After learning to code through a traditional coding bootcamp, and later teaching at a couple others, Laura Ruiz-Roehrs thought there might be a better way.
She took her idea to Geekdom’s Startup Bootcamp in February, and the experience convinced her that her idea was indeed marketable. She eventually quit her day job and enrolled in Geekdom’s incubator program, working to scale Code Flight, which aggregates coding resources in a way that’s less expensive and more self-guided than a coding bootcamp.
Geekdom, which launched as a co-working space and tech incubator downtown in 2011, is now taking its weekend-long startup bootcamp on the road, thanks to support from Bexar County.
County commissioners in May agreed to fund 10 bootcamps that will be free for participants, using $175,000 from the county’s innovation fund. Each of the four county precincts will host one, with the rest to be held at Geekdom’s East Houston Street location.
The first, set for Friday evening at Our Lady of the Lake University, is aimed at reaching college students and others on the West Side who might not get as much exposure to these types of opportunities as their peers at other colleges, said Commissioner Justin Rodriguez (Pct. 2).
“It’s not for lack of talent,” said Rodriguez, who will be on hand to kick off the bootcamp. “This is an opportunity to plant a flag and potentially find the next great company.”
The revamped bootcamp is an updated version of Startup Weekend, with tweaks made to better serve a wider variety of would-be entrepreneurs, said Charles Woodin, CEO of Geekdom. The earlier iteration, he said, put attendees into small groups to work on a single idea; the new version allows everyone to work on their own.
Additionally, while Geekdom’s roots are in tech, the new bootcamp will be applicable to anyone with a business idea, said Woodin, who pitched the updated program to county commissioners. By the end of the weekend, each bootcamper should come away with a basic pitch deck, which helps potential investors understand a company’s value, an elevator pitch and a one-page business plan outline.
Ruiz-Roehrs said the variety of business ideas her fellow bootcampers worked on helped make the weekend feel collaborative rather than competitive.
Geekdom’s wider goal is to help launch 500 startups over the next decade, with three-quarters of them staying in San Antonio. To that end, it has expanded and tweaked its programming beyond the bootcamp, to offer multiple entry points for startups to move through a more defined pipeline, as Ruiz-Roehrs has done with CodeFlight.
These updates come at a time when entrepreneurship is experiencing something of a renaissance after years of what some business experts fretted was a decline in American innovation and flagging business creation.
Entrepreneurship unexpectedly received a shot in the arm during the pandemic, however, short-circuiting that decline. While COVID lockdowns blew up the economy almost overnight, by July of 2020, new businesses were being created at a record clip.
And while the pace of new business creation has slowed slightly since then, Bexar County recorded more than 25,000 new business formations in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, thousands more than in 2019.
That growth is reflected in the increasing number of incubators in San Antonio.
Austin’s Capital Factory opened a location at Port San Antonio in 2021 to expand its Center for Defense Innovation, which nurtures partnerships between the private sector and the U.S. military, while VelocityTX focuses on early-stage bioscience companies. And long before new business ventures were known as startups, LiftFund was offering loans to high-risk entrepreneurs.
Bexar County launched its own innovation fund in 2016, with $1 million annually commissioners can use to, among other goals, fund talent development competitions and help entrepreneurs get their ideas to market and scale them.
Commissioners have funded efforts like TechFuel, a startup funding competition, said Jordana Matthews, the county’s program director for special initiatives — as well as matching grants for companies that have already secured funding from a pair of federal programs that enables small businesses to partner with public research institutions to develop new technology and bring it to market.
Geekdom’s updated bootcamp program fits well with the county’s innovation goals, Matthews said.
Taking the program into each commissioner’s precinct allows each of them to offer input to tailor the event to their constituents and interests, Woodin said. Commissioner Grant Moody (Pct. 3) has said he is interested in programming focused on veterans, Woodin said, while Commissioner Rebeca Clay-Flores suggested a women-centered event in Precinct 1. County Judge Peter Sakai will “own” one of the six bootcamps to be held at Geekdom.
Matthew Espinoza, who incubated his own business at Geekdom several years ago, is now overseeing the organization’s expanded programming. He emphasized that even people without a specific business idea who just want to learn more about the basics of refining an idea and starting a business can benefit from a bootcamp.
He said he’s expecting between 20 and 30 participants for the first camp, slightly more than usual.
“Given that this is our first event not at Geekdom, we wanted to make sure we got the word out,” he said. “We’ve really leaned on our community partners, and people in the entrepreneurial community, and the county, to let people know about the bootcamp.”
With nine more that will take place through 2024, he said, there’s plenty of opportunity for anyone interested to get involved.
