startups

Xenex CEO talks Rackspace, health care and San Antonio’s growing tech scene


Technology, entrepreneurship and solutions that “help people get jobs done or interact with technology better” have always interested Morris Miller.

He founded Curtis Hill Publishing, the first company to put Texas case law on CD-ROM, and sold it to Thomson Legal Publishing. He co-founded Rackspace Holding Inc., a cloud computing company based in San Antonio, and helped launch Xenex Disinfection Systems, another San Antonio company, that sells robots used to disinfect hospital rooms. He’s also a managing partner at Tectonic Ventures, a venture capital firm that’s invested in Xenex, Kymeta, Humatics and other technology businesses.


Xenex, of which he currently serves as CEO, has robots in more than 400 hospitals and employs around 100 people. Miller recently sat down with the San Antonio Express-News at Xenex’s headquarters. Here’s an edited transcript of the conversation.


Q: Your grandparents on both sides had their own businesses. What are some of the lessons you’ve taken from them?

A: My mom’s dad, whom I’m named for, and his brother invented a machine that copies keys. She used to talk about how he (Morris Abrams) knew the name of every single employee (at Curtis Industries) and all of them could come and talk to him. It was a collegial atmosphere. There was no difference between rank. He also did innovative things. As the factory grew, it took longer to walk from one end to the other, so he decided he would give roller-skating lessons, and all of the employees learned how to roller-skate. These were the lessons of treating everyone with respect, trying to get to know everybody and being willing to innovate inside.

My dad’s father immigrated from Czechoslovakia, and he worked day and night. They had a dry goods store in Pleasanton, Texas, and my dad used to tell me stories (about him). It was the idea that the customer was always right, and you can render tremendous service to a customer to gain their loyalty. Eventually, he (grandfather) came to San Antonio and bought the Robert E. Lee Hotel. When I was young, he would pick me up in the morning and take me down there, and I would work at the desk with him and interact with the clientele. It was customer-service-oriented — what else can you do to make the customer happy?


Q: What’s been the greatest achievement and greatest setback of your career so far?

A: Being able to assemble groups of people to work together with a common purpose. At Rackspace, the goal was to deliver fanatical support — whatever it took to make that customer happy. We brought in people who helped us achieve that. Similarly at Xenex, everybody comes together to try to reduce infections and save lives. Those are the greatest achievements: finding people, imbuing them with that culture of what you want to accomplish, working with them to help them do it and disciplining yourself to get out of the way sometimes and let them do what they do best — because if you let them, they’ll do even better than you could do on your own.

I find it very frustrating when you can’t get a business to grow fast enough. When you have a solution like we have at Xenex … it is a daily frustration on my part to try to figure out how we get health care to adopt something that will help patients faster, because it’s such a regimented industry. It’s not known for innovation; it’s known for sort of steady, slow progress. And yet you have an innovation like this that’s game-changing.

Q: Have there been any difficulties with adoption in the local market?

A: I remember at Rackspace somebody read a verse of the Bible that said something like, “You’re never a hero in your hometown.” It was years before we had big San Antonio companies using Rackspace for hosting. We were doing $100 million a year, and we were like, “We have like no San Antonio companies. How does that happen?!”

We’ve (Xenex) seen adoption here. The robots are at University Health Systems, Baptist Orthopedic Hospital, San Antonio Military Medical Center and the VA hospitals in San Antonio and nationwide. Do I want the rest of the hospitals in San Antonio to adopt it? I do. It’s good for the patients, and we want to work with those infection preventionists to see if together we can make a difference.

We would hear periodically that hospitals were worried about cost, and our response to that is putting in the robots free of charge. We’ll bill you when you reduce your infection rates, and that’s a risk that I’m happy to take because we’ve seen such consistent infection rate reductions.

Q: What are some of your takeaways from Rackspace?

A: Early on, we had a rule that there could be no technical arrogance. Sometimes you’ll know a lot more than even your customer does about a situation, and it’s important to maintain your objectivity and be willing to share your knowledge without any judgment of your co-workers or a customer. You’re there to solve their problem, and that’s really why you exist. It’s a tremendous opportunity.

Being willing to change the way teams were structured. If you think about a typical company, you’ll have an accounting department, a customer service department, maybe an upgrades department; and at Rackspace, we looked at it a little differently. We said, “We’re going to have teams, and we’re going to have people from each of those departments on every single team. The accounting department is answerable to the accounting person on the team and so forth.” That brought us closer to the customer.

At Xenex, that plays out by having the customer service people in the field, which is harder for us to manage from San Antonio, and yet it’s critical that they’re in the hospitals interacting and understanding what customers’ problems are rather than what we perceive their problems to be.

Being able to monitor your growth and dial growth up or back based on how fast you could afford to grow and being measured in it to run a profitable company was another great lesson.

Q: What do you think the future of companies like Rackspace is?

A: We always had a saying that as every category grows, it ends up dividing. If you think of the category of milk, you had milk, then pasteurized and homogenized milk, then vitamin D milk, then 2 percent milk, then low-fat milk, then almond milk, then rice milk, now you’ve got muscle milk. I think what you’ll see is companies like Rackspace becoming even more specialized at what they do. Rackspace has always been about support. David Sambur at Apollo Global Management knows how to run companies, and he’ll figure out what the niches are where they can grow, whether that may be providing a human interface to Amazon Web Services or to what’s happening to Google on the back end.

There are many people who need a human ear and somebody to bounce ideas off of. That’s what Rackspace was about, and I would be willing to bet in the future that’s what they will continue to be about: giving a human hand to a highly technical operation to allow you to accomplish your business purposes on the web. I don’t think that’s going away.

Q: Will they ever be public again?

A: I think it’s very likely they’ll be public again, but I have no information that you don’t have.

Q: How has San Antonio’s attitude toward technology changed?

A: Whether it’s Geekdom or the new WeWork space that was announced recently, I think that now people understand that this is a technology city. It started with the military bases, where you had all of these highly trained technical people, and then you’ve got wonderful schools — University of the Incarnate Word, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio College, the University of Texas (at) San Antonio, St. Mary’s University — that are producing incredibly talented graduates who want to get involved.

This is a really great city to live in. The infrastructure was well-designed. Intellectually, it’s a fantastic city. You can have both great companies and a great quality of life with your family. There’s a lot of venture funding available now, whether it’s through Tectonic Ventures or other places, and people are willing to get involved not only financially but also as coaches.

It’s a very generous city in terms of leadership. I think our openness to giving back is a huge difference. Nobody feels overwhelmed like many people feel in a big city, where they kind of want to go off and hide. Here, there’s plenty of open space. There’s time to go help people who need help.

Q: How does San Antonio set itself apart?

A: We’re on the rise in terms of technology, and it’s a place where you can have a career and grow. There’s not the constant pressure of one company versus another. We see a tremendous amount of company loyalty within San Antonio.

It takes five to 10 years to make these companies (a success). It was at year nine where everybody thought Rackspace was an overnight success. You can keep people here and engaged, and they’ll continue to work, whereas in other cities they’re constantly getting taken between companies.

Q: What can people do to help?

A: It may be a matter of how we view ourselves. If you look at yourself as a tech hub, which I do, I’m happy to talk to people about technology here. I’m happy to encourage them to start companies here (and) I’m happy to encourage companies to come here, because I think you can have it all in San Antonio.

It may be that as San Antonians, we tend to be very genuine, so maybe we’re our own worst critics — like, “Well, we haven’t made it yet.” Actually, maybe we have and we just don’t realize it! I think getting everybody to be excited about what we have here, what we are, what we can be, that might be the key. People just need to say, “Yes, we are here; we have arrived.”


madison.iszler@express-news.net | @madisoniszler






Quick facts on Morris Miller

Typical morning routine: Wake up between 4:30 and 5 a.m., drink espresso, answer emails, exercise for 30-45 minutes, start making phone calls or head to the office.

Current or most recent read: “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There” by Marshall Goldsmith

Favorite local restaurant: Cappy’s, Paesanos, Piatti, Feast and La Fonda

First job with a paycheck: Cleaning up the darkroom at a local photo lab for $2.65 an hour

Passion/hobby outside of work: Golf

If he had to pick a different career in a different industry: Doctor



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