FOREWORD

A Quest for the Essence of Entrepreneurship

THE UNSTOPPABLES ISN’T JUST A BOOK. It’s the product of a quest—a shared quest by author Bill Schley and me to discover the keys to entrepreneurship and to share them with people all over America. Our goal is to double the number of entrepreneurs in our country—starting with you, our readers. And if you choose the entrepreneurial path, we want to double your chances of success. Those are the goals behind every chapter and every page of Bill’s book.

To understand this objective and why we’re so passionate about it, you need to know a little bit about us.

The company I helped found, Rackspace, was launched by three former college buddies from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, in 1998. We now employ more than 5,000 Rackers in locations from Texas to London to Hong Kong. Our mission: To provide hosting and cloud computing backed by “Fanatical Support” to more than 200,000 customers worldwide, including most of the Fortune 100.

Our world headquarters is located in a building we call the Castle—a once-abandoned mall in a forgotten neighborhood in San Antonio. My desk sits beside the space once occupied by Gingiss Formal Wear, where I rented my first baby-blue ruffled tuxedo for the high school prom. All the experts said we were crazy when we moved here, but I guess that’s how we do things at Rackspace: we listen to our Rackers and to our customers first. Only later do we check with the experts.

Today, customers come from all over the world to visit us in this 1.2-million-square-foot space that no one else wanted. They sense the energy of the place, they see the excitement and enthusiasm on every Racker’s face, and they tell us that it still feels like a startup—a vibrant enterprise driven by hungry entrepreneurs. Rackspace has evolved into a big, well-managed company that’s traded on the New York Stock Exchange, grew by more than 25 percent in 2012 to $1.3 billion in annual revenue, and is earning accolades worldwide—but we’ve never lost our entrepreneurial zeal.

Maybe that’s why Fortune magazine just named us one of the Best Companies to Work For in America for the fifth time in six years. People love working here, and we love them back. And in turn we all love our customers. Call another company and you’ll probably listen to a recording, start pressing buttons, and listen to more recordings. Call Rackspace and you’ll speak with a Racker, trained and empowered to solve our customers’ problems. We’re famous for our combination of innovative technology and passionate Rackers, which enables us to deliver the Fanatical Support for which we’ve become known throughout our industry.

You may be starting to get a feeling for why I’m such a believer in the power of entrepreneurship. I’ve seen it work its creative magic here at Rackspace. I’ve seen the value it’s created for every Racker, for our far-flung customers, and for communities like the one in which our headquarters is located in San Antonio, where our arrival helped reverse 20 years of decline. I know that this same power is what communities all over America need to thrive in the twenty-first century—and I also know, sadly, that it’s what far too many are lacking.

That’s the source of the obsession that underlies The UnStoppables.

My obsession with uncovering insights into entrepreneurship was spurred by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 and the period of sluggish growth that followed. The U.S. job creation engine is broken. How can we fix it? The key is entrepreneurship.

No one works harder to understand entrepreneurship better than the Kansas City, Missouri–based Kauffman Foundation, which bears the name of a great twentieth-century entrepreneur, Ewing Marion Kauffman, a former salesman who went on to found a great pharmaceutical company. I encourage readers of Bill’s book to visit the Kauffman Foundation website and dig into its impressive archive of original research, particularly the 2009 report, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur. Recent research by the foundation has shown that the vast majority of new jobs in this country are created by young organizations, those that are less than five years old. Politicians, reporters, and many average citizens tend to assume that job creation is the province of giant corporations—the Fords, GEs, and Walmarts of the world. They do play their part. But the real source of most well-paid, emotionally rewarding jobs is young businesses—and that means entrepreneurship.

So where will the great entrepreneurs of tomorrow come from?

In search of an answer, I visited my alma mater, Texas A&M, where I was invited to speak to their MBA students. They were a bright, idealistic, and engaged bunch. After offering a few remarks, I asked the students, “How many of you would like to start your own businesses one day, or work for a young business?” Practically every hand shot up.

Then I asked, “And how many of you will be doing that as soon as you graduate from A&M?” There were a few chuckles around the room, and nearly all the hands came down. It seems there was a huge gap between the dream of entrepreneurship and the real-life plans most students had created.

I asked the students to explain the gap, and the answers were revealing. Several students pointed to the huge debt they were carrying after years of expensive undergraduate and graduate-school training. Many would graduate owing $50,000 or more. That burden made them more risk averse than when they began their studies. It discouraged all but the most daring among them from undertaking the personal and financial risk that’s inevitable when launching or joining a young company.

Others pointed out that, armed with an MBA from a respected university, they could probably land a six-figure salary from a prestigious, established company that their parents would be proud to mention to their friends. That path would give them security (or so they thought) and enable them to quickly start paying down their student loans. Launching a start-up or joining a young company would mean they’d face a far greater opportunity cost—another factor discouraging entrepreneurship.

The third factor, I came to learn, was the nature of MBA studies themselves. The business students at our great universities learn many useful skills—accounting, finance, organizational dynamics, human resource management, and much more. They leave school well equipped to help run mature enterprises. But they don’t learn how to assert their will or overcome their fear of failure. And they don’t spend enough time studying the essence of entrepreneurship: getting in motion, building your team, and learning how to succeed with customers.

Combining these factors, it’s no wonder that entrepreneurship is flagging in America, and that our once-powerful job creation engine is stalled. The educational institutions that we rely on are inadvertently stifling the entrepreneurs who might otherwise emerge. They destroy more entrepreneurial spirit than they create.

I decided that I wanted to try to help solve this problem. And that’s where author and branding strategist Bill Schley enters the picture.

I often listen to books on tape while driving to work and back. A few years ago, I happened across Bill Schley’s book, Why Johnny Can’t Brand. The book had made a Top Five Marketing Books of the Year list someone had sent me, and once I heard it, I knew why. It was full of insights that I wanted to put into action.

I reached out to Bill at his offices in Connecticut. A few months later, I welcomed him and his business partner to Rackspace for a tour of our company and some working sessions with our senior leadership team. Bill and I hit it off from the start, and over the ensuing months a business relationship developed into friendship.

Most important, we discovered our mutual passion for entrepreneurship. We were obsessed by the same questions: What lies at the heart of entrepreneurship? Why do some entrepreneurs succeed while others fail? And how can our society double the number of new entrepreneurs we produce?

Bill and I decided to set out on a journey to answer these questions.

Our quest took us well beyond the boundaries of the business world. We journeyed from Texas to New York to the West Coast. From there we traveled to Israel, a tiny nation with an amazing entrepreneurial culture that is well documented in the book Start-up Nation by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. We met a host of amazing business founders there, along with government officials, educators, and experts who helped us understand how Israeli society has been reshaped deliberately to foster the spirit of entrepreneurship—with incredible results.

After we returned from Israel, I had to get back to work at Rackspace, but Bill traveled on to Virginia Beach and San Diego, where he observed and met with members of the U.S. Navy SEALs. In his research, he’d discovered that this most elite force of warriors has a number of crucial characteristics in common with the greatest entrepreneurs, including a willingness to adapt on the fly, dedication to the mission, readiness to tackle (and master) risk, and single-minded devotion to the team. He suspected that if he could learn what propels the SEALs beyond all normal human limits to succeed in some of the world’s most challenging environments, he might unearth secrets that could fuel the...