San Antonio-based collaborative startup space and incubator Geekdom announced Tuesday the election of a new chair of the Board of Directors.
Stepping into the role is Cat Dizon, co-founder and chief operating officer of Active Capital. She will lead a board of six who help facilitate Geekdom's programs and events. Other board members include Velocity TX CEO David Fonseca, Executive Director of 80|20 Foundation Alexandra Frey, Google Customer Engineer Sean Patterson, Jungle Disk President and CEO Bret Piatt, and Braustin Homes CEO Alberto Piña, CEO.
Dizon — a University of Texas at San Antonio alumna — said with the Alamo City's rapid growth, both in terms of population and workforce, it's prime time to be part of the San Antonio startup ecosystem.
"Geekdom's mission to start and grow San Antonio startups has always been inspiring work to me," she said, adding Geekdom's strong leadership team — and the thriving startups it has supported — were the biggest draws to the role.
Geekdom CEO Charles Woodin said after two years of service on the board, it's a welcome development to see Dizon elected chair.
"She cares about San Antonio entrepreneurs and shares our goals of building and retaining startup businesses that will fuel our local economy," he said.
As Active Capital COO, Dizon led seed rounds for business-to-business, software-as-a-service companies. Before that, she served as executive director of Alamo Angels, a group of angel investors investing in local and other Texas startups. Prior to that Dizon worked at Rackspace, where she was Director of Corporate Strategy and Development helming mergers and acquisitions, growth businesses, staff operations and other tasks.
Geekdom co-founder Graham Weston said in a release Dizon in her role at Rackspace demonstrated both enthusiasm and experience — qualities he said are particularly crucial now with the "city on the rise."
Dizon is filling the role left by the previous chair Lorenzo Gomez, who spent two and a half years as board chair. He recently launched an interactive mental health website and app WeTree.
