San Antonio, home to the Alamo, has a long history of innovation. The city is where the U.S. Air Force originally took flight and today all U.S. Air Force recruits come through Lackland AFB for basic training. NASA also did testing on monkeys for space flights at the former Brooks AFB and the military base played a key role in training astronauts for space.
San Antonio also had one of the nation’s first network computer companies: Datapoint. The roots of innovation run deep here and continue to flourish with giant technology companies like Rackspace Hosting. It grew from a humble startup to a $1 billion company. And now Geekdom, a downtown coworking and collaboration space, is working to help incubate the next generation of technology companies locally. In its first year, it has helped more than 50 companies and hosted the first class of the TechStars Cloud. Join the San Antonio community here.
For the first meeting of Startup Grind in San Antonio, it is only fitting to have a true innovator, Jason Seats one of the movers and shakers in San Antonio’s startup community. He currently serves as managing director of the TechStars Cloud program, which takes place every January to April at Geekdom. The theme-based accelerator has helped launch 23 companies in two years. Seats is also an active angel investor. He’s also a mentor to 3 Day Startup San Antonio and High School Startup.
In 2006, Seats, cofounded Slicehost, an early cloud computing hosting company, with his college friend Matt Tanase and two years later sold it to Rackspace for millions. He graduated in 2001 from St. Louis University with two degrees in computer science and engineering. Seats moved to San Antonio after the acquisition of Slicehost by Rackspace. He worked at Rackspace until 2010 as vice president of software development for Rackspace Cloud, managing the cloud engineering teams. Seats and his wife have two young children. The event will take place on the 11th floor of Geekdom, starting at 7 p.m. on January 29th. Please join us for the thought-provoking talk from one of the city’s top movers and shakers in the technology industry nationwide and locally.