Innovating Web 2.0 Storage: Fabrik CEO Mike Cordano (Part 1)

Mike Cordano is the CEO and co-founder of Fabrik. Prior to Fabrik he served as executive vice president of Worldwide Sales and Marketing for Maxtor Corporation, where he was responsible for the formation and management of the Branded Products business unit. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado.

SM: Mike, take us back to your origins. Where are you from?

MC: I was born in Silicon Valley. My dad was a engineer at IBM and an early member of the storage team. The storage group at IBM relocated to Colorado when I was 18 months old, so I grew up in Colorado. Dad spent his whole career in storage and disk space companies. He was an early member of Storage Technology, which was a spinoff of IBM. He had two or three other startup hard drive companies, two of which he founded. I saw all of that growing up as a child.

I grew up watching this happen. I never imagined I would have landed in disk drives and serial entrepreneurism myself. Through connections and other things in life, I ended up doing an internship at Seagate while I was at the University of Colorado.

SM: Was that internship in Colorado?

MC: No, it was in Scotts Valley. I spent my sophomore year summer there. I stayed in touch with the person who was my manager during my internship. He had joined Conner Peripherals, a startup hard drive company. Five months after I graduated he called me up and told me he had a great opportunity for me at Conner, so I joined him there just prior to the IPO. That was quite an experience.

SM: How long did you stay?

MC: I was there for seven years. It supplanted Compaq Computers as the fastest company to a billion dollars, and our CEO was on the cover of Fortune Magazine. It was the boom company of the time. I learned a lot about storage and disks, but I saw the explosive growth and learned a lot there as well.

That is where I developed my early career. I was on the sales and marketing side and went up through the ranks. I spent a lot of time developing relationships with customers from a sales and business development standpoint. Those early years of my career took me from San Jose, California to Singapore and back to Texas. I saw a lot of the world. Living outside of the country was one of the most interesting and growing experiences of my life. I was 27 with a three-month-old baby living in Singapore.

SM: What did you do after Conner?

MC: I went to Maxtor in 1995. At the time it was an eight-year-old hard drive company that was in very bad shape. I went there for two reasons. First, I wanted to experience the turnaround. This was clearly a turnaround story. The other interesting component was that the job was in Colorado, so it was a way to return home.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Innovating Web 2.0 Storage: Fabrik CEO Mike Cordano
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