From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you go work for Dell?

Joe Kinsella: I did. I like to tell people that I spent three years at Dell, two of which I can explain because I was under a contract. I wasn’t sure why I stayed the third year. Dell is a great company, but I’m a software person.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a hardware company.

Joe Kinsella: It’s better now. I noticed this morning, they actually sold out their software group. At that time, it was really hard because I think they were trying to morph from system integrator DNA into hardware DNA. There was a very early form of that software group where Dell was doing acquisitions on a steady basis. One of the West Coast companies that was acquired was Evergreen. They had a whole series of SaaS acquisitions.

I ended up running a series of different organizations for them. I think my biggest organization spanned three countries and had 120 people. It was logistically challenging. In startups unless you hit that scale, you don’t always get that experience of scaled-up management. I found it logistically challenging. I confess, it was not intellectually challenging for me.

By the time I got to the third year, I realized I needed to get back to my software roots. I started, a little over two years, thinking about what was next for me. One of the things I did for Dell was M&A. I would go down and really understand what the core assets of the company were and what the technical risks were. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the cloud computing disruption that was about to happen was going to be immense. It seemed to me that it was going to be bigger than the Internet and the dot-com boom.

In my third year, I started figuring out how I could make that transition to build something big in that space. The intersection of cloud computing with my own professional passion for systems management and building software to manage infrastructure was going to be a really rich space. I don’t think I, personally, was ready to make the leap of building that business and everything that it entailed, but I did try. I talked to some investors. I started trying to figure out where the opportunity was and try out different ideas. There wasn’t just a lot of interest. Part of that was my own commitment to it.

I had a very charismatic CEO convince me to take a turnaround VP Engineering role for him at a company called Sonian. It was an A-round funded company. Shortly after, the company had a B round that Amazon participated in. They were doing document archiving in the cloud. I spent a year and a half there really turning around their technology. It was pretty interesting technology. When I left, there were 4,000 to 5,000 cores of compute and two to three petabytes of storage that spanned multiple public clouds. It was a really hard problem to solve.

I realized, a year in, that I wanted to build CloudHealth. CloudHealth was a distillation of everything I wanted to do, which was that systems management experience and that tool development experience. I resigned. I spent two months after I resigned wrapping things up. I set myself up as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence in Boston with Northbridge Venture Partners.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From an EIR Experiment to a Fast Growth SaaS Company: Joe Kinsella, Founder and CTO of CloudHealth
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