TechStar Cloud Companies Energize San Antonio’s Technology Community

TechStars has incubators in Boulder, Boston, Seattle, New York and San Antonio.
Hey wait, how did San Antonio snag a high-tech incubator?
The investors demanded it, said Nicole Glaros, managing director of TechStars Boulder. She relocated to San Antonio for three months to aid Jason Seats, managing director of the TechStars Cloud.
And by all accounts, the inaugural TechStars Cloud, which held its Demo Day this past Wednesday at the Charline McCombs Empire Theatre downtown, was a smashing success.
The 11 teams occupying the 11th floor of the Geekdom in downtown San Antonio have packed up and plan to depart for their hometowns which include Portland, San Francisco, Reno, New York, Boston and Madison, Wisc. But one team from Virginia, Emergent One, which makes a platform that allows companies to easily create an Application Programming Interface or API, plans to stay in San Antonio for a few more months and maybe longer.
Several of the entrepreneurs that I spoke with during the Demo Day After Party at the Weston Centre talked fondly of the time they spent in San Antonio. Most of them lived downtown and they loved being able to walk along the river walk to restaurants and to explore. A few of them regretted they didn’t have more free time to visit all of the local attractions. They were spending 18 hour days working on their ventures. Still, they leave the city with fond memories.
And although the majority of the teams will depart they take with them the tech magic that TechStars Cloud created. In fact, Seats will already go to work preparing for the next TechStars Cloud class. And the desks that the TechStars Cloud companies vacated at Geekdom will quickly fill with local technology entrepreneurs looking to create the next big thing. Also, all of the out of town visitors who attended the TechStars Demo Day leave the city with a great impression of what is possible here.
“It’s super impressive,” said Brian Gorbett, with Microsoft Bizspark, during an interview at TechStars Demo Day. “Being a first year incubator they’ve managed to capture some interesting companies. I think they found some of the best cloud companies at least that I’ve seen.”
Gorbett, based in Chicago, has travelled to several Demo Day presentations around the country and said the San Antonio presentations were among the best he had seen.
And this is only the beginning. TechStars Cloud has a four-year commitment to remain in San Antonio.