It was May of 2021: COVID-19 vaccines were going into arms and transmission rates were low. San Antonio, like the rest of the country, was feeling hopeful. It was going to be a “hot vax summer,” when we would finally be able to reunite.
Tech Bloc, the tech sector advocacy group, was ready to help make that happen. It hosted a “Reboot Rally” in downtown’s Legacy Park, drawing hundreds of young professionals and tech workers thrilled to network in person once again.
Then came the Delta variant.
“Little did we know we were only about a third, or maybe halfway through the pandemic,” said David Heard, a co-founder of Tech Bloc. “That really damaged my psyche.”
Heard, who announced Monday that he has stepped down as the inaugural CEO of the nonprofit he co-founded in 2015 with former Rackspace employees and longtime tech industry boosters Lew Moorman and Lorenzo Gomez, originally planned to bow out of the top job before the pandemic.
In February of 2020, just weeks before the country locked down to “flatten the curve,” the Tech Bloc board engaged in what board chairman Dirk Elmendorf called “a very big strategic planning session” to chart the group’s course in the coming years without Heard at the helm.
That effort was put on hold at the start of the pandemic, as the organization, like so many others, pivoted to how it could help the community in the immediate term.
Now, Elmendorf said, the clouds appear to have truly parted, and Tech Bloc will move forward with Ileana Gonzalez, 29, at the helm. Gonzalez, a UTSA graduate who was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, has been working in the tech startup community since she graduated in 2016.
She takes over as the local tech landscape has changed dramatically since 2019. Remote and hybrid work have changed the calculus for where many employees live and work. San Antonio’s downtown has still not recovered from the pandemic. On the plus side, UTSA’s downtown School of Data Science will help fill the local pipeline for tech talent, while the cybersecurity ecosystem at Port San Antonio continues to grow.
Elmendorf credits Heard with leading Tech Bloc successfully through the changes.
“He did so much for Tech Bloc [through] the pandemic. The fact that we still exist at all is largely due to David Heard,” he said.
Waiting for the call
For his part, Heard is now savoring the wins Tech Bloc notched, not least of which was creating the organization in the first place, pulling together hundreds of tech workers and other young professionals who were, it turned out, just waiting for the call.
That call came in 2015, after rideshare companies packed up and left San Antonio thanks in part to lobbying by legacy taxi companies and a City Council that had yet to recognize the future of the sharing economy. A city without rideshare, organizers believed, would be unable to attract the kind of young, highly educated workforce San Antonio leaders said they sought.
Hundreds attended that first meeting, many more than organizers expected, and Tech Bloc became a political force almost immediately, helping pave the way for rideshare companies’ return. After that victory, Tech Bloc turned its attention to advocating for the city’s tech sector, and policies that would attract young professionals.
In addition to its advocacy, Tech Bloc hosted well-attended annual events it dubbed rallies, complete with high-profile keynote speakers. The last major rally before 2021’s Reboot was its 2019 rally, featuring Reed Hastings, co-founder and CEO of Netflix.
Heard told the San Antonio Report he considers those rallies, and the engagement Tech Bloc fostered in general, one of the organization’s biggest accomplishments, although he also likened the question to a parent being asked, “Who’s your favorite kid?”
But bringing people together “is a big point of pride for me.” More than one couple met at Tech Bloc events and later married, he said. “We brought tech together over the last eight years in ways that it had not come together before.”
Beyond that, he said, the tech industry in San Antonio now has a policy voice. Before Tech Bloc, there was no single entity representing the sector. Today, he said, City Hall “knows who to call — they call us all the time. We have a seat at the table.”
Heard also cited Tech Bloc’s support of CAST Tech High School, located at the original Fox Tech campus downtown.
“Look, given its support by Charles Butt and H-E-B, CAST Tech was going to happen with or without us,” he said. “But once we did team up, the conversation shifted to, ‘that high school has to be downtown.'”
Tech Bloc helped raise money for CAST Tech from its tech industry members and Heard personally served as an inaugural board member.
Jeanne Russell, executive director of the CAST Schools, recalled the announcement that SAISD would build CAST Tech downtown at Tech Bloc’s first anniversary rally. The partnership, she said, was “synergistic and powerful.”
Post-pandemic challenges
Now, as the $11 billion tech sector in San Antonio continues to expand — perhaps most notably at Port San Antonio, which welcomed its latest cybersecurity company just last week — Heard will remain on Tech Bloc’s board and support Gonzalez as she steps into the role and guides the organization to meet the challenges of a post-pandemic world.
Gonzalez, who was still hoarse on Tuesday after cheering for UTSA as it walloped Texas State on Saturday, is already deeply embedded in the tech community. She has worked with Tech Stars, a Colorado-based accelerator, and for Capital Factory, helping the Austin-based incubator open up shop in San Antonio.
She’s also led Tech Bloc’s national Tech Fuel competition for startups for the past four years, growing the event to more than 80 companies that will vie for $100,000 in prize money this year. Gonzalez also works as a consultant, helping startups connect with venture capital.
She said advocating and growing San Antonio’s tech sector will be her focus at Tech Bloc, and she hopes to ultimately grow the organization.
“I’m here to connect all of the entities throughout the city” rather than focusing on individual tech hubs, she said. “I want us to come out stronger together as a city so that we can start [competing] statewide and nationally.” She said for now she’s in “exploration” mode.
Like Heard, who is the chief marketing officer of SecureLogix, a cybersecurity company, Gonzalez will keep her day job and run Tech Bloc on the side.
For his part, Elmendorf said it was difficult to accept that all the work that went into the organization’s February 2020 strategic planning effort will never be implemented. But ultimately, he said, “We cleared the decks to say, OK, let’s regroup and think about what we want to do post-COVID.”
Doing so, he said, “provides more room to give Ileana the runway to tackle things that are more relevant now.”
San Antonio’s tech scene has long been more collaborative than cut-throat, he said, “And I want more people to see themselves as, ‘Hey, I can start something here and build it into something big. And the more people do that, the more successful our city will be.'”
