About 100 institutional investors, startup CEOs, sports executives and academics gathered at the Fort Worth Stockyards in the week before September 21, 2026, for the third annual Rock Yard Roundup. The program paired bull rides and custom-made cowboy hats with conversations about biotechnology regulation and co-investing. Founder Daniel Dart said attendees represented close to $1 trillion in combined assets under management.
The conference usually takes place in Austin, but Dart chose Fort Worth for this edition, The Dallas Morning News reported. Dart, an Austin-based venture capitalist who founded Rock Yard Ventures, has said Fort Worth better reflected a focus on domestic building than New York or San Francisco—a priority he connected to investors’ interest in U.S. manufacturing and industry.
From Jail Cells to MIT Sloan
Dart’s background differs from the conventional venture-capital path. According to Wikipedia, he earned two master’s degrees from the London School of Economics without first completing undergraduate studies, then graduated from MIT Sloan with an Executive MBA in 2024. The Dallas Morning News has reported that Dart was in and out of jail and prison while growing up in California.
Rock Yard Ventures is a solo general-partner firm named for Dart’s father’s construction supply business. Its investment focus is critical physical infrastructure and industrial technology, according to an interview with Infinite Frontiers. At the roundup, that industrial focus sat alongside discussions of biotechnology regulation and co-investing.
Wall Street, Biotech and Family-Office Money Under One Tent
The three co-hosts brought different investment backgrounds to the event. Greg Lippmann is founder and chief investment officer of New York-based LibreMax Capital; Oleg Nodelman founded San Francisco-based, biotech-focused EcoR1 Capital; and Robert Forsythe is co-founder and chief executive of Tampa-based Third Lake Capital.
Dart has described the conference’s aim as building connections across Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Dallas, and characterized Fort Worth as unpretentious. John Moncrief, a partner at Moncrief Properties, said the gathering led to new relationships and conversations among attendees he described as independent thinkers willing to challenge conventional wisdom.
A Quantum Computing Pitch Amid the Cowboy Hats
Chad Rigetti, CEO and co-founder of Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Sygaldry Technologies, was among the founders at the gathering. The startup is developing quantum-accelerated AI servers. Rigetti has said the San Francisco Bay Area remains the leading place to fund companies, while arguing that the roundup showed promising companies can also attract venture funding elsewhere. He described it as a small gathering representing a large amount of capital, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Rock Yard Ventures backed Sygaldry, which closed $139 million in combined financing: a $34 million seed round led by Initialized Capital and a $105 million Series A led by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Hoodline previously reported. Before co-founding Sygaldry, Rigetti founded Rigetti Computing. Sygaldry says its servers are designed to work alongside data-center GPUs to reduce AI energy consumption, an area that aligns with Rock Yard Ventures’ industrial-technology focus.
Regional funding and infrastructure pressures
For an Austin comparison, Crunchbase News, citing Crunchbase data, reported that Austin-based startups raised $7.19 billion in 2025, up from $4.37 billion in 2024, while deal counts fell from 312 to 272. Those figures provide regional context but do not establish how Dallas–Fort Worth compares with Austin or the rest of Texas. On the infrastructure side, The Dallas Morning News reported that ERCOT large-load interconnection requests exceeded 230 gigawatts in 2025, compared with 63 gigawatts reported in December 2024. The requests signal grid-planning pressure; they are not realized electricity demand and do not demonstrate the performance of any one company’s technology.
The Stockyards’ Bull-Riding Backdrop
The bull-riding setting reflects the Stockyards’ Western theme. Professional Bull Riders was founded in 1992 by 20 cowboys who each invested $1,000. Spire Capital acquired the organization in 2007 and later sold it to Endeavor Group. In 2025, Professional Bull Riders, On Location and IMG were acquired by TKO Group Holdings in a deal valued at $3.25 billion. Chad Blankenship, president and general manager of the Ariat Texas Rattlers, was among those connecting bull-riding culture with the conference’s setting.
