McCombs and Austin Bet on Small Business

TEXAS Entrepreneurship and City of Austin partner for new pitch competition

Small businesses represent nearly half of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. Austin is home to an estimated 42,000 small businesses, and a 2025 study by USA Today named it the best city in which to start a new business.

Hoping to build on that momentum, Austin City Council’s Austin Economic Development committee moved Sept. 24 to partner with TEXAS Entrepreneurship within McCombs School of Business to develop a pitch competition in support of Austin’s small-business ecosystem. The city has committed $50,000 in funding to run a citywide small-business needs assessment and an additional $250,000 over two years to design and deliver a pitch competition that would attract small-business owners for mentorship, feedback, and the chance at nondilutive funding.

Mellie Price, B.S. ’93, M.S. ’19, assistant professor of management and executive director of both TEXAS Entrepreneurship and the Brumley Institute for Graduate Entrepreneurship, explained the heart behind this partnership and the potential for the competition to generate opportunity for Austinites.

Q: What inspired this pitch competition and the partnership with Austin?

There’s a whole world of small businesses that have the potential to create careers, to improve communities, and even shift the cycle of generational poverty. They’re really powerful.

The ecosystem laid out for big, venture capital-backed businesses doesn’t exist for smaller ventures, yet they need the same tools to succeed. The City of Austin recognized that TEXAS Entrepreneurship had the experience to help bring those skills to the city’s small-business community. Through a competition, they can get mentorship and expert feedback and win nondilutive funding so that flywheel of growth can start for them.

We’re in the research phase now, which includes surveying the small-business community both on and off campus to inform the structure of the competition in a way that best suits the business owners we hope to see apply.

TEXAS Entrepreneurship and the Brumley Institute have been creating meaningful opportunities for entrepreneurs for years, so the plan is to leverage the knowledge that the team has garnered through the Texas Venture Labs Investment Competition into this new project.

Entrepreneurship shouldn’t stop at the edge of the Forty Acres; it should connect our students across the entire city of Austin and the business community.

Q: What kinds of entrepreneurs do you hope to see?

The idea is to serve a variety of industries and companies that fall into diverse categories and are in different stages of development.

Most importantly, we want to see local, nontech small businesses that truly feel like the competition can fulfill their growth needs.

Every founder has to move from having an idea for a business to figuring out enough of it to launch. Then, they have to figure out how to stay alive, and ultimately how to grow. Beyond the money, we want to give entrepreneurs feedback and skills to get to their next step.

Q: What can the competition mean to a small-business entrepreneur?

It’s about helping them grow the foundation of their business. Beyond the award money, the process of preparing for the competition will include mentorship, pitch coaching, networking opportunities, and office hours with subject matter experts and community partners. In most competitions, the feedback and preparation are often as helpful as the money itself.

Q: What do you hope emerges from this partnership between the City of Austin and TEXAS Entrepreneurship?

For the UT side, we want to see students getting internships and employment opportunities with small businesses across Texas or potentially even launching their own. There are many measures of success, and jobs are one. We also hope to see persistence rates for Austin’s small businesses rise because we want to see these businesses grow and create even more jobs. We also want to help family businesses grow their foundation and stabilize their legacies.

I’m really passionate about this work. We hope it becomes a platform that helps our students and the broader Austin community achieve the American Dream.

Story by Raul Flores