Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was there any segmentation of what kinds of customers were finding your product attractive?

Nelson Nahum: First of all, before the customer, I would like to tackle the question of the business model. We created a great technology. We found out that Amazon really liked what we do because it’s enterprise storage and it brings additional functionality to the Amazon cloud. Amazon doesn’t really OEM, but they offered us a cloud that is connected to them. Any customer of Amazon can be a customer of ours.

We said, “This could be very good. We can put in a small cloud and get the first customer.” This is how we got the first customer. We promoted the storage inside Amazon. There weren’t really a lot of options to use storage there as opposed to storage on-premise where anybody can buy from any storage company. The market is much more crowded today and it’s much harder to differentiate. Back then, the only options were either Amazon storage or us. Then people started finding us.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your business model was a regular subscription SaaS business model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What would be the most comfortable for us to understand what you do is if you step us through a customer use case.

Martin Manniche: I can go into a few customer use cases. One is how are we bringing value to a bigger telco? So an operator who is offering consumers home TV services or broadband services are what we call triple-player services. They have been doing triple-player services for a long period of time. What we are doing is we are making the network router in the home—what’s also called the customer premise equipment—and make that smart.

That means that if you’re looking at your phone and services coming to that device, normally when you have a traditional router, you get one release when you get the device. Maybe without your knowing it, there’s a service release going to that product. The only thing that this device does is enabling broadband, voice, and maybe being a connection broker to your TV system in the home. We are changing that. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition (Part 1)

This interview could just as well be a part of our Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence (TLAI) series. It sits at the cusp of Cyber Security and Artificial Intelligence, an area where much is happening.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s begin by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to SparkCognition.

Amir Husain: I’m the Founder and CEO of SparkCognition. SparkCognition is an Austin-based cyber security company that’s looking to apply artificial intelligence to the security of physical assets as well as cyber assets. There’s this notion of cyber-physical where the world of IoT is now merging with digitally-controlled cyber systems and that creates a lot of new security challenges that our artificial intelligence and cognitive software is looking to address. We’re basically looking at the nexus of the industrial Internet with the use of artificial intelligence to solve security challenges. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You still had $3 million which you hadn’t really started building a product on. You were basically experimenting with the cloud and learning about the cloud.

Nelson Nahum: Yes. I didn’t have the $3 million then. My experiments started the day after I was laid off. It took a few weeks until the bill from Amazon came. The money came later. The idea was we should cover enterprise storage that has flexibility.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next? How does the story progress?

Nelson Nahum: One thing that I want to mention is that the two startups came after bad news. The first one was because the company was closing. The second was because I was laid off. It’s easy to get comfortable to be in a VP position in a big corporation. Only when things happen that you do things that are much riskier and much less comfortable. We then had the money. We hired the best engineers. I had 250 people that I could choose from. We got a really good team of engineers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 1)

IoT is moving right along, here is a comprehensive discussion on some use cases and solutions from Greenwave Systems that are real and active.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Greenwave.

Martin Manniche: I’m the Chairman and CEO of Greenwave Systems. We’re a managed services platform company. We are located and headquartered in Irvine, California. We see ourselves as a global company. We have an Asian headquarters in Singapore. We have the European headquarters in Denmark and Scandinavia. We have branch offices in Korea, San Jose, and India.

More and more people in the telco space or people who build managed services platforms or have a managed network are looking to have a  horizontal-built platform. This is a platform where everyone can participate and build services one top of the platform without understanding anything else and how they are interfacing with an API and be able to build a user experience on top of that. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue did you get to before the LSI acquisition?

Nelson Nahum: I think we were in the $10 million range.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you sell for?

Nelson Nahum: It’s confidential. It was good for most of the people.

Sramana Mitra: So the bottomline is that you made some money off that transaction?

Nelson Nahum: Yes, definitely. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the financing history beyond that $2 million Fidelity and General Catalyst round?

Andre Durand: I would say after about two years roughly, in very traditional fashion, we started raising money to fuel our growth. I think we raised about $30 million in total between 2003 and 2012. In 2013, we made a decision to switch our business model from a perpetual software license to a subscription business model.

Sramana Mitra: You waited till 2013 to make that shift?

Andre Durand: We did for a couple of reasons. Number one is we were selling infrastructure to big enterprises. While they are open to buying applications on a subscription model, their infrastructure decisions are measured in 3 to 10 year increments. They didn’t really want to be buying infrastructure and visiting a subscription decision every year. Almost all of their infrastructure was purchased on a very traditional basis. That was number one.

Number two was that it wasn’t until we began offering our own cloud service that our own business model was bifurcated. We knew that was not optimal. We >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Nelson has built an interesting enterprise storage company and one of his key strategic moves was an unusual deal with Amazon.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nelson Nahum: I was born in Uruguay. I immigrated to Israel to study in college. Back in the 80s, Uruguay was governed by junta. It was not very nice to stay there. Me and my brother moved to Israel with little money to study engineering. I got accepted into the university. The first thing that I liked in Israel was the freedom that everybody had. It was totally new for me because I grew up in a dictatorship kind of environment.

Sramana Mitra: What did you study?

Nelson Nahum: Engineering. First of all, I studied Hebrew. After a few months, I got accepted into an engineering school in Technion University. >>>