With the Rand Building, home to co-working space Geekdom, fast approaching full occupancy, the question for those leading San Antonio’s quest for a vibrant downtown tech scene is “What’s next?”

The answer is spilling over into nearby buildings, and it’s already happening, Geekdom CEO Lorenzo Gomez said in an interview before Geekdom’s blowout fourth-anniversary celebration at Main Plaza.

CodeUp, Turner Logic and Grok Interactive are among tech companies that have taken up residence in the Vogue Building on Navarro Street. There’s another small group of startups in the World Trade Building at Broadway and Houston Street. Cybersecurity company Root 9B has an office in the Tower Life Building on St. Mary’s Street. Website design company Biltt is in the Finesilver Building.

“I imagine a day when you walk from Geekdom to the Alamo, and you see as many tech people, if not more, than tourists,” Gomez said. “And that’s when you’ll know we’ve won.”

Gomez has been giving a presentation on the state of the city’s tech ecosystem. It starts with the “City You Know,” comprising a few slides showing touristy features including the River Walk, the Alamo and a mariachi bar. It then moves on to the “City We See,” which focuses on urban quality-of-life draws such as the Pearl Brewery and Tobin Center for the Performing Arts and events such as downtown community bike rides and the kickoff summit for SA Tech Bloc, an organization of tech professionals rallying to make the city attractive to top talent.

It moves on to the story of Geekdom’s founding, which has become something of local tech sector lore.

Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston got an email from someone who refused to relocate to San Antonio, saying it had “no urban core,” “no startup scene” and little in the way of urban development.

Source: Geekdom CEO Lorenzo Gomez

Weston bought the Rand Building and in 2011 launched the San Antonio branch of Geekdom there with CoffeeCup Software founder Nick Longo.

It’s been a blockbuster four years, Gomez said at Geekdom’s anniversary celebration as music from the the Flying Balalaika Brothers, a Slavic dance music group, began filling Main Plaza.

“Look at what we’ve done in the startup scene,” he said. “Geekdom was created, we have about 780 members now. … We’ve had four companies exit — either bought or merged with another company. Our startups have raised north of $50 million worth of venture capital. And then we’ve had five companies open up second remote offices here.”

One, WPEngine, opened a Geekdom office a year ago with four desks and has since expanded to about 25 people taking up Geekdom’s largest suite.

The local tech scene is “growing at the pace of tech advancement,” said Debra Innocenti, a Strasburger & Price tech attorney who has an office in Geekdom and gives members free legal education.

“I think that we do have a perfect storm of things happening,” she said. “I love, love, love being surrounded by all the innovation, all the entrepreneurs. It gives back to me in spades. … I love being able to poke my head out the door and say, ‘I got a client that needs help with negative SEO (search engine optimization). Can anyone help?’”

Innocenti was this year’s winner of the Long Live the Geek award, which Geekdom awards to a member who has given back to the co-working space community.

As for the Rand Building, Geekdom and competitive startup incubator Techstars Cloud now occupy the top three of eight floors. Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy occupies the fifth. Gomez said retail leases were being negotiated for the first floor.

He said tech companies were “fighting over” locations on the remaining floors.

“By the end of the year, I believe we’ll have the whole building spoken for,” he said.

Geekdom’s expansion is just part of a tech ecosystem that’s growing in presence and influence.

Tech Bloc launched this spring with an overflow crowd at the newly opening Southerleigh Fine Food and Brewery. One of the group’s first missions was to bring back ride-hailing services that had left the city, complaining of overly burdensome regulations.

Mayor Ivy Taylor in October used a Tech Bloc event to announce an agreement with Uber. On Wednesday, she took the inaugural ride of Lyft’s return.

The University of Texas at San Antonio in September was awarded a $2 million annual grant, renewable for five years, to fund the Information Sharing and Analysis Organizations Standards Organization.

U.S. Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, held a congressional field hearing there to get testimony on bringing federal agencies onto the cloud.

Rackspace, the city’s largest publicly traded tech company, penned an agreement to support Amazon Web Services and in September cut the ribbon for the OpenStack Innovation Center at its Windcrest headquarters, a collaborative endeavor with Intel Corp.

Globalscape, another local tech company, has gotten analyst attention as a company to watch.

Bexar County has kicked in $50,000 for Tech Fuel, a contest designed to get folks with ideas for tech startups into the development phase.

“It’s amazing how far it’s come in four years,” said David Heard, chief marketing officer for SecureLogix and a TechBloc co-founder. “We’ve got a long way to go, but it’s been such a tremendous arc. Such growth in such a short period of time gives us hope that we can get to where we want to be.”

Geekdom, he said, “should celebrate their birthday in a big way every year.”

“Because a big part of their mission is to bring people together,” Heard said. “They call it ‘creative collision.’ And so much of building the ecosystem is connecting people. Of course, Tech Bloc, we’re trying to do very similar things. I hope it’s a party for all of San Antonio.”

lbrezosky@express-news.net