Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: My next question is around customer acquisition. It sounds like this is all direct selling.

Jedidiah Yueh: Yes. We work with channel partners, but the majority has been direct enterprise software sales.

Sramana Mitra: Are there any nuances in that journey with Delphix starting in the late 2000’s as it moves along? Are there any strategic maneuvering that you did that is worth discussing?

Jedidiah Yueh: The world changed while we were building out the company. The movement to the cloud began. AI services emerged. It was pretty important for us to make sure that the product would be able to deliver data in the cloud and for these AI services. There were new demands that required additions to the product.

Sramana Mitra: As for the competitive landscape, what were you encountering in the market?

Jedidiah Yueh: Delphix has a number of competitive adjacencies. Some backup vendors will do a subset of what we do. There are tested data management products that do a subset of what we do. There are storage products that do a subset of what we do. Nobody really focuses on delivering high quality, fast, and secure data for developers and data scientists across all these enterprise apps. We have a wide set of potential competitors but no one that we see on a highly repeated basis.

In contrast, at Avamar, we saw Data Domain all the time. We had a very clear competitor in a well-defined market. We don’t have as much of that here at Delphix.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you some questions about financing. You are clearly not doing lean startups. You’re doing fat startups. Can you talk about investors that you worked with in either company whom you’ve had as partners?

Jedidiah Yueh: At Avamar, we were funded by Benchmark and Lightspeed. At Delphix, we’re funded by Lightspeed and Greylock. We’ve worked with a number of quality investors.

Sramana Mitra: Who at Greylock do you work with?

Jedidiah Yueh: Asheem Chandna is on the Board.

Sramana Mitra: The minute you talked about your strategy, Asheem Chandna came to my mind. He’s one of the best fat startup infrastructure VCs in the industry.

Jedidiah Yueh: One of the problems with the products I invented is that they require a large number of developers to bring to market. They require significant funding.

Sramana Mitra: Who else besides Asheem have you found to be open to doing fat startups?

Jedidiah Yueh: All of the big VCs like fat startups for enterprise infrastructure products because they’re typically expensive to build, but you also have a higher certainty of minimum value. If you understand the space and you have a unique technology, chances are that you will get some kind of a return. If you’re lucky, you can build a large, longstanding business.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building Fat Startups: Delphix CEO Jedidiah Yueh
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