138. Alamo Angels: The Future of South Texas Startups

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Welcome to Big City, Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard.

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Our guest today is Sebastian Garcon, the managing partner of Alamo Angels in San Antonio. It's an angel investor network that helps newly launched startups take the next big step toward becoming viable businesses. For South Texas entrepreneurs seeking early stage funding and business expertise, support from Alamo Angels can prove to be the bridge to future growth and success. I call IT Alamo Angels 2.0, Sebastian. It was founded, I believe, in 2020 and has grown from more than 32 members or investors to more than 140 accredited investors who together deployed more than $7 million across 50 plus startups to date. We'll learn more today about the alliance of individual investors, how you select startups for investment, and how listeners who are seeking to build their own nascent businesses can vie for funding from Alamo Angels.

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So welcome to Big City, Small Town, Sebastian. Bob, thank you so much for having me. I was telling you earlier I had Lasik eye surgery and I got it done in Colombia, which is where I'm from, and I haven't told you this, but obviously they restrict the use of screen time, particularly within the first 24 hours or so.

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So I was trying to figure out what do I do within this time.

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And so I've always been wanting to catch up with your podcast and that's what I did while. While I was recovering, particularly within those first hours. So I just looked you up on Spotify and I started listening to a few of your episodes. So I thought it would be good for you to know. Now we know why interest spiked in Colombia for a brief period of time. Because you were down there listening. I was. Oh, you saw it. You probably saw it. I'm making that up. We appreciate you listening wherever you were. Absolutely. And you know, I was going to ask you later, Sebastian, about your origin story and how you came to San Antonio, but I'm going to do it now instead. Since you mentioned that you're a Colombiano by birth and heritage.

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I'm always interested in what I call brain gain stories, which is how smart, talented people have come to choose San Antonio to plant their flag.

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So tell us how you got here. Yeah. Originally from Colombia.

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Like I said, born and raised in bogota, the capital. 10 million people live in Bogota, so it's a big city. I ended up coming to the US Because I had an academic scholarship to go to a school here.

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They gave me a few options out of Which I ended up choosing A and M Corpus Christi. I saw the pictures. I think that's how, you know, marketing works.

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You know, they have the Island University. You see the aerial picture of their campus, you see the guys surfing, everyone having a good time in the beach. So I'm like, that's where I want to go. And I ended up going there because of that. So that was close to 20 years ago. I did my bachelor's and master's in A and M Corpus, ended up working for the university for A and M at their innovation center, which was newly launched at the time.

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And that's what brought me to angel investing. So I just kind of fast forward five years ago, 2020, because I was already doing a lot of these. A good friend of mine who was at Velocity called me up and said, hey, we're looking at integrating Alamo Angels into the family of businesses of Velocity, and we think you may be the person to help us transition that and then hopefully take over from there. And that's basically what brought me to San Antonio. That's a big change from 10 million in Bogota to Corpus Christi, which I don't know, it's half a million people.

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350,000 last time I checked. You know, I'm a big admirer of Bogota. I lived and worked in Latin America for many years. And people may not know that in San Antonio this, but the birth of Ciclovia was in Bogota, Colombia, by the mayor and his brother. And. And we do it twice a year here. They do it every Sunday in Bogota and in other cities. Yes, there's much that we could learn from that big city. They. They figured out how to do it in a city of 10 million people every week. We ought to be able to figure out how to do that in a city of a million and a half, more than twice a year. But that's a subject for another day.

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I'm interested in the Innovation center in Corpus. I didn't. Don't know a lot about that, but I know that Alamo Angels has extended itself from San Antonio down into the Rio Grande Valley and Brownsville specifically. So are we developing more of a regional ecosystem for tech startups and entrepreneurs? Yeah, I think that's the goal, Bob. So, you know, we started looking at San Antonio. How do we expand our market here? How do we truly make an impact within everything that's happening within this local ecosystem? But because of I. Because of the time that I've spent down in Corpus Christi, I realized that there is a lot of opportunity down in The South Texas region.

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I do know that this is perhaps not the mecca for innovation in terms of, you know, venture backerable companies being born out of that region.

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But what I do also know is that there is a lot of opportunity as it relates to the funding that could potentially come out of those places. So when I talk about the South Texas region, I'm talking about all the way from San Antonio all the way down to Brownsville. You know, the Rio Grande Valley, Corpus Christi, Laredo, Macallan, Brownsville, obviously San Antonio. Like I say, those are the cities that I believe could potentially encompass that region.

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And a lot of those individuals that are doing great things in those places are already investing. They're just doing it in different asset classes.

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And so where I see an opportunity is on centralizing investment activity throughout the South Texas region, but centralize that through Alamo Angels to invest on startups. I noticed you have a couple of prominent Brownsville leaders on your board now. What's going on down there for you? Yeah, so the mayor of Brownsville, I was telling you just now, John Cohen, he's member number one for the Brownsville chapter, he believed on the vision, like I said, you know, we sold them on television that I've just shared with you, and they took us up on that vision.

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We ended up getting some funding in order for us to operate on our market, because obviously it's not the same as San Antonio, and we definitely needed to have some sort of budget to operate. And so the Brownsville Community Improvement Corporation, BCIC is basically an EDC for that region. They ended up seeing the vision and supporting it through providing us the funding that we needed to operate on that chapter.

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We opened that chapter almost a year ago, and we ended up recruiting a few leaders within those markets that joined the Alamo Angels and now are investing throughout the dynamics that we put together within the headquarters here in San Antonio. What happens down there is they basically see the same deal flow opportunities that we have in here, and they are able to now make investments into the companies that our investors here in San Antonio are also investing on. And does a foothold in Brownsville lead to future activity in Northern Mexico? And specifically maybe down not just in Matamoros or somewhere on the border, but down all the way to Monterrey.

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Yes, and we actually thought about going all the way down to Monterrey. The only reason for which we don't have an actual presence and don't plan to have presence is because they already have have a player that is already doing or meeting that mission that we like to accomplish. And that's Angel Hub. So one of the largest angel investment networks in Mexico.

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It's actually located in Monterrey. They're called Angel Hub, like I say.

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And so rather than competing with them, that's not our intention.

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We want to collaborate with them. So the synergies in between Monterrey, San Antonio and everything in between, I think are very, very big. But we don't want to establish something and duplicate efforts if somebody's already doing it. That makes sense. Well, I called Alamo Angels 2.0 at the outset. Sebastian, why don't you explain how originally launched independent of Velocity Texas and how it's been relaunched and what that means both for the organization and for velocity. Yeah, so 2020 came around, Bob, and I think you mentioned before, Alamo Angels 2.0, I'm going to call it 2.3 now. And I'm going to go a little bit about the history of how we got here today. 2017 is when Alamo Angels got started. It was actually started under the name of the San Antonio Angel Network.

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2018 came around and we ended up rebranding to what we know today as the Alamo angels. And then 2020 is when we ended up integrating into the family of businesses of Velocity. So for me, Alamo Angels 1.0 was when 2018, when it got rebranded and they set that vision for what this could potentially be.

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2020 for me is Alamo Angels 2.0, which is when Velocity realized that there was an opportunity for them to contribute towards the ecosystem and ended up integrating Alamo Angels into a family of businesses. And for me, Alamo Angels 3.0 is what we've got going on right now, which earlier this week or last week, I'm sorry, we celebrated the new era of the Alamo Angels. And for us, it's basically a new vision that we had set for ourselves, a new partnership that we have in place. And that's basically what we're working towards now. All right, so how do you go about your business? How are you identifying potential startups to fund and how are those startups connecting to you and what's the process that unfolds?

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You know, we've got a variety of different sources that provide us with the deal flow that we're seeking. Obviously, what we're looking at is investing on the most promising startup of the week can find, ideally in San Antonio. But that does not have to be the case.

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We are investing on companies all throughout Texas and quite honestly, all throughout the United States. How do we find them? We have really good Relationships with different organizations that get access to those companies, including other angel networks, including venture capital firms all throughout the country. Like I said.

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But quite honestly, at the end of the day, it's the founders themselves that surround themselves with the type of founders that we believe kind of share that same DNA that we've identified on one founder and the circle of founders that they have. They also tend to have the same features or characteristics that we usually or typically look for. And so one of the best referral sources that we usually find is when a founder refers another founder from their own network. And because we've been investing in companies all throughout the U.S. you know, we've been able to tap into a lot of different ecosystems. Like I said, the most ideal scenarios for us to find companies out of San Antonio, that's number one. And then number two would be Texas. Just to give you an idea, about every single month we're featuring companies for potential investment. Typically two to three companies is what we're looking at. And we usually invest on at least one of those companies.

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But the process, if you take it a little, if you go back and back, engineer how we get there, there's about 50 applicants per month that want to get to those two or three spots. Okay, there's two or three spots to present their businesses to investors to come and present. So we have a monthly pitch event. It's kind of like a Shark Tank type of dynamic where the founders come. They do come to San Antonio, they pitch, they have time for Q and A. We ask for them to step out of the room, and then we have an internal discussion. So those type of dynamics, very similar to what people see on the show in Shark Tank is what happens.

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But in real life here in San Antonio, I often like to highlight the fact that we are bringing a lot of these people to San Antonio that otherwise would have never been here.

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So two months, two or three months ago, we actually had a cycle where we had a company from Chicago, one company from Chile, the country in South America, and another one from Austin. They all came to San Antonio just to pitch our network of investors.

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And so from an economic development perspective, I think there is a little bit of a case that we can make in terms of the Alamo Angels contributing towards that and providing the VCV that the city needs. But coming back to how we find these companies, right? Like, so 50 applicants per month, we usually feature two or three. There is a process in between to help us select those companies. And given that we are a community, we are a network of angels, we typically leverage our own network. And so what we did was we set it up a selection committee and those committee members are the ones that help us identify the companies that we end up presenting to the group. People within that committee are typically subject matter experts in different fields because obviously my team and I don't know at all and don't know about everything.

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And so we've got somebody from the medical field, we got somebody from the tech cybersecurity field, we got people that are a little bit more generalist, we got people that are very sophisticated as it relates to investing in. Do those investment terms make any sense? That type of dynamic does take place when we meet with them. And what we do is out of the 50, we shortlist that to maybe the ones that we believe fit the criteria to what we are typically looking for, maybe to 12 or 15 at the most. Then we ask the committee to go and score those applicants, and then we meet once a month to discuss those scores and then to identify which are the ones that we want to invite to come and pitch. So it's a long process to get to where we are.

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If I pitch my company, am I going to hear when I come back into the room whether or not I get funding, and if so, what kind of level of funding do Alamo Angels offer? I always tell founders your goal when you come to a pitch event or when you are pitching anyone is not necessarily for you to actually get a hard commitment right away. Your goal is to generate enough interest for them to want to speak to you again. And so when we host these pitch events, they have 8 minutes for pitch, 10 minutes for Q&A, 18 minutes on stage for them to make a case. Again, their goal is not for people to raise their hand and say, I'm going to invest $100,000 on you. It's for them to convince as many people as they could potentially get to to attend the next step, which in our case is what we call a deep dive. And so the deep dive session usually happens the week after and it's an hour long session in between those investors that heard the pitch and the founders of that company so that they can continue on with those conversations, but truly get more details as of how is that company doing. And so that's part of the dynamics that come into play when we do the deep dive. Then after that we typically have a better sense once the founders step out of the calls, then we have a better sense of who is looking into potentially investing, what needs to be done in order for that investment to happen.

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And so that helps us identify some of the different tasks that we need to perform as far as due diligence goes.

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And then assuming that that due diligence goes well, then we write those companies a check. Between the time that they pitch to the time that we have an actual investment commitment, it's usually about a month or so. But again, in between that month, not only did they pitch, but we also held the deep dive session. We did the due diligence and then we got everyone to commit X percentage or X dollar amount. How much are we investing? For early stage companies, usually we invest anywhere between $60,000 to $300,000. That's usually a range for the most part. Like I said, when companies come to us, at least one of those companies is getting an investment. And it's typically a six digit investment every time that we invest. What's interesting to me about Alamo Angels is your individual investors who come from all walks of life, as you said, they decide themselves whether they want in on an investment, isn't that correct?

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Yes. They can opt in or they can opt out. And that's the other good thing about what we do, Bob. We're not a fund. Right. Like what funds do is they get a bunch of LPs to give them money and then they invest that money on their behalf. What are LPs? Limited partners. Thank you for asking. Yeah, limited partner investors, Right. So those investors say, I don't want, don't have the desire or the time to make investment decisions to go and look for companies that could potentially be investable. I'm just going to give you my money and you go and invest on my behalf. That one approach. Those are typically venture capital firms or funds. Okay. That's not who we are. We are an angel community. So what we do is we do the hard work on the front end in terms of sourcing those companies, identifying the good companies that could potentially get an investment and presenting those companies in front of our investors. Now when they come into the room, our investors get to learn about that company, but they also get to make an investment decision on their own.

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So we are not telling them you got to invest on this one or on that one. We're just telling them these are investable opportunities. We believe you could potentially have an interest on investing, but you still need to make that decision. Now, on top of that, how we add value is besides finding those, those companies, and I've already explained the process, there is a whole process that goes into that we put into place in Order to get to the top of the crop, we also make it extremely simple for you to make that investment. So I'm going to take it back to when I first took over.

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I remember we used to celebrate$25,000 checks when we were investing in these companies.

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And that did not happen all that often. This is back in 2020. It happened maybe every. Every other month or once a quarter. Okay.

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But it was also because in order for you to make an investment into those companies, you had to meet the minimum investment amount that those companies were willing to take at the time. Most of them were a minimum of $25,000.

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So if you as Bob, want to invest on the company, you needed to invest a minimum of $25,000. That was five years ago. Today, the minimum that I'm seeing is usually about 50k. So if you like a company and you want to invest in that company, you need to write at least a $50,000 check. How we've made it easier for our investors, particularly those that are just now getting started on investing, is by lowering down that threshold. And so when you come and see these companies and you have an interest, you raise your hand, you say, I want to invest.

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We help you make that investment with as low as $5,000.

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The reason that works is because we pool everyone's investment commitments. So we have people that do $5,000 checks, but we also have people that do $100,000 checks.

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All of them come into a pool. Okay. And then we create an spv, a special purpose vehicle, which is basically a legal entity, an llc, where all these investors are partners of. And then we make an investment through that one entity. What that did was maybe you liked it, but you don't want to invest 50k, but you do want to invest $10,000. Now you have access to that investment opportunity. Okay. And so from an investor standpoint, that is a big benefit. From a founder standpoint, there is something called a cap table, and it's basically a summary of everyone that has invested on your company. Like a database. Think of it as an Excel spreadsheet. But there is a maximum amount of people that you can have in there. Don't quote me on this.

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I believe it's 99 people or so, or entities like 99 investors. If you start taking thousand dollar checks, two or five thousand dollars checks, that is going to fill up real quick. And you don't want to reach that limit all that quickly, number one.

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But number two, and perhaps the most important one, companies that are venture backed, that are truly following that journey of growth. They don't raise funds only once. They typically have different rounds of funding and they go back to raise funding every 12 to 18 months and get what happens every time they need to raise funding or they need to make an important decision, they got to go back to their investors, collect signatures and make sure that everyone signs up. If you have $1,000 check rider that you need to collect the signature, it becomes a little bit of a headache after a while. And so for us, if we say we're investing$200,000 into a company through Alamo Angels, that does not mean that it's a single person within the Alamo Angels that is investing is most likely a group of individuals with whom we Group those $200,000 from and ended up making that investment through through a single entity as opposed to a bunch of different small investors. And for people who are not real familiar with this world of startups and investments, Alan Moe Angels is an early stage investor. You're coming in with what may not strike people as a lot of money. Let's just say a quarter of a million dollars at the top. That can be a make or break sum of money for two or three people that are working together to convert an idea into a, into a viable business. Yeah. That can keep them going for six months or a year where otherwise they might not be able to stay the course. Yeah, no, you, you bring up a really good point. So what, what kind of companies are we investing on? Yeah, they are in fact early stage companies. What in our world we will consider a pre seed or seed stage development. One thing that I like to clarify every time I talk about the companies that we invest on is these are not concept or idea stage. Okay. These are companies, they are in fact companies that are early on their journey, but they already got something going on. A lot of them already have some sort of traction. And traction for us is hard to measure or explain just because we are agnostic in terms of the industries that we're investing on. And depending on the industry that you are seeking or you are dealing with, traction could be portrayed in different ways. If you're looking at a medical device company as an example, traction is more likely not going to be in terms of revenues, but it could be companies that already have FDA clearance as an example. That's a big milestone, that's a big important piece of traction that we take into consideration if we invest on that company.

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If you are Talking about a B2B SaaS company company, obviously at that point maybe reoccurring revenues is something that we actually want to see. And so the levels of traction are going to be different depending on the industry that we're analyzing in terms of investments.

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But my point is they've already got something going on.

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They're perhaps not making millions of dollars, but they've already proven that people are willing to pay for their product or that somebody thought that it was good enough for them to give them an FDA clearance, if that makes sense. So traction is important. The other element is at the end of the day, because these are early stage companies, people ask me a lot of times, is it their ip, is it how big the market, is it their competition? What is it that you typically look for? And at the end of the day, yes, we look at all of that. We want to make sure that it's a big enough market where they can scale that they can capture a big portion of that market. We want to make sure that they've got the correct IP in place in order to protect themselves. We want to make sure that they are fully aware of the competitive landscape. We want to know their investment terms are at par with what the industry calls for within what they are building.

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But at the end of the day, Bob, it's about the founders and the team that is behind this. All these are early stage companies and more likely than not, they need to pivot along the way. And we are looking at founders that are, have the capacity of pivoting, adjusting to the market in such a way that they can that company from, they can take that company from point A to point B, to point C and then finally to an exit, which is how we make our money. And a lot of your investors were in that position once upon a time, and then they realized their own business success and now they have capital to deploy and they're, they're both reaching back and helping other people start up. But they're also looking for opportunities to make windfall profits out of their capital that they wouldn't get out of more traditional investments. Yes, but it's high risk, isn't it? High risk, high reward. That's the word that we operate on. Another big portion of what we do within the Alamo Angels. So far we've been talking about investing, right? Like getting together monthly to look at these companies and potentially make investments on them. But the other big important element is education. People need to know how to invest on this asset class. What does it mean to be an angel investor? What is venture capital? How do you make returns? How do you build your portfolio? It all goes back to the basics or fundamentals, which is finance one on one diversification. Right.

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So the best way for me to explain it, if you make investments on 10 companies, you are most likely going to lose your investment on maybe seven of them. There will be two others that will give you a modest return, maybe 2,3x return, but there would be one that will not only give you or compensate, I'm sorry, for the losses, but also give you the upside that you were seeking. So if we look at the, the baseball analogy is, you know, you're hitting a lot of different balls and you don't have to hit them all as long as you hit a couple good ones, but you make that one home run that makes, that makes up for a good game. That's basically what we're seeing. All right, let's hear about your hits. Okay, I'm going to bring up a couple of good ones because they are local.

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This is big city, small town podcast and I think it's important for us to highlight the good things that are happening in San Antonio. We're also at gigdom and so this the first one that I'm going to share. It's actually a company that flourished out of this ecosystem. This is a company called Parlevel. I don't know. You're familiar with them. Sure. So Parlevel, nowadays it's mainstream of some sort type of dynamic where you go to an airport and you find these vending machines and you're, you know, I remember the first time that I came across that I was waiting and looking around trying to figure out where, where was the, the person that was going to help me do the checkout. And nobody ever came because it was a self checkout type of dynamic. Right. The first time that I came across that was actually here at gigdom way back ago, maybe 10 years ago when I came and they had it down on the first floor. And so now it's mainstream. A lot of people have it, but they are one of the pioneers of that technology. Self attended vending machines. They started here at Geekdom, I believe.

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Don't quote me on this, but I want to say that it was a student out of Trinity and another one out of UTSA that ended up coming up with that idea and they developed it to the point where it became an actual business and then they ended up selling it to a big retail player in the space. I was saying before, you know, we want to invest in companies that get us through the finish line, which for us is an exit. That's how we make our money different from banks. We're not looking to make a percentage return, give you a loan, and then get a percentage back. We want to invest on you, help you along the way, and ride the whole wave with you. And so either wave finalizes either by you getting an acquisition, somebody bigger, like it happened with Parlevel, comes into play and says, you know, I like what you're doing. This is complementary to what I. I'm also building within. Within my own company. I'm just going to acquire you.

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That's when we get our money back as investors. Or maybe you go to New York, ring the bell and do an ipo. That doesn't happen all that often, but that's another path towards the Alamo Angels. Invest in Parlevel. We did invest in Parlevel, so that's.

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Yes. So we invested on that one, and we got a good return out of it. What's a good return? I want to say it was a forex return. Forex return. And that company eventually sold for tens of millions, hundreds of millions. That was an undisclosed amount. I don't think that people can find it publicly. I never was able to find it. I do know that we get a good return as investors. Okay, so that's one that I will highlight. And then another one is medical device company. Again here from San Antonio, the founder, her name is Gabby, Gabby Niederhour. She's a little bit of a rock star on that space in the medical devices space where we invested on her company, Bluegrass Vascular. That was her fourth medical device company that she was running. The previous three had been acquired. And so we knew that she had the pedigree to do something with the company that she was working on at the time. Sure enough, a year and a half after, the company ended up getting acquired by a big player within the medical space. And then we got our return. That's fast. A year and a half. That was a little bit of an outlier. That doesn't happen all that often. The company could have potentially kept going, but they ended up selling. And so, you know, it took. It took a lot less than what we expected, but we still got a return. So that was another good one. All right, so if somebody is tuning into the program, Sebastian, and think they have the next PAR level in their brains or here, somewhere here at Geekdom, how do they go about connecting with you and trying to become one of those two or three companies that gets to do the monthly pitch and ask for money? Bob, I think by the time that this episode comes out, either we will already have our new website live, or it should be just a few days from being live. We've been working on that for a couple of months now and we are very proud of what we are coming out with in terms of the type of information that we can provide people with as it relates to learning what type of companies we want to invest on and how to go about the application and selection process. Best way for them to learn about the Alamo in jewels and whether they are a good fit is to go through our website, alamoinjules.com that's a first step. Submit an application. We do have an application portal in there. And so submitting that application helps us identify those investment opportunities and really compare apples to apples, since all of them have to answer the same questions. If there is somebody local from San Antonio, we are always doing something around the community. So San Antonio Startup Week is coming up the third week of October. And so they can always find us at events. We would be participating in events, hosting our own events. But we're always trying to do something here in the community. We often come to gigdom and also try to collaborate with them. So should somebody come across, myself, Francisco, Michael, from my team, personally, you know, that's, that's definitely a good way for us to start those conversations. But if, if, if we don't know each other personally, I think the website is probably the better resource. All right, so last question. You've been, you've been in South Texas a number of years now. How do you see San Antonio post pandemic?

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Is the, the tech space in general, the industry, Are we moving forward or moving backwards?

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I think we need to look at the big picture in terms of historical data as it relates to San Antonio specifically. But we also need. I'm a big fan of context and benchmarking, so I don't think we could judge an ecosystem like San Antonio by looking at what's happening here on its own. I think we need to look at comparable cities and how they have developed. We should also even look at leaders within those spaces so that we can always seek to get where they once were. And so I'm looking at places like Silicon Valley as an example. I did a program at Stanford two years ago, I think. So I had an opportunity to spend some time in Silicon Valley. It was a venture capital program along with 500 Global, which is a big player within the VC space around the world.

00:31:52.759 --> 00:32:11.000
And I learned a lot from that program. One of the biggest things that I had learned was venture Capital. It's actually not even all that old. This is an industry that has been around for less than 60 years, closer to 50 years. And then you look at places like Silicon Valley, where it all started, basically.

00:32:11.319 --> 00:32:51.859
And then you quickly realize that it was a process that took a little longer to get to where they are at now. But as you analyze not only Silicon Valley, but a lot of the other different ecosystems, you quickly realize that it takes 15 to 20 years for those ecosystems to fully develop and flourish and get to see the results that they have now. So let's take that back to San Antonio now. So we look at San Antonio as an ecosystem, and I think we could potentially look at gigdom as a really good signal of where that flag was planted in terms of us here in San Antonio saying we're going to do something for the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

00:32:52.019 --> 00:32:59.299
And geekdom hasn't been around for all that long. It's been 12 years, 2013, 2011, somewhere around. There you go. So 12, 13.

00:33:00.019 --> 00:33:11.059
It's less than 15 years, for sure. I want to say it's maybe more like 13 years or so. What that tells me is we're still on that journey. We're getting closer.

00:33:11.140 --> 00:33:14.470
Okay. To where we will start seeing a lot more results.

00:33:14.869 --> 00:33:34.470
But I want for people to understand that these things are not built overnight. Now, the last comment that I will make and the real test for us as a community will happen within the next two to five years. And that is, let's go back to Silicon Valley, because I think that's truly where it all started.

00:33:35.509 --> 00:34:13.019
The reason for which Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley is because there were a lot of seeds that got planted in those grounds, and those seeds start growing, and then those new plants planted more seeds, and then everything started flourishing. Okay, now, by that, I'm talking about companies that got started there, and then executives or people that worked early on on those companies, they ended up after the companies exited or throughout their growth process, they ended up going somewhere else, starting their own companies and sort of replicating some of the good things that they saw in the companies that they saw succeed here.

00:34:13.019 --> 00:34:37.869
It kind of started with Rackspace, and I think Rackspace planted a few seeds, by the way. Alamo Angels was one of them. There was a group of Rackers that said, we need to do something. And that was sort of the origin of back then, the San Antonio Angel Network, which is now Alamo Angels. Obviously, we've transitioned throughout the journey, but the idea or the concept of making that happen actually did come out of the Rackspace era.

00:34:38.429 --> 00:35:11.199
Now we're about to see a lot of companies that have been on that growth process from San Antonio that I believe once they become a success, then they will plant new seeds and then those seeds will continue to expand and help this ecosystem flourish. I'm talking about companies like FloatMe, which I believe they also have an office here in gigdom. They also started here at gigdom. That's another company that recently and by recently, maybe a year ago, less than a year ago, they raised their Series A, $16 million. They're doing great. They've got a lot of traction.

00:35:11.360 --> 00:35:14.719
I do believe that they could potentially go through an acquisition fairly soon.

00:35:15.039 --> 00:35:22.480
So there will be some success stories coming out of that. We're talking about Darkhive as an example. It's a company on the defense space.

00:35:22.800 --> 00:36:20.050
They also have seen a lot of traction and they're raising their Series B now. So again, getting closer to where they achieve a certain level of maturity that will also start looking at the light at the end of the tunnel as it relates to potentially going through an acquisition or some sort of exit, which was the other one. I was going to bring another one, but I guess my point is there is companies that have been on this race for some time now. They're about to finish that race. And I'm hoping that then those companies and people that have been working on them will start planting some seeds and then the ecosystem will continue to flourish. But again, looking, looking at time frames, I think we're getting closer. We're not quite there yet, but I do believe that the future is bright for sanitary. All right, that's a good place to stop. Let's agree that the next time that you have a big, successful exit that you'll come back on with the founder of that company and we can share that success with our audience. Happy to. Sebastian Garcon, Alamo Angels. Thanks for coming on to Big City.

00:36:20.130 --> 00:36:21.730
Thank you, Bob. Appreciate the invite.

00:36:25.170 --> 00:36:53.599
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Big City Small Town. Please share this episode with friends and colleagues. And if you haven't already, sign up for Monday Musings, my weekly newsletter. Just go to bigcitysmalltown.com and add your email. Big City Small Town is brought to you by Western Urban Building, a city our children want to call home, and by Geekdom, where startups are born and smart ideas become businesses. Thanks to Corey Ames of Ensemble, Texas, for the production of this show. We will see you next week.