"A true friend stabs you in the front" - Oscar Wilde
If the Internet has not changed your job – please let me know. I want to invest tn the startup that find a way to get you involved in the Internet. No joke. If your industry does not know how to use the Internet for profit, I really want to know about it.
I think there is a huge untapped Market that we just are not thinking about.
Because they are not like us.
I know there are millions of posts like this on the Internet. But this is the only one of them that is my post. About the things I have learned that I think are really important.
And just to prove how much of a screw up I was when I was younger – I owned an Alfa Romeo before I owned a house. I owned a MG MGA convertible before I had money in the bank.
I owned two houses once and could not afford either one of them.
I won custody of my kids when they were 10 and 12 and learned a lot about what is important.
Dying poor is not a bad plan. Living poor is.
I will leave my kids with college educations, and a lot more advantages than I had when I was their age. I doubt I leave them much money though. Today I can afford the stuff I wasted money on 25 years ago. 
Looking for another Alfo Romeo. One I can buy without feeling guilty about it.
And that is the difference between where I should have been spending money 25 years ago, and where I *can* spend it today.
Today is my payoff for getting my shit together ten years ago.
If you are under 50, have credit card debt, don’t have money in the bank and only own toys – you need to reset everything.
But stuff. Stuff you can pay for.
Seems easy. Takes a huge comittment.
Rob
Below is an email I shared not only with my teams, but with my Senior Leadership.
I manage Social Media. But I am just a customer care guy that knows Social Media tools.
That does not make me a “Social Media Maven/Expert/Guru, etc” – it makes me customer guy with more tools than I had a decade ago. Simple.
The post I reference – and it is good reading.
I am very pleased to report that Rackspace has no “Social Media Experts”. We have Rackers that care for customers and know how to use various tools. We are not, and will never become the tools.
A couple years ago, ServInt – a “competitor” to my employer wrote this blog post:
Why ServInt Stands Beside Rackspace and You Should TooI sent the author of that post an email and soon found myself developing a great relationship with the author – Reed Caldwell, the CEO of ServInt. Yes, some could say we compete – we are in the same business – but there is a LOT of business in this space, and there are many ways to differentiate yourself so you serve different segments. ServInt and Rackspace have some overlap. Not a lot. Not enough that I feel either of us sees the other as “the enemy”. In fact, we’ve become online friends. Eventually we will meet in person, and I believe we will become better friends.
Today I tip my hat to Amazon Web Services – much as Reed tipped his hat to us years ago. We don’t “win more” when our competitors struggle. We “win more” when the entire industry wins more.
I have a great deal of respect for AWS. I have met Werner Vogels several times and think he is an amazingly humble, kind, and brilliant man. The type of man I cannot hope fails and that is working for a company I still do a lot of business with (just not in Cloud computing!).
Amazon will recover from this, and they will do so quickly. And customers everywhere will learn more about geographic redundancy – at least enough to investigate it and discover the cost/complexity and make an informed decision on what is right for their business.
And the Cloud will get stronger. Every failure teaches us more. Every failure makes us stronger and our customers better informed. As an industry.
To my friends at AWS – hang in there. This too shall pass and tomorrow will be a brighter day – for all of us, and for all of our customers.
This was the title of a Twitter update I posted earlier this morning. And I included the fact that there was a story behind this tweet.
And here is the rest of the story…
I sent an email to our Chairman tonight – Graham Weston, who I respect a great deal.
Here is part of what I told him:
What I just really, honestly love about this company – I
feel completely comfortable putting my personal “brand” on the line.
I am completely comfortable telling companies that if we screw up, I
will make it right for them. I do NOT promise what Rackspace will do.
I promise them what *I* will do – and I know Rackspace will have my
back.I am not sure many companies get how empowering that is – that I trust
my employer enough to give my customers my personal guarantee -
because I know my company has my back.I’ve spent two + years talking to some of the best customer support
companies on the planet – some of the largest high profile social
media adopters – and none of my peers feel that absolute sense of “my
back is covered”. It is extremely empowering and adds a level of
authenticity to what we do that we could not have planned for – or built a
program around. It is what I know of us as a company (much because I was a customer for so long) – the trust I have earned, and my knowledge of the business. I am not going to give away the farm. I am running a for-profit business. But I know when to give away a few daisies to sell a dozen roses.This is NOT normal with the other companies I am dealing with. I think we are doing something pretty unique here – and I really appreciate it. Mostly I appreciate not having to get permission to do what is right. I am trusted to do what is right.
And empowered.
And that is very unusual. More unusual than we think, I think.
So I want to dig deeper into that, and find out how what we are doing works, and how we can extend it, and how we can even teach it to others – because we are fundamentally based on giving knowledge back. Be that OpenStack, or what we are learning in Social Media.
Knowledge is more fun when it is shared.
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