Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman (Part 1)

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Daniel Putterman is the president and CEO of Cloud Engines. Prior to his current position he founded Mediabolic in 1999 and served as CEO until its sale to Macrovision (now Rovi) in 2007. Additionally, he founded MaxInfo, the first collaborative Web media design software for the Internet (and acquired by NetManage), as well as EoExchange, a multimedia search engine for the Web. Over the past 20 years, Daniel has worked as an entrepreneur advocate, and has invested and teamed with colleagues to launch numerous Silicon Valley companies. He spent the earlier part of his career in senior management positions at Borland International and Symantec Corporation, where he was responsible for product management, business development, and worldwide evangelism

Sramana: Daniel, let’s start at the beginning of your story. Where are you from?

Daniel Putterman: I was born in Montreal, Canada, but moved to the U.S. when I was just over four years old. My parents were bohemians and wanted to come to the Bay Area to be part of the new movements. I grew up in the Bay Area. My entrepreneurial roots make me feel like a world citizen because I have worked with people and conducted business all over the world.

Sramana: Where did you go to school?

Daniel Putterman: I have been a serial dropout. I have successfully dropped out of middle school, junior high, high school, and college. There is a positive spin to that story. I left middle school to go straight to junior college, where I took the adult computer science curriculum. I finished multiple programs there including computer science, mathematics, and statistics. I did eventually go on to UCLA. When I was 16 I had co-authored my first book with Microsoft Press, and I feel as if I have been attached to the industry for a long time.

Sramana: Have you always had a passion for computer science?

Daniel Putterman: Very much so. In the early days I taught software development to kids. I was always a technologist at heart. In the late 1980s I began working for Borland which was a very exciting company.

Sramana: It’s kind of sad what happened to Borland.

Daniel Putterman: In many ways it is. It was pre-IPO and the energy level was high. It was game-changing every day. There was a battle between Borland and Microsoft and Borland was winning. That was incredibly exciting.

That time was when I started building acumen around business development and started forming relationships around conducting business. At that time they had the OOP World Tour, and I would show up in foreign countries where there would be 4,000 people attending. It made me feel like a rock star even though I was talking about structured languages.

Sramana: What year does that bring us up to?

Daniel Putterman: That would have been until the early 1990s. I stayed there for four years in product management and business development. I then followed a mentor to Symantec and stayed there for four years as well.

In the mid-1990s I caught the entrepreneurship bug. That was just before the average person had heard the concept of a home page. Could Engines is my fourth company. MaxInfo was the first company which was named after my dog, Max. I was getting into very interesting concepts allowing multiple individuals to collaborate via websites. During that time I turned down my first term sheet.

During those days venture capitalists were in a different mode. At that point the VCs were not too shy or too important to show up on your doorstep. They wanted to talk to you about your business. It was a very interesting time. I ended up selling that company to NetManage, which is here in the Valley.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Plug-and-Play Cloud Storage At Home: Cloud Engines CEO Daniel Putterman
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