I grew up in the Valley.
I'm building what I wish existed.

I'm Ely. I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. Spent most of my childhood taking things apart, making little websites, and bugging my parents for the next laptop.

I left for Texas A&M, got my degree, and started grinding. Houston first: insurance, consulting, logistics, payments. Then Amazon, where I helped launch an AWS IoT product used by enterprise customers worldwide. Then DoorDash, shipping features to millions of users and mentoring other engineers.

Now I'm a Founding Engineer at an AI startup, building a platform from scratch on AWS GovCloud and leading a team. I write code every day. I ship every day. I live in the tools that are changing how software gets built.

A while back, I came home with a SaaS idea and joined Ruby Red, the local startup program. Great people, great experience, really useful in a lot of ways. But the more I went through it, the more I felt like there wasn't quite a lane built for tech-startup builders in the Valley yet. Software, AI, something you ship on the internet and grow from anywhere. That's a different shape than what most programs here are tuned for.

So I started talking to people. Students, engineers, side-project builders, folks back home from Austin and SF. Same story kept coming up: “If there was something for people like me here, I'd show up tomorrow.”

That's buildrgv. A lane for tech builders in the Valley. Starting with Build Days, growing into cohorts, a physical space, and eventually funding the best ideas that come out of it.

I'm not trying to replace what's already here. I'm adding the piece I wish had been here when I was 17, or 22, or 28. A place where the valley builds.