191. San Antonio Joins MIT's REAP Program: Geekdom's Charles Woodin on Building a Startup Ecosystem That Stays

Yep.

And so what is maybe different in the quality and nature of Geekdom today in your experience, 2026 versus when you stepped in as the business development manager? We were recounting before we hit record that you've been a familiar face for myself since I moved to San Antonio in 2017 here at Geekdom as I started to plug in and out.

But what do you feel like is different in the nature and the quality of this space today? Yeah.

Yeah,

I mean, when I put myself in the shoes of joining the team in 2017, geekdom was in an interesting place then.

And before I dive too far in, I'll say that one of my top strengths, which we do strength finders here, is context.

It's one of my top strengths.

And so I spent a lot of my time, even before becoming CEO, trying to understand the context of geekdom from 2011 until 2017 when I joined, so the first six years.

And that in and of itself, I think, had its own identity.

But what I was joining in 2017 was a place that was going through a transition.

And what I mean by that is looking back from 2011 till 2016, there was a really foundational program that existed within Geekdom that I think helped form the identity of what Geekdom was to the people that worked within it and the people who saw it from outside, which was a program called Techstars Cloud Accelerator.

And that Techstars accelerator brought 44 different companies into this space during that time, you know, when Geekdom was at the Wesson Center and then when it moved over here in about 2015, 2016.

And that program really, I think, brought this expectation and knowledge of tech forward.

and entrepreneurship and acceleration, it was a large part of the identity of Geekdom.

However, Geekdom as a business model, as an entity, really operated as a co-working space throughout that whole time, but yet that identity piece was a part of what Graham and Nick's original intent was when they started the company back in 2011. was to be a place for those types of things to happen.

And so flashing forward to 2017 when I joined, Techstars had just shut down here the year before.

There wasn't an entity or a program that was bringing that type of identity to the surface the way that it was in the past.

And so there was this, what do we do now type of a clean slate canvas that we were working with.

And when I was given the opportunity to step in as CEO a year and a half later, that was still something that was not formulated.

We had done small things to start creating or filling that gap.

We had created a pre-accelerator program, which had some amazing companies go through.

2018, we had a company called Broston.

go through, which is now called Porch Pass, doing amazing work and is scaling quite largely.

And we also had Float Me, which came through in 2019 when I became CEO.

And so that program had started.

Yep.

And so what is maybe different in the quality and nature of Geekdom today in your experience, 2026 versus when you stepped in as the business development manager? We were recounting before we hit record that you've been a familiar face for myself since I moved to San Antonio in 2017 here at Geekdom as I started to plug in and out.

But what do you feel like is different in the nature and the quality of this space today? Yeah.

Yeah,

I mean, when I put myself in the shoes of joining the team in 2017, geekdom was in an interesting place then.

And before I dive too far in, I'll say that one of my top strengths, which we do strength finders here, is context.

It's one of my top strengths.

And so I spent a lot of my time, even before becoming CEO, trying to understand the context of geekdom from 2011 until 2017 when I joined, so the first six years.

And that in and of itself, I think, had its own identity.

But what I was joining in 2017 was a place that was going through a transition.

And what I mean by that is looking back from 2011 till 2016, there was a really foundational program that existed within Geekdom that I think helped form the identity of what Geekdom was to the people that worked within it and the people who saw it from outside, which was a program called Techstars Cloud Accelerator.

And that Techstars accelerator brought 44 different companies into this space during that time, you know, when Geekdom was at the Wesson Center and then when it moved over here in about 2015, 2016.

And that program really, I think, brought this expectation and knowledge of tech forward.

and entrepreneurship and acceleration, it was a large part of the identity of Geekdom.

However, Geekdom as a business model, as an entity, really operated as a co-working space throughout that whole time, but yet that identity piece was a part of what Graham and Nick's original intent was when they started the company back in 2011. was to be a place for those types of things to happen.

And so flashing forward to 2017 when I joined, Techstars had just shut down here the year before.

There wasn't an entity or a program that was bringing that type of identity to the surface the way that it was in the past.

And so there was this, what do we do now type of a clean slate canvas that we were working with.

And when I was given the opportunity to step in as CEO a year and a half later, that was still something that was not formulated.

We had done small things to start creating or filling that gap.

We had created a pre-accelerator program, which had some amazing companies go through.

2018, we had a company called Broston.

go through, which is now called Porch Pass, doing amazing work and is scaling quite largely.

And we also had Float Me, which came through in 2019 when I became CEO.

And so that program had started.