Luz Cristal Glangchai Archives

Luz Cristal Glangchai, founder of VentureLab, photo courtesy of VentureLab

Luz Cristal Glangchai, a scientist and founder of VentureLab in San Antonio, spoke last month at the fifth annual TedXSanAntonio event.

Glangchai wants more girls to become engineers. She runs a nonprofit organization which teaches kids as young as five to high school age skills in entrepreneurship and to experiment in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.

Three students companies from VentureLab have already raised $240,000 in funding, according to Glangchai.

Before launching VentureLab, Glangchai served as the director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Trinity University. She also managed the Idea to Product Program at the University of Texas at Austin. And she founded NANOTaxi, a drug-delivery company that developed disease-responsive nanoparticles to target tumor tissues.

Glangchai holds a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from UT Austin, as well as doctoral certificates in Cellular and Molecular Imaging for Diagnostics and Therapeutics, and in Nanoscience and Nanotechnology. She holds an M.S. in biomedical engineering, a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in the Plan II Honors Program from UT Austin.

For three days, 40 people will meet, brainstorm and create companies during San Antonio’s Three Day Startup Weekend.
The action takes place this Friday at the Geekdom at the Weston Centre in downtown San Antonio.
Luz Cristal Glangchai, associate director of Trinity University’s Center for Entrepreneurship, oversees the program. She held a bootcamp last night at Trinity for the participants to brief them on what to expect during the weekend and what to bring with them.
The weekend kicks off at 2:30 p.m. on Friday and concludes with the newly-formed companies pitching their ventures to funders and others on Sunday. That portion is open to the public, but the rest is closed.
About half the participants are students from Trinity, the University of Texas at Austin and at San Antonio, St. Mary’s and even as far away as Rice and Iowa State.
“It’s really about education,” Glangchai said. “It’s kind of a really intense hands on lesson in entrepreneurship.”
This is the third Three Day Startup Weekend in San Antonio. The first took place at the Molina Healthcare building last November, followed by another one at Rackspace in May, Glangchai said.
Three Day Startup Weekend, fashioned after the original Startup Weekend, took place in Austin. Some University of Texas students held the first one in 2008. Since then, companies spin out of the Austin startup weekends have raised $4 million. Some of them include Famigo and Forecast.
The biggest success story in San Antonio is BandDemand, Glangchai said.

Tag: Luz Cristal Glangchai

Encouraging Girls to Become Engineers

San Antonio’s Three Day Startup kicks off Friday