Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: By the time you went to VCs, you had proof of concept, plenty of customer feedback, and you were a proven quantity as far as the VCs are concerned. I imagine raising money was not very difficult. Ron Bianchini: Right. I loved our Series A round. We basically went back to Menlo and

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Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 6)

Ron Bianchini: Because of the incredible offload ratio, we’re able to build a clustering flash-based product that gives you some incredible performance levels. You can put that in front of a disk-based product, ideally a clustering disk-based product, and build out a system that gets the performance of flash with the cost point of disk. Sramana Mitra:

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Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in 2004, you sold to NetApp. Did you work for NetApp? Ron Bianchini: I did. Sramana Mitra: For how long? Ron Bianchini: As part of the acquisition, we all had two-year golden handcuffs, but I stayed for four years. Sramana Mitra: To work for NetApp, did you have to move to Silicon

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 1)

This interview puts the spotlight on a very interesting topic: how companies that primarily monetize through their enterprise/B2B business and use B2C offerings to test software as well as to generate leads. In the cloud storage business, we’re seeing very interesting trends, and Matthew explains the rationale and the analysis very well. Great conversation! Sramana Mitra:

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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I just have one last set of questions before we retire. You are one of the few entrepreneurs I have interviewed who has roots in Latin America. We see entrepreneurial activity in the technology industry from Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs. Why has Latin America been slow on developing in the technology industry?

Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 6)

Andres Rodriguez: I’ll tell you the short answer. For young entrepreneurs today, they can do it but they have to have technical people in the team that have lots of equity in the company. The one thing that an investor wants to see is the proof point that you have a concept. This is for the

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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In modernizing the enterprise storage using cloud principles, was there any other competitor or were you the first to come into that space? Andres Rodriguez: When we came out, we thought we were the first but there are always competitors in the space. We have competitors today. Sramana Mitra: Big opportunities tend to

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Building Fat Startups: Nasuni CEO Andres Rodriguez (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happened next in your history? Andres Rodriguez: After we sold Archivas, we had all the top venture capitalist wanting to fund the next project. Sramana Mitra: I’m sure. What’s good with being an entrepreneur is, capital follows you. Andres Rodriguez: Success breeds capital. Sramana Mitra: However, let’s talk about the investment pieces

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