Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Dani Golan, CEO of Kaminario (Part 1)

Dani Golan discusses trends in enterprise storage.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with an introduction to Kaminario and yourself.

Dani Golan: It’s a pleasure to talk to you. It’s exciting times in IT. If you look at the macro trend—whether it’s cloud computing, Internet of Things, Big Data, the explosion of data is at the center of all that. Kaminario is the next generation storage company that caters to the modern infrastructure. We are essentially the data backbone for data that resides in the cloud.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about what kind of customers you cater to. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Nuxeo CEO Eric Barroca (Part 1)

At every sector of enterprise software, cloud services are starting to open up doorways to connect with Artificial Intelligence. This interview is a granular look at the role metadata and data structures plays in that interface.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Nuxeo.

Eric Barroca: I’m the CEO of Nuxeo. We help organizations data assets. We are focusing on helping an organization manage new types of information and assets, especially in the space of media and financial services.

Sramana Mitra: How does this fit into the competitive landscape? There’s a lot of digital asset management solutions that we see. What’s >>>

Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You had $6 million in funding. What happens next?

Justin Moore: The 2008 financial meltdown happened a week later.

Sramana Mitra: But your money was in the bank before the financial meltdown.

Justin Moore: One week before—September 8, I believe. About a week later, you had the financial meltdown. You can imagine trying to recruit people into a three or four-person startup when you’ve got no experience in storage enterprise infrastructure. Enterprise is not hot at all. No one was interested in enterprise in 2008. It was all about consumer and eyeballs. >>>

Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you walk us through the progression of how many partners you had in year one and so on. How did that number ramp up?

Justin Moore: I couldn’t tell you what the actual numbers were, but it grew rapidly and exponentially. We went from signing two partners a month in the first year to probably 20 partners a month in year three. Eventually, we got to the point where we had over a thousand service provider partners.

Sramana Mitra: What was the incentive structure? What was your pricing model? >>>

Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where were you positioning this? Was this for small businesses? Was this for mid-sized businesses? Where was the sweet spot?

Justin Moore: In the early days, the sweet spot was sub-20-employee companies. We had this concept of trying to empower small businesses to run with the resilience of an enterprise. How do we empower the little guys to have the same level of IT confidence as the big guys?

Sramana Mitra: What was the customer acquisition strategy to get to these sub-20 customers?

Justin Moore: First, it was direct. Then we realized that it was going to be far too expensive. As we approached small businesses directly, we found out that a lot of them were working with Managed Service Providers. These are outsourced IT professionals who are effectively the IT department for small companies that can’t afford to have a dedicated IT team. >>>

Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We’re now in 2006?

Justin Moore: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Justin Moore: We started thinking conceptually about Ancient in 2006 and started investing seriously in 2007 and all of 2008. I took a bit of time quite frankly. I moved from the Peninsula up to San Francisco. I was a city boy. Then I was in the Peninsula, just working all the time. I moved to the city and got back to things I was interested in. >>>

Scaling a Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery Business in Silicon Valley: Axcient CEO Justin Moore (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page.

Justin tried his hand in other businesses and never had the time to go back and finish his degree at Stanford. He learnt business on the job. Today, he has a thriving Disaster Recovery Cloud venture, for which he has raised over $60 million. The company has not IPO’d or exited yet. Instead, it is moving upmarket from its SME customer roots.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What is your backstory?

Justin Moore: I was born and raised in Manhattan. I moved to London when I was in my early to mid teens and then came out to California for college. >>>

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