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: Is that what you decided to do with Avere?

Ron Bianchini: The VCs always said, “We would rather invest in a strong team than invest in a strong technology because it’s the team that has to bring the technology to market.” We started out with exactly that plan. Let’s leverage flash. Let’s separate performance and capacity.

This is where I think we got lucky as much as we were good. While we’ve been focused incredibly on the flash piece and making sure the data gets veered the right way, all the cloud vendors have been focused on just the lowest price point of capacity that you could get. We always thought that we were focused on performance and the NaaS vendors would focus on capacity. It turns out that cloud has just crushed them. The price per terabyte in cloud is much better than the price per terabyte for NaaS.

About a year and a half ago, instead of putting our flash product in front of NaaS, we put it in front of cloud as well. Then, we could hide the latency of the cloud. We started off by calling ourselves a NaaS optimization company because we make disks go fast. Now, we call ourselves a hybrid cloud company because if you put our product in place and the users are accessing our product, the data could be stored locally on NaaS or remotely in the cloud and the users can’t tell the difference. Effectively, we enabled all of the cloud vendors to compete with the enterprise storage vendors.

Sramana Mitra: You raised venture capital right away or did you build some of this with your own money and then raised venture capital?

Ron Bianchini: We went about a year on our own. The good news was because I had done two companies before and our VP Marketing had been at two different companies, we were able to get the company started and pay them very little. We basically paid minimum wage. We ran that over a year until we got to a proof of concept. Then we took that proof of concept on the road and we used that to go get our first funding.

Sramana Mitra: I see. With the proof of concept, you went to investors and not to customers?

Ron Bianchini: We did both. You have to sign up customers first. In the early days of Avere, there was literally me and 18 engineers. This was before we got funded. The engineers were building the product. I did everything else. I literally built all the desks of the company. I got us a phone line. When I wasn’t doing that, I was visiting customers. I went out to as many people who would listen. I would tell them our concept. We used that early feedback to tailor the product.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Serial Entrepreneurship in Pittsburgh: Ron Bianchini’s Amazing Journey
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