Mark Collier

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.