hello, world

by Mark Davis, CEO

Posted Thursday, June 25, 2009 in News          2 comments

Tags: startups

Today, we announced our closing of a $7 million series A venture capital investment, led by Vivek Mehra of August Capital, with continued participation by our seed investor Maha Ibrahim at Canaan Partners.  We’re awfully proud to be working with them, and are glad to have their support as we prepare to launch our first product later this year.

It’s a tough market out there for startups raising capital.  Absolutely brutal.  What does it take for a pre-product IT infrastructure startup to get this strong a funding round from top notch venture capitalists?

1. An exciting market. The market potential has to be measured in very large numbers (tens of millions of dollars is not interesting), and there has to be reason to believe that the right startup can take a leadership position.
2. Compelling technology. A technology that’s 20% better than existing products can be fine for a big company’s product strategy.  For a startup, it’s woefully inadequate.
3. Great team. Merely good people don’t cut it.  By the way, we’re hiring.
4. Enthusiastic customers and partners. Many people outside our company have helped us understand how much we can help enterprise and cloud data centers.  If your company is interested new solutions for storage in the virtual data center, we’d love to talk with you too.

We’re still pre-product, and we’re believers in the adage that one shouldn’t publicly brag about what their product can do until they can back it up, and we aren’t quite ready for that.

So rather than talking about our product just yet, we want to engage in a dialog about the problems we’ve seen out there.  We’re looking forward to discussing the things we’ve seen in the world of storage and virtual servers.  It will not be our purpose to throw stones at the competition, but we do intend to describe reality as we see it, and sometimes that will require talking about the inadequacies of existing products.

We’re storage and virtualization people.  Experienced, been around the block.  Yes, we’re old enough to have learned programming from the writings of Kernighan, hence the "hello, world" reference in the title above.  (Although some of us read his work more than a decade after he wrote it.  We aren’t that old.)

We think we have some great ideas, but we’re also interested in hearing what you think.  So we encourage you to subscribe to and comment on this blog.  Stay tuned.