You know those moments when numerous people tell you that you "NEEEED" to talk to someone because they think you'll instantly get along, and then you finally meet the person and, in fact, you discover they were spot on? Well, this episode was one of those moments. Paul is a fascinating character with experience in marketing, sales, sales engineering and... traveling the world creating and playing music for world dignitaries. We cover what it was like watching Rackspace evolve from just a few dozen employees to a few thousand while honing in on the customer first culture that has helped the company scale so fast over the past twenty plus years. I also address Rackspace's shift to adopting a managed public cloud service offering, acquiring Datapipe, and the strategic decision made years ago to focus on Open Stack. Listen and learn folks. Listen. and. Learn.