“First, as Rackspace’s original home, and later as the
birthplace of a small company you may have heard of
called YouTube, which famously called one night during
our early days, asking for overnight installation of ten
new servers for its fledgling business.”
I NEVER really considered myself a “techie,”
but boy, could I nose out business opportunities. I
launched a variety of businesses beginning at the
tender age of thirteen, ranging from selling pork to
livestock photography to, eventually, real estate and
development. Yet there was a growing force that I simply
could no longer resist: the Internet. Though comfortably
ensconced in my thriving real estate business, I sensed
opportunity and I wanted “in.” When I encountered three
local Trinity students seeking funding for an Internet-
hosting business, we banded together and I became the
first investor and cofounder of their fledgling company,
Rackspace.com. Within six months, I had put my real
estate business on hold and assumed the roles of CEO
and Chairman, positions I held until 2006.
A full two decades after we founded Rackspace, I
still enjoy recalling the early days at the company and
describing how we ended up veering from our initial
concept. At the beginning, I assumed I would model
it after the real estate industry. Instead of renting
apartments, however, we’d be renting out server space
to customers. Back then, we helped our Internet Service
Provider (ISP) customers with just about anything and
everything, including fixin g computers and networks,
just to generate revenue. But when we zeroed in on the
dedicated-server rental concept, we chose to focus
on that to the exclusion of everything else. Our ideal
customer was self-sufficient—in the model of Amazon
or Google—where transactions were made purely online,
with no customer support and virtually no customer
contact of any kind.
To give you an example of how diligently we stuck
to this philosophy, one founder actually had his email
autoresponder message state his mailbox was full
and divert people to the customer support number,
while his phone message did just the opposite—refer
people to a full mailbox. In reality, we were not dealing
with this “novice” group of customers at all, deeming
them incongruent with our desired customer profile.
The angry emails started pouring in, and they were
decidedly not in the form of emotional rants. Instead,
they included logical arguments supported by details
of customers’ multiple contact attempts and their
resulting frustration.
I grabbed one such relatable email—remember, I’m
not a techie myself—and showed it to our founders
to discuss. Somehow, generating all this anger
seemed contrary to the principles of good business
management, and the alarm bells were ringing. If there
were so many people out there wanting to do business
with us, shouldn’t we find some way to accommodate
them—and, of course, monetize our idea in the process?
A Reversal To Fortune
We decided to do a complete one-eighty. The company
was only nine months old at the time, and I knew that it
was not too late to change our culture to one of service,
with customer satisfaction as our ultimate barometer
of success. I realize that every company these days has
a mantra of customer service, but what does it take to
actually make these words a reality?
I called on David Bryce, the most customer-focused
executive of anyone I knew at the time, to shepherd
this change. He joined the company in 1999 as the vice
president of customer care. Handing me a book by famed
customer service advocate Leonard Berry, Bryce set the
company on a brand new path, which he called “fanatical
17