Category: San Antonio (Page 31 of 62)

Lessons of a First Time CEO at SA New Tech

December 4, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Jay Miltor presents XYN Technologies, photo by Andrew Moore

Jay Miltor presents XYN Management, photo by Andrew Moore

At SA New Tech Tuesday, Pressable’s Founder Vid Luther shared tough lessons learned as a CEO.
Originally named ZippyKid, Pressable, a WordPress hosting startup, got a new name following an eight hour meeting, scheduled to last 30 minutes, in June with Rackspace Hosting founder Dirk Elmendorf and a few others. After much consideration, Luther decided that the “Kid” in ZippyKid targeted the wrong demographic and didn’t leave a professional and reliable impression.
Now named Pressable, the startup has changed its web layout and pricing to target a more professional demographic – namely other web developers. The rate is now $25 to manage up to five sites, instead of only one, so web developers can use Pressable on the backend for website stability, speed, and security on their client’s websites.
“Rather than us managing a client one by one, they manage clients and we make them look good,” Luther said.
Five days after the changes, Pressable began to see more customers sign up and has enjoyed a brisk signup rate ever since. To date, Pressable boasts more than $1 million in yearly revenue and has around 1,200 customers.
Luther also gave advice on what a CEO should, and should not, do to have a successful business.

Raise more money than you think you need.
Hire smart people and then get out of their way.
Have a mission, a vision, and a value proposition, and make sure your employees share them.
Learn to speak to investors, marketers, and non-technical employees in language that they will understand.
Be personable and smile! Your face is the face of the company.
Spend more money on things that generate revenue, like marketing.
Have confident body language.
How you think about your customers is how your employees will think about your customers.
Don’t make self deprecating jokes as a CEO, important listeners might not know you are joking.
Don’t use sarcastic humor as a CEO; new employees may take you seriously.
Don’t assume that you are 100 percent responsible for your employee’s livelihood; they should know what they are getting into with a startup.

In addition to Luther’s presentation, Michael Girdley touted his Codeup boot camp, XYN Management employee explained its statistics solution for hospitals organ transplants and a Southwest Research Institute engineer shared an open source robotics code.

Codeup

Codeup is a nine week in-person web development boot camp that guarantees to either get their graduates a job or refunds half of their tuition. The boot camp was created by Entrepreneur Michael Girdley because, well, he “got mad”.
“I’m mad that our educational system is so broken,” Gridley said. “I’m mad that people like Vid and all my friends who run companies can’t hire good people. And then I was mad that I had all these friends that wanted to be programmers but kept failing. I also like teaching.”
Teaching oneself to be a programmer is difficult, and Girdley found that most people either did not know where to start or were unsure what to teach them.
The boot camp, which begins on Feb. 3, costs $7,985 and will cover Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and JavaScript. The classes will be from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Students will spend only 45 minutes to an hour in lecture each day and will devote the rest of the time to applying what they learned. Girdley has already received 50 applications and has accepted 17. His first class still has a few more spots left. To get more women involved in web development, Codeup is offering three half-off women’s scholarships.
There will be a Codeup info session at Geekdom on Thursday, Dec. 12.

XYN Management

Pronounced “Zen Management” and presented by COO Jay Miltor, XYN Management has created a cloud based application which helps hospital solid organ transplant programs keep up with their patient outcomes and predict what the outcome will be for future transplant procedures.
According to Miltor, all transplant centers in the United States get a report card twice a year which grades them on their transplant outcomes. This includes how many patients survived and how many kept a functional donated organ. If the hospital falls below standard, they must undergo a rigorous and expensive corrective action plan.
XYN Management has created a system that allows hospitals to keep up with their report cards in real time and predicts what future report cards will look like with statistical analysis. The system will also calculate the risk for a transplant based on a patient’s medical record.
The startup has been in business for a year and a half and has 15 current clients. Miltor says the company is profitable but is also looking for additional investments.
XYN Management is currently looking to hire a high level statistician (has a college degree in statistics) who can also code. Additionally, they need an interface designer, an Apex programmer, and a programmer.

Southwest Research Institute’s ROS industrial software

Southwest Research Institute Sr. Research Engineer Shaun Edwards presented the ROS industrial software – open source software for industrial robotics programming.
Edwards is working to create a community for the software and hopes someone will be able to create a breakthrough in the industrial robotics industry. A robotics programmer, Edwards is frustrated with the current state of industry technology which has been largely resistant to change and has been lagging behind other robotic applications with 10-year-old technology. Edwards hopes more users will build up the software base and ultimately be a resource for SWRI, opening the door for greater robotics possibilities in the industrial area.
“They build up the code base. People actually give software back to the ROS industrial program. Then we can leverage that,” Edwards said.
In a demonstration of the software, Edwards showed how it can identify visible objects such as a bag on the floor. He hopes that one day industrial robots will be able to look at and interact with objects intelligently.

Coffeecup Software Founder Nick Longo on Startup Grind San Antonio

December 2, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 2 Comments

Nick Longo, founder of Coffeecup Software, co-founder of Geekdom

Nick Longo, founder of Coffeecup Software and co-founder of Geekdom, grew up in New York, really, really poor.
He shoveled snow. He also sold briefcases from a warehouse on a corner in New York at the age of 13. He was hustling and making money. That’s where entrepreneurship started with him.
He also served in the U.S. Air Force. When he got out, he ended up training greyhounds in Corpus Christi. He later opened up a coffeehouse with money borrowed from his wife, a nurse. He ended up adding Internet access to the coffeehouse and he created one of the first Internet cafes in the country. He also started developing websites and eventually he launched Coffeecup Software, which sold an HTML editor to create business websites. He later sold it and joined Rackspace. In late 2011, Longo and Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston created Geekdom, a co-working space in downtown San Antonio which nurtures high-tech startups.
This summer, Longo had just come back from running with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain – twice. He said he mitigated the risks of running the course. He had researched the entire course. He found out the best place to start is at the beginning of the course. All of the injuries took place at the end of the course, Longo said.
A lot of people told him to start at the end of the course. But his research told him different. That’s kind of the double-edged sword of mentoring in entrepreneurship.
“You should get advice from as many people as you can,” Longo said. Then sort through it and make your own decisions.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Texas Intrepid Ventures’ David Spencer on Startup Grind San Antonio

December 1, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

David Spencer is an advocate for San Antonio’s technology community.
Spencer was a founding board member and co-chair of the now defunct San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative, known as SATAI. He also served a two year term as chairman of the Texas Emerging Technology Fund, which invested in early stage technology companies in Texas. Aside from his public advocacy for the technology industry, Spencer is an entrepreneur. He founded OnBoard Software with a friend in 1996 when his employer, Kelly Air Force Base shut down. The software development company grew to $17 million in annual sales.
In 2005, Spencer sold OnBoard Software to MTC Technologies for $34 million. He has invested in a few startups since then and currently runs Texas Intrepid Ventures, which invests in commercializing military medicine.

Techstars Austin’s Jason Seats on Startup Grind San Antonio

November 29, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

Jason Seats, managing director of Techstars Austin

Jason Seats loved playing with Lego blocks as a kid and even did college projects with Legos as a young adult.
His heroes were Carl Sagan and Richard Feynman growing up and the fictional Indiana Jones. At the age of eight, he thought he wanted to be an archaeologist.
But even as a little kid he dreamed of running his own business, which he would call Seats Enterprises.
He grew up in St. Louis. His older sister is a nurse and his younger brother is getting his Phd in physics at Stanford.
He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees.
In 2006, he co-founded Slicehost, an early cloud hosting company, with Matt Tanase, a college friend. Two years later, they sold it to Rackspace for millions.
Seats served as managing director of Techstars Cloud at Geekdom in San Antonio for two years. He moved to Austin earlier this year to head up the inaugural Techstars Austin class.

Startup Grind Features Graham Weston of Rackspace

November 27, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 3 Comments

Graham Weston, co-founder and chairman of Rackspace Hosting, grew up in the greater San Antonio area.
At his first job, he worked in his dad’s cookie plant balancing the books from delivery drivers and occasionally packaging cookies. His dad owned Grandma’s Cookies and later sold the company to Frito Lay.
Weston’s first venture into entrepreneurship in grade school involved selling organic pork from his family’s ranch through advertisements proclaiming “Go Hog Wild” in the local newspaper. He also ran a photography business in high school.
In college, he would drive back and forth from Texas A&M in his VW Diesel Rabbit listening to get rich quick tapes in his cassette player.
His junior year at Texas A&M, Weston launched a successful real estate venture while going through college. He successfully protested his family’s property tax appraisal and then figured that there might be a business doing that for others. He founded a company that protested commercial property taxes.
Because of his property tax business, Weston was well positioned to see opportunities in real estate during the financial crisis of the late 1980s.
After school, Weston ended up buying one of the tallest buildings in downtown San Antonio, later named the Weston Centre at the age of 27. The building had fallen into foreclosure and then bankruptcy during the Savings and Loan Crisis of the late 1980s. He wanted to buy the KCI Tower, but wasn’t able to do it. Later the former National Bank of Commerce building came open. It was way more than Weston wanted to spend. But he raised more money and then bid against real estate mogul Sam Zell and won.
The Weston Centre later contained one of the first data centers for Rackspace. It housed some of the first websites on the Internet for YouTube and HotorNot and other Internet pioneers.
Rackspace, now a multi-billion dollar company, had a humble beginning.
Weston and his partner, Morris Miller, met three college students who bid to wire the Weston Centre with high-speed Internet access. The students didn’t get the contract, but Weston and Miller liked them. They asked them what else they were working on. That’s when Pat Condon, Dirk Elmendorf and Richard Yoo told them about their hosting business, which would later come to be known as Rackspace.
Weston recounted how they invested $1 million and in less than a year another company wanted to buy the business for $20 million. That deal fell through. But they knew they had a solid business, which was making money every month. They grew Rackspace by adding more servers and data centers and in 2001 they planned to take the company public, but the dot com bust occurred. They went through a few tough years, but they were able to persevere and succeed where many failed largely through Rackspace’s focus on providing “fanatical” customer support.
In 2008, Rackspace went public at $12 a share. Its stock closed Wednesday at $37 a share. The company has a market capitalization of more than $5 billion.
Today, Rackspace has more than 5,000 employees worldwide and is San Antonio’s largest high-tech employer with close to 3,000 employees in Central Texas. Rackspace also has an Austin office.

Insights from Gov. Rick Perry’s Visit to Israel

November 26, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By ALAN WEINKRANTZ
Special Contributor to Silicon Hills News

Photo and videos by Alan Weinkrantz

I have been traveling back and forth to Israel for just about twenty years. Most of what I worked on with my Israeli clients has been focused on platform technologies such as the commercialization of VoIP, the rise of computer security, the birth of rapid prototyping and Wi-Fi, the deployment of IPTV, the tablet PC, and many other transformational technologies, which today are mainstream.
Israel is going through a transformation in its startup and innovation economy. The technologies of what became the core infrastructure of the Internet we live on today, are now being replicated in areas such as agriculture, security, medical devices, energy, and water.
People come to Israel from all over the world to create and do new things. While you can say it’s technology in the literal sense, I think what’s going on there is something that borders on being spiritual and even possibly religious, depending on what you believe in.
It’s code.
You know, the code from the various religions, beliefs sets and the rising consciousness of our planet that are now being written into the Internet of things.
I believe that a new type of scripture is being written – one that is part of a gigantic interconnected network and massive data sets. And much of that scripture is being written, or rather, coded in Israel.
If you take into account that Israel is the home of major R&D centers like Apple, Intel, GE, Cisco, Google, HP, TI, IBM, Microsoft , eBay and recently, Facebook, much of what drives the future of the global innovation comes from this very blessed region of the world.
Last month, Texas Governor Rick Perry visited Israel to open the new Texas A&M “Peace” campus in Nazareth. He gave a keynote at the WATEC Water Conference and met with various business and political leaders, such as President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu
A long time friend, Jon Medved, who runs the world’s largest equity-based crowdfunding platform, OurCrowd, invited me to join Governor Perry for breakfast in Jerusalem.
We met with the Governor and six others with him on the trip, and discussed the startup economy of Israel and addressed the opportunities for Texas to be greater aligned with Israel.

In addition to our discussion about Texas and Israel, Governor Perry was kind enough to provide this impromptu video inviting Israeli startups to come to Austin for SXSW 2014. (Disclosure: SXSW was a partial travel sponsor of my trip).
Medved is a long time VC, investor, and entrepreneur whose fund has some very interesting deal flow of companies to look at. In doing so, he is very much an economic and innovation indicator of what’s coming out of Israel.
Medved will be in Texas next month to hold meetings in Dallas and Houston to connect with the community who has expressed an interest in being part of his approach to investing in Israel’s startup economy.
When it comes to areas of energy, agriculture, security, medical devices and water, I believe that there is no other state in the U.S. that can even come close to where both Texas and Israel are heading. We have the smarts, the money, the land and the natural resources to build what’s next and what’s possible if Texas and Israel will more closely align.
While doing the traditional things that politicians do when they travel abroad, my sense was that Governor Perry went to Israel to sew the seeds of bringing the State of Israel and The Lone Star State closer together what could be a new wave of economic and social entrepreneurial development over the next 20 years.
It will be interesting to see what transpires from Governor Perry’s mission to Israel, some of which I genuinely believe involved some degree of divine intervention from both sides, regardless of what religious beliefs one may have.
To whoever becomes our next Governor, I hope you will continue to follow in his vision.
After all, it’s just code.

Based at Geekdom in San Antonio, Alan Weinkrantz is a Public Relations Advisor and Communications Strategist focused on technology, platforms, and industry standards.

New Rules, New Tools for Startups and Tech Companies

November 26, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 1 Comment

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Duane La Bom with the Open Cloud Academy

The demand for high tech workers outstrips the supply.
So Rackspace Hosting came up with an innovative solution. The San Antonio-based company launched the Open Cloud Academy last year to put people through a rigorous training program that equips them to do jobs as network systems administrators and other technical positions.
“I can get you job ready in a matter of two to three months,” said Duane La Bom, director of training at Rackspace and director at the Open Cloud Academy.
La Bom spoke on a panel at FreeFlow Research’s New Rules, New Tools San Antonio event Monday night at Geekdom. The panel focused on new training opportunities to match skilled workers with jobs. It also touched on new ways to raise money for startups through equity-based crowdfunding.

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research

Peter French, founder of FreeFlow Research, also announced his startup has merged with John Hill’s Technology Connexus Association, a nonprofit technology research organization. FreeFlow Research will continue to be based at Geekdom and will also sponsor more events in coming months, French said.
The other panelists included Andres Traslavina with MyEdu, an Austin-based startup, Luis Martinez with Trinity University, Joy Schoffler with Leverage PR and CF50 and Nathan Roach with Greenhouse.
Originally, Rackspace planned to hire about a third of the graduates from the Open Cloud Academy. But to date, it has hired 68 percent of the graduates, La Bom said. The other 30 percent have found jobs with other companies, he said.
The Open Cloud Academy also focuses on helping military veterans find jobs in the commercial world and it adds some diversity to the typical candidates Rackspace hires for IT jobs, La Bom said.
“We wanted to get more females and more minorities into IT. The Open Cloud Academy was a way to do that,” he said.
The Open Cloud Academy classes costs between $3,500 and $4,000 and lasts between eight to ten weeks. Typically, Rackspace paid $12,000 to $15,000 to a recruiter for each technical person it hired. Now it can avoid those costs by training its own IT workers, La Bom said.
Traslavina with MyEdu said the startup helps students plan their careers by using academic tools and simple apps to make their lives easier. MyEdu can also unveil their innate talent and help them visually set up a portfolio of their projects, work experiences and academic credentials, he said.
“We focus on helping recruiters hire potential and not focus on the traditional hiring credentials,” he said. .

New Rules, New Tools San Antonio panel

Trinity University’s focus is on undergraduate education and its strength is in equipping students with critical thinking skills, said Martinez with Trinity.
“We match students with opportunities for real world experience plus the community here in San Antonio,” Martinez said.
San Antonio’s entrepreneurial community is like Boston in the 1980s, Martinez said. Lots of entrepreneurial ventures and innovate growth is happening in San Antonio right now, he said.
Rackspace has also partnered with high school programs to recruit younger students to pursue careers in Information Technology jobs, La Bom said.
And the Open Cloud Academy does not yet have specific funding for veterans yet, but Project Quest and Workforce Solutions Alamo both provide scholarships to attend the programs.
Project Quest covers 50 percent of the tuition costs for students who qualify and also reimburses them up to two months rent and provides money for utilities and childcare costs too.
The Workforce Solutions Alamo provides funding through a Federal fund.
To date, 20 students have received a full scholarship to attend the Open Cloud Academy under that program and another 45 received funding through Project Quest, La Bom said.

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Five Startups Pitch at 3 Day Startup San Antonio

November 25, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Five startup teams pitched ideas at the latest 3 Day Startup San Antonio event last weekend.
Cristal Glangchai and the Venturelab team ran the event, which was the ninth 3DS San Antonio. Trinity University sponsored the event hosted at Geekdom.
Thirty-five students participated in the 3 Day Startup. They went through all the phases of starting a company, including the idea phase, market validation and research, prototyping, and pitch preparation.
“The event has been really eye opening,” said UTSA Sophomore David Barrick. “It’s been very hard. We’ve been shut down a lot by the mentors, but there has been very good feedback and constructive criticism, especially for our group.”
Mentors for the event included Cole Wollak, Richard Ortega, Michael Girdley, Pat Condon, Kaoru Fujita, Niraj Kumar, Nick Honegger, and Cristal Glangchai. They worked with each team to refine ideas and perfect pitches right up to the final pitch Sunday night. After giving their final pitch, a panel of Judges including Rackspace founder Dirk Elmendorf questioned each team’s presenter. The other panelists included Sweb Development founder Magaly Chocano, UTSA Entrepreneurship professor Anita Leffel, Trinity University Entrepreneurship Professor Luis Martinez, and Pressable founder Vid Luther.

The following five startups presented:

Code Venture

Presented by Trinity freshman Kylie Moden, Code Ventures is creating an iPhone and iPad app that teaches kids how to code at an early age. The app takes a story book approach, and entering the correct coding syntax for each lesson will make the story characters talk or interact. The lessons are designed for kids ages 7 to 12 and will help them take the very first steps into the coding world. The demo shown was programmed to teach Java, but Moden says the app could be easily adapted to other languages.
Code Venture’s app will give away the first lesson – or chapter — for free, with additional lessons costing $4.99. They will target the app to parents that are already professionals in high tech jobs, such as those at Rackspace Hosting and USAA. The app will also be marketed to the homeschooling community, which Moden plans to reach by going to homeschooled conventions and conferences.
Code Ventures is looking for a mentor specializing in CS education and a graphic designer.

Seat Check

Seat Check is creating an app based solution to a rather disgusting real world problem: dirty toilets. Trinity accounting graduate Sergio Giralt opened the presentation with a video of a public bathroom user’s worst fear – having to clean the toilet seat.
His solution, Seat Check, will use both a disinfectant wipe dispenser and an app which functions like a prepaid card. Using the app’s “bump” feature, a user will be able to make a wipe dispense from a machine without having to touch anything else in the restroom. The wipe can then be used to sanitize the toilet and can be flushed after use. The app will cost users 25 cents to 50 cents a wipe, depending on the deal struck with the venue location.
Seat Check plans to market the solution first to Regal Cinemas, but also wants to target restaurants, gas stations, and arenas. The startup is looking for an initial investment of $15,000 and wants to hire someone who can help build the actual product dispenser. The investment will help them move their first prototypes into the movie theaters.

Fashion Connection

Fashion Connection’s business model is based on a simple assumption: Men hate to shop. UTSA sophomore Rohit Saxena’s solution is to connect male shoppers with fashion experts who can help them shop — either through a video consultation service or connecting the shopper to a fashion connoisseur to walk them through the store.
The online consultation would start at $19.95 for 30 minutes and the connoisseur service would start at $39.95 per shopping session – though the startup did not define how long it would last. It would differ from similar services offered in other stores in that the connoisseur could be available to shop anywhere. Potential connoisseurs would have to upload a fashion profile of themselves to be considered by the startup and would be paid as contractors. The service would start in San Antonio and would begin advertising primarily in local malls.
Fashion Connection is looking for graphic designers and web developers to help them put their service together.

BodyH4X

Presented by Rackspace developer and running enthusiast Gus Ireland, BodyH4X helps athletes know when they are overworking themselves by providing a way to track their body’s cortisol levels. Cortisol is a stress related hormone that can make the body covert muscle to fat as a survival mechanism, hindering athletic performance.
Every person has a specific cortisol baseline, and BodyH4X helps runners establish that baseline by using a mouth swab litmus test. After testing their levels, users will record them in the BodyH4X app by utilizing their smartphone’s camera to input the swab color and record a level. Additionally, the app will import data from a runner’s fitness tracking device, such as FitBit, to compare those levels with the athlete’s performance data. Ultimately, this will help athletes determine when they are losing performance to high cortisol levels.
Ireland plans to market the product to runners, bikers, and swimmers. The app will have a free version that tracks cortisol levels along with the performance data and a paid version which will give athletes predictions and warnings about their workout routines. The paid version is $25 a month.

Local Care Package

Local Care Package was started to create a way for distant parents to order packages of San Antonio products for students attending colleges in the city. Presented by Graphic Designer and Marketer Leslie Tolbert, the startup has already begun to form partnerships with various businesses around town to create the packages. Parents can choose from several pre-assembled packages or can select from a list of products. According to Tolbert, it is both a good way for parents to show that they care and a way for local businesses to find new customers. The packages will range in price from $30 to $100.
Local Care Package hopes to partnership with local universities and campus organizations to get their service advertised on flyers and newsletters that go out to parents. They will also work to build a team of drivers in San Antonio. They have already received their first order from parents in Honduras, who they connected with while doing market research.
Of the many startup ideas pitched at the previous eight 3DS San Antonio events, seven companies have gone on to receive a combined total of $2.6 million in funding.
While most 3DS pitches will not result in successful companies, panelist and UTSA entrepreneurship professor Anita Leffel sees the events as critical to producing future entrepreneurs.
“It gives them self-confidence,” Leffel said. “That is what I like so much about this type of program, why we did it at UTSA and will now do it every semester. I’ve watched people blossom.”
Pressable founder and panelist Vid Luther sees 3 Day Startup as having an important link to the Geekdom ecosystem, as many of those first 3DS participants still pursue startups at Geekdom.
“You see entrepreneurs over here that, while their ideas may not be the ones that they are pursuing today, they were able to make networks and connections that got them to build and work on the things that they are currently working on,” Luther said. “I think long term it’s very hard to tell how successful this will be but short term it’s a very good networking thing that allows you to do more than just your résumé.”

Geekdom is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News

Rackspace Hosting Holds 7th Annual Thanksgiving Day Food Drive

November 24, 2013 / LauraLorek@gmail.com / 0 Comments

By ANDREW MOORE
Reporter with Silicon Hills News

——–
All photos by Samantha Davis.

Despite the 40 degree weather and high wind, two turkeys and the Roosevelt Rough Rider mascot continued to dance to the music in front of Rackspace Hosting’s San Antonio headquarters. The normally hot and stuffy mascot suits now failed to keep them warm.
“The thing that kept me warm today is dancing a lot,” Rackspace Sr. Manager for Lead Generation and cooked-turkey mascot Stan Slimp said.
But Slimp wasn’t the only frozen turkey on the move. Several feet away more than 70 volunteers loaded turkey after turkey into local residents’ vehicles along with everything else needed for a complete Thanksgiving meal.

In total, Rackspace Hosting purchased 1,500 turkeys for the event. Additionally, 1,500 “Rackers” spent their own money to put together 1,546 boxes of food which included mashed potatoes, rice, beans, green beans, carrots, cranberry sauce and more. The boxes also contained non-Thanksgiving items such as peanut butter, jelly, cereal, and spaghetti for kids to eat over the winter break. The San Antonio Food Bank supplied additional soda, chips, fresh produce, and bread for 1,500 families as well as boxes for the Rackers to use. In total, each family received around 100 pounds of food.
“It’s part of our culture to give back, to be a neighbor,” Rackspace Community Affairs

Specialist Allie Howard said. “One of the reasons that we moved into this side of town and into this neighborhood is because we had an opportunity to make a difference and to elevate this community.”
Around 20 Food Bank volunteers and 16 Theodore Roosevelt High School students helped the Rackers load all the produce into each car. More volunteers arrived from the community as well. Some of the Racker’s children even drew Thanksgiving pictures to give away to the families.
“It may be hard work, but at least we are able to help the community,” Theodore Roosevelt Senior Robert Robledo said. “It’s fun to be here, to be helping out someone you don’t know.”
To distribute vouchers for the food, Rackspace worked with family specialists at seven northeast San Antonio schools in the Walzem area and the San Antonio Food Bank. The vouchers were specifically targeted to families under the poverty line. According to San Antonio Food Bank COO Erika Borrego, one in four children and one in five adults in the Walzem area are classified as “food insecure” — meaning they are often not sure where their next meal will come from. In the local schools which received vouchers, more than 90 percent of students live at or below the poverty line. Without the Rackspace food drive, many residents would not be able to have a Thanksgiving.
“It really helps us out. Otherwise we wouldn’t have had anything,” resident Karen Kendrick said. “It’s going to make a big difference for us because we don’t really have any relatives to get together with.”
“The way things are right now, as hard as things are, anything that people give you makes you feel good,” resident Manuela Munoz said. “This is a lot of love. You gotta love people for them to be out here in this cold weather. It’s a blessing.”
While giving out food was the main goal of the event, Rackspace also worked hard to create a fun and welcoming atmosphere. For the last two years, Rackspace K-Rack DJ and Private Cloud Evangelist Dale Bracey pumped out dance music to keep residents, and volunteers, upbeat.
“Everybody’s dancing. We had people rolling up just dancing in their cars with a smile on their face,” Bracey said as his system played Baauer’s Harlem Shake. “You kind of get them involved; make them feel part of it.”
“It’s nice to be able to make people laugh and have a good time and make them feel welcome.” Rackspace’s Lawrence “Sugar Bear” Reyes said as he greeted residents in his turkey suit. “It is great to see Rackspace leading the charge here for the community, and people volunteering their time left and right to be part of something special.”

Some residents, such as Marvin Trimble, even got out of their car to join the festivities.
“Bro, I was dancin’!,” resident Trimble said. “They made this fun. They made a sad situation – a man needin’ some help – fun!”
At the end of the day, the food drive gave out 1,011 complete meals – roughly 50.5 tons of food. The San Antonio Food bank plans to distribute the remaining 239 turkeys and roughly 500 food boxes across San Antonio and the surrounding counties.