Entrepreneurship. Why/What/How & My Learnings. Poojan Kumar (CEO & Co-founder, Clumio)

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Ruby Russell
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1 Entrepreneurship Why/What/How & My Learnings Poojan Kumar (CEO & Co-founder, Clumio)

2 My Background Grew up in India, did my Bachelors in Computer IIT Bombay Masters, Computer Stanford Oracle (Co-founder of Oracle Exadata) Co-founder & VP Eng, PixBlitz [10 people company] VMware (Head of Data Products) Co-founder & CEO, PernixData (acquired by Nutanix) [$65M venture capital raised over 4 years; $20M annual revenue; 200 people company] Nutanix (VP, Engineering & Products) Current: Co-founder & CEO, Clumio (Founded Oct 2017, 15 people today) 2

3 Passion Creation Technology, but also the Business of Technology Solving problems that someone is willing to pay for (enterprise space) Comfortable taking risks to chase a dream 3

4 Framework High TECHNICAL RISK Low If we can build it, they will come. B2B Infrastructure, biotech Examples: Snowflake Computing, Pure Storage No man s land. Service businesses like consulting If we can build it, will they come? Hobbyists Examples: Personal computers (inexpensive hobby), rockets (expensive hobby) We can build it, will they come? Consumer, business applications Examples: Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, Uber Low DEMAND RISK High 4

5 Entrepreneurship: Why? 3 reasons why people start companies To change the world To become famous To make a LOT of money Turns out that to achieve any one of them, you have to achieve the other two 5

6 Entrepreneurship: What? Risk Taking Experience Big Idea: Find a big problem and a discontinuity in the industry Money 6

7 Entrepreneurship: How? Risk Taking Think of non linear progression, not just linear progression Experience One of the best experiences you can get is joining EARLY in a startup Big Idea Think of big problems that can take advantage of discontinuity and doing more with software Raise Money! 7

8 Discontinuity Example: PernixData Decouple storage performance from capacity Hypervisor FVP Software Scale-out storage performance using any server media Any shared storage for capacity and data services 10x Faster VMs Scale-out IOPS with compute 95% lower storage costs 8 PernixData. All rights 8

9 Help me Raise Money! What do you really need? Big idea & discontinuity Awesome team (Co-founders & Complimentary Skills) Product Clarity & deep understanding of Competition Technology / IP (Defensible) GTM Strategy Reference Customers Execution (Timeline, What/When/How, How much Money) The above is your deck! 9

10 Example PernixData: 2 guys and a powerpoint! Raised $7M Series A Took 25 engineers and 1.5 years to create a 1.0 Took raising $65M over 4 years to create a business ($20M/year, ~1000 customers at acquisition) Lesson: Easy to create products in PPT, but requires money in reality Clumio: 3 guys and a powerpoint! Will take 35 engineers and 1.5 years to create a 1.0 Will take raise hundreds of millions over the next 5-7 years to create a multi billion dollar company 10

11 Remember! There is NO company without MONEY If you cannot raise money for your idea, go find another idea How much MONEY? Money that takes you from point A to point B Example: For a enterprise product from PPT to early product with customers Then you raise more money to scale and show how you can scale revenue by scaling sales and marketing (AKA find a product market fit) Then you raise money to scale even further and innovate more And that s what s called Series A, Series B, Series C Don t go over your skies THERE IS NO FINISH LINE! 11

Company Evolution Example: PernixData Founded First paying

0 1st to support flash and RAM ~400 customers 200k VMs

0 Feb 2012 Aug 2013 Feb 2014 May 2014 Aug 2014 Feb 2015 Aug

12 Company Evolution Example: PernixData Founded First paying customer FVP 1.0 First clustered solution with read/write FVP 2.0 1st to support flash and RAM ~400 customers 200k VMs optimized FVP 3.0 FVP Freedom 500+ customers Architect 1.0 Feb 2012 Aug 2013 Feb 2014 May 2014 Aug 2014 Feb 2015 Aug 2015 Q First Full Fiscal Year - $9.3 million PernixData. All rights reserved. 12

13 What makes a Company? Team Big Idea & Discontinuity Right Investors Great Board Great Advisors Surround yourself with the RIGHT advisors PernixData: Mark Leslie, John Thompson, Paul Sallaberry and more 13

14 Don t forget to Learn! Listen to the Market An Entrepreneur needs to have a BIG long term vision but also the ability to LISTEN to the market and be nimble Be a sponge! Listen to what your advisors and board says Listen to your sales Listen to your customers Be open-minded Take advantage of Silicon Valley! Don t settle And last but not the least, DON T LOSE YOUR ATTENTION TO DETAIL every step along the way 14

15 Some words to live by. The secret of getting ahead is getting started - Mark Twain 15

16 16 Thank You!

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