Gary Wojtaszek
Founder, RecNation RV & Boat Storage
Gary Wojtaszek is a proven executive in the real estate, data center and technologies industries working across both public and private companies with a proven track record of success. He also has considerable private equity advisory and board governance experience. Wojtaszek’s experience includes founding, growing and monetizing private and public companies of scale, working in varied corporate situations including IPO, LBO, fast growth, as well working in restructuring and bankruptcy reorganizations.
As CyrusOne’s CEO, he developed the data center strategy that led to the successful IPO, REIT conversion and spin-off of CyrusOne from Cincinnati Bell - a 140 year old Telco. In that role, he transformed a regional $500 million data center company and grew it to become the third largest data center company in the world with locations in the US, Europe, Asia and LATAM, which was recently sold to KKR for $15 billion. Under Gary’s leadership, CyrusOne was one of the top 5 best performing REITs in the industry significantly outpacing S&P 500, DOW & RMZ indexes and grew the company at a 25% CAGR during his tenure.
He’s currently the founder and “Chief Camper” of RecNation, which is the largest specialized real estate company in the US focused on marine and RV storage. He established WOJO Capital partners which focused on acquiring and developing boat and rv locations and then established a larger Joint Venture with Centerbridge Partners. He has raised $800 million of capital and is quickly scaling the business. In a few years, the company has developed a robust operating platform and is now the largest institutional owner in this newly created industry. RecNation currently operates 60 locations spread across 7 states with over 16,000 customers.
Wojtaszek has extensive and varied board work experience working in both domestic and international companies, public and private companies, as well as recently serving as one of the lead independent directors of company going through a successful bankruptcy reorganization.
Wojtaszek was one of two independent board members at Talen Energy which is one of the largest power generation companies in the US with a fleet of power generation assets including Nuclear, Coal, Renewables and Gas. He was asked to join the board of Talen after advising them on how to develop a digital strategy to compliment their power generation assets, which lead to the first data center bring constructed next to a nuclear plant. In this role, he oversaw every aspect of a very complex bankruptcy process for a highly regulated $4.5 billion power company, that had a mix of subsidiaries involved in the bankruptcy process. It is considered one of the most successful bankruptcy proceedings in terms of the speed of resolution given its highly regulated industry. As part of this role, he was a board member of Cumulus Data Center which was the first data center ever built next to a Nuclear Generation Facility. The facility was recently sold to Amazon for a 3X MOIC.
He currently is a board member at GDS Holdings which is a NASDAQ listed company and is the largest data center company in China. This has been one of the fastest growing companies in the industry and has had to deal with the political challenges associated with being a Chinese based, but US listed company. Wojtaszek has been intimately involved with the dual listing process on the Hong Kong exchange, spearheaded the expansion into Southeast Asia, and regularly speaks with US investors on the company’s behalf. He recently joined the board of the Digital Land Holdings subsidiary of GDS which is pursuing growth in SE Asia and helped raise $600M of initial funding to pursue the growth in the SE Asian market.
Wojtaszek is also an advisor to Carlyle Group and sits on the boards of their two data center portfolio companies Involta which is a US based managed service provider called Involta as well as Nxtra. Nxtra is one of the largest data center companies in India which is a joint venture between Bharti Airtel & Carlyle. Nxtra has data centers in all of the major cities across India including Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Pune and others. He is also an advisor to Actis Capital a London Based PE fund focused on acquiring and managing digital assets in developing markets and advised on the recent acquisition of a data center portfolio in South America.
Additionally, Wojtaszek sits on the board of Quantum Loophole which is developing a 2,000 acre data center site near Northern Virginia which is the largest master planned data center development in the US. He works alongside TPG Capital which is the largest financial investor in this project. He is involved in all aspects of the company’s planning, strategy and oversight.
Other board experience includes: Poema Global (Hong Kong based NASDAQ SPAC) which acquired Gogoro, Interprivate Infrasructure (US based NASDAQ SPAC). Additionally, he served on the board of Cincinnati Bell and CyrusOne.
He has previously served on many non profit boards including SMU Lyle School of Engineering, Dallas Chamber of Commerce, KIPP Charter School, Dallas Zoo and Lang Entrepreneur Center at Columbia University. He is a regular commentator on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money, Squawk Box, Bloomberg, Forbes and WSJ.
He graduated from Columbia Business School and Rutgers University, is married with four children and lives in Dallas, Texas.