Lanham Napier — CEO
Lanham Napier is the CEO of Rackspace. He avidly promotes the workplace culture that drives the company’s famed Fanatical Support®. This passion for empowering customers has made Rackspace the acknowledged leader of the open cloud.
Napier joined Rackspace in April 2000, a couple of years after its founding. He recognized early on that the company’s employees—dubbed Rackers—and its unique culture of customer service, would be the keys to its success. Napier strives to give Rackers the same exceptional support that they provide to the company’s customers. That approach has won Rackspace recognition by FORTUNE® magazine as one of the 100 Best Companies to Work For, and by Bloomberg Businessweek as a Top 100 Performing Technology Company.
Under Napier’s leadership, Rackspace has grown from a privately held company with fewer than 100 Rackers to one of the fastest-growing firms on the New York Stock Exchange, with more than 4,500 Rackers working in a dozen locations around the globe, and more than $1 billion in 2011 revenue. Napier has been recognized by Forbes as one of America’s 20 Most Powerful CEOs under 40, and by Ernst & Young as an entrepreneur of the year. He is a frequent guest on CNBC and other business news channels, and gives keynote speeches on leadership and technology to C-level audiences around the country.
Before coming to Rackspace, Napier worked for Merrill Lynch and for Silver Brands, a private equity firm. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Rice University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Lanham lives in San Antonio with his wife and two children where, with the help of a cloud-based app running on his smartphone, he controls the temperature of a backyard smoker and regularly makes award-winning ribs.