Mark Collier

As many know, I have spent the last year and a half trying to get the OpenStack open source cloud operating system off the ground, after convincing Rackspace to embrace this model almost 2 years ago.  We had our OpenStack conference last week in Boston, and announced the big next step: creating the OpenStack Foundation. Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical and very wise woman, was kind enough to suggest I join a community discussion list dedicated to discussing foundations.  Learning from those with experience in such things is going to be vital as we sort through the many options as a community. Her only recommendation was to write a brief bio to kick things off, which somehow morphed into this insanely long post.

Like most of you, I started hacking in elementary school because girls were scary. In middle school we moved to Austin and I got my first computer, a Coleco Adam, because my parents were both public school teachers and we couldn’t afford an Apple. SmartLogo ftw!  In High School I learned Pascal, and like most young nerds was obnoxious enough to try and teach my teachers a few things. I competed in (and won) quite a few programming contests, to offset my time riding the bench for the basketball team with something I could actually achieve.

My first (and only non-tech) job was a 3 day stint washing dishes over memorial weekend at a local restaurant overlooking Lake Travis in a small community called Briarcliff (which Willie calls home).   This netted me a whopping $100, and I spent it all on a microsoft mouse to see what the apple zealots were buzzing about. It had two buttons, Apple suckers!  This should help me get girls for sure.

When I turned 16 I started working at a local mom and pop computer shop (remember those?) in Austin and probably assembled over 1000 PCs over the years with these summer jobs. I also did sales and training, so I’d sell the PCs up front, go back and assemble them, then train the customers on how to use these magic machines. This was like 1987. I had bad hair and no style. Still scared of girls.

I tried Computer Science at Trinity University for a semester but decided I didn’t want to be a career programmer (also, I kinda sucked) so ended up studying economics. Not because I wanted to become an economist (eww!) but because I found it interesting and my parents were paying for that paper so I had to study something. Finally met a girl (we are now married).

After I (barely) graduated I started at Dell working in a performance lab (thanks to my friend Todd Brannon) doing benchmark testing on new hardware that hadn’t reached the market yet. This was a geek’s dream come true, playing with the latest stuff before anyone else. Also, benchmarks can take hours, so what is a geek going to do? Play games. Anyone remember Command & Conquer? It destroyed my friend Rigo’s legal career because he dropped out of law school to play it every day. Now he’s a successful entrepreneur. Play games, people.

Eventually I went to the dark side (business! money! greed!) and tried product marketing, because playing games all day does eventually get old. This led me to realize that what I really loved was forging partnerships in the tech industry and taking risks on behalf of my company, because what the hell. It’s not my company!  As an example, we once picked a graphics chip for a new gaming PC we were building from an unknown, unproven graphics start up with only 30 employees.  They called themselves “Nvidia”.  Now they all drive Porsches.  Worked out.

I did a brief stint at a web start up (it was 2000, duh) and another tour of duty at Dell (first biz dev job, working with broadband companies a.k.a. big Telcos) eventually ended up at Musicmatch, a cool music app company you would remember, had Apple not erased those memories. I loved escaping the big company environment (Dell had lost the magic after becoming #1, but that’s for another post), working with passionate entrepreneurs who cared about their users and wanted to build a sustainable company. Just what I was looking for!  We were acquired by Yahoo 3 weeks and 1 day later. Drat.

Turns out, Yahoo was full of incredibly bright people, and I worked in the music group in L.A. for 5 years forging partnerships and learning how to dress. I started learning about the dynamics of platforms, which fascinating me from my economics roots. I worked with a team that built the first Yahoo! music app for Facebook and had a million users in a month. This opened a few eyes at Yahoo! and got me thinking about the future of “business development” in the age of APIs, but mostly we were focused on building a business within the constraints of the music industry. The economics of music licensing and the insistence on DRM by the major labels were (and continue to be) major impediments to innovation in music, and we had the added burden of trying to educate the world on the concept of subscription music in the face of Apple’s simpler approach.

After years of lobbying we finally got the labels to agree to let us sell music in MP3 format, but it was too little too late. Our subscription music service was still bogged down by MSFT DRM by the music labels, and Apple was garnering all the users anyway. We eventually sold off the subscription business to Rhapsody (a deal I worked on, but didn’t particularly enjoy, as I like building things!). Now we see Spotify getting lots of press and traction, which fills me with both pride and dread since we had the same damn thing 5 years ago… but as they say, there’s little difference between being early and being wrong. We also had the #1 personalized radio station called LaunchCast.  Didn’t Pandora just have an IPO?  Could certainly do a whole series of posts on Yahoo.

Yearning to get back to my geekier roots and actually be part of building a platform ecosystem (and escape the unfolding drama at yahoo) I hooked up with the good folks at Rackspace, who I knew from my days working with Jim Curry at Dell. They were building a cloud by developers for developers, because a lot of them were the slicehost team we acquired (Jason Seats is the man, if you don’t know him you should), who really got it. My title was “biz dev” but the role was more about convincing developers at cloud companies to adopt our platform APIs. We launched a program called “Cloud Tools” to promote their work, which was great fun. Shining the spotlight on other people’s work feels good, and it turns out it’s great business too.

I quickly started pitching to Lew Moorman (president of the cloud group and chief strategy officer for Rackspace) the idea of open sourcing some or all of our cloud (amplifying others ideas, including Jason Seats and Jim Curry to be precise. Credit where it’s due and all that. These days OpenStack has 1000 fathers it seems. Jonathan Bryce tells me they were talking about it as early as 2007, so I can’t take too much credit). This got the first sign of real traction in December of 2009, when Jason Seats started pitching the idea.  People (read: Lew) listened to Jason, as they should. By January Lew asked me to start pulling a plan together to evaluate, and by spring of 2010, Jim Curry and I we were pitching the board and Bret Piatt and I were lining up companies to join the mission.  The fuse was lit.

Boy did we light a fire! We had no idea how much pent up demand there was for an open cloud standard. The excitement immediately exceeded the readiness of the code, but the brilliant thing about open source (done right) is that there is no barrier to contribution. The more eyes were on it, the more payoff for contributors who didn’t want to fall short of the crazy high expectations.  Everyone could feel the potential.

After convincing Rackspace to pursue an open source development strategy, my role in the community has been in many ways to create those insanely high expectations, by growing the community of commercial backers and code contributors and marketing the successes. These two roles are very complimentary, especially in the first year, where one of the best pieces of news we could share to generate excitement was that a new tech giant was getting behind the movement.  Within the first year we had Dell, Citrix, Cisco, Canonical, even Microsoft on board.

Did we hype OpenStack? Hell yes. There is a powerful self fulfilling prophecy at work in a community driven initiative with no barrier to contribution except drive and the will to do it. One of the best decisions we’ve made IMHO is recruiting incredibly talented marketing folks like Lauren Sell and Todd Morey, who have been the unsung heroes of the first year in an world where code trumps all. (Also want to hat tip Anne Gentle who has proven that documentation is where the user meets the product and is vitally important).

I know that many developers question the value of marketing, and that in open source in particular it’s looked at as irrelevant or, at best, a distraction. I also know that there is a rich history of open source projects, foundations, and lessons learned. We truly do stand on the shoulders of giants. But we also haven’t been afraid to do things “the openstack way”, to borrow a phrase from Apache, including making marketing and other “non code contributions” a priority.

I think every new community needs to respect and learn from other communities, while also nurturing their own unique characteristics and taking some risks along the way. My gut tells me that as we take the next step to establish an OpenStack Foundation, we, as a community, will again need to balance a reliance on proven models and the voice of those with far more experience, with the emerging “openstack way”. If I could be so bold as to define the “openstack way” just a little bit, I think it would be this: think big, everyone’s welcome, and all contributions matter.

Update:  Josh Mckenty, who did as much to make OpenStack a reality as anyone (having led the creation of Nova at Nasa Nebula which became OpenStack Compute, and now CEO of Piston) pointed out an important part of the OpenStack Way.  This principle was established on the eve of the first OpenStack Design Summit in Austin over drinks at Star Bar, just days before the public announcement.  Tensions were running high, as he was still jumping through legal hoops at NASA to make the launch happen, and we needed a guiding principle (and a bit of comic relief).

Free as in Speech, Love, and Beer.

I had the privilege of attending what I think will end up being a historic moment in the technology industry. The event was Facebook’s Open Compute launch, in which they opened up two technology domains known more for their secrecy than knowledge sharing and, in the process, broke down the walls between the domains themselves. I captured this video of Mark Zuckerberg introducing the concept at their headquarters in Palo Alto April 7th, 2011:

Mark Zuckerberg introduces Open Compute April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.

The two domains, historically considered separate, are Data Center Design and Server Design. In the old world, it made sense to look at a server as a single unit, because applications typically lived on a single server (or, at most, a cluster of servers). In the new world, an application can span tens of thousands of servers (as I believe Facebook does), or hundreds of thousands of servers, as I believe Google does. No one knows for sure how many they have, but it’s a lot!

Given that Rackspace (my employer) operates datacenters globally and has tens of thousands of servers as well, our datacenter teams have been collaborating with Facebook for many months on next generation designs. When they asked our chairman Graham Weston to attend the event, I immediately saw an opportunity to jump on his coat tails with an openstack flag hidden in my back pocket. I just had a hunch there was more to this movement than just hardware… and here was my chance to sneak in and represent for all my OpenStack peeps out there…

Much has been written about cloud computing (commonly thought of as a large collection of servers running such apps “in the cloud”), but much of the discussion centers around distributed software systems to handle this new shape of problems (HADOOP, Cassandra, OpenStack) or the services implementing such software designs (Amazon, Rackspace).

At that software layer, clearly a wave of innovation is being unleashed by the open source software development model, in which like minded individuals are free to collaborate, regardless of company affiliation, to solve interesting problems. From my vantage point as one of the founders of OpenStack, I can tell you first hand that this model is unbelievable powerful as it attracts the brightest minds on the planet to come together to solve problems. It’s also redefining what it means to do “business development” in this era, as the mortal enemies of the past become the collaborators of the future, but that’s best left to a future post.

Now, Facebook is doing the same for two previously distinct domains: Data Centers and Servers. Jonathan Heiliger’s team presented some great background:

Facebook’s VP discusses Open Compute at Facebook, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.

Facebook’s Open Compute Launch, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.

The key word, in my mind, is previously. When viewed as a system — one giant supercomputer (for lack of a better word) with a hundred thousand processor cores being powered and cooled by massive fans, air ducts, and even higher voltages than normal all the way to the motherboard, it hits you: the building is the chassis for this computer! The open software platforms that enable apps to run on a computer the size of an airport are, then, in a sense the new operating system (OpenStack, Cassandra, Cloud Foundry, etc). Scoble has some great photos of the facility here (one stolen below).

By looking at the datacenter as one giant computer, Facebook was able to discard components that previously seemed essential, like the front “face plate” of each server (now just one of thousands of nodes in side a giant computer). They call this “vanity free” design, and I love it. Here’s a picture of Graham Weston in front of a “triplet” which is a 3 rack design with tons of these vanity free servers inside:

Amir Michael explains the history and goals in this video I captured at the event. Love the enthusiasm!!:

Facebook’s Open Compute Launch, April 7th, 2011 from OpenStack on Vimeo.

In my mind, the next wave of innovation comes from looking at the software and hardware (datacenter included) as one complete system. At the risk of invoking a technology cliche and inviting a fan boy war: The Apple Way. Putting aside the obvious not-very-open approach to innovation Apple is known for, my point is this: By looking at the problem from the software application level all the way down to the strands of electrical wire running into individual servers and even the physical location of the “giant computer” itself (near plentiful electricity, low risk of natural disasters etc), a whole new wave of innovation has yet to be realized.

Although data center folks like to use something called “PUE” to measure the efficiency of their designs, it really just measures the waste at the physical level (i.e. electricity that did NOT go to something “useful” like making the processor run), this does not measure the waste of bad software. I use the term “bad software” for simplicity, but what I mean in practical terms is that a lot of the “work” being done by those processors — even in the Open Computer “hyper efficient” design, is wasted and we may not even know it. The biggest reason we’re in the dark when trying to look at this problem holistically is the closed, proprietary nature of the players building so many of the technology pieces of the stack – until now.

Starting today, communities like Open Compute can combined forces with other open communities like OpenStack and Cloud Foundry to get real world data on how a given workload (say, serving up TMZ.com to 10M users or something less critical, like storing images from Mars) actually consumes power to find the waste and come up with innovative solutions across domains. To prove that collaboration is about action and not talk, Jesse Andrews, Jim Curry and myself approached the Facebook team after the event and said “hey! lend us some of these servers and we’ll take them to our office in San Francisco and have OpenStack running on them tonight!”. Something that might have taken months to arrange was now in motion in a matter of hours! A couple of videos of our secret plan in action:

OpenStack running on OpenCompute — on launch day!

Going back to the Apple comparison for a moment – there is a reason the iPad gets 10+ hours of battery life, and it is not purely about the capacity of the battery (hardware design & decisions) or the lightweight iOS operating system (software design) or the custom ARM processor (chip design), or the well understood nature of the applications and the resources they use (software platform design), it’s about all of these things taken as a whole. While there may be one company on the planet capable of taking this approach in consumer electronics you can hold in your hand, IMHO there are ZERO companies on the planet who can do it at the “datacenter computer” level. This is why it is more essential than ever that we embrace openness at every level of the stack, and get to work on this critical problem: together!

While I applaud all of the smart minds working on alternative energy sources, which will no doubt be essential to the future of our planet (and economy!), I’m equally excited to see the walls coming down amongst the practitioners that will be putting a massive amount of that energy to work (via cloud computing) in dramatically more efficient ways through open source and open design in the years to come.

Go here to get yours.

OPENSTACK: OPEN SOURCE CLOUD SOFTWARE

Had a fun time chatting with my buddy Howard Lindzon on Stocktwits.TV recently. Unfortunately my internet connection was pretty bad so the skype video is a little dodgy, but the audio is good. We talked about OpenStack and Rackspace and I valiantly defended Austin (the greatest city on earth) from Howard’s baseless attacks.

It was good fun and I hope to do it again soon.

You can read the news on what we’re doing at rackspace (open sourcing our cloud) and why elsewhere, including interviews dropping throughout this week. Instead I thought I’d share my personal perspective on how we got here. The greatest biz dev deal I’ve ever closed was with my own company.

Since I joined Rackspace a year ago, intrigued by the disruptive power of cloud computing, I’ve been amazed at just how wild and wooly this industry is. From the characters you meet to the ever changing alliances and consolidation, it truly has been one wild ride. And Rackspace, improbably, has been right at the center of the action. Out gunned by competitors that could seemingly squash us like a bug, we’ve managed to claw our way to be the #2 cloud, with some decent mindshare to boot. One of the keys is our ecosystem of developers, who’ve built amazing things on our API. Having a hand in building that community has been a real pleasure. You can see the state of things at Cloud Tools. But that’s small beer compared to what we’re doing today.

One of the first things Jim Curry asked me to think about when I joined was whether or not we should open up some piece of our code, such as our Control Panel. My immediate reaction was “hell yes!” but I also gave it some more thought, and the more I pulled on the string the more convinced I became it was the right answer for our entire development model. This was crystalized for me last June during a panel at GIGAOM’s Structure 2009, where Matt Mullenweg (founder of Wordpess, and someone I’ve always admired) said something to the effect that “if you find yourself competing with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google for the first time, realize who you’re competing with: Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The only way you’ll get leverage is Open Source.” That was it. I was convinced.

Having spent 7 years at Dell and 5 years at Yahoo! with a startup in there somewhere, I think it’s fair to say that 12 years of my career have been spent trying to change big companies without much to show for it. Yeah I’ve hit a few doubles, learned a lot and made great friends, but changing a company of any size is just really, really hard. But I’m way too stubborn to stop trying. Now if it sounds like all of this is a set up to declare that I single handedly changed Rackspace, it’s not. But I am very proud to have been a part of what I believe is a “bet the company” move for Rackspace. A move that is all about knowing your comparative advantage, and above all, understanding 3 things I am pretty passionate about: The power of Freedom (my libertarian side), The Leverage of Community (my ‘everyone bring a side and I’ll fire up the smoker for some BBQ’ side), and how to align interests (Biz Dev).

So I pushed from time to time on the idea internally, and got a few head nods but mostly we were all just so busy hanging on in the midst of cloud mania that there wasn’t much traction (or action) on the idea. This all changed in a fateful meeting just before Christmas (December 2009) when Jason Seats (founder of Slicehost, and another person I admire greatly!) made a presentation to the cloud leadership team proposing the radical notion that we open source our entire cloud. Every last bit. Our junk hanging out, for the world to see. I am going to post that deck for posterity, as soon as I check with Jason I’m not sure the slides alone will do it justice without his delivery style, but suffice it to say he had the room buzzing with the possibilities, with plenty of naysayers and questions as you’d expect. Without his championing of the idea, I don’t think I ever would have gotten the green light (a few weeks later) from Lew to actually start pulling a formal plan together for the CEO and Board to approve.

This quickly became a team effort, with Jim Curry focused on the internal issues (which were many, and daunting), such as organizational impacts, approvals, etc. Before Jim starts yelling about the way I’ve characterized him as the paperwork guy on this, let me make this 100% clear: I think the reason I’ve never really been able to change a company before is that I just did not have the will to keep fighting the internal fight. Jim has as strong of a will as anyone I’ve worked for so I knew I had the right partner in crime. The third amigo was Bret Piatt, who was locked in a conference room in Austin with us for days trying to build powerpoints and business cases that could possibly explain in a compelling way to management why in the hell we want to give away the millions of dollars worth of IP they’ve spent building a cloud — to our competitors!

The biggest key to the argument in my mind was always LEVERAGE. The competitors have an ARMY of developers. More developers than we have employees! We’ve got to build our own army, out of all of the people out there who have an interest in seeing an open cloud emerge (there are a lot of us!). But I’m not sure that’s what convinced most people. I think it was really two things: 1) Rackspace is about Fanatical Support. If you follow the company at all, you’ll know we beat this drum day in and day out. But it’s really true. The company gets paid because we care. We don’t care because we’re paid. I know this sounds impossible to the average cynic (myself included), but it really runs through the company. And this move is the ULTIMATE bet on fanatical support. level the playing field, focus on customers. 2) Leadership. This move puts in the spotlight, but in the role of community builder not technology hoarder. This is software development done the Rackspace way (see #1). I do think the Android analogy has convinced a few people, which is a real world example of community leverage at work to compete against a more proprietary (yet dominant) player.

In between the pitches to management and today, about 5,000 other things happened including the formation of dedicated teams and people pitching in from across the company as this thing snowballed to today’s launch. Since this post is already too long I’ll just hat tip Rick Clark, who has been our secret weapon in all this, bringing his incredible experience working at open source leader Canonical, and note that a hundred other Rackers also pitched in. Maybe they can add their perspective in the comments or their own blogs.

How’s it going on the leverage front… can we deliver the community I promised management? Well, let’s just say we are now working with NASA. Freaking NASA! RIght now, images from outer space are being recorded to hard drives in an undisclosed location running Rackspace software, which just gained it’s freedom from our datacenter. And the amazing breakthroughs NASA has made operating cloud computing at scale are being incorporated into the future of the Rackspace Cloud. Just to put this in perspective: NASA is the largest collector of data in human history. If they lose data, they have to fire off a rocket. People’s lives are on the line. Clearly my blog needs this kind of technology behind it (for my annual post.)

But of course we couldn’t stop with a community of two, so we set out to bring thought leaders from across the globe together to comb over the designs in the heads of the architects, validate assumptions, and start hacking on REAL code as a TEAM. Over 25 companies participated, just last week. Since I was asked to corral all of the geeks, naturally I planned the “Design Summit” in Austin, TX. We just wrapped that up, and now here we are making the announcement today. Special thanks to my secret weapon, my wife Dianna who has had to play the single parent role with our headstrong 4 and 6 year old daughters (no idea where they get that from) while I’ve been immersed in all things OpenStack the past week weeks and months.

So what’s next? What crazy promise am I going to make to the Rackspace and the rest of the OpenStack community? Easy: the first partnership with an alien race. WIth a little help from my friends at NASA.

Cloud Freedom starts today! It’s never too late to start doing the right thing, Amazon If you love your code, set it free. If it was meant to be, it will come back to you (in python).

OpenStack: Free, as in Beer, Speech, And Love.

You can learn a lot more about it at openstack.org and of course by following @openstack on twitter. Also, don’t hesitate to become a fan of OpenStack on Facebook if you have one more Like button click left in you today.

@sparkycollier

So many other “I’m leaving Yahoo.. sniff” blog posts have been written, I’ll try to keep your interest with things like all nighters in London or the occasional french castle.

But first… it’s true that when I joined the Yahoo! Music team in 2004 I had never seen a more talented collection of people anywhere in the world. Yeah, we made about a million mistakes, but I gained a ton of experience and life long friends out of it. Looking at you SteveO, Big Mike, Spiegs, Roberto, JT, Walker, strauss, Howie, Albert, Traci, Shannon, even my token Laker fan friend Matt New… that’s about 5% of the amazing folks (to the rest: don’t hate, and visit me in Austin .

I lost track of the number of once in a life time experiences but a few come to mind like going to the Grammy’s (for the record, I hate the grammy’s but WTF it was cool), watching Karin Gilford eat 3X her weight in BBQ at Salt Lick (still not sure how), two trips to london with spiegs and traci, seeing the look on ventura’s face when we showed up for our 8am train to Paris still out with Traci from the night before [redacted], staying in a castle with Albert & Spiegs for the music festival in Bourges, France… Cannes for MIDEM with Walker during the Obama inauguration (despite deathly food poisoning thanks to one shellfish below)… It’s all rather ridiculous, really… I’m a very lucky S.O.B. I know it.

Cannes, France. Which one of you made me ill?

Lest you think it was all cristal and rock stars, I actually put out some work product like signing our largest distribution deal for the Yahoo! Music Engine (Dell), and successfully executing a (somewhat) graceful exit from the client software business and into the social app/widget distribution game with deals with folks like RockYou, Bebo, Piczo, and Skyrock (they are based in Paris — see it was all for business I tell you!). But I will definitely remember the people, events, and places the most.

So, after 5 years at Yahoo!, including a magical 3 weeks and 1 day at Musicmatch before we were acquired, I have decided to move to the other end of the web where I can let my inner geek sing playing with cloud computing all day: Rackspace.

Rackspace is best known as the biggest “managed web hosting” company around, helping thousands of businesses focus on what they do best without worrying about buying servers and managing them day to day to keep their business running on the web.

But what really interested me was a new type of business infrastructure that has gotten a fair amount of press (creating some confusion in the process) called “cloud computing”. Everyone has a different definition, but at the core it’s still about making it easy to run your business on the web without worrying about how it happens behind the scenes.

If “managed web hosting” was about picking up the phone to have someone else set up your server in a matter of days (or hours) instead of doing it yourself, the promise of the cloud is radically simpler: clicking a button in a control panel and having a server up in running in seconds. Even better, having new servers brought online automatically the moment Oprah pimps out your new thing and millions of people rush to buy it. *having enough chicken is up to you.

If that sounds like a commercial, you’ll have to excuse the enthusiasm, as I’ve recently binged on the corporate kool aid. Rackspace talks a lot about the culture, and in case you think this is just like every other company, consider this: “Rookie Orientation” is a week long! I’m about as cynical as they come, but even I left impressed. Ask me about Sugarbear.

All I can say is that somewhere along the way I fell out of love (just a tiny bit) with what technology could do in theory, and started to value what you can actually do with it in practice. No new development in the tech world has the potential to have a bigger impact across almost every business than this crazy thing called “the cloud.” Because as much as I may be fascinated by technology as a life long geek, I’m acutely aware that most of the time technology sucks.

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.

On an unrelated note, I just switched to MAC.

So… When given the opportunity to become a “Racker” as VP of Business Development, helping build bridges between companies to make this new cloud technology suck less and do more, all I could tell Lew was: Hell yeah.

In addition to doing BD work building partnerships, which I really loved doing at Yahoo!, I am also excited to do some Corporate Development (M&A).

The rest of the particulars are on linked in so just click here.
And remember that curtis said you should follow me on twitter here.

As I mentioned before, I joined the board of an amazing non-profit this year called the Austin Music Foundation. AMF supports the music community with a series of educational events, and every once in a while we get to put on an event just for fun — which also helps us raise a few bucks to support the mission.

To that end, spend the evening of August 9th with some of the coolest cats in Austin enjoying the amazing food of EL SOL Y LA LUNA and, naturally, the music of from David Garza and Suzanna Choffel. I’ve included the event details below along with a few of their songs. Tickets are $35 with all proceeds benefiting Austin Music Foundation’s educational programs, and can be purchased here.

Austin 360 has a blurb on the event here.

Hope to see you there!
@sparkycollier

Testing out this 8tracks music mix service.

UPDATE: After tweeting, posting to facebook, telling everyone I know verbally, filing a formal objection on Experian and — probably most importantly — contacting my mortgage broker (who does a ton of business with Wellsfargo and has high level contacts there) I received a response from Wellsfargo. They are agreeing to fix it! Kudos to them for taking my complaint seriously and for doing the right thing. They have now sent an update to all credit agencies to fix the previous error. This is a huge relief, as I did not intend to wait 7 years for this to go away. Obviously, I would have preferred not to go through this time wasting ordeal in the first place, but i am glad I got a positive (and fair) resolution.

[ORIGINAL POST BELOW]:

Dear Wellsfargo,

I have been a loyal customer for over 10 years – closer to 20 in fact. After I refinanced my mortgage in January of 2009 via a mortgage broker (capstar lending), I was actually delighted to learn that wellsfargo had purchased the loan. After all, I have been happy with your service for years. However, you really screwed up this time. Despite your assurances to the contrary, your screw up has now impacted my credit, and you need to fix it. now.

Here’s the deal:

I have never received a single statement, bill, payment coupon book, or anything that might facilitate making payments. Ever — to this day in June 2009! The first correspondence I received from you stated that I was 3 months past due with a handy pamphlet on how to avoid foreclosure. FORECLOSURE! Are you effing kidding me?

I immediately called (4 times in fact) and cleared up the issue (so I thought). I was told that in your records I was set up to receive electronic statements. However, 1) I was never sent any electronic communication from Wellsfargo regarding my mortgage (I checked again, including SPAM folders) 2) I never elected this option and 3) I was told by the 4th person I talked to that it was impossible for me to get my first statement electronically for a new refinance, as a matter of wellsfargo policy.

My guess is that the error in your system is rooted in the fact that I am also a wellsfargo checking (and saving) account customer, where I DO have online statements set up. When you bought my loan, it appears you linked the accounts (without my knowledge), which inherited the “online statements” setting, but that was impossible since the first bill (according to the 4th wellsfargo representative) must be a mailed, paper bill according to your own policy. After talking to you 4 times I logged in (to my old checking account) and attempted to view the online statement you claimed were beint “sent” to me, and was given the following error message: “This account is not currently eligible for online statements”. To document the absurdity of the situation I captured a screen shot and am hosting it here (account info masked for security):

Wellsfargo you screwed up, now fix it.

Mind you — this is 3 or 4 MONTHS after I was supposedly receiving electronic statements in lieu of paper statements. This error confirmed positively that I had never received any statements electronically – and as I have stated I never have (even to this day) received anything via u.s. mail.

After settling up on the 3 months of past due bills I was assured 1) I would receive a bill for the next month (due June 1st) after paying the 3 months past due — that never happened (I STILL have NEVER received a bill) and 2) that this incident — entirely Wellsfargo’s fault — would NOT be filed as a negative incident on my credit report. Obviously both of these statements by welslfargo have turned out to be false. At this point I have still not received a bill, though my account is now current (You are finally allowing me to access the site electronically and I am making electronic payments now).

Bottom line: The account would have never been past due if you had billed me a single time, ever, and as documented above I also did not have access to electronic statements. You also informed me that you didn’t have my phone number, which you obviously should have gotten from the company you purchased the loan from, as I never contracted directly with Wellsfargo for this home loan refinance (again, I used Capstar – a broker).

In summary, I request that Wellsfargo remove this negative credit reference from my file, and if you value my business as a customer of over 10 years with 4 accounts, issue an apology for wasting my valuable time with this nonsense.

Mark Collier

P.S. I am forced to document this here because the experian dispute path only allows 120 characters. Even Twitter gives you 140!!

A funny thing happened on the way to teaching this class introducing Austin musicians to Twitter… namely that I had to drive to San Antonio (at 7am) and back to Austin on the day of the presentation, and upon arriving back in Austin just before the talk I realized I’d left my Macbook in San Antonio. This is not nearly as romantic as leaving your heart in San Francisco. In fact, it totally sucked as I had no way to access the slides I’d prepared.

So, I just winged it which actually worked out just fine. I was really happy to meet some of the most interesting and creative folks in Austin and to do my part to help the Austin Music Foundation achieve it’s mission. If you search for AMFtwitter you’ll find many of the attendees and I’d encourage you to follow them and watch them kick ass for Austin Music!

I’ve embedded the slides below, as you can see these were really just my speaker notes and nothing special as far as fancy powerpoint goes. (read: they are damn ugly.) I’ve received a lot of requests for them, though, so I am adding them here as a reference. The talk was geared for people who had never used Twitter or were just getting started with it, to clear up a lot the confusion (RT@#WTF) that is leading a lot of people to give up before realizing the benefits.

I also am adding this video which I think gives a nice overview as well:

Please remember that the Austin Music Foundation really needs the support of the community to keep on truckin, so become a member or contact me about sponsorship opportunities anytime. And follow AMF on twitter! www.twitter.com/austinmusic

If you’d like to receive a beta invite to test out the AWE.SM URL shortening & analytic service I mentioned, just DM me (or send an @sparkycollier and I should get it). You can reach me at www.twitter.com/sparkycollier

Cheers,
Mark “Sparky” Collier