I received a press release Wednesday morning announcing that The Planet would be holding a ribbon cutting ceremony at their new World Headquarters at Bayou Place, and since even the Mayor had proclaimed that Wednesday would officially declared as “The Planet Day,” I decided to drop by to see what it was all about. For those of you who aren’t familiar The Planet is the Number 1 privately held, dedicated server hosting provider in the world (second only to publicly held IBM) and the Fourth-largest hosting provider of Web sites (3.1 million). You can find more stats here.
Even more interesting to me was the fact that the press release said that Doug Erwin, CEO of The Planet would also be presenting the Houston Technolgy Center with a check for $25,000 to help kickstart their online Startup Business School (which will be led by Marc Nathan of the HTC and which StartupHouston will also be participating in ). Walter Ulrich, President of the HTC was there to accept the check, and if you’ve never heard Walter speak before, he is a very motivational speaker, with grand plans for both the HTC and Houston. In his speech, he anticipates Houston passing Silicon Valley in terms of recognition for startup activities within 5 - 6 years (as he has said in the past, this will be due to innovation within the Nanotech, Biotech, Energy tech, and IT/Web tech areas combined).
I have captured both of their speeches on video which you can watch below.
Here is Doug Erwins complete speech on the opening of The Planet’s new global headquarters (about 20mins):
http://www.vimeo.com/433378Here is Walter Ulrich’s speech (4 mins) on The Planet’s contribution to the HTC and Houston’s technology and startup communities:
http://www.vimeo.com/433763As I have heard in several other discussions, for their to be any viable startup community, a city has to have several anchor companies that attract technical, business and creative talent, which then have the potential to spin out later and start other new projects. I see The Planet as being one of those technical anchors for Houston that will do this very thing and we can see that they are already playing a very important role in helping to foster Houston’s startup community. I am looking for other great things to come.
If you want to get an even greater insight into The Planet’s new digs, you can visit their blog site for the complete tour. Go here.
I thought that The Planet grand opening was a great event and they clearly made a strong commitment to the city of Houston. It should also be mentioned that Walter Ulrich called Kurt and StartupHouston out specifically as a partner during his speech. That just goes to show how much StartupHouston has become an important component of the Houston Technology and Startup landscape.
As far as the Web Startup School goes, I’m planning on having a completely free, bring-your-own-lunch seminar and discussion every six weeks or so.
We have a few topics and speakers picked out already, but I’m more than happy to take suggestions for others. Simply email me at mnathan - at - houstontech.org with the subject line: Web Startup School
Thanks again Kurt for your coverage of the event and the coversation we shared at lunch.
Wow! This is really great news. We need to revitalize Houston and show we are a great place for new school technology companies,it’s nice to see the Mayor getting involved too. Nice article and I loved the video. I will share this out with quite a few people. I am also really excited about the changes going on at HTC with Marc.