there's a referral kicker: if the founder you refer wins, you win too. Closes July 31 - APPLY

Coefficient Giving The big one: grants running from $100,000 all the way to $10,000,000 for teams building where AI meets global health. Closes Aug 21 - APPLY

FEATURED EVENTS

Founder’s Couch

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Building the Moon Base

Houston AI Club August Meetup

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉The AI Trust & Safety Job Board - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK
👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 20:00:00 +0000

22 ChatGPT Agents Built for Every Marketing Job

Most marketers use ChatGPT to do general research and then call it an AI strategy. The ones outperforming them are deploying specialized agents built for specific jobs.

We put together 22 plug-and-play ChatGPT marketing agents that handle the work eating your week, each with built-in instructions and structured outputs ready to go in under 5 minutes.

Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 22 free.

Inside you'll find:

Competitive intelligence agent that visits competitor websites and builds detailed comparison matrices automatically
Customer feedback analyzer that ranks improvement opportunities by business impact
Social listening specialist that monitors brand mentions and flags reputation risks before they escalate
Campaign optimization agents that handle attribution analysis and surface what is actually driving results

Your competitors are already running agents like these.

Get 22 ChatGPT Marketing Agents free when you subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain today.

Get The Guide

Howdy Rocket Networkers,

I've spent the past few weeks in Minnesota visiting fam, so now it’s ime to reconnect…

because this week? Stacked.

But first: the World Cup Final is TODAY. ⚽ If you're reading this instead of watching, I respect the loyalty. Now go turn on the game.

Here's what's on deck in Houston for me:

📍 Female Founders & Friends: Sports Edition — July 21 at SESH. Founders + sports is a combo that never misses.

📍 Bayou City Startups — also July 21. Yes, same night. Consider it your networking doubleheader. Stretch first.

📍 Cursor Meetup — July 23. If you've been letting AI write half your code lately (no judgment), this is your room.

And are few more circled in red on my calendar: the official Claude Community event next week. I'll be there…come say hi. AND Joseph Bankole's Founder's Couch on July 31 at Innovation Studios, where 14 founders skip the pitch decks and just talk honestly, which sounds like exactly what HTX needs.

cheers,
- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, July 21

Greater Houston Business Procurement Breakfast

🚀Bayou City Startups July Happy Hour

Unwind and reconnect with your favorite Houston startup founders, funders, operators, and ecosystem builders.

🚀Female Founders & Friends: Sports Edition — Sesh Collective (9:00–11:00 AM)

Monthly founder meetup, World Cup edition — women building in sports, fitness, wellness, and entertainment.

💰🦄FirstCheck: Investor Foundations — The Ion (5:30–7:00 PM)

Free angel-investing fundamentals from iCUE USA — how early-stage investing actually works (listed on the Ion calendar as Angel Investing 101).

Wednesday, July 22

🚀Cup of Joey — Mission Control Coworking, West Houston (8:30–10:30 AM)

West-Houston satellite of the Friday Ion staple — same purpose-driven open networking, different side of town.

Space City Bootstrappers Monthly Hang

🤓💻AI Agents Are Here — Learn How to Deploy on AWS (Hands-On Workshop)

Thursday, July 23

🤓💻Cursor Meetup Houston — CityCentre / Memorial City (5:30–8:00 PM)

Learn Cursor's context engine, Agents, and Plan Mode straight from the team's own techniques. Approval required; arrive before 6 PM for building access.

🚀NASA Tech Talks: Sensorimotor Performance in Space — The Ion (6:00–7:00 PM)

Dr. Scott Wood on how altered gravity reshapes the brain's spatial awareness and movement control. Free; networking after at Second Draught.

💰FirstCheck: Smart Angels Do Smart Deals (online) — Zoom (6:00–7:30 PM)

Hands-on class on evaluating deals and making invest-or-pass decisions like a disciplined angel. Free, online.

Friday, July 24

🚀Cup of Joey — The Ion (8:30–10:30 AM)

The weekly Friday-morning open networking staple for Houston founders and startup lovers.

💻Cybersecurity Circle — The Ion (9:00–10:30 AM)

Supportive weekly circle for people entering or transitioning into cybersecurity careers.

🚀SCORE Office Hours — The Ion (10:00–11:30 AM)

Free 1:1 mentoring from SCORE's volunteer expert business mentors.

🚀STARTUP CIRCLE

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

💰 MONEY ON THE TABLE

Claude for Startups 🚀 Free Claude API credits, priority rate limits, and a founder community for early-stage startups founded within the last four years. Open to any early-stage founder, with extra credits for VC-backed teams. Rolling applications - APPLY

America's Seed Fund (NSF SBIR/STTR) 💰 Up to $2M in non-dilutive R&D funding for deep-tech startups, with zero equity taken. Open to startups in all 50 states across AI, energy, robotics, medical devices, and more. Rolling project pitches - APPLY

Alibaba CoCreate Pitch 2026 💰 The world's largest product-based startup competition, with a $1M+ prize pool and a $200K top prize. US founders compete at the Los Angeles final on Sept 9-10. Application deadline July 25 - APPLY

Cypher Pilotathon & Startup Showcase (Houston) ⚡ Pitch a real pilot to energy and industrial decision-makers at The Post in Houston on Sept 15. For pilot-stage startups in critical minerals, grid, industrial decarbonization, or industrial AI. Free to apply; pilot-pitch submissions close July 30 and showcase-only closes Sept 8 - APPLY

IgniteHTX Pitch Competition (BakerRipley) 🚀 Houston-area entrepreneurs across Harris, Fort Bend, Brazoria, and Montgomery counties pitch for up to $5K in prizes, plus free pitch coaching and workshops. Check the page for the next cohort's dates - APPLY

FEATURED EVENTS

Founder’s Couch

🏅Female Founders and Friends

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

BCS

Cursor Meetup Houston

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

Confession time...

Oleg Lysiak — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 19:15:56 +0000

I posted about tomorrow's workshop on LinkedIn... and it flopped.

Either I've been using Claude so much the algorithm thinks I'm a bot, or LinkedIn really doesn't like posts about scraping LinkedIn. Probably both.

Welp. Good thing I have this newsletter.

Tomorrow at 2PM CT, I'm joining legendary Adam Robinson's "Claude did what???" to show two skills... conference prep in 5 minutes, and a daily comment finder that drops warm leads in Slack before my first coffee.

Both free. Both yours to steal.

Check the post LinkedIn buried here and register here.

- 🫶oleg

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Howdy Rocket Networkers,

There are two Giorgios you need to know in Houston.

The first is launching Lumino, a fintech startup on a mission to fix payment processing for business owners. The two-sentence version: Lumino bundles payments, software, and financial workflow tools into one operating system so businesses get better cash flow and actual control over their revenue. Their "Conscious Commerce" model gives every business its own dedicated merchant account… no hidden fees, no surprise fund seizures, no predatory fine print.

They're hosting a VIP reception -- if you're an investor or want smarter payment processing for your business, [apply to join here]. Or DM me and I'll make the introduction.

They're based in the Ion and planning plenty more events, so go follow them on LinkedIn.

The second Giorgio makes sure you don't walk into an investor meeting unprepared. Founders: he'll pressure-test your pitch before the people writing checks do. Investors: this is also a deal flow goldmine -- vetted founders, already pitch-ready.

Do you think you're ready to talk to investors?

Get a free VC readiness report before you're in the room. Takes minutes, costs nothing, and tells you exactly where investors will push back.

👉Run your free VC readiness report👈

One last thing...

🏅🔥Female Founders & Friends: Sports Edition is Tuesday, July 21, 9-11 AM at Sesh Collective. Houston is hosting the World Cup, so this month's meetup celebrates women building in sports, fitness, and entertainment. Real speakers, real conversation, no pitching.

[RSVP here]

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, July 14

Why Networking Isn’t Turning Into Deals — And What To Do Instead

🚀Plugged In — Coffee Meet Up — The Ion (8:30–10:00 AM)

Plug and Play Sugar Land brings its morning innovation coffee to the Ion — founders, investors, and startup-curious folks over a casual cup.

Wednesday, July 15

🚀From Pilot to Performance: Building Your AI Procurement Roadmap — Virtual (8:30–10:00 AM)

Part two of GHP's AI series — how procurement and supply chain leaders scale AI responsibly, led by Cassye Cook Provost of RossGrigsby Consultancy.

🚀Cup of JoeY | Richmond-Katy — Day 6 Coffee (8:30–10:30 AM)

🚀Community. Connection. — Impact Hub Houston

Monthly space for entrepreneurs and changemakers; running as unstructured co-working time during the June–July summer pause.

🚀Perfecting Your Pitch — The Ion (5:30–6:30 PM)

Dr. Doug Franklin (DeckLaunch / Fresh Tech Solutionz) on building a pitch deck that lands.

Strategy At Scale: Integrating PESTLE Analysis & SAFe For Valuable Impact

Thursday, July 16

Houston XR Meetup

🤓💻Hack AI Turns Two: Tech Party

The Marketing Dept. Coffee Meetup

🔥🌶️💻Houston AI Club: Build Lab with Perplexity — 801 Travis St, 17th Floor (6:00–8:00 PM)

Hands-on build session — a 1-hour Perplexity Computer competition solving real Houston small-business problems. $100 in free Perplexity credits per attendee.

🤓💻Houston Linux User Group — The Ion (6:00–8:00 PM)

One of Houston's oldest Linux user groups — OS trends, software dev, and hands-on training.

Friday, July 17

🚀Cup of JoeY — The Ion Lobby (8:30–10:30 AM)

The flagship Friday Cup of Joey — coffee, open networking, and the "what's your why" conversation.

🚀Mapping Houston's Innovation Ecosystem — The Ion (10:00–11:00 AM)

Wade Pinder, the Ion's Mentor in Residence, walks through the resources, orgs, and people that make up HTX's startup ecosystem.

🚀NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

Biweekly office hours connecting Houston founders with NASA experts, tech-licensing opportunities, and JSC capabilities.

Saturday, July 18

🚀Cup of JoeY | POST Houston (Pistachio's Coffee) (8:30–10:30 AM)

3rd-Saturday monthly satellite inside POST Houston.

👀 Coming up next week

🚀🔥🌶️Bayou City Startups July Happy Hour — Tuesday, July 21 (5:00–7:00 PM)

Unwind with Houston founders, funders, operators, and ecosystem builders. Zero pitching policy — come build relationships. RSVP early, it fills up.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

🏅Female Founders and Friends

Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION

Reno Startup Week is a community-driven event dedicated to celebrating the entrepreneurial spirit in Reno, emphasizing its inclusive nature. In 2026, we will come together in person to honor and highlight the flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem in Reno and its influence extending beyond, fostering a worldwide culture of innovation. Secure your spot by registering early for this year's event!

Plugged In - Coffee Meet Up

BCS

Cursor Meetup Houston

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 20:00:00 +0000

Two Congress Passes for the Price of One

Code 2FOR1 gets you two WeAreDevelopers World Congress passes for the price of one — so don't make the trip to Silicon Valley solo.

San José, CA · September 23–25, 2026. 10,000+ developers, 500+ speakers, 20+ stages, and the full software development lifecycle in one place.

On stage: Kelsey Hightower, Thomas Dohmke (former GitHub CEO), Christine Yen (Honeycomb), Olivier Pomel (Datadog) — the people building the tools you use every day. Three days of AI, agents, cloud, security, and architecture, plus workshops, live coding, and the official Congress party.

Bring the builder you'd want in the room with you.

Get Your Passes

Hi everyone,

I hope you’re having a nice 4th of July weekend and catching some World Cup games.

We have some interesting events coming up this week. See below for details.

And here is something that got me - 😂😂😂

This might be the most useful AI answer of 2026 LOL

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, July 7

🚀Cup of JoeY | Fulshear — (8:30 AM)

🚀Speed to Market: Houston's Advanced Manufacturing Edge — Partnership Tower (11:30 AM–1:00 PM)

Greater Houston Partnership forum on moving advanced manufacturing projects from concept to operation, with panelists from CliftonLarsonAllen and San Jacinto College.

⚡How Oil and Gas Professionals Are Building Wealth Smarter — The Ion (12:00–1:00 PM)

Financial Advice Center session on investing, taxes, and retirement planning for O&G professionals.

🌶️🚀Tech + Tequila Talk: What AI, Cybersecurity, and Tequila Have in Common — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

Blue People and Alpfa Houston on AI's advantages and cybersecurity risks, led by Reynaldo Gonzalez.

Wednesday, July 8

Gardens, Not Platforms: Designer In The Loop

OpenClaw Houston Weekly AI Meetup

🚀Cup of JoeY | Sugar Land — Houston Marriott Sugar Land (8:30–10:30 AM)

Buying and Selling Businesses

🚀Summer Tech Soiree — Makiin Thai (6:00–9:00 PM)

Hosted by The invincible Team & Patrick Jones at Makiin Thai, 2651 Kipling St Ste 101. Registration requires host approval.

Thursday, July 9

🚀Stop Being Chief of Everything For Fractional CFOs, CMOs & CHROs

🚀Capital Connections Summit — Houston City College Central Campus (11:00 AM–1:30 PM)

Houston City College Center for Entrepreneurship. Panel on access to capital for small businesses, moderated by the SBA Houston District Office.

🚀⚡Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup at Second Draught — The Ion (5:30–8:00 PM)

Timbergrove-hosted gathering of energy, operations, and technology professionals from the upstream ecosystem; pizza and beer networking.

Friday, July 10

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey — The Ion Lobby (8:30–10:30 AM)

The flagship Friday Cup of Joey at the Ion — coffee, open networking, and the "what's your why" conversation.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Stop Being Chief of Everything For Fractional CFOs, CMOs & CHROs

Venture Trailblazers featuring Tim Draper

OpenClaw Houston Weekly AI Meetup

Summer Tech Soiree

Plugged In - Coffee Meet Up

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 20:19:43 +0000

Howdy Rocketnetworkers!

Quiet week ahead — unless you count America turning 250. Happy 4th, everyone. Take a minute to remember the values this country was built on.

But there's one event I can't shut up about: the Latino Founders Forum – Houston.

Yes, it's called the Latino Founders Forum. No, you don't have to be Latino to come. Pull up, grab a drink, throw on your favorite soccer jersey, and meet people who actually build things. Everyone's welcome.

Here's where it gets good. This one's a triple celebration.

We're toasting two birthdays — Sunny Zhang of TrueLeap and Born Global, and Chef David Cordúa of The Lymbar. And Sunny isn't just blowing out candles; he's launching orian.ai, Community Intelligence. (see here post here)

Wins, founders, good food, and a community that shows up for each other. That's the whole point.

Huge thanks to the co-organizers making it happen — ScanNinja, Tool Store, Timbergrove, TrueLeap and The Lymbar. This one doesn't come together without you.

One more thing: we're bringing World Cup energy this month, so wear the jersey.

See you there.

- oleg 👊

Stop letting busywork get in the way of selling

Researching accounts. Building lists. Writing sequences.

There's a better use of your team's time.

Apollo is the AI revenue engine that handles the busywork, so you can stay focused on selling.

Plus, everything you need is in one place:

230M+ verified contacts
AI-powered outreach
Data enrichment
Inbound lead capture
Meeting scheduler
And more

Stop doing busywork and start building pipeline, faster.

With Apollo — the AI revenue engine powering 4M+ users.

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Tuesday, June 30

Industrious Coworking Day: Summer Series

🔥🌶️🚀 Latino Founders Forum – Lymbar Hosted

🔥🌶️🚀Three Birthdays, One Future - with Dr. Sunny Zhang 🎂

Wednesday, July 1

🚀Cup of Joey | Bellaire — Cedar St. Cafe (8:30 AM)

Thursday, July 2

🚀Side Project Society - July Meetup

🚀NU PI™ – A PHENOMENAL MATHEMATICAL DISCOVERY

🚀Houston AI Club July Meetup (July 2nd - 801 Travis St) Free Parking

Friday, July 3

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey — The Ion (8:30 AM)

The flagship Friday Cup of Joey at the Ion — the anchor of the Houston founder week. Coffee, open networking, and the "what's your why" conversation. Running the day before the holiday.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30 AM)

Founders and newcomers talk traction, funding stage, ICP, and bootstrapping. Runs right after Cup of Joey at the Ion.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Stop Being Chief of Everything For Fractional CFOs, CMOs & CHROs

Founder Series | Raising feels weird right now. How much should i actually raise?

Side Project Society - July Meetup

Venture Trailblazers featuring Tim Draper

OpenClaw Houston Weekly AI Meetup

Summer Tech Soiree

Check out this post from Joseph at StudioPod on how he built his equity partner board with AI. Pretty cool stuff.

Instagram post

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 21:04:27 +0000

Everything GTM. One platform.

Small teams don't have time to stitch together five tools and hope it works.

Apollo gives you everything you need to find leads, reach them, and close deals — all in one place:

230M+ verified contacts
AI-powered outreach
Data enrichment
Inbound lead capture
Meeting scheduler
And more

Stop juggling tools and start building pipeline that scales.

With Apollo, the AI revenue engine powering 4M+ users.

Howdy Rocket Networkers,

I’m stoked that Apollo is sponsoring this issue.

So let me show you the exact workflow they power for me. The one that feels like a cheat code.

Here's the problem with networking.

You meet someone great at a meetup.

You have a real conversation.

And then you get home, and their name is just... gone.

The follow-up never happens. The relationship dies before it starts.

I got tired of that. So I built a skill called gtm-linkedin-to-crm (if you have HubSpot, Claude and Apollo, you can download it by clicking on the link).

Here's what it does.

I give it a LinkedIn profile. Screenshot, URL, doesn't matter.

It reads the profile. Name, title, company.

Apollo enriches it. Email, phone, job title, company details. All of it.

Then it writes everything into HubSpot. Creates the contact. Creates the company. Links them together.

I don't touch a spreadsheet. I don't copy. I don't paste.

I just say to Claude: "add this person to HubSpot" and drop in a screenshot.

That's it.

Ten minutes of busywork, gone. Replaced by one sentence.

Spend your energy on the conversation, not the data entry that comes after.

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, June 22

⚡URTeC - Day 1

🚀InnovateEnergy Week 2026 - Day 1 (use code -IEWEEK200OFF)

Tuesday, June 23

🚀InnovateEnergy Week 2026 - Day 2 (use code -IEWEEK200OFF)

🚀Cup of JoeY | Downtown

🤓💻AI Agents Are Here — Learn How to Deploy on AWS (Hands-On Workshop)

🤓💻Claw agents and multi-agent systems on Foundry

⚡URTeC - Day 2

Rice World Cup Cities Hack — Kick-Off Workshop — The Ion (June 23–24)

Sustainability-focused data hackathon tied to the FIFA World Cup. In-person kickoff June 23–24 at the Ion, then a virtual build through Sept 15. $10K grand prize, $17.5K in total prizes. Teams build data and visualization tools on real Houston urban datasets.

Wednesday, June 24

🚀InnovateEnergy Week 2026 - Day 3 (use code -IEWEEK200OFF)

VC Readiness, Investor & Funding Event

🚀Space City Bootstrappers Monthly Hang

⚡URTeC - Day 3

CPG Houston Happy Hour – Jun 24

💰VC Readiness, Investor & Funding Event — SPACES, 708 Main St, Fl 10 (6:00 PM)

Investor insights, fireside chats, and a live founder pitch competition with a cash prize. Hosted by Scale Haus. $10 tickets, food and drinks included. Good night to practice the pitch and meet investors.

Thursday, June 25

🤓💻Does Houston Really Have a Technical Talent Shortage?

🚀NASA Tech Talks — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

The fourth-Thursday NASA session at the Ion. This month spotlights NASA education and partnership opportunities for students, colleges, and universities, with info booths and activities. Stick around for networking after.

Friday, June 26

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey — The Ion (8:30 AM)

The flagship Friday Cup of Joey at the Ion — the anchor of the Houston founder week. Coffee, open networking, and the "what's your why" conversation.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30 AM)

Founders and newcomers talk traction, funding stage, ICP, and bootstrapping. Runs right after Cup of Joey at the Ion.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Power Trio of Energy Industry Innovation & Technology

Stop Being Chief of Everything For Fractional CFOs, CMOs & CHROs

Founder Series | Raising feels weird right now. How much should i actually raise?

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

come to the energy drone summit with me

Oleg Lysiak — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 19:19:11 +0000

I'll be honest.

"Energy Drone & Robotics Summit" doesn't sound exciting.

It sounds like bad coffee and worse lanyards. But here's what that name hides.

For 10 years it's pulled in the people actually deploying drones and robots in energy.

Asset owners. Operators. The builders.

This year, 1,800+ of them. All in Houston.

June 22-24. Keynotes, owner panels, live demos, real deployments.

Including the pitfalls. The part most events skip.

It anchors InnovateEnergy Week. So one badge also gets you the Industrial Digital Reality Summit and the Industrial AI Nexus Summit.

Three summits. One trip.

I'm going. Come with me.

And here's a little something for my Rocket Network community: use code IEWEEK200OFF.

$200 off a conference pass. Or a free expo pass.

Details - HERE. Take a look.

And if someone in your network would get more out of it than you would, forward it.

Questions? Just reply.

Otherwise, see you June 22.

- oleg 👊

ps -- not connected on LinkedIn yet? [link]

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 20:00:00 +0000

An engineering fellowship to land your next job

Many engineers feel stalled because the role itself has not evolved. The work looks the same, but the market has moved.

Senior engineering in 2026 demands ownership, faster judgment, and comfort with ambiguity. If your role is not pushing you there, it may be holding you back.

Last cohort, 15 hiring partners sent 31 representatives to evaluate challengers through 246 live interviews. Gauntlet offers a reset. Apply now.

Cohort 6 starts July 6

_{Must be a US citizen to qualify.}

Howdy Rocket Networkers,

The beautiful game is back... and I'm hooked. Catching the opening matches here in Houston today, so I'll keep this one short.

Lots brewing in the H-Town ecosystem this week. Plenty of reasons to close the laptop and go shake some hands in real life.

Speaking of the game... Tuesday, come watch it with the rest of us at Bayou City Startups — June Happy Hour — location shared on RSVP (5:00–7:00 PM). Adrianne Stone's monthly founder/funder/operator hang. One rule: zero pitching. Relationships first, save the pitch for the follow-up. Venue drops when you RSVP.

Events are below and talk soon.

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, June 15

How to Think Like a Founder and Take Action — Online (Founder Institute) (7:00–8:30 PM CT)

Live online session with Jonathan Greechan (FI Co-Founder & CEO) on the mental barriers that keep founders stuck and a framework to start building. Live networking after. Online — join from anywhere.

Tuesday, June 16

🚀🦄💰Angel Investing 101: FirstCheck — Investor Foundations — The Ion, Conf. Room 032

Intro workshop on early-stage investing mechanics and whether the asset class fits your goals. Time TBC — check link.

🤓💻PyHou — Houston Python: Databricks Notebooks + Houston Databricks User Group Kickoff — Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave #100 (6:00–8:00 PM)

Talk on Databricks Notebooks’ evolution to Python, plus lightning talks. Kickoff for the new Houston Databricks User Group. (Group events page — specific event ID not exposed; verify on arrival.)

🏥TMC Innovation Lunch n’ Learn: Building MedTech for Regulatory Approval — Medical Device Labs @ TMC

Panel on building medtech companies positioned for regulatory approval and long-term value. Hosted by Mobius, AVIO, BayCath Medical, and CLA. Lunchtime — verify time.

⚡Catalyst x Energy Tech Innovations with Shell & Technip Energies — Greentown Labs Houston

Kickoff of Go Make 2026, an open-innovation program on catalytic solutions for industrial decarbonization. Time TBC — check link.

⚡June EnergyBar — Greentown Labs Houston

Climatetech and energy ecosystem networking with the Consulate of Canada. Time TBC — likely evening; check link.

AI & Tech Networking Event by Ascent Valley — Eight Row Flint, East End (7:00 PM)

AI and tech founders, operators, and investors connecting across the Houston ecosystem.

🦄💰Investor Connect: Pitch & Deal Flow Night — Eight Row Flint, East End (8:20 PM)

Founders and investors for pitches and deal flow. Pairs naturally with the Ascent Valley event next door.

🌶️⚽Bayou City Startups — June Happy Hour — location shared on RSVP (5:00–7:00 PM)

Adrianne Stone’s monthly founder/funder/operator happy hour. Strict zero-pitching policy — relationships first, save the pitch for a follow-up. Venue shown to RSVP’d guests

Wednesday, June 17

🚀Perfecting Your Pitch (with Dr. Doug Franklin, DeckLaunch) — The Ion

Workshop on building a compelling pitch deck for founders and early-stage owners. Time TBC — check link.

Cup of Joey — Richmond-Katy — Day 6 Coffee (8:30 AM)

Satellite edition of the Cup of Joey founder community out west.

🚀Cup of Joey — Bay Area Houston — Space Center Houston (8:30 AM)

Bay Area satellite edition at Space Center Houston.

Thursday, June 18

🚀🌶️Houston AI Club — June Build Lab: The Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) Role — 801 Travis St, 17th Floor (6:00–8:00 PM)

Hands-on workshop on the FDE role — mindset, methods, and tooling. Bring a laptop. Free parking validations courtesy of Nimble.

🤓💻Houston Linux User Group — The Ion (6:00–8:00 PM)

One of Houston’s oldest tech user groups — OS trends, software dev, and current tech, with hands-on instruction.

🚀🌶️Founder and Funders Happy Hour

Friday, June 19

⚡ENRG HTX — June 2026 — The Ion (8:30–10:00 AM)

Community for founders running on (or curious about) EOS, 10–250 employees. Organized by Erick Garcia, Lesa Skipper, and Craig Ceccanti.

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey — The Ion (9:00 AM)

The flagship Friday Cup of Joey at the Ion — the anchor of the Houston founder week.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (9:00 AM)

Founders and newcomers on traction, funding stage, ICP, and bootstrapping. Runs alongside Cup of Joey.

Rice Tech Transfer Office Hours — The Ion

Meet Rice’s Office of Technology Transfer on commercializing university research. Time TBC — check link.

Houston Methodist Office Hours — Houston Methodist Tech Hub @ Ion

Healthtech founders: meet the Center for Innovation team on healthcare solutions and applicable tech. Time TBC — check link.

Gheelicious Launch Mixer — The Cannon, West Houston (5:00 PM)

Founder-hosted product launch mixer at The Cannon. Entrepreneurs and operators.

Saturday, June 20

🚀Cup of Joey — POST Houston (Pistachio’s Coffee) — POST Houston (8:30–10:30 AM)

Third-Saturday satellite edition at POST Houston for founders, builders, and creatives.

⚡♻️Greentown Labs Open House: Member Showcase & Lab Tours — Greentown Labs Houston

Climatetech member showcase and lab tours. Good for meeting cleantech founders. Time TBC — check link.

TEDx Sugar Land 2026: Rewriting The Future — Ismaili Jamatkhana & Center, Sugar Land (9:00 AM)

Ideas-and-innovation conference with a tech track. Marginal for pure startup focus, but a notable regional gathering.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Founder and Funders Happy Hour

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:36:14 +0000

Cap table management that works for you

Managing your cap table shouldn’t drain your time or derail your budget. Pulley takes the complexity and surprises out of equity management with intuitive workflows, audit-ready compliance, and accurate reporting—all backed by support and pricing you can rely on.

CFOs and finance leaders trust Pulley to stay compliant with key tasks like 409A valuations, ASC 718 reporting, or 83(b) elections without incurring expensive legal fees or getting bogged down with manual work. With Pulley, you get 100% audit-defensible data, powerful tools, and real expertise.

Learn more here

Howdy Rocket Networkers,

I've been running my sales through Claude for a while now. Some of the skill and automations are wild.

And it taught me the opposite of what you'd think.

The better the AI gets, the louder the noise gets. Every inbox is drowning in AI-written pitches now. Perfect grammar. Zero soul.

AI can prospect. AI can follow up. AI can pack your calendar with leads.

But it can't shake a hand. It can't read a room. It can't be the voice someone remembers on Monday morning.

So when I saw the first-ever Houston Sales Community Meetup... and the theme?

"The Noise vs. The Voice: Prospecting in the Age of AI and the Return of the Human Connection."

That's the whole game in one line. Let the bots handle the noise. The deals still close on the voice.

I'm going. If you sell for a living in H-Town, come find me there.

Let's go. 🚀

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, June 8

🚀How to Launch an AI-Powered Company With a Day Job, ft. Adeo Ressi — Online / Founder Institute Houston (1:00–2:00 PM)

Free online session with Adeo Ressi (founder of 11 startups, 14 VC funds, ~$2B in exits) on testing ideas, finding early customers, and building an AI startup in focused hours without quitting your day job.

Tuesday, June 9

⚡Greentown Labs Go Make 2026 Kickoff: Catalyst x Energy Tech Innovations with Shell & Technip Energies — The Ion (5:30–8:00 PM)

Open-innovation kickoff celebrating the Go Make 2026 cohort focused on catalytic solutions for industrial decarbonization. Hear founder pitches and network with startups over food and drink.

🏥Texas Brain Economy Summit (Day 1 of 2) — Houston (June 9–10)

Center for Houston's Future and UTMB summit positioning the region as a global leader in brain health, with leaders from the World Economic Forum, McKinsey Health Institute, Rice, MD Anderson and more. Ticketed.

Cup of JoeY | Puttery featuring the HRVCC — Puttery, 1818 Washington Ave (6:00–8:00 PM)

Special nighttime edition of Cup of Joey with the Houston Regional Veterans Chamber of Commerce — coffee, drinks, and networking connecting the military and business communities.

🚀Houston Sales Community Meetup

Space for Houston Sales folks to connect, step away from the daily grind and share practical insights

Wednesday, June 10

🏥MIT Future of Healthcare Technology Forum — TAMU EnMed Building (5:15–8:30 PM)

MIT Club of South Texas forum on how innovation, government and policy are reshaping healthcare, featuring MIT alumni and Houston healthcare leaders from Texas A&M EnMed, Rice bioengineering, and Kelsey-Seybold.

🏥Texas Brain Economy Summit (Day 2 of 2) — Houston

Second day of the brain health and innovation summit (see Tuesday).

Cup of JoeY | Sugar Land — Houston Marriott Sugar Land, 16090 City Walk (8:30–10:30 AM)

Monthly second-Wednesday Sugar Land edition of Cup of Joey — a relaxed coffee meetup for founders, innovators, and career builders focused on purpose over pitches.

🤓💻GitLab Transcend

Thursday, June 11

⚡Goals & Gigawatts: Houston Energy & Climate Week “The Power of &” Kickoff Party — Houston (1:30–6:30 PM)

Energy-and-innovation kickoff for Houston Energy & Climate Week with food, drinks, a HECW showcase, the Mexico City FIFA opening match, plus a DJ and karaoke.

🚀⚡Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup at Second Draught — The Ion (5:30–8:00 PM)

Casual monthly happy hour for upstream operators, engineers, founders, and digital leaders navigating digital change in oil and gas. No slides, no panels — just beer, pizza, and conversation.

Friday, June 12

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey — The Ion (8:30–10:30 AM)

The weekly Friday open-networking coffee gathering for founders, builders, and the broader Houston innovation community.

Mapping Houston's Innovation Ecosystem — The Ion (10:00–11:00 AM)

Session facilitated by Ion Mentor in Residence Wade Pinder to help founders, investors, and community members navigate Houston's startup resources and players. Free.

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

Peer roundtable bringing together founders, teammates, and experts across Greater Houston to work through traction, funding stage, ICP, and bootstrapping.

How Shareable Short-Form Videos Build Trust and Sales

Saturday, June 13

🚀AI - The Next Wave Seminar

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Founder and Funders Happy Hour

Texas Brain Economy Summit

Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup at Second Draught

AI - The Next Wave Seminar

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 31 May 2026 21:00:27 +0000

Howdy,

Let’s keep this one brief..

I posted something this week that half the internet called fake news.

It did almost 50,000 views.

Here's what happened. Friday morning, scrolling Yahoo Finance, I hit a story so absurd I read it twice: one company spent $500 million on Claude in a single month.

Half a billion dollars. Thirty days. One AI bill.

So I posted it. And the comments lit up. "Fake." "No way." "The math doesn't math."

The DMs were worse. Founders I respect, telling me the number was impossible.

And honestly? I'm not sure if it's true either.

But here's the case for it. If this is one of Anthropic's biggest enterprise clients... thousands of seats, agents running around the clock, every customer query burning tokens... half a billion stops sounding insane and starts sounding like a Tuesday.

We've stopped counting tokens like they're money. They are money.

So I'll throw it to you. Real, or too wild to be true? Hit reply and tell me what you think... I genuinely can't decide.

And… make sure to check out featured events secection

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, June 1

Vibecoding 101 for Startups: Build Your First App w/ Mark Montalban

The technical barrier between your idea and a real product just disappeared. Vibecoding 101 is a free, beginner-friendly introduction to Replit, the AI-powered tool that lets you build working apps using plain language, no coding experience required.

Tuesday, June 2

AI Tinkerers Houston — Builders’ Meetup (evening | venue on RSVP)

Curated, screened room for engineers and founders shipping with foundation models — live code demos on agentic workflows and local execution, no slides. Find the June 2 event and request entry on the chapter page.

🚀Personal IPO Summit 2026 (June 2–3 | Virtual, Free)

Two-day virtual summit on attention, distribution, and turning an audience into real revenue — tactical content for founders and creators building a personal brand. Runs June 2–3.

🏥Humans of Healthcare: Code Blue — Nursing Through Today’s Challenges (5:00–6:30 PM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

Houston Methodist Center for Innovation speaker series — a panel of healthcare experts on today’s nursing landscape and the challenges shaping their careers.

Wednesday, June 3

Buying and Selling Businesses (5:30–7:00 PM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

Lenny Saizan of Murphy Business & Financial leads a practical discussion on the realities of selling and acquiring a business — one of the biggest financial decisions an entrepreneur makes.

Thursday, June 4

🚀Cup of Joey — The Cannon West (8:30–10:30 AM | The Cannon, West Houston)

A West-side edition of the Cup of Joey founder coffee — open networking for the startup and tech community.

🚀Houston AI Club — Monthly Meetup (6:00–8:00 PM | 801 Travis St, 17th Floor)

Houston’s largest AI community (150+ attendees) — presentations and demos on practical AI, plus networking and food. Pulls founders, engineers, and operators across the ecosystem.

🚀Side Project Society — June Meetup (6:00–8:30 PM | Improving, 10111 Richmond Ave)

Monthly gathering for builders working on side projects — show what you’re making, swap feedback, and meet other Houston makers.

Friday, June 5

🚀Cup of Joey — Ion Networking (8:30–10:30 AM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

The weekly Friday founder coffee — open networking to talk tech, inspire innovation, and build community.

🚀Startup Circle Houston (10:30–11:30 AM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

Founders, teammates, and newcomers across Greater Houston work through real startup topics — traction, funding stage, ICP, and runway.

Rice Tech Transfer Office Hours (10:00–11:30 AM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

Meet the Rice Office of Technology Transfer to explore commercializing university research — open to startups and entrepreneurs.

NASA Office Hours (10:00 AM–12:00 PM | The Ion, 4201 Main St)

Biweekly office hours connecting Houston founders and startups with NASA experts on licensing technology and partnerships.

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👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Startup Circle Houston

Founder and Funders Happy Hour

Texas Brain Economy Summit

Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup at Second Draught

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 24 May 2026 19:00:00 +0000

Happy Memorial Day Weekend friends!

Quick one before you fire up the grill.

Anthropic just dropped a founder's playbook for building an AI-native startup... and it's actually good. None of the usual "AI changes everything" fluff. Just real frameworks for each stage of the journey.

They map the whole thing across four stages: Idea, MVP, Launch, Scale. For each one you get the goals, the ways founders blow it, and the exercises to dodge that fate.

My favorite part? A framework for telling genuine product-market fit apart from early hype. Because we've all watched a "rocketship" turn out to be a sparkler.

There are founder war stories from companies actually doing this, plus a cheat sheet for when to reach for chat versus the coding tools.

If you've got 20 minutes this long weekend, give it a read.

👉 CHECK IT OUT

DON’T FORGET TO CHECK THE ”MONEY ON THE TABLE” SECTION!!!

One more before you log off...

Houston founder Dr. Sonny White just closed a $12M oversubscribed seed round for Casimir. Scout Ventures led it, with Tim Draper and Capital Factory along for the ride.

The pitch? Pull persistent power straight out of the quantum vacuum. Yes... really.

His first device is a 5mm chip called MicroSparc, built for the places where swapping a battery is a nightmare. Embedded sensors. Wearables. Tire pressure monitors. First commercial units targeted for 2028.

Going from theoretical physics to a manufacturable semiconductor is absurdly hard. Which is exactly why this one's worth watching.

Godspeed, Casimir.

👉 Read Sonny's note

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, May 25

Tuesday, May 26

🔥Houston AITX Meetup: Building a Second Brain with Obsidian — POST Houston
Houston chapter of the AITX Community. Speaker Josh Medeski walks through building a “second brain” in Obsidian through an AI lens — capture, organize, and connect your thinking. Networking, opening remarks, then a hands-on workshop + interactive demo at POST Houston (401 Franklin St).

Greater Houston Business Procurement Breakfast — Ion, 4201 Main St (8:00–11:00 AM)

Stop by the B2G Victory Team table at the Greater Houston Business Procurement Forum. Breakfast runs 8–9 AM; the forum connects Houston’s small and minority businesses to contracts, financing, and technical assistance.

🚀Founder Institute Houston 2026 Graduation + Demo Day — The Cannon West Houston (6:30 PM)

Five Founder Institute graduates pitch live, then open tables for a casual Demo Day. Alumni, mentors, and ecosystem folks are welcome to come celebrate. (Start time per FI program schedule — confirm on Luma.)

₿Houston Crypto Meetup #32
Houston's Bitcoin, crypto, and Web3 crowd is getting together.

This isn't another boring meetup... it's real talk for HODLers, traders, builders, and the crypto-curious. No hype, no pressure. Just honest conversations, a few laughs, and drinks with people who actually get it.

Wednesday, May 27

Space City Bootstrappers Monthly Hang

An unstructured cowork-and-hang for local founders, early-stage employees, and investors. Bring headphones if you want heads-down time. (Recurring 4th-Wednesday event — the link may display the prior month’s instance.)

Thursday, May 28

NASA Stories at the Ion: A Conversation with Branelle Rodriguez (8:30–10:00 AM | The Ion)

NASA’s Artemis II Orion Vehicle Manager on what it took to ready the spacecraft, its high-speed reentry, and what’s next for Orion. Complimentary breakfast and networking beforehand. Free.

Industrious Coworking Summer Series — free coworking day (8:30 AM–5:00 PM | The Ion)

Drop-in coworking day at Industrious inside the Ion — coffee, refreshments, and a focused space to get work done. Open to the community.

🚀United by the Game: Mega Networking Experience — powered by Martin Curiman (6:00–9:00 PM | The Ballroom at the Bayou, 500 Texas Ave)

Citywide coalition networking night tied to Houston’s big global moment — 100+ organizations across business, civic, cultural, and consular communities. Broad business/civic crowd (founders welcome), more networking than tech programming. VIP at 5:30 PM, doors 6:00 PM.

🚀Ai Tech Mixer Houston (6:00–9:00 PM | Mr. Nice, 1216 West Clay St)

Laid-back AI + tech networking mixer hosted by the Houston AI & Tech Meetup. Come hang out, make connections, talk shop.

🚀Houston Education Innovation Ecosystem May Meet-Up — The Cannon West Houston (6:00–8:00 PM)

InnovatED brings together educators, EdTech founders, and leaders shaping the future of learning. Featured speakers: Christopher Mayes and Jon Lambert.

Friday, May 29

🚀Ion Networking with Cup of Joey (8:30–10:30 AM | The Ion)

The weekly Friday-morning ritual — coffee-shop-open networking to meet new people, talk tech, and build community. Always worth the early start.

SCORE Office Hours (10:00–11:30 AM | The Ion)

Free 1:1 mentoring from SCORE’s volunteer business mentors — useful for early founders working through strategy, ops, or growth questions.

🚀Startup Circle Houston (10:30–11:30 AM | The Ion)

Founder roundtable for Greater Houston startups — recurring topics include traction, funding-stage identification, ICP, and bootstrapping runway.

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Founder Institute Houston 2026 Graduation + Demo Day

Startup Circle Houston

Texas Venture Gala & Forum 2026

HOUSTON EDUCATION INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM MAY MEET-UP

Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: TBD

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 17 May 2026 21:35:47 +0000

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Howdy folks,

How about some news and things I’m excited about?!

Houston just got its big exit.

Fervo Energy hit Nasdaq last week under $FRVO and popped 33% on debut, pushing its valuation past $10 billion. For a Houston-based geothermal startup selling 24/7 carbon-free power to Google data centers -- that's a statement. TechCrunch

Taylor Chapman put it well: investors and operators have been saying for years that what Houston's startup ecosystem needed most was a big exit. Well, now it has one. The real question is what happens next -- does this capital find its way back into the ecosystem, or does it leave town?

That's the part worth watching. Full TechCrunch breakdown here.

Houston's education ecosystem just got its own home base.

My friend Naeem Vehvaria is launching the very first InnovatED Monthly Meet-Up -- a recurring gathering for educators, EdTech founders, and leaders who are done waiting for someone else to fix learning. First events set the tone for everything that follows. Be in the room when this one starts.

Spotlight: Kevin Jones & Eugenia Timasheva

Two Houston builders. Two bets on where the internet is actually going.

Kevin Jones runs developer relations at Edge & Node (the team behind The Graph), hosts the Crypto Mastery podcast, and teaches devs how to ship on Ethereum at events like HackMoney and RenderATL. Eugenia Timasheva brings 15+ years of data and growth experience across Google, Amazon, and Sephora -- and runs the operational side of everything they build together.

Together, they're co-founders of Spritz -- a censorship-resistant chat app for Web3 with HD video, live streaming, and no central server to shut down. Kevin also founded 1Claw, an AI security venture doing secret management for agents and humans: HSM-backed vaults, a TEE proxy that strips PII before it hits any LLM, and an Intents API that lets agents sign on-chain without ever touching a private key. Free tier starts at 1,000 requests a month.

Houston keeps building. These two are proof.

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, May 18

How to Choose the Right Startup Idea Before You Build(07:00 am - 08:30 am)

⚡Geothermal Transition Summit NA (Day 1) — Norris Conference Center (All Day)

Pint of Science: AI — Decoding Humans — Social Beer Garden (7:00–9:30 PM)

Tuesday, May 19

Cappuccino Connections (8:30 am - 10:30 am)

Female Founders & Friends (9:00 am - 10:00 am)

⚡Geothermal Transition Summit NA (Day 2) — Norris Conference Center (All Day)

Angel Investing 101

🚀Bayou City Startups May Happy Hour 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Wednesday, May 20

🚀Cup of JoeY | Bay Area Houston (8:30 - 10:30 AM)

🚀Cup of JoeY | Richmond-Katy (8:30-10:30 AM)

⚡Cypher AI Summit: AI Adoption in Heavy Industry (1:00 PM - 4:00 PM)

Thursday, May 21

🚀Wade's Houston Startup Speedrun — The Ion, 4201 Main St (9:00 AM–7:00 PM)

🚀⚡Greentown AI + Energy Sector Pitch Day — The Ion, 4201 Main St (1:30–6:30 PM)

🚀Houston AI Club May Build Lab (6:00 PM to 8:00 PM CDT - 801 Travis St)

🤓💻Should You Build an MCP Server? (5:30 PM to 7:30 PM CDT)

Friday, May 22

🚀Cup of Joey — The Ion, 4201 Main St (8:30–10:30 AM)

SCORE Office Hours — The Ion, 4201 Main St (10:00–11:30 AM)

NASA Office Hours — The Ion, 4201 Main St (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion, 4201 Main St (10:30–11:30 AM)

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Founder Institute Houston 2026 Graduation + Demo Day

Startup Circle Houston

Texas Venture Gala & Forum 2026

Bayou City Startups May Happy Hour

HOUSTON EDUCATION INNOVATION ECOSYSTEM MAY MEET-UP

Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: TBD

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🔥 What’s hot in Houston’s innovation scene this week?

Oleg Lysiak — Sun, 10 May 2026 20:00:00 +0000

The Hustle: Claude Hacks For Marketers

Some people use Claude to write emails. Others use it to basically run their entire business while they play Wordle.

This isn't just ChatGPT's cooler cousin. It's the AI that's quietly revolutionizing how smart people work – writing entire business plans, planning marketing campaigns, and basically becoming the intern you never have to pay.

The Hustle's new guide shows you exactly how the AI-literate are leaving everyone else behind. Subscribe for instant access.

Get our Claude playbook

Howdy folks,

Hope you're all crushing it!

If you're up for playing soccer with tech folks, reply to this email and I'll add you to the WhatsApp group. I know most of us haven't played in a long time and/or are out of shape — that's not the point. It's about having fun with the community before the World Cup starts and getting excited for the beautiful game. We're collaborating with Sphere and will be running a small tournament.

- oleg 👊

LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!

We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list📅📍

🚀 - must attend

🔥🌶️ - something hot

🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks

🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related

⚡- energy-related

♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related

🏥 - health care related

🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related

🏅 - sports tech related

₿ - web3 related

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Monday, May 11

Stop Guessing: How to Use AI to Validate Your Startup Idea in Days

Tuesday, May 12

EO Houston: Why the Next Decade of Breakthrough Brain Tech Matters For You — Tony's on Richmond Ave (11:20 AM–1:00 PM)

Wednesday, May 13

Cup of JoeY | Puttery featuring the HRVCC (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM CDT)

How Oil & Gas Companies Are Generating Consistent Pipeline and Closing More Deals (12:00 pm - 1:00 pm CDT)

Houston Crypto Meetup #31 (5:30 PM to 7:30 PM CDT)

Residential Real Estate Awards 2026 (4:00pm –6:00pm)

Thursday, May 14

🚀Cup of JoeY | Sugar Land (8:30 AM – 10:30 AM)

React HTX Monthly Meetup — Rice Nexus at The Ion, 4201 Main St Suite 175 (6:00–8:30 PM)

Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup at Second Draught

TAMU New Ventures Competition - Day 1

Out in Tech Houston | Monthly Mixer

Friday, May 15

TAMU New Ventures Competition - Day 2

🚀Cup of Joey — The Ion, 4201 Main St (8:30–10:30 AM)

🚀Startup Circle Houston 💫

Mapping Houston’s Innovation Ecosystem (10:00 am - 11:00 am)

Pints & Prototypes (4:00 pm - 5:30 pm)

Nucleate Austin Semi-Final

Saturday, May 16

Franchising 101: From Corporate to Owner — A Practical Bootcamp

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

FEATURED EVENTS

Founder Institute Houston 2026 Graduation + Demo Day

Startup Circle Houston

Texas Venture Gala & Forum 2026

Techstars Pitch Series

Female Founders & Friends

Bayou City Startups May Happy Hour

FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________

👉Energy Community and Energy Tech Jobs - LINK
👉The Biggest Free Remote Job Board in North America - LINK
👉Start your targeted job search today with AI - LINK

That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
❤️ - ROCKET NETWORK TEAM

🚀RocketNetwork

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

🔐 HOUSTON, CYBR.SEC.CON IS COMING UP

🤖⚡ AI + ENERGY = VERY HOUSTON

🚀 HOUSTON, WE'RE HACKING

⚡ MEANWHILE, HOUSTON HAS TWO ENERGY WEEKS

🚴 ONE MORE THING: BIKETOBERFEST NEEDS SPONSORS

The Voice Data Behind the World's Best AI

HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK

Tuesday, September 8

💻The Technology Leadership Advantage Series — The Ion (12:00–1:00 PM)

🚀Design Your Business Backwards — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

Wednesday, September 9

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)

🚀Cup of JoeY | Sugar Land — Houston Marriott Sugar Land (8:30 AM)

🚀How to Start a Startup — The Ion (5:00–6:30 PM)

💻Houston Linux User Group — Sesh Collective (6:00–9:00 PM)

Thursday, September 10⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11) - DAY1

🚀Woodlands Innovation Network — Parkwood Two, The Woodlands (2:00–3:30 PM)

🏥TMCi Happy Hour — Medical Device Labs @ TMC (4:00–5:30 PM)

⚡💻Upstream: Digital Tech Meetup — Second Draught (5:30–8:00 PM)

💻Out in Tech Houston Monthly Mixer — Second Draught (7:00–8:30 PM)

Friday, September 11⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)- DAY@

🚀Cup of JoeY | Ion — Ion Houston (8:30 AM)

💻🌶️AI Circle Houston — The Ion (9:30–11:00 AM)

🚀NASA Office Hours — The Ion (10:00 AM–12:00 PM)

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

FEATURED EVENTS

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

2 Free AI Courses. No Credit Card Needed.

HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK

Monday, August 31

🚀🌶️Houston AITX Community Monthly Meetup: Teaching agents to pay — POST Houston (5:00–7:00 PM)

🏥HealthTech, MedTech Startups, Investors, Innovators Networking — AvantGarden (7:00–10:00 PM)

Tuesday, September 1

🚀Cup of JoeY | Fulshear — L3 Craft Coffee (8:30 AM)

🌶️Design Your Business Backwards — The Ion (5:00–7:00 PM)

🚀How to Start a Startup — The Ion (6:00–7:30 PM)

💻Houston Unity Meetup: First Official Gathering — Reality COLLAB at HCC Central (7:00 PM)

Wednesday, September 2

🚀Cup of JoeY | Bellaire — Cedar St. Cafe (8:30 AM)

🚀Buying and Selling Businesses — The Ion (5:30–7:00 PM)

💻🌶️AI-Powered Analytics with Power BI MCP Server and Claude — Virtual (7:00 PM)

Thursday, September 3

🚀Cup of JoeY | The Cannon - West — The Cannon West Houston (8:30 AM)

🚀Entrepreneurship Roundtable with OPEN — The Ion (11:00 AM–1:00 PM)

🚀🌶️AI Operator Spotlight: Houston’s Top AI Leaders Open Their Playbooks — The Ion (5:30–8:00 PM)

Friday, September 4

🚀Cup of JoeY | Ion — Ion Houston (8:30 AM)

💻🌶️AI Circle Houston — The Ion (9:30–11:00 AM)

🚀Startup Circle Houston — The Ion (10:30–11:30 AM)

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!

MONEY ON THE TABLE

FEATURED EVENTS

🔥 What's hot in Houston's innovation scene this week?

Get certified in digital marketing — for free.

HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK

Monday, August 24

🚀Entrepreneurship Roundtable with OPEN — The Ion (11:00 AM–1:00 PM)

🚀FIESTA: Lilie Lightning Talks — Liu Idea Lab at Rice (6:00–8:00 PM)

Tuesday, August 25

🚀Cup of JoeY | Downtown — The Innovation Hub (8:30 AM)

🌶️💻RoarCon 2026 — The Ion (Tuesday through Thursday)

🚀Latino Founders Forum – Houston — The Lymbar (5:00–7:30 PM)

🚀FIESTA: 2026 Summer Venture Studio Demo Day — Duncan Hall at Rice (6:00–9:00 PM)

💻How Do I Use AWS S3 for Real Projects? — Improving Houston (6:00–8:00 PM)

🚀CONNECTED — Commissioner Rodney Ellis’ Community Building, 2787 El Camino (6:00–8:00 PM)

Wednesday, August 26

🚀Cup of JoeY | Mission Control Coworking (8:30 AM)

🚀Space City Bootstrappers Monthly Hang (10:00 AM)

🚀CPG Houston Happy Hour — Gristworkz (5:00–7:30 PM)

🚀FIESTA: First Pitch Open Mic Night — Liu Idea Lab at Rice (6:00–8:00 PM)

🚀🌶️Illuminate 2026 Opening Night: VIP Red Carpet + Immersive Experience — Greater Heights (7:00–10:00 PM)

Thursday, August 27

🚀Cup of JoeY | The Woodlands — First Cup Coffee Co (8:30 AM)

🚀🌶️Illuminate Day 1: The Lumino Launch + Builder Summit — The Ion (8:30 AM–6:00 PM)

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

Thursday, September 10

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11) - DAY1

Friday, September 11

⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)- DAY@

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`

👉📅ROCKET NETWORK HTX CALENDAR 📅👈

👉ROCKET NETWORK DEALS👈

`HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK`