The reputation of the company now known as Rackspace Technology, he said, “is eroding rapidly” after years of shifting business plans, executive shuffles, financial losses, staff cuts and, finally, thethat left tens of thousands of customers without access to their email, contact and calendar data.
“Any type of incident at that magnitude is going to take some time to recover on the financial and reputation fronts and restoring the trust of customers,” said Dizon, who founded venture capital firm Active Capital in 2017 with Rackspace co-founder Condon. “It’s going to be a long road.” The changes continued last year as Rackspace kept trying to work out where it stands in the rapidly evolving cloud computing market. Discussing the latest quarterly loss in May, then-CEO Kevin Jones raised the possibility of selling off parts of the company. Rackspace, he said, had completed a “strategic review” after hearing from a potential buyer interested in one of its businesses.
In October, the company said it would move out of “The Castle,” its 1.2 million-square-foot headquarters in a former mall in the suburb of Windcrest. The move will downsize the company’s footprint to an office space of 75,000 to 90,000 square feet on the far North Side. Dax Moreno, who was an early Racker and remains a fan of the company, wonders about the company’s place in San Antonio’s evolving tech community.Dax Moreno, a Rackspace sales manager from 2003 to 2010, said he follows the company the way alumni of a major university follow their alma mater’s football program. And, like Dizon, Moreno has built his Rackspace experience into new ventures.
Graham Weston, Dirk Elmendorf and Lew Moorman take part in a panel discussion during the 2017 Tech Bloc rally at Rackspace.Yoo, who said he “isn’t a direct shareholder,” calls himself “the guy who essentially started Rackspace.” In his book “Billion or Bust!” Napier said he held several titles over the next six years, including CEO. He also recalls navigating the company’s near fall as the dot-com bubble burst, earlier board conversations about selling the company, consideration of moving its headquarters to Austin and the switch from a tech-driven Linux culture to Microsoft systems. Through it all, he wrote, he was pushing a “vision in which Rackspace would become to San Antonio what Dell was to Austin.