Risk & Business Magazine JGS Insurance Risk & Business Magazine Spring 2018 | Page 17

FEATURE STORY
BY: GRAHAM WESTON
ENTREPRENEUR & FOUNDER
OF RACKSPACE
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
f ledgling 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 fixing
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
“YET THERE WAS
A GROWING
FORCE THAT I
SIMPLY COULD NO
LONGER RESIST:
THE INTERNET.”
the principles of good business
management, and the alarm bells were
ringing. If there we re 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
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