Part I – Outline
Introduction – Grand Strategy & "Steeples of Excellence"
History of Dallas’ Growth & Leadership
The Bay Area & Silicon Valley – Case Study
Dear Everybody,
This post will dive deep on one of my most passionate topics – The Future of Dallas and how us Dallasites might continue to propel Dallas as one of the thriving cities in our country and the world.
This will also just be Part 1 of multiple, as many different aspects of “city-flourishing” strategy need to be covered.
I. Introduction
I care deeply about Dallas. Beyond living here for my entire life besides college, my family has lived in Dallas for generations. All four of my grandparents moved here during childhood or in their twenties. My parents were born and raised in Dallas and have lived here besides their college and graduate degrees. Also, I am blessed that my grandparents and parents are role models that exemplify civic responsibility. Each of them embodies the power of philanthropy and service toward our local Dallas institutions and communities.
I aim to carry forward this legacy of service to Dallas in my life, and I hope to continue being a high-contribution Dallas citizen for decades to come. I believe actions are stronger than words, but I also believe that well-organized ideas can be catalysts for action and change. This deep dive aims to provide strategic ideas that can unlock an even more blossoming future for Dallas.
Two core ideological frameworks will underpin my exploration:
1) “Grand Strategy” and
2) “Steeples of Excellence”
What is Grand Strategy?
Grand strategy is defined as "a state's strategy of how means (military and nonmilitary) can be used to advance and achieve national interests in the long-term."
The term is most applicable to nations, but the idea of Grand Strategy is useful for cities or even individual organizations. Packy McCormick wrote brilliantly on his Not Boring blog applying the concept of Grand Strategy to OpenAI's incredible, strategic growth. I am going to apply Grand Strategy to Dallas in this deep exploration.
Nations, States, and Cities need a cohesive vision of the future to move toward, but they also need to anticipate the dynamic forces and to strategize on decisions and initiatives that can realize that vision. By looking through a lens of Grand Strategy, we can elucidate the most critical factors and potential strategic projects that will enable Dallas to thrive.
Core to the idea of Grand Strategy is analyzing societal trends with a system’s thinking perspective that focuses on the long-term impact of strategic decisions – How will implementing this policy influence the long-term prosperity of citizens? What are the core drivers of economic prosperity for our city? What new organizations or changes to existing institutions will create the highest leverage for positive change?
Those are just a few example questions we could ask in relation to Dallas’ Grand Strategy. In more simple terms, Grand Strategy is about thinking big picture – elucidating the individual actions that will benefit the collective whole.
What are Steeples of Excellence?
A core part of a strong Grand Strategy is knowing which areas to focus on and how to allocate scarce resources accordingly. A city cannot try to do everything and become a “jack of all trades and master of none.”
Exceptional success at all endeavors is governed by power laws. Famous entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel said, "We don't live in a normal world; we live under a power law." In his book Zero to One, Thiel wrote about power laws extensively in relation to technology investing. Thiel explained how in a venture investment fund around 80 percent or more of the entire returns of the portfolio are often driven by one single investment. For Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, that investment was Facebook.
The world of technology investing is not a perfect analogy to the success of a city, but the philosophy of power laws holds—the most successful organizations or assets of a city will drive a huge amount of the growth and prosperity.
To prioritize focus and resources most strategically, the idea of “Steeples of Excellence” is a valuable framework. The concept of Steeples of Excellence was championed at my alma mater, Stanford University. Fred Terman was a visionary leader for Stanford in the 1940s through 1960s, becoming the first Provost in 1955. The Provost served as the “lieutenant” to the University’s President, and Terman was responsible for executing key initiatives that helped propel Stanford into its current standing as one of the most reputable universities in the world (sorry to toot our own horn!).
Terman consistently referred to Steeples of Excellence because he wanted to be clear that Stanford needed to focus intensely on its strengths – Stanford was going to become world-class by excelling in certain domains. Science, math, engineering domains, such as electrical engineering, statistics, and materials science, dominated the university’s resource allocation and focus. Terman’s strategic decision to focus on these cutting-edge engineering domains was prescient as the boom in the semiconductor industry was yet to begin and the brand of “Silicon Valley” was still decades in the making. In fact, many people regard Terman as the “Father of Silicon Valley” because of his leadership of Stanford as an engine for scientific and technological innovation.
Terman did not only prioritize resources for the research and graduate departments in Engineering, he also built extensive partnerships with the emerging industry innovators, namely Hewlett Packard. In fact, Terman was Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s professor at Stanford. To solidify Stanford as a center of gravity for technology innovation, Terman built the Stanford Industrial Park adjacent to campus to provide space for these up-and-coming companies.
Thus, Terman’s “Steeples of Excellence” birthed Silicon Valley. Terman’s visionary strategy for Stanford still bears immense fruits today for Stanford and the entire Bay Area economy. Perhaps, if not for Stanford’s deliberate effort to forge Silicon Valley, that region would not have had Apple, Google, and Meta, among countless other world-leading companies. Those three companies combine today for close to $7 trillion in market capitalization. By comparison, the entire London Stock Exchange represents just over $3 trillion in market capitalization. Silicon Valley carries more economic might than most countries.
Stanford and Silicon Valley’s rise to power will be covered in even more detail below, but it is important to emphasize how impactful that long-term strategic planning in the 1940s through 1960s is on the Bay Area’s current day economy and vibrancy.
Dallas cannot compare to the technological might and innovation of the Bay Area (yet!), but Dallas has its own history of strategic, visionary leadership and bold projects and innovative companies. Understanding Dallas’ past is vital to prepare for the future.
II. History of Dallas’ Growth & Leadership
Dallas’ history is rooted in entrepreneurship. Capable entrepreneurs and savvy politicians were critical in creating the foundation for Dallas to grow into a booming city. After the town was first chartered in 1856, a critical moment arrived for the young town of Dallas only 17 years later. The transcontinental Texas & Pacific Railroad was arriving in Texas and it would intersect the north-south Houston & Texas Central Railroad. The founder of Dallas, John Neely Bryan, had envisioned that Dallas would become a railroad destination, but strategic planning and business deals were necessary to ensure that both of these major railways would cut through the town. Other options existed, but the early Dallasites made it happen.
Remarkably, Dallas is one of the only major US cities that is both land-locked and not on a major navigable waterway. The Trinity River cuts through Dallas but it is not reliable for trade, so the creation of the major railroad intersection was critical for making Dallas a center of commerce. Today, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex is the 4th largest metropolitan area in the US, and Dallas is the 9th largest city on its own.
“Liquid Gold”
While railroads allowed Dallas a strong start, Dallas’ growth was truly compounded by the oil boom in Texas during the early 1900s. After the Spindletop discovery in Beaumont, Texas became the center of gravity for oil entrepreneurs looking to capitalize on an emerging, speculative industry. Dallas’ formation as a railroad hub also made it a natural settling point for new oil businessmen. My great-grandfather, Harry Bass Sr., was one of those many oil entrepreneurs moving to Dallas in 1932.
Dallas solidified as a hub for the oil business after the discovery of the East Texas Oil Field in 1930. H.L. Hunt and his formation of Hunt Oil Company became the key leading company commercializing oil production in the East Texas field.
As a Dallas family, the Hunts have carried forward decades of business, philanthropic, and institutional leadership in incredibly diverse areas. Most famously, Hunt descendants to this day own the Kansas City Chiefs and have won three Super Bowls in the past five years under leadership of Clark Hunt.
Another Hunt descendant, Lyda Hill, is one of the most influential philanthropists and investors in Dallas today. Lyda Hill has committed to the “Giving Pledge” to give all of her wealth to charity throughout her life and through her charitable organization Lyda Hill Philanthropies. That organization is the impetus for the reimagined development at Pegasus Park in West Dallas. Pegasus Park was formerly the headquarters of the Mobil Corporation, but now has been completely remodeled by Lyda Hill Philanthropies’ leadership to serve as a hub for innovation in biotechnology, healthcare, and social enterprises. (More on Pegasus Park in a future section of this piece).
Over the years, oil companies were so critical to Dallas’ economy that they even created Dallas cultural icons. The red “Pegasus” was the icon for the Mobil oil company, but it became the unofficial mascot for Dallas because Mobil built a large, neon Pegasus that stood atop the Magnolia building in Downtown Dallas. In fact, the aforementioned Pegasus Park bears that name because it is the old Mobil headquarters.
A quick aside… With the growing global concern for the threat of climate change, it is easy to criticize the contributions of the oil & gas industry toward harming our planet. Such criticisms have aspects of truth, of course – pushing for innovation and efforts to reduce emissions and prevent climate change are vitally important toward our future. But I believe that putting the evolution of the oil & gas industry into a wider context is also critical. Texas and the US more broadly would not have created the same level of prosperity that we benefit from today if not for the incredible economic and downstream benefits that have origins in the energy availability created from oil & gas. Moreover, the wealth accrued from huge successes in the Oil industry are often being used for incredibly ambitious and sustainable economic development efforts such as those mentioned above from Lyda Hill.
Our world must be analyzed with shades of grey in mind, and no doubt Oil helped create the Dallas that exists today. For that reason, I believe it is helpful to learn from and to try to understand and glean lessons from that history. We can argue that the Oil industry was Dallas’ initial Steeple of Excellence. The railroad crossing put Dallas on the map, literally, but it was Dallas entrepreneurs’ instinct and execution to capitalize on the discovery of oil & gas in Texas that turned Dallas from an emerging town into a booming metropolis.
The power of the entrepreneurial spirit that motivated Dallas’ growth during that period of its history is another important lesson to highlight. The Oil Boom may have benefited from a bit of reckless ambition and some speculation that bolstered Dallas, but those traits also formed a foundation for a culture of exceptionalism and aspiration that lives on in Dallas today. Dallasites dream big, and that willingness to go after big, bold projects in the future will continue to compound Dallas’ leadership as an innovative city for decades or even centuries to come.
I feel even more passionate about that culture of entrepreneurial ambition and the pursuit of bold ideas because of the direct impact this spirit had in my own family through both of my grandfathers: Dick Bass and Bryan Smith.
Dallas’ Entrepreneurial Spirit in My Own Life
As I mentioned previously, my great-grandfather Harry Bass received an incredible opportunity to succeed in business because of the oil industry. My grandfather Dick Bass was the most direct beneficiary of Harry’s incredible work ethic to build oil and gas businesses, but I admire Dick because he did not rest on the laurels provided by his father. Dick carried on the work on the family businesses with his brother, but when the right time came, he seized new opportunities: the ski industry.
As an original investor and homeowner in Vail in Colorado, Dick served on Vail’s Board for many years. At one point in the 1970s, Bass family entities owned a majority stake in Vail (well before Vail’s epoch as the evil empire of skiing). When Ted Johnson came into Vail in the winter of 1969 to try to woo investors into starting a new ski resort in Utah in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Dick was the only “Large Mouth Bass” who took the bait. Perhaps, without Dallas’ culture of exceptionalism Dick would not have had the boldness (some may have called it arrogance) to take on such a risky venture. Nevertheless, Snowbird was born.
With these stories of my fortunate ancestry, the intention is not to brag. I feel only deep gratitude for the opportunities provided by the hard work of my family members, and I hope to use this very lucky station to pay it forward even more. Also, I choose to reference them in this account of Dallas and its Future because they are the source material that most deeply motivates me. The enterprising dedication of Harry Bass and the daring vision of Dick Bass birthed incredible organizations that (at least in Snowbird’s case) continue to positively impact thousands of lives to this day. We can all learn from their stories.
Incredibly, my other grandfather, Bryan Smith, benefitted from Dallas’ entrepreneurial spirit in a totally different way – Bryan was an early employee and Board member at Texas Instruments.
Texas Instruments
If we think in terms of Terman’s Steeples of Excellence, Texas Instruments was unequivocally one of those steeples for Dallas in the 1960s through 1970s. After TI’s engineer Jack Kilby created the first integrated circuit, TI grew quickly into one of the most critical manufacturers of electronics and semiconductors, especially for military and commercial applications. TI was a critical technology supplier for innovations that impacted the Apollo space programs.
Beyond TI being a technology leader, the executives who led this company to phenomenal growth commercially may have had an even bigger impact on Dallas through their philanthropy and institutional leadership in Dallas and across the country. The four founders, Erik Jonsson, Cecil Green, Eugene McDermott, and Pat Haggerty each had huge impacts.
The demand for a highly educated workforce at commercial enterprises like TI was the origin of UT Dallas. In fact, UT Dallas originated from a research institute formed by McDermott, Green, and Jonsson called the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest in 1961. Eight years later after growth of the institute, the University of Texas System accepted UT Dallas as its newest institution, reorganizing the research institute into a full-fledged university.
The TI founders’ goal was to make UT Dallas the “MIT of the South.” That goal may not be fully realized today, but the quality and scale of UT Dallas today is enormous and a vital contributor to the Dallas and Texas economy. With a student body of over 31,000, and leadership in engineering fields such as computer science and electrical engineering, UT Dallas is undoubtedly one of Dallas’ most vital institutions with compounding impact.
Dallas’ Civic Leadership
City leadership beyond the business world furthered Dallas’ momentum in the mid-20th century. Woodall Rodgers was an influential mayor who led the city from 1939 to 1947 during World War II and was instrumental in building infrastructure to support Dallas’ contributions to the war manufacturing efforts. Rodgers also masterminded the creation of foundational infrastructure including: 1) Love Field’s expansion (one of Dallas’ Airports), 2) the Garza-Little Elm Reservoir (a vital water source for the city), and 3) Central Expressway (one of the major highways).
Perhaps the most pivotal Dallas mayor was Erik Jonsson. As just mentioned, Mayor Jonsson made huge contributions to the Dallas business community as a founder and president of Texas Instruments (“TI”) but compounded his impact as mayor. Jonsson took office perhaps at Dallas’ most discouraging time in 1964, one year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Downtown Dallas. But Jonsson ended up serving three productive terms, most notably spearheading the creation of the DFW Airport. The DFW Airport is still the second largest airport in the US and solidified Dallas as a critical touchpoint for domestic and international travel. Quantifying the economic impact of this airport on Dallas is difficult, but one outdated estimate in 2014 had the economic impact at $31 billion annually.[1]
Jonsson’s transition from leading one of Dallas’ most innovative, impactful companies at TI into civil service as Mayor illustrates the vital connection between the private and public sectors that can catalyze a city’s growth and prosperity. Countless other mayors and civic leaders played huge parts in putting Dallas on the map as a vibrant city, but the examples above demonstrate the compounding returns of bold projects and decisive leadership.
Ironically, Dallas’ current Mayor is yet again named Eric Johnson (although spelled differently). Mayor Johnson is showing an analogous boldness to former Mayor Jonsson – he is not shying away from controversy and willing to take principled stands and suggest courageous ideas. This year Mayor Johnson announced he would switch his political affiliation from Democrat to Republican, saying “The Democratic Party today is not the same party it was when I joined it thirty years ago—it has ticked considerably to the left, while I have moved to the right.”
Johnson also recently promoted an audacious suggestion: bring the Kansas City Chiefs back to their original home in Dallas (they were formerly the Dallas Texans upon their founding by Lamar Hunt in 1959). Some may argue that this move back to Dallas would be a natural move as the Chiefs are still run by Lamar’s son Clark and owned by the Hunt family. To the dismay of Kansas City fans and perhaps my dear Dallas Cowboys, I love Johnson’s idea!
Big, bold ideas are what transformed Dallas into one of the most prominent metroplexes in the country over the last century, and it will be our current and future city leaders’ audacity that will compound Dallas growth for decades to come.
Before we dive into many of those big, bold ideas that I will propose in this sprawling manifesto, I want to first take a close look at one of the other most successful executions of city and economic growth in recent history: the Bay Area and Silicon Valley.
III. The Bay Area & Silicon Valley – A Case Study
Although I have lived 23 out of my 27 years in Dallas, I had the privilege to spend the other four years during college at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley. That experience gave me direct experience and insight into a metropolitan area with arguably the most important engine for technological progress in the world. My hope for Dallas is that someday it may rival the impact of Silicon Valley, which may be a foolish ambition. In order to move toward that hope, we must learn from the history and structural forces that enabled the Bay Area’s exceptional influence on the world today.
Many critics today can point to glaring flaws in the Bay Area, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley such as extreme politics and bureaucracy, huge income inequality and cost of living, and rampant homelessness. I do not deny those flaws, but examining the imperfections is a topic for another post. Instead, I think it is more valuable for Dallas’ future to understand the immense strengths that the Bay Area capitalized on. As I mentioned, the framework of Steeples of Excellence originated at Stanford with Fred Terman. In many ways, Terman’s initial Steeples for Stanford planted those early seeds of exceptionalism for the Bay Area as a whole.
With Stanford becoming a center of gravity for engineering excellence through acquisition of world-class talent both in academia and business, Stanford began the “flywheel” of momentous growth that began the explosion of semiconductor industry innovation, venture capital investment successes, and eventually the computer and Internet revolutions. It is impossible to credit Stanford completely for beginning this virtuous cycle, but there is no doubt how big a role it played.
Because Stanford served as the centralizing force for talent and resources in the form of R&D spending and investment risk capital, companies like Hewlett Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel had all of the natural resources needed to be formed and to grow exponentially. These massive company successes in the 1960s and 1970s fueled the growth of the venture capital (VC) industry in Silicon Valley, eventually bringing to life some of the biggest firms to this day such as Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. These compounding returns to scale of course recirculated even more resources back into Stanford and the Bay Area innovation ecosystem as a whole, allowing the flywheel to spin even faster. Eventually yet another era of companies arose from this flywheel: Apple, Atari, Oracle (and many others).
With each successive generation of successful technology companies, resources in the form of talent (researchers, professors, alumni, and students) and capital (e.g. the Stanford Endowment fund) accrued meaningfully back to Stanford. Thus, it was only natural for the Internet boom to be centered in Silicon Valley, and even today the nascent Artificial Intelligence Boom is led by many Bay Area companies (NVIDIA, OpenAI, etc.).
In addition to technology behemoths like NVIDIA, Google, Meta, and Apple that garner market caps in the trillions, the Bay Area remains dominant in early-stage venture capital. According to Bloomberg, the Bay Area accounted for over $200 billion of VC investments in tech between 2019 to 2021, which represents over 35 percent of all US venture investment. Some began to predict that San Francisco’s growing social and government issues would begin to reverse the trend in venture dominance, but it actually strengthened in the first quarter of 2023 to 41% of total VC funding.[2]
(Sadly, Dallas-Fort Worth did not even make that list… Let’s aim to change that!)
The scale that Silicon Valley and the Bay Area has reached today is gargantuan, but I reiterate that the origins of this scale can be traced back to those prescient decisions by Stanford leadership and other business leaders such as Hewlett and Packard to create strategic initiatives and policies that laid the foundation for a great flowering of innovation and a virtuous flywheel of compounding returns to scale.
I am not naïve enough to claim that Dallas will ever compete with the Bay Area on raw innovation firepower (at least in the coming decades). Unfortunately, we are too far behind, and it would be foolish to try to mimic the Bay Area’s strengths. Instead, I believe that Dallas can and should develop its own unique Steeples of Excellence in orthogonal areas of technology, innovation, and culture.
As we saw with Stanford for Silicon Valley, the “source code” for cities to improve and to thrive begins at the foundation of its people—the education systems.
This concludes Part I of this series on “The Future of Dallas” – This initial chapter was much more backward looking at Dallas’ and the Bay Area’s history before truly diving into the future, but I firmly believe that understanding and learning from history is vital toward carving out the best path forward for Dallas’ future.
Here is what is coming (subject to change):
Parts II & III – Outline (Upcoming)
Education is the foundation
Healthcare & UTSW - Leverage strengths
Datacenters, Computing, & Energy - Another Steeple of Excellence
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem
Ambitious City Building Projects
Recruiting Great Companies
[1] https://pearsonpartnersintl.com/blog/economic-impact-of-dfw-airport/#:~:text=Dallas%2FFort%20Worth%20International%20Airport,on%20a%20%249%20billion%20payroll.
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-12-07/san-francisco-bay-area-nyc-boston-dominate-vc-investment-in-us