Interview with Steve Herrod – General Catalyst Partners

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General Catalyst PartnersGeneral Catalyst Partners, Interview with Steve Herrod
Date: 16 February 2015
General Catalyst Partners Crunchbase profile

Recently I had the great honor and pleasure to speak with Steve Herrod, managing director at General Catalyst partners. Before entering the VC world, Steve enjoyed an impressive 12-year long career at VMware where he held various technical leadership roles and left as CTO.

I had a very forthright talk with Steve, no marketing speak or any rehearsed answers. To reflect the open nature of our chat, I left the transcription largely un-edited.

Steve-HerrodI spoke to Steve about developments in the market and his investmentfocus at General Catalyst partners. Specifically we discussed the trend towards Mobile, Mobile payment and the increased scarcity in developer talent.
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John W. Thompson: CEO Virtual Instruments and Chairman of Microsoft

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Virtual Instruments LogoVirtual Instruments, interview with CEO John W. Thompson
Date: 19 June 2014
Virtual Instruments CrunchBase profile

For my CEO Series I interview CEOs and founders of start-ups in IT Infrastructure, SAAS, Fintech, Mobile and eCommerce. Their views are shared on my blog.

Recently I had the great honor to speak with John W. Thompson. It is hard to introduce such a heavyweight, so I will start by listing a few of the most notable positions he occupies. His positions, besides being impressive – are relevant to understand the viewpoints he holds and voiced during the interview.

After a long career at IBM where he held various executive positions, John W. Thompson became CEO at Symantec, which he helped build to a $6 billion company over a period of 10 years. In 2009, he was contender to be secretary of the Department of Commerce.

John W. ThompsonIn 2009 he became involved with Virtual Instruments (VI) as an investor and became CEO of VI in 2010. Besides this demanding role, in February of this year John W. Thompson was famously appointed Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, replacing Bill Gates. In this function he was involved in replacing former CEO Steve Ballmer with the current CEO Satya Nadella. Here is a link to his appointment speech.

Additionally, PernixData, Liquid Robotics, Domo and Seagate are among the companies where John holds advisory positions. [Read more…]

Storage Startup popularity on Google Trends

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I was just playing around with Google Trends. A great tool to compare search popularity between search terms.

How much impact storage startups really have on the market is hard to pin down, but the search popularity of individual brand names does provide some perspective.

Below, I compared worldwide search popularity between Storage Startups over the last 6 years. I looked at three groups; Boxed Storage, Software-only Storage and Server-side Caching Solutions. Then to put the Startup scene in some perspective I compared the most popular of each group to storage giants EMC and Netapp.

Boxed Storage: Nutanix, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Tintri, Skyera


Boxed Storage [Read more…]

Rohit Khetrapal, CEO of Tegile Systems on path toward IPO

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tegileTegile Systems, interview with CEO Rohit Khetrapal
Date: 26 February 2014
CrunchBase profile Tegile Systems

As a part of my CEO series, I interview CEOs of innovative companies in the fields of Storage, Virtualization and Networking.

Tegile Systems has been founded in 2009 and offers a range of Hybrid Storage arrays, labelled as Zebi storage arrays. Their top model can be configured as a 100% all-flash array, while keeping the option open to expand the storage capacity with cabinets of magnetic disk up to 200 TB.

Tegile Zebi arrays further offer flexibility in terms of access (iSCSI and Fibrechannel) and work with NFS, CIF and SMB.

I spoke with CEO Rohit Khetrapal about the core values of Tegile Systems, his views on the storage market and their path toward IPO.
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Interview with John Blumenthal, CEO of CloudPhysics

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CloudPhysics LogoCloudPhysics, interview with CEO John Blumenthal
Date: 30 September 2013
CloudPhysics CrunchBase profile

Introduction to CloudPhysics

A company’s IT Infrastructure is crucial to its survival and succes, which is why most companies invest heavily in their IT Infrastructure to reduce risk and increase performance.

Despite these investments, the complex and dynamic nature of IT Infrastructure environments means that most companies do not have a complete picture of their IT infrastructure and the workloads that run on it. There is a risk and performance penalty associated with this.

The risk lies in making changes to your largely unknown environment; like adding resources, adding workloads and changing policies. These can have unpredictable effects that jeopardize the stability of your IT Infrastructure. To mitigate this risk, companies create separate Test & Development infrastructures to test new configurations. However these are costly and time-consuming, plus some real-world scenarios cannot easily be replicated.

The performance penalty arises from the fact that an unknown IT Infrastructure can not use its resources optimally.

Screen Shot 2013-12-30 at 13.42.08

Enter CloudPhysics. They have developed a non-disruptive data collection technique for VMware vSphere environments where data about the IT Infrastructure and the workloads that run on it are collected.
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Interview with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta

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MAXTA INC. LOGOMaxta, interview continued with CEO Yoram Novick
Date: 18 November 2013
Maxta CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

In this article, I interview Yoram Novick, the CEO of Maxta Storage.

Maxta

A short introduction to Maxta based on my introductory article of last week.

Maxta offers a software storage solution, that creates a storage layer across server side flash + magnetic storage. The solution works by installing their software on each of the servers you want to include and Maxta creates a storage pool across them.

Read my interview with the CTO of Atlantis Computing, another player in the Software Defined Storage space

Magnetic disks are leveraged for capacity and flash is used as a caching layer, with the capability of accelerating both reads and writes. For speed and redundancy, the software replicates writes between the server flash of different hosts, and de-stages to magnetic disks later.

I interviewed Yoram Novick to learn more about Maxta and his views on the storage market
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Interview Poojan Kumar – CEO of PernixData

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pernixdataPernixData, interview with CEO Poojan Kumar
Date: 4 November 2013
PernixData CrunchBase profile

CEO Series

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views.

PernixData

Storage arrays have typically been designed for Data Services and not performance. By scaling up disks inside the array, performance does increase but the supporting infrastructure quickly becomes a bottleneck.

Server side flash offers a solution by being close to the application. However because it is a single device, you loose many of the crucial advantages of virtualization like mobility (HA & DRS)
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Interview with CEO of Jeda Networks | Stuart Berman

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jedanetworksJeda Networks, interview with Stuart Berman
Date: 5 Oktober 2013
Jeda Networks CrunchBase profile

As a part of a larger series, I am interviewing CEOs that lead companies in the field of Storage, Virtualization and Networking. What developments in the market did they see that inspired them to build their company? How will the market develop from here? These questions are on most of our minds, and I am keen on asking leaders in the industry for their views. This article is followed up by part 2 with background on Software Defined Storage Networking (SDSN)

Jeda Networks created a Software Defined Storage Network solution that reduces complexity in the connectivity between the compute layer and storage layer. They abstract al the complexity into software and then use regular Ethernet fabrics to build these virtualized storage area networks.

They are in a specific niche in which very few (if any) have dared venture. The inspiration for contacting Jeda Networks goes back to an article by Duncan Epping that I read a while back.

CEO of Jeda Networks Stuart Berman and I had a call last week in which he provided insight into the start of the company and his vision on the Networking and Storage market. Jeda Networks is Stuart’s fourth startup that started 4 years ago. The company was self-funded for 2 years and received external capital 2 years ago.
[Read more…]