Part One of a four-part Urban Nerd series exploring how an unlikely path, an overlooked city, and long-term conviction gave rise to Active Capital — one of Texas’s quiet venture successes.

I’ve known Pat for a long time.

Truth be told, when I worked at Rackspace, and I spent close to a decade there, I didn’t really know him. I definitely knew who he was. He was always a big deal. His name carried weight. But like a lot of things in a company that large, proximity didn’t always mean connection.

It wasn’t until after I left Rackspace and started working more deeply in the startup scene that I actually got to know Pat. And the more I got to know him, the more I found myself looking up to him. I consider him a friend. A mentor. An advisor. And every time I talk to him, I feel like I walk away having learned something, not just about business, but about people, leadership, and how to build something meaningful without losing yourself in the process.

That’s what inspired this series.

This will be a four-part exploration of Pat’s journey, his work, and what he’s built. Not because it’s flashy, but because it’s remarkable in a much quieter, harder-earned way.

There’s another reason I wanted to write this.

Between my time at Rackspace and my time outside of it, I’ve had a front-row seat to something that still bothers me deeply. I’ve watched hundreds of incredibly talented people leave San Antonio. Engineers. Sales leaders. Product managers. Founders. Operators. Some of the most brilliant people I know.

I don’t blame them. I don’t begrudge them. San Antonio is a tough market to build a tech career in. The gravitational pull of other cities is real. Opportunity often lives elsewhere.

But Pat stands apart from most of the people I’ve watched come and go.

He figured out a way, not an easy way, to stay in San Antonio and still build something significant. This series is, in many ways, a hat tip. It’s also a curiosity. How is this possible? And if Pat could do it, what does that mean for others who want to try?

To understand that, you have to start at the beginning.

Pat didn’t grow up with advantages.

“I grew up poor,” he told me. “We never owned a house, but we never missed a meal.”

He was born in Arlington, Virginia, and raised just outside Washington, D.C., in Springfield. Money was always tight. His mom worked two jobs. She batch-cooked meals for the week. They got help where they could. What left the deepest mark, though, wasn’t just the lack of money. It was what that lack did to his family.

“I watched my mom and my dad tear each other apart because of our financial situation,” he said. “I was 11 or 12 years old watching my parents fight constantly, and the core of the fights were always about money.”

That experience shaped a defining decision.

“I decided I was never going to ask my parents for anything,” he said. “Not because I didn’t want things. I just didn’t want to contribute to the fighting.”

From that moment on, work became his way forward.

By 13 or 14, Pat was waking up at 4 a.m. to deliver the Washington Post. He worked after school at a dry cleaner. He sold Christmas trees. He stacked turkeys at the grocery store. He played football, “not well,” he admits, but enough to learn discipline and teamwork.

“Work ethic was ingrained in me very early,” he said. “I took it everywhere.”

College wasn’t part of the family plan. No one in his immediate orbit had gone. It wasn’t even discussed. A friend changed that.

“One of my best friends said, ‘You should apply to five colleges,’” Pat said. “I picked five I’d never heard of. One of them was Virginia Tech.”

Getting accepted, he says, was “the biggest break I’ve ever had in my life.”

Once there, he found himself surrounded by people who saw the world differently. One roommate arrived freshman year with a suitcase full of computer equipment. Pat arrived with beer. They bonded quickly. Another close friend came from an entrepreneurial family and was always thinking about starting something.

Pat worked constantly. His dad covered tuition at first, but one semester in, the call came. He couldn’t help anymore. A friend put Pat’s next tuition payment on a credit card. That bought him time.

Instead of bouncing between unrelated part-time jobs, Pat joined Virginia Tech’s co-op program, alternating semesters of school with real-world work. It gave him professional experience and clarity about what he didn’t want.

“I had friends who went straight through school, got accounting jobs, and thirty years later they were still accountants,” he said. “A lot of them don’t enjoy that.”

In 1999, Pat and one of his partners dropped out to start a dot-com. They launched just as the market collapsed. Venture capital disappeared. Companies folded overnight.

They survived, barely, in part because they hadn’t raised money.

“As long as we were willing to put meals on credit cards, we could keep going,” he said.

They pivoted. Then pivoted again.

“We never gave up,” Pat said. “But we did give up on ideas that weren’t working.”

During one of those pivots, Pat was the poorest of the three founders. To stay involved at all, he moved back to Northern Virginia and worked at Sears selling electronics.

“I crushed it,” he said. “Top five sales nationally.”

When the company began gaining traction again, he needed to return to Blacksburg. That’s when he took a job selling books door to door across southwest Virginia.

“It’s the hardest job I’ve ever had,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of people quit. I made it the whole way.”

He barely made money, but he gained something more important. Mental toughness, mentorship, and a habit of constant learning that never left him.

In 2002, Pat finished his degree in finance. Almost immediately, the business took off.

They found their lane in business email hosting, infrastructure companies depended on every day. Revenue doubled year after year, reaching $10 million within five years. They built the company in Blacksburg without venture capital by hiring Virginia Tech students part-time and growing them into full-time roles.

What ultimately changed everything wasn’t just growth. It was gravity.

As the company scaled, infrastructure became mission-critical. Reliability wasn’t optional. Downtime wasn’t acceptable. That search led them to Rackspace, first as a customer, then as something closer to a partner.

“They answered the phone,” Pat said. “They actually cared.”

What began as a small server footprint grew steadily as the business grew. Pat found himself flying to San Antonio more and more, building relationships across the company, from account teams to executives to founders.

By 2007, Rackspace made an offer.

“It was a life-changing offer,” Pat said. “But we didn’t shop it around. We believed in them.”

The company was acquired. The founders stayed.

And just like that, Pat wasn’t an outsider looking at Rackspace anymore.

He was part of it.

That moment, crossing from founder to Racker, would shape everything that came next.

Next: Pat’s years inside Rackspace, and how they quietly set the foundation for Active Capital.