David Skok

George Rockett, you are a soul brother of mine. George Rockett Peter Gross, PE Dean Nelson Christian Belady Joseph Kava Alex Veytsel Twenty five years pricing contracts on the buyer side has left me professionally suspicious of everyone. Twenty five years of men in good suits quoting uptime figures that would embarrass a weather forecaster. My default setting: show me the receipts. George has receipts · George invented the filing cabinet. What everyone who arrived after 2015 missed: there was no industry. Just engineers in windowless buildings, each convinced he was the only person alive who cared about chilled water. Their own mothers thought they worked in IT. George found them. One at a time. Not to sell them anything ⋯ out of pure curiosity, which is the one thing you cannot fake for thirty years. He never sold data center space. He built the community that came to fill it. ↝ Publishing by 1998. Vocabulary, then rooms, then arguments. Events by 2002, and that was the unlock. Not another ballroom with cold chicken and a lanyard that strangles you by hour three ⟶ a room where the engineer, the utility guy, the developer, the CFO and the investor finally had to look each other in the face. He saw two decades early that the walls were the problem. Some leaders choose distance. Michael Jackson mystical, floating behind glass. George went the other way. Present. Accessible. Human. The Taylor Swift model: everyone believes they are his close personal friend, and the maddening part is they are all correct. ◆ Do not mistake the warmth for softness. Not just the most thoughtful person in this industry. The hardest thinking person in it. Power, silicon, capital, policy, land, water, snarled like fishing line at the bottom of a boat, and George sits with it until it comes apart into something usable. Somebody had to argue this sector into consequence. George was holding the loom. Then the thing almost nobody bothers with. Training the next generation. Ethics and stewardship in the same syllabus as cooling design. He refused to let this become a business that only knows how to count. Then 2023. The exact age a reasonable man takes the board seat and works on his short game. He started over instead. Yotta. And this week Bowmark took a majority of InfraXmedia, the house he built, now carrying DCD, Yotta, Data Center Nation, SDxCentral. Magazine nobody asked for to a platform private equity paid up for. Not luck. Twenty eight years of compounding. I have been wrong about timing my whole career and right about most everything else. So take this as a professional assessment: George is not evolving. He is unlocking new characters. https://lnkd.in/edMDz8pf

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Thrilled for OVNI Capital to be backing RIFT in a pre-seed round led by AlleyCorp (Luc Ryan-Schreiber). Rift is building the first real-time aerial intelligence network, a new layer of infrastructure for persistent, on-demand visibility where it matters most. This funding will scale production of their autonomous stations, accelerate deployment in high-stakes environments, and expand the team leading the next phase. 🗞️ Explore the full story: - StartupMafia: https://lnkd.in/dARrg25N - BFM Business (FR): https://lnkd.in/eADSUsn7 - Les Échos (FR): https://lnkd.in/eFG3zAy5 👨‍🚀 Join the mission → https://lnkd.in/erm_SrTG

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