Eric Ries

 

On Thursday, December 1st Rackspace celebrated the grand opening of its San Francisco office and the Space Cowboys from the Rackspace Startup Program were there to witness. It was a grand affair hosted by Robert Scoble, technology evangelist, and Chief Learning Officer at Rackspace Hosting, who is building a new community of people fanatical about tech startups. Special guests at the event included GoPro, Loggly, New Relic, Foodspotting and the Honorable Ed Lee who shared his thoughts about the San Francisco tech community and proclaimed it “Rackspace Day,” honoring the company’s commitment to investing its resources in his city.

A favorite saying of someone I know in this industry is that “It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow”. It’s a recurrent theme as terms like “pivot”, “lean”, “agile” and “minimum viable product” become the lingua franca of startups. We’ve moved rapidly from a culture of throwing lots of time and resources at a problem to one where we give a startup the minimum oxygen it needs to survive and let it iterate quickly to find its perfect niche.