I was a Racker from 2010 to 2014, I left shortly after Lanham did, I was also located in San Antonio near Castle until 2022. It's a very sad thing that Rackspa

I was a Racker from 2010 to 2014, I left shortly after Lanham did, I was also located in San Antonio near Castle until 2022. It's a very sad thing that Rackspace is dying, but I must concur with the assessment. Apollo, like most private equity firms, is a bunch of bean-counters who are focused on financializing acquisitions, using their assets as leverage to extract money, and then offloading it to bag holders in the market who ride it down into the abyss. When I left Rackspace they had no debt, a massive war chest, and a reasonably competitive product offering to AWS that could have been capitalized on. As soon as Lanham left and they put an MBA sales guy in as CEO (Taylor Rhodes), and I heard rumors they'd turned down an acquisition from a major tech company but were considering a sell-out, I left to go do startups, and so did many other top-tier Rackers. It used to be commonplace in South Texas (San Antonio / Austin) tech scene to meet new Rackers and talk to them about the old days, and just generally see Rackers having a huge presence in startups and tech. You still see a lot of former Rackers around, but they're all so far removed from those days now that this is not how we identify when we introduce ourselves. Not much new blood. Apollo decided it would be more financially sound to get rid of the core values, end "fanatical support", delete the fanatiguy logo and branding, and then lay off every single non-management American worker to replace them with 2-3 people working overseas from India. Rackspace support has been a boiler room bottom-barrel call center since at least 2019, and the pandemic massively accelerated what was already on the horizon. The company has been culturally dead and financially doomed far before the ransomware attack. The ransomware attack is just the final nail in the coffin. Apollo took a ~$5B company with no debt, loaded it up to do multiple acquisitions theoretically worth $2B ($7B if you're following) and made it worth less than $1B on market. Real geniuses there, who managed to completely destroy a solid American company that helped create a burgeoning tech scene outside of the Bay Area, so they could pocket the money personally as they drove the company into bankruptcy. It's unfortunately a tale as old as time, or at least as old as the 80s. Private equity is a bunch of sharks doing leveraged buyouts to con retail investors into holding the bag. Hasn't changed since I've been alive, and isn't likely to change before I die. The moment Rackspace sold to Apollo, they were on the trajectory of death. It just took awhile for reality to set in and consequences to catch up. I don't always agree with Yoo and I don't agree with everything he said in this article, but he's absolutely right about bean counters ruining tech companies.