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 Valley? What were the terms of that acquisition?

Ron Bianchini: I stayed in Pittsburgh. They knew that I would want to stay in Pittsburgh. It was a really good acquisition. Everyone had my best interests at heart and they warned me, “You’re going to start off with nothing much changing. Over time, we’re going to pull most of those functions back to Silicon Valley. In the end, Pittsburgh is just going to become an engineering development site.” That’s how it played out.

In the beginning, it was all about integration. Everyone had roles to do. As time went on, Pittsburgh became 100% engineering. They offered me other roles but to be most effective, I would have needed to be in California. That’ why I left. I left very amicably, but the role in Pittsburgh had diminished to just watching the engineers do their job.

Sramana Mitra: What was the concept of Avere Systems? What was your observation of the lay of the land? Where did you see the opportunity to start another company?

Ron Bianchini: A storage product has two things. It has capacity and it has performance. When we started Spinnaker, we knew we needed to scale to cluster the capacity piece. We said, “Someday when we’re done with that, we’ll scale the performance piece.” Obviously, we never did it. With the Network Appliance acquisition, there was never any reason to do it, but we always knew we wanted to scale the performance side of storage.

I left in June and spent the summer with the kids. They went back to school and I was bored very quickly. One of the things we never got to solve was scaling the performance piece. At that time, flash storage really started to pick up in enterprise usage. The genesis behind Avere was my CTO from Spinnaker, Mike Kazar. He left at the end of the summer just when I was getting bored. The timing couldn’t get any better because he and I started meeting and we talked about performance scaling. We talked about how we could leverage flash. That’s what we did.

We built Avere to target the performance scaling part of storage. At the highest level, it sounds very simple but of course, the work is in the details. Any piece of data that’s going to need a lot of transactions, we steer to flash, and every piece of data that doesn’t need a lot of transactions, we steer to disk. It turned out that our algorithms are correct 98% of the time. Only 2% of the time do we get it wrong. Only 2% of the time do we have to go and get data from disk.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey
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