A few months ago Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, asked me why I work at Rackspace. “Would you still work at Rackspace, even if you won the lottery?” he asked me. “Yes,” I answered.

But it didn’t click WHY I answered that way until I saw this presentation by Dan Pink.

You really must watch it. It points out that a lot of what we think about rewards and getting the best work out of someone in this modern world is all wrong.

Is your job giving you a sense of purpose? Does it give you motivation to do better work? Does your boss get out of your way, or does he/she just give you a list of tasks to do?

I’m very fortunate to work for a company that gives me a purpose and then gets out of my way. The purpose? Help startups. Period. Note that I, and my coworkers, Rocky, Rob, Michelle, help out everyone we can, even those who host on our competitors. If you watch my videos I’d guess that only a small portion are actually of entrepreneurs who host on Rackspace.

Why? Because we have a deeper purpose than to just help ourselves. It’s why I work at Rackspace.

When we got to Israel we heard from lots of people that Soluto was a great company and had a great approach to a sizeable market: Windows users.

I’m very happy that we got the first video interview of this company in their Tel Aviv, Israel, headquarters and congrats to Soluto for beating dozens of other companies to win Techcrunch Disrupt.

Speaking of which, Techcrunch Disrupt was a great event with much better speakers than TC 50. Congrats to that team, too, for stepping up the game quite a bit. Oh, and the wifi rocked.

Knocking Live Video‘s co-founder, Brian Meehan, was the one who convinced Steve Jobs to approve streaming video apps. That opened the door for a bunch of streaming video apps. This is a cool app that you can use to video with your family and they have a ton of things coming out. Does Steve Jobs have something like this up his sleeve for the next iPhone? I bet he does.

Here I meet him and get his story but also get a look at their latest video chat app that lets you do live video conversations on your iPhone or iPad or, now, your Android phone.

Also, check out how fast it’s being downloaded! This is a third-wave app, they are growing faster than Twitter or Foursquare and got to a million users faster than either of those. Wild growth.

Oh, and stick around to the end of the video to hear their experiences with Rackspace hosting.

Are you using Knocking? Why not?