“If I went back to my laboratory right now, I’d have a very difficult time trying to find data that I created and try to cross-reference it with other files,” Vela said. “These labs experience a lot of turnover. Eventually, that data over time becomes inaccessible to us.”

Vela put the research aside and made his way to San Antonio to try to develop a solution at Geekdom.

There, he met Tolbert and J. Arturo Covarrubias, a native of Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, who is the team’s technical engineer and is building the infrastructure.

As part of Techstars, they’ve gotten $118,000 in equity investments so far.

On April 9, they’ll seal a 13-week term at Techstars with the group demo pitch — a chance to drum up more funds from investors.

A few blocks away at the Rand Building, Air Force veteran Layne Perelli was at a Geekdom “hot desk,” working on CogSpeed. It’s an app that will be able to test — in the field and within minutes — whether a pilot or driver is mentally able to perform or a high school athlete is showing signs of a concussion.

“I refer to it as a speedometer for the brain,” Perelli said.

Perelli, a human factors engineer who once worked at the School of Aerospace Medicine at Brooks AFB, got the patent for his brain gauge in 1984, before the technology to make it mobile existed.

When iPhones and iPads rolled around, he knew his time had come.

For two years, before finding out about Geekdom, he sought in vain for the right people to help him translate his test into an app.

“I had some rudimentary programming, but I’m a designer, not a software guy,” he said. “Well, Geekdom was developed and I found out about it. And I came here in September of 2013, just a little over a year ago; and literally within three days of being here, I found a programmer.”

By October 2013, he’d found a second programmer through Rackspace. And in June, he found a business manager.

There are no corner offices at Geekdom. But if there were a control center for it all, it would be in the cloud space of its director, Lorenzo Gomez.

On a recent afternoon, he was down to the wire on readying the co-working space’s new event center for a South by Southwest meet-up.

Then there are the blueprints that are in the works for the next floorwide expansion at the Rand Building, purchased by Rackspace CEO and Geekdom co-founder Graham Weston to house Geekdom’s evolution into San Antonio’s nexus of the next new tech thing.

That evolution is part of Geekdom’s growing up.

Geekdom’s various startups, some already working businesses, have passed the $25 million mark in terms of investment capital. The Geekdom Fund, a separate venture capital fund, has just reported nearly $3 million in equity from 47 investors. The tech-oriented co-working space has 800 members collaborating on projects.

“We’ve created enough momentum and density to where this is where all the tech people want to be,” said Nick Longo, another Geekdom co-founder. This is why there’s a waiting list to get in.

Gomez admits he wasn’t quite sure San Antonio was a place where something like Geekdom could work.

“I think Nick probably knew that there was this pent-up scene here,” Gomez said. “I was very skeptical, but he knew; and so when they launched, there were so many people that showed up. It was really perfect timing.”

Co-locating has allowed for tech growth that’s been “magical,” Michael Girdley, Geekdom Fund CEO and CodeUp coding school founder, said from the fund’s office in the Weston Centre.

“I’ve seen so many things happen positively because everybody’s in the same place,” he said.

On the floor below, the latest class of San Antonio’s Techstars, a selective coaching program aimed at helping startups move from concept to demo, worked to perfect their apps.

“We think we’re onto something pretty big,” said Leslie Tolbert, a San Antonio native who has taken on the integration and design role for Nebulab. This is a three-member team that’s building a cloud-based lab management system for scientists. It helps that its CEO is a scientist.

Johns Hopkins University graduate Guillermo Vela of Laredo was conducting brain cancer and stem cell research when he realized how much work was lost because of a lack of a good digital storage platform.

“If I get this off the ground and it works, it’ll be because of the resources I found at Geekdom,” he said. “For me, it’s worked out fantastically.”

On another floor at Rand, David Barrick, the 20-year-old CEO of Lightly, was readying both hardware and software for the debut of his stage lighting app.

Barrick is a pastor’s kid who grew up trying to master the church’s lighting system. He put his electrical engineering degree at the University of Texas at San Antonio on hold to come to Geekdom.

In March, his app will debut in five area churches.

It wasn’t a difficult decision to leave school and become a Geekdom entrepreneur with access to office space and mentors, he said.

“I’d rather do something right now, make something of myself now and see this vision through right now,” he said. “I’ve got a huge opportunity in front of me, and I need to pursue the opportunity at hand and not wait for an opportunity for a job in two years.”

Article via San Antonio Express-News and the original article is available here.