1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: A few weeks ago, I talked with an old friend of mine who I’ve known for 20 years. His name is Murli Thirumale. He’s done several startups in the storage space. He built Portworx and sold it to Pure Storage. Pure storage is like an old storage company that was a hardware company that is trying to go from hardware to software.

They are trying to climb up the stack and the Portworx acquisition is perfect for their mode of going up the stack. I was telling Murli, “You guys should do Platform-as-a-Service so that you can be considered the center of innovation at that layer.”

Ashmeet Sidana: I do know Murli Thirumale. He’s a fabulous entrepreneur.  The Portworx-Pure Storage merger story makes absolute sense because they have a challenge. That merger can help them innovate.

I wouldn’t jump to the answer if that is what the right answer is and that is what you should open it up to as a platform. I could think of creative ways.

For example, the hybrid cloud. The hybrid enterprise is another trend that would play to the advantage of a player like the Portworx plus Pure Storage as a combined company.

There are alternative strategies that you can think about, but that is the job of the project manager and CEO – to lay out the vision and the strategy based on what is out there. Is there an opportunity to create fabulous companies on top of other platforms? The answer would be yes.

Sramana Mitra: I agree with you. With the Pure Storage and Portworx deal, the big opportunity right now is selling Portworx to the Pure Storage customers because there are thousands of those customers. They almost don’t need to do anything else.

The reason I’m spending so many cycles on the SaaS strategy is because, in my universe, my goal is to help one million entrepreneurs reach a million dollars in annual revenue. In that world, every time I encounter security entrepreneurs, I need to think about how to get this guy an audience with the buyers.

If you look at the Shopify ecosystem and people who are building apps on Shopify, it’s very easy to get to people through their marketplace. For people building in the Atlassian marketplace, it’s very easy to get to customers through their marketplace.

I’m very much looking for these ecosystems that entrepreneurs can tap into. It’s a win-win because the business model is powerful. Anywhere between 15% to 30% revenues go to the platform owners. It’s a profitable revenue if a product finds product-market fit and can be sold to a large number of customers.

Ashmeet Sidana: I completely agree that it is a value that is provided by these marketplaces. One of my companies last week launched on the Amazon marketplace. I see this more and more and if the company can leverage distribution, then it is something that they should take.

You are on the vanguard of letting people understand that the only way to build a company is not through a venture-backed company. An entrepreneur can be successful in building a business that would not be interesting to a VC and yet be very lucrative to the entrepreneur.

You can have a $10-million-dollar business and be a very successful entrepreneur without ever taking venture capital. People forget that exists. We will see a lot more of those companies coming up and more innovation leveraging SaaS and IaaS marketplaces.

Sramana Mitra: We have formalized some of these points of view in what we call bootstrapping to exit categories. If you look at Atlassian’s acquisition, maybe a small number of people are building something and selling to the marketplace and getting acquired by Atlassian itself for $30 million or $50 million. That would be a successful exit.

Ashmeet Sidana: I think the media tends to miss how attractive and valuable that alternative approach is. I think we overweigh the venture-backed model which is a viable model as well.

Sramana Mitra: What else is going on in your universe that you want to discuss?

Ashmeet Sidana: What excites me of course, as an engineer myself, is what is happening in technology. I’m always looking at core technical trends to try to see where the hard problems and challenges are.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital
1 2 3 4 5 6