Join us for a 30-minute conversation with
TBHF Legend Graham Weston, CEO of Weston Ventures

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Graham Weston, CEO of Weston Ventures, was born to be an entrepreneur in a long family line of entrepreneurs. He grew up on his family’s cattle ranch in Marion, Texas near New Braunfels and got a degree in agribusiness from Texas A&M University. Though he was expected to return from college to run the ranch, these plans were changed when he started a real estate business from his dorm room. His father, now 96, is still waiting for him to return to the ranch!

For close to 30 years, Graham Weston has played a prominent role in technology, business and real estate in San Antonio. An early investor, later CEO and board chairman of Rackspace, a NYSE-traded, managed hosting company, he is also owner of Weston Properties, with its flagship Weston Centre, home of some of the most prestigious corporate names in the city.

Graham Weston has had an entrepreneurial focus from his high-school days and formed his first company, Assessment Technologies, from his dorm room at Texas A&M University. He saw the opportunity to use property data collection to negotiate ad valorem taxes as a result of working on a real estate issue at his family’s ranch one summer. Before he sold it to his partners, Assessment Technologies had evolved into a property-tax consulting firm with household-name clients nationwide.

He moved assertively to acquire distressed real estate in1992 after the real estate crash. He led a group of investors, including family members, to acquire what was then San Antonio’s newest and tallest office building renamed Weston Centre, home to some of the most prestigious professional firms in San Antonio.

His continuing interest in data and technology led him in 1998 to see the potential in a startup server-management company, Rackspace, where he initially provided critical angel-investor funding and became actively involved in its management and early rapid growth. Later, as Chairman of the Board, he oversaw its initial public offering in 2008 as a global company operating on four continents with more than 6,000 employees. Rackspace was traded on the New York Stock Exchange until its purchase by Apollo Global Management for $4.4 Billion dollars in 2016 that took the company private.

Through Rackspace, Graham became aware of how difficult it was to be in the tech business in San Antonio due to the lack of supporting resources. Now the focus of his interest and work is in the city to attract technology investment and job opportunities. Graham has acquired the historic Rand Building downtown. He co-founded Geekdom, a tech startup incubator and coworking space, and Weston Urban, a commercial real estate development company, to build and foster a high-tech ecosystem in downtown San Antonio and to reenergize a downtown that had been in decline for more than a decade. Today Weston Urban owns 20 acres of real estate in downtown San Antonio. It is in the process of managing, building, and refurbishing well over a million square feet of real estate with more than 1,500 apartment units on the drawing board. Weston Urban is responsible for the new office high-rise, The Frost Tower, on the San Antonio skyline. Designed by world-renowned Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects, the tower offers Class A office and retail space surrounded by walkable parks.

While at Rackspace, Graham established the Open Cloud Academy, a full-time, 9-week, cyber-security boot camp for students to achieve industry-recognized certifications and gain hands-on experience. He later founded the Open Cloud Institute at the University of Texas at San Antonio to develop degree programs in cloud computing and big data technologies.

After serving as a tri-chair on Mayor Julian Castro’s SA 2020 Committee, he worked with City, County, and UTSA leadership to bring hundreds more technology jobs into the downtown area. In 2018, Weston’s 80-20 Foundation made a $15 million gift to create a School of Data Science at UT San Antonio’s expanded downtown campus which is slated to grow to more than 10,000 students. The first buildings for the new school are set to open in 2021, adding significantly to Weston’s vision of a thriving downtown tech community.

Graham Weston served on the Board of Regents at Texas Lutheran University from 2002- 2006 and is currently a board member at Frost Bank, Texas’ largest publicly traded financial institution. He has been broadly recognized for his contributions to the business community in San Antonio, as well as for his active participation and leadership in city planning endeavors. He was inducted into the San Antonio Business Hall of Fame in 2011. In 2014, Graham was the recipient of the Babson College and Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs Award in Boston, Massachusetts. He was recognized as a Distinguished Alumni at Texas A&M University in 2018.

Graham was commended by the City of San Antonio for his 2005 role in helping victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. With a partner, he purchased and refurbished the former Montgomery Ward store in Windsor Park Mall and created a shelter for some 2,500 refugee families that included safe day care for children so their parents could look for jobs. Rackspace employees ran the shelter for eight weeks and built an online search engine to locate and reunite families that were separated during the evacuation process.

Today, Graham Weston is highly focused on his long-term goal of building a technology district supported by a vibrant urban downtown community. His dream formed at Rackspace – to provide top caliber local talent for an increasing range of corporate and entrepreneurial technology needs – is beginning to bear fruit.