FOREWORD

A Quest for the Essence of Entrepreneurship

THE UNSTOPPABLES ISN’T JUST A BOOK. It’s the product of a quest—a shared quest by author Bill Schley and me to discover the keys to entrepreneurship and to share them with people all over America. Our goal is to double the number of entrepreneurs in our country—starting with you, our readers. And if you choose the entrepreneurial path, we want to double your chances of success. Those are the goals behind every chapter and every page of Bill’s book.

To understand this objective and why we’re so passionate about it, you need to know a little bit about us.

The company I helped found, Rackspace, was launched by three former college buddies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1998. We now employ more than 5,000 Rackers in locations from Texas to London to Hong Kong. Our mission: To provide hosting and cloud computing backed by “Fanatical Support” to more than 200,000 customers worldwide, including most of the Fortune 100.

Our world headquarters is located in a building we call the Castle—a once-abandoned mall in a forgotten neighborhood in San Antonio. My desk sits beside the space once occupied by Gingiss Formal Wear, where I rented my first baby-blue ruffled tuxedo for the high school prom. All the experts said we were crazy when we moved here, but I guess that’s how we do things at Rackspace: we listen to our Rackers and to our customers first. Only later do we check with the experts.

Today, customers come from all over the world to visit us in this 1.2-million-square-foot space that no one else wanted. They sense the energy of the place, they see the excitement and enthusiasm on every Racker’s face, and they tell us that it still feels like a startup—a vibrant enterprise driven by hungry entrepreneurs. Rackspace has evolved into a big, well-managed company that’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange, grew by more than 25 percent in 2012 to $1.3 billion in annual revenue, and is earning accolades worldwide—but we’ve never lost our entrepreneurial zeal.

Maybe that’s why Fortune magazine just named us one of the Best Companies to Work For in America for the fifth time in six years. People love working here, and we love them back. And in turn we all love our customers. Call another company and you’ll probably listen to a recording, start pressing buttons, and listen to more recordings. Call Rackspace and you’ll speak with a Racker, trained and empowered to solve our customers’ problems. We’re famous for our combination of innovative technology and passionate Rackers, which enables us to deliver the Fanatical Support for which we’ve become known throughout our industry.

You may be starting to get a feeling for why I’m such a believer in the power of entrepreneurship. I’ve seen it work its creative magic here at Rackspace. I’ve seen the value it’s created for every Racker, for our far-flung customers, and for communities like the one in which our headquarters is located in San Antonio, where our arrival helped reverse 20 years of decline. I know that this same power is what communities all over America need to thrive in the twenty-first century—and I also know, sadly, that it’s what far too many are lacking.

That’s the source of the obsession that underlies The UnStoppables.

My obsession with uncovering insights into entrepreneurship was spurred by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the period of sluggish growth that followed. The U.S. job creation engine is broken. How can we fix it? The key is entrepreneurship.

No one works harder to understand entrepreneurship better than the Kansas City, Missouri–based Kauffman Foundation, which bears the name of a great twentieth-century entrepreneur, Ewing Marion Kauffman, a former salesman who went on to found a great pharmaceutical company. I encourage readers of Bill’s book to visit the Kauffman Foundation website and dig into its impressive archive of original research, particularly the 2009 report, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur. Recent research by the foundation has shown that the vast majority of new jobs in this country are created by young organizations, those that are less than five years old. Politicians, reporters, and many average citizens tend to assume that job creation is the province of giant corporations—the Fords, GEs, and Walmarts of the world. They do play their part. But the real source of most well-paid, emotionally rewarding jobs is young businesses—and that means entrepreneurship.

So where will the great entrepreneurs of tomorrow come from?

In search of an answer, I visited my alma mater, Texas A&M, where I was invited to speak to their MBA students. They were a bright, idealistic, and engaged bunch. After offering a few remarks, I asked the students, “How many of you would like to start your own businesses one day, or work for a young business?” Practically every hand shot up.

Then I asked, “And how many of you will be doing that as soon as you graduate from A&M?” There were a few chuckles around the room, and nearly all the hands came down. It seems there was a huge gap between the dream of entrepreneurship and the real-life plans most students had created.

I asked the students to explain the gap, and the answers were revealing. Several students pointed to the huge debt they were carrying after years of expensive undergraduate and graduate-school training. Many would graduate owing $50,000 or more. That burden made them more risk averse than when they began their studies. It discouraged all but the most daring among them from undertaking the personal and financial risk that’s inevitable when launching or joining a young company.

Others pointed out that, armed with an MBA from a respected university, they could probably land a six-figure salary from a prestigious, established company that their parents would be proud to mention to their friends. That path would give them security (or so they thought) and enable them to quickly start paying down their student loans. Launching a start-up or joining a young company would mean they’d face a far greater opportunity cost—another factor discouraging entrepreneurship.

The third factor, I came to learn, was the nature of MBA studies themselves. The business students at our great universities learn many useful skills—accounting, finance, organizational dynamics, human resource management, and much more. They leave school well equipped to help run mature enterprises. But they don’t learn how to assert their will or overcome their fear of failure. And they don’t spend enough time studying the essence of entrepreneurship: getting in motion, building your team, and learning how to succeed with customers.

Combining these factors, it’s no wonder that entrepreneurship is flagging in America, and that our once-powerful job creation engine is stalled. The educational institutions that we rely on are inadvertently stifling the entrepreneurs who might otherwise emerge. They destroy more entrepreneurial spirit than they create.

I decided that I wanted to try to help solve this problem. And that’s where author and branding strategist Bill Schley enters the picture.

I often listen to books on tape while driving to work and back. A few years ago, I happened across Bill Schley’s book, Why Johnny Can’t Brand. The book had made a Top Five Marketing Books of the Year list someone had sent me, and once I heard it, I knew why. It was full of insights that I wanted to put into action.

I reached out to Bill at his offices in Connecticut. A few months later, I welcomed him and his business partner to Rackspace for a tour of our company and some working sessions with our senior leadership team. Bill and I hit it off from the start, and over the ensuing months a business relationship developed into friendship.

Most important, we discovered our mutual passion for entrepreneurship. We were obsessed by the same questions: What lies at the heart of entrepreneurship? Why do some entrepreneurs succeed while others fail? And how can our society double the number of new entrepreneurs we produce?

Bill and I decided to set out on a journey to answer these questions.

Our quest took us well beyond the boundaries of the business world. We journeyed from Texas to New York to the West Coast. From there we traveled to Israel, a tiny nation with an amazing entrepreneurial culture that is well documented in the book Start-up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. We met a host of amazing business founders there, along with government officials, educators, and experts who helped us understand how Israeli society has been reshaped deliberately to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship—with incredible results.

After we returned from Israel, I had to get back to work at Rackspace, but Bill traveled on to Virginia Beach and San Diego, where he observed and met with members of the U.S. Navy SEALs. In his research, he’d discovered that this most elite force of warriors has a number of crucial characteristics in common with the greatest entrepreneurs, including a willingness to adapt on the fly, dedication to the mission, readiness to tackle (and master) risk, and single-minded devotion to the team. He suspected that if he could learn what propels the SEALs beyond all normal human limits to succeed in some of the world’s most challenging environments, he might unearth secrets that could fuel the work of aspiring entrepreneurs. And that suspicion proved to be absolutely correct—as you’ll learn in the pages of this book.

Finally, our quest brought Bill and me back to where we started—to Rackspace. As I’ve explained, Rackspace is no ordinary company. We’ve kept the entrepreneurial feeling alive even as we’ve gone global. Rackers are as fired up about the mission—to give Fanatical Support to our customers—as we were when we were a start-up.

The question was: How did Rackers accomplish this? Did we really know? If there were definable insights into our success that could help more entrepreneurs succeed as we did, could we codify and explain them? I had to know the answer—in part, for the benefit of our own expanding legions of Rackers. It’s critical for us at Rackspace to keep replicating our own success as we grow. Being able to communicate our approach in clear, simple language would be enormously valuable in helping nurture the Rackspace of the future.

At the same time, I knew that countless other Americans could benefit from a deeper insight into the wellsprings of entrepreneurship.

A few years ago, San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro, one of the most dynamic young political leaders in our country, asked me to help lead SA2020, his long-range strategic initiative for the city. That yearlong experience confirmed my belief that if we are going to change our cities, and thus our country, we can only do it by fostering an entrepreneurial culture. Entrepreneurs create fulfilling jobs, unleash opportunities, take the big risks, build wealth, replace the old with the new, and keep our nation competitive.

This conviction is one reason I recently launched a coworking space for startups called Geekdom in San Antonio. After only a year, it has become one of the country’s fastest-growing shared working environments for young entrepreneurs. Within its first year, it grew to be the largest program of its kind in Texas, with more than 500 members working with mentors and energetically coming together to transform ideas into new apps, products, and services. Soon a spinoff program took Geekdom into local high schools and middle schools. We’re planting the seeds of entrepreneurship early.

Geekdom also became home to TechStars Cloud, part of the Boulder-based nationwide technology accelerator program. The San Antonio program is unique, as it is devoted to cloud-related innovation. Young developers and entrepreneurs from around the world are knocking on the door, asking to come here. Our second TechStars class is just beginning, and I can’t wait to see what emerges from it—perhaps a future Google or Rackspace. So the personal quest that drove Bill Schley and me to travel the world in search of the essence of entrepreneurship has already started to bear some remarkable fruit along the way.

Bill and I didn’t set out to write a book. It was only after we came home from our travels and our many conversations that we realized we had accumulated insights worth sharing. An experienced author, Bill decided to take on the task of writing it down—and that’s how The UnStoppables was born.

This isn’t a book about Rackspace, and it’s certainly not a book about me. The observations are often fascinating, but they’re in Bill’s words, not mine. This book is a manifesto and a guidebook for Americans who want to build something of value and take charge of their own destiny. It’s an invitation to you to overcome your doubts and fears and to dare to follow your dreams.

America is the original start-up nation. And the land of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs is still the world’s premier source of entrepreneurial creativity and zeal. We have everything it takes to lead the world into a new age of entrepreneurship—and there’s never been a better time than now. The Internet provides access to global markets, and the cloud lets you build your business with less capital than ever before. All we need are more people who are ready to get into motion and take advantage of today’s unprecedented possibilities.

America is and must remain the Broadway stage of entrepreneurship—the magnetic hub of creativity and growth that entrepreneurs from India, China, Brazil, and everywhere on earth recognize as the greatest place to seek fame and fortune.

I’ve always believed that the best way to predict the future is to invent it—and the best way to predict your future is to invent it yourself. That’s the wisdom entrepreneurs understand and live by.

Ask yourself: Do you want to watch others create and build the future, or do you want to do it yourself? If the idea of stepping into the arena and joining the action excites you, you’ve come to the right place.

Welcome to The UnStoppables.

—Graham Weston,

Chairman and Cofounder of Rackspace

San Antonio, Texas