The Era of Big Has Arrived in San Antonio

Growing up, I didn’t think big. I think a lot of us in San Antonio carry that, whether we realize it or not. I grew up in an inner-city neighborhood where most of my world existed within about a five-block radius. I didn’t get on a plane until I was 18. My life felt small, […]
The Logos Matter: What’s Next For San Antonio’s Tech Talent

Article 5 of a 5-part series on UT San Antonio’s hidden talent pipeline When I was CEO of Geekdom, San Antonio’s largest co-working space at the time, our mission was simple: help build the city’s tech scene one company at a time. I remember one meeting that taught me more about recruiting than any other. […]
When Yahoo Came Looking for Talent at UT San Antonio

Article 4 of a 5-part series on UT San Antonio’s hidden talent pipeline Yahoo was one of our earliest industry partners to come looking for talent at UT San Antonio. After Meta and Netflix, they reached out to see what was happening here. They were looking for talent across computer science, computer engineering, business analytics, […]
When Netflix Discovered UT San Antonio

Article 3 of a 5-part series on UT San Antonio’s hidden talent pipeline Once you spend a day recruiting our students, you stop thinking about what San Antonio doesn’t have, and you start seeing everything it does. That’s exactly what happened when I reached out to Netflix. I knew our students had the talent to […]
When Facebook (Meta) Came to UT San Antonio

Article 2 of a 5-part series on UT San Antonio’s hidden talent pipeline When Meta (Facebook) came to recruit at UT San Antonio for the first time, the recruiter arrived polite but skeptical. We had been trying to bring them here for a while. Getting big tech companies to visit wasn’t easy because we weren’t […]
There’s a Tech Talent Boom Happening Under Our Noses

Article 1 of a 5-part series on UT San Antonio’s hidden talent pipeline My friend Diego Bernal once told me, “Talent is evenly distributed, but opportunity is not.” It’s one of those lines that stays with you, a sentence that explains an entire city in eight words. I thought I understood what he meant when […]
One Living Room, Countless Bridges: How Musical Bridges Around the World Turned San Antonio Into a Global Music Hub

In 1997, not long after moving from the USSR to San Antonio, I invited my piano professor from Moscow to perform here. But where? With no concert hall at our disposal, friends graciously opened their Hill Country living room for the evening. The response was electric. People packed the space, and before the final note […]