By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News
Founded in late 2011, Geekdom has served as a catalyst for San Antonio’s technology startup industry.
Graham Weston, chairman of Rackspace and Nick Longo, founder of CoffeeCup Software, founded Geekdom.
Lorenzo Gomez now serves as the director of Geekdom.
It hosted the Techstars Cloud program, which graduated two classes of companies from its three-month accelerator including Par Level Systems and TrueAbility, which are both still based at Geekdom.
Other startups operating out of Geekdom include Pressable, Remote Garage, Monks Toolbox, CodeUp, VentureLab and Health eDesigns. It has helped more than 200 startups so far. The Geekdom Fund also offers San Antonio-based startups a chance at $25,000 in funding. The Geekdom Fund board meets monthly to evaluate startups and award funds.
Geekdom membership costs $50 per month or $200 monthly for a dedicated “tech startup desk” in an office.
Geekdom also hosts all kinds of events including a monthly Master’s Series featuring accomplished speakers in the technology industry, hackathons, 3 Day Startups, Startup Weekends, the monthly San Antonio Startup Grind and Health 2.0.
Geekdom last year launched a San Francisco office.
For the past two years, the collaborative coworking space, technology incubator and accelerator, has occupied the 10th and 11th floors of the Weston Centre downtown. But at the end of March, Geekdom will move to its new home in the historic Rand building, a former bank and department store building built in 1913, on Houston Street. The sixth floor will be for established companies with large numbers of employees and the move in date for that floor is set for Mid-April. The seventh floor will be for the general membership and it’s move in date is March 31st. Eventually Geekdom will takeover the entire 8-story building as its current tenant Frost Bank moves out.
The new offices will have bike racks, showers, and lockers, changing rooms, a nap room, a kitchen and more.
The space will contain a lot of white boards and other writeable surfaces and it will have reliable high-speed Internet with lots of outlets for wired service as well as Wi-Fi. It will also have a vault of mailboxes.
The main floor of the building features an events center where Geekdom will hold member and public events. The events will be livestreamed online from there using NewTek’s Tricaster equipment. The space is two stories and has a balcony and has doors that are accessible from the street.
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in Silicon Hills News’ print magazine, launched at SXSW Interactive 2014. Also, Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News.
Leave a Reply