SANewTech Seeks to Foster San Antonio’s Technology Community

Cole Wollak wants to help foster San Antonio’s growing technology community.
So he created San Antonio New Tech, a new technology meetup that takes place on the first Tuesday of every month at Geekdom, a downtown collaborative coworking site for geeks.
The first gathering takes place next week and 75 people have registered to attend. The event features short presentations from Dirk Elmendorf, one of the founders of Rackspace who now runs a startup called Trucking Office, Troy Troman with Rackspace talking about its Open Cloud and Open Stack initiatives and Eric Larson and Richard Ortega, founders of Grapevine, a startup based at Geekdom.
The idea is to fill the Geekdom room with like-minded people who can discuss their ventures, bounce off new ideas, socialize, network and collaborate.
“That diversity could create awesome serendipitous events,” Wollak said Friday afternoon during an interview at Geekdom.
The San Antonio New Tech meetup is the kind of grass-roots events that Geekdom seeks to foster, said Nick Longo, its director. The coworking site, founded last November, has quickly grown to 425 members and is currently expanding from the 11th floor to include the 10th floor of the Weston Centre.
“I like when the community, the geeks, the entrepreneurs, creators, organize their own events,” Longo said. “Because that’s organic.”
Wollak, a 2011 engineering graduate of Trinity University in San Antonio, previously worked as program manager for TechStars Cloud, headed up by Jason Seats. He also interned at FlashScan3D. He’s working on his own stealth startup and plans to announce it publicly in coming months.
Wollak has always had an interest in entrepreneurship. He help start the entrepreneurship club at Trinity University and he worked on organizing the 3 Day Startups in San Antonio.
He learned about the New Tech meetups while helping to run the TechStars Cloud program. Meetups regularly take place in New York, San Francisco, Boulder, Colo. and Denver. He wanted to create the same kind of community building event here. Wollak also hosts the San Antonio Open Coffee gathering every other Tuesday in San Antonio. It’s a group of people interested in talking about technology whether it’s a local startup or the latest news coming out of Google or NASA.
The focus of the San Antonio New Tech meetup is to foster the city’s tech community, create awareness about what’s happening locally and to provide a destination for newcomers to San Antonio who are technology and entrepreneurially focused to get to know the community, Wollak said.