1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepak Jeevankumar of Dell Technologies Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In a cyber security startup, I don’t think anybody other than the founder who’s the product visionary can close those deals with the first few customers. Only a founder who has deep enough knowledge of the product and space can position on the fly.

Let’s talk about a couple more case studies of companies that you’ve invested in that you’re particularly excited about. What do we learn from that? What do we learn about trends? In the enterprise, where are we going?

Deepak Jeevankumar: I mentioned multi-cloud. How does an enterprise customer work in a world where you have your private cloud infrastructure? We have made many bets on that. On the security side, we bet on a company called RedLock, which provides continuous security for AWS.

The more important thing about multi-cloud is, it’s easy to move applications, but it’s very hard to move data around. We have made a few bets. One is min.io. The founder is a serial entrepreneur. He sold the company to RedHat before. It was the first open source storage systems.

What they are doing now is creating the equivalent of Amazon and object storage for private clouds, IoT devices, and embedded devices. When the developers are used to working on Amazon S3, they can get the same experience whether they’re working on the laptop, Azure, or Google.

It’s one of the fastest open-source projects of the last two to three years. They have more than 300 million Docker pulls. Many big enterprises are using them.

We love the story of the entrepreneurs. They know how to build the open source community. They know how to build storage products. They are very authentic.

Another one on a different part of the storage layer is YugaByte. YugaByte was created by the people who led the data infrastructure team for Facebook. The product that they created inside Facebook are the ones that power Messenger, news feed, and others. They’ve taken their lives’ worth at Facebook to create a database that can work across multiple clouds.

You can run your SQL database and run the database with one master in a public cloud and another master in a private cloud. Your data will be available to applications wherever they are.

Another way of looking at it is democratizing access to data in a multi-cloud world. That’s a pretty big theme for us. We have been tracking what is happening in the container world quite closely. As we all know, it’s a very big trend. Google created the Kubernetes project. That created a huge wave around Kubernetes.

Now, how do you do the network and security layers on top of Kubernetes? A couple of the early contributors to this came out of Google and created Tetrate. They are bringing the concepts of dynamic networks and security.

The industry name for this is service mesh. That’s another example. We are still very big believers in IoT and embedded security. One of our companies has already been acquired by Palo Alto Networks. It’s called Zingbox.

Sramana Mitra: How much of the channel access are you able to open up through your relationships and other companies within the Dell world?

Deepak Jeevankumar: We have invested in a cyber security company called Cylance which was acquired by Blackberry. One part of Dell now has relationships at Netskope. It’s a case by case basis. We can help open up access.

We can also help introduce startups to customers through our personal network. I would say that there’s no one template that would work for every company. There are some companies that we can help more than others.

Sramana Mitra: Great, thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepak Jeevankumar of Dell Technologies Capital
1 2 3 4