Rackspace Email

And, yeah, I spent 15 years in the golf industry and then moved here.

Got a job at Rackspace.

Don't ask me how someone who's in the golf industry gets a job with managed servers, but had a great career there.

And then volunteered for First Tee during that time and had been familiar with it because I have just my love of golf.

You could like, oh, there's a company out there that does that.

I think it was Rackspace or whatever they were using.

I can't remember, but it doesn't matter.

It's like AWS now.

Uh, I then went to, to, uh, Microsoft to run audience marketing, which is kind of a different flavor of product marketing.

And I spent the next, uh, couple of years building product marketing teams at different companies, including Rackspace and SolarWinds.

And then I've been a CMO for the last, uh, four jobs I've had.

And, uh, and that's, that's been my journey.

And my third observation, which actually came about when I was actually writing the book, 'cause I started writing the book 10 years ago, is that, uh, two, two important observations.

One is that product marketing is strategy, and they're often disconnected, right? So as a product marketer, you often are told, "Hey, go and write a messaging document.

Go launch this product." And it's often very tactical work, right? I remember when I first joined, uh, Rackspace, they told me, "You know, when the product is ready, we'll call you so you can do the press release and update the website." And I told them like, "That's not how product marketing [laughs] works.

That's just, uh, you just need a, a webmaster or, or a PR person for that.

What do you see as some of those sort of challenges, but also some of where you've seen it work really well in terms of that collaboration of lots of different teams all feeling like they're pulling in the same direction?

When I headed up Asia sales for Rackspace in Hong Kong, we were a 12-person team, so everyone wore many different hats.

I was running a sales team where we didn't have enablement in in hong kong as we were working within the us and then we started to bring in people from marketing perspective and stuff like that when we joined forces and started to realize what lands in the us is not going to land in hong kong the way we advertised the way we marketed The way we sold to our clients.

There were so many cultural differences that needed to be respected in order to make our mark.

And that's perhaps through perception, that's perhaps through you've not sat in my chair, how could you possibly tell me what to do type mentality that we know exists in lots of places in organisations.

So, yeah, I think that's a really interesting point of the kind of qualification piece.

And as you scaled in that Rackspace example earlier, How did you, what were some of the kind of specific mechanisms that you use to maintain that culture and to preserve that way of working?

Yeah, one of them was the hiring process.

But Who has completely crushed it for me.

I know there are some companies out there right now that a lot of their companies like Rackspace.

That's a back office server company, yet there are people putting brand logos on their body.

It just blows my mind.

Yeah.

Go to go to Rackspace.

We have an announcement with them this week, right? There's lots of ways, lots of places you can go for these things now.

Yeah, ultimately, it's going to be infrastructure analogs out there, co-location.

So, geez, when I started Cinevating in 2011, Microsoft 365 had just come out.

A lot of folks were skeptical of it at first, and we're doing a lot of hosted email, like Rackspace hosted email with a third party and things like that, but hadn't really gotten too much into cloud hosting.

But as you start an MSP and clients, you start getting involved with networking and Sinovate kind of started as a telephony and avoid provider on-premise phone system and whatnot and moved into the MSP space.

And that's kind of how we've transitioned our journey.

Yeah, yeah.

Excited to chat about all sorts of things, both in terms of background and current work with Chetan Gupta today, who is Chief AI Officer at Rackspace.

Well, welcome, Chetan.

How are you

And as the sort of industry matured, we sort of started looking at a broader spectrum of things.

And that's what I was doing.

And then I joined Rackspace.

And I've been here four months.

And while I'm a veteran in the space in general, like I've been everywhere in the IT, if you want to call it still like that, I'm more than 35 years started hacking, basically soldering my own computer and hacking assembly and now doing that stuff I'm doing.

Yeah, Zach Schneider here, another industry veteran, I think over 27 years working for startups, for bootstrap companies, for big tech like Apple and Rackspace, building public clouds, SaaS offerings, and platform as a service offerings.

Excellent.

So we've got a vast amount of experience on the call today, which is fantastic because a lot of what we've been looking at here is a comparison of the old ways, as it were, and the new ways.