Lanham Napier

For the past two and a half years, Rackspace has been leading the open cloud revolution — a movement to break the grip of closed, proprietary cloud vendors and instead put choice and power in the hands of customers. For the most part, we’ve kept our heads down: writing code, launching new products and serving customers on our new open platform. But now we’re ready to tell the world what we’ve been doing — and what we can do to boost businesses of all sizes.

It was an honor this morning to appear on CNBC’s Squawk Box for a lively discussion on one of my favorite topics: the future of cloud computing.

Startups are willing to break away from the crowd and make things happen. Within the Rackspace Startup Program we have the distinct pleasure of working with these kinds of people day in and day out. And within the framework of Rackspace, we are fortunate to have leaders that thrive outside the crowd and make things happen. One of those leaders is the voice and the face of Rackspace. You’ve seen this guy on CNN, MSNBC, Bloomberg, CNBC and the BBC. He understands that entrepreneurs must have vision and guts to make things happen within a tech startup. What follows is some valuable insight on the startup realm from Lanham Napier, CEO of Rackspace.

Our combined efforts helped to prevent approval of unbalanced legislation in SOPA and PIPA. Now we have a chance to work on laws that will aid us in our daily fight against copyright infringement—without harming the Internet.

Our efforts to rewrite the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act are showing good results. But we’ve got to keep the pressure on.

The bill now before Congress would do more harm than good.  We’re working to get it amended, so it can target online thieves without hurting innocent users of the Internet.

Last week marked the first ever Rackspace Financial Analyst Day at the New York Stock Exchange, which culminated with Graham Weston and several Rackspace customers ringing the closing bell.

We’ve got a Nintendo Wii in the break room here at the Rackspace Blacksburg, VA office. We’ve even got a wicked ax for rocking out to Guitar Hero. But the reason that everyone was gathered in there yesterday was to watch our CEO, Lanham Napier, on Fox Business News. He told the Rackspace story to thousands of viewers. He told people what a ‘Racker’ is. He got called a ‘Gutsy Texan’ by Liz Claman. It was a great interview.