Patrick Condon is one of the cofounders of Rackspace Hosting, a San Antonio based hosting company that has grown to $1 billion in revenue. At Rackspace, Condon has held all kinds of leadership positions in marketing, customer care, and business development. Condon attended both Trinity University and Santa Clara University. He received a BA in Finance from Santa Clara University. Today, Condon spends most of his time helping startups. He was instrumental at Rackspace in the acquisition of Webmail.us, an email company in 2007. It was Rackspace's first acquisition. Rackspace went on to buy Slicehost and Jungle Disk a year later. Condon is actively involved in San Antonio's technology entrepreneurial ecosystem and Rackspace's Startup Program. He has served as a mentor at 3 Day Startup San Antonio, High School Startup, TechStars Cloud and at Geekdom, the collaborative workspace in San Antonio. Pat is also an active angel investor. He has invested in companies like Austin-based Greenling, which delivers organic local produce to homeowners, TrueAbility, a technical testing startup, ParLevel Systems, a vending machine system company and ZippyKid, a WordPress hosting company, all based at Geekdom. He focuses on early-stage Software-as-a-Service companies that serve small businesses and freelancers. And this little nugget comes from David Cohen, founder of a TechStars, in a blog post: "Pat’s guilty pleasure is the television show Wipeout, he once paddled 200 miles non-stop in a canoe, and he has an incredibly sensitive sense of smell."
Pizza and beer at 6 p.m. Interview at 7 p.m. Special thanks to venue sponsor: Geekdom
In an interview with Rackspace, Condon gave the following advice to startups.
- Do more with less
- Defy conventional wisdom
- Stay very focused; be narrow and deep
- Build something you call actually sell
- Don’t raise money until you absolutely have to
- Know yourself and your team, and be honest about what you are good at and not good at