Search This Blog

Friday, February 10, 2012

An interesting experience with the CEO of a very popular Flash Storage company

In 2009 I had an interesting experience and was very close to joining a popular Flash Storage company. I was talking to the then CEO and then CTO (David and David). I was in conversations for a potential VP of Engineering role with them but did not want to relocate to Utah. (I had done my time in Utah working for Novell and did not want to move back to run engineering for FusionIO).

Nonetheless, the important point was that I was telling my views of what the company should be doing for the next few years and the then CTO and now CEO was extremely impressed with me as I had his playbook open in front of him. He was not only surprised but also impressed as to how I could have known so much without working for the company.

To be honest, I did feel a little proud of myself as well.

Anyway, musing over some older memories. Have the snippet of email between me and the company execs below.

S


=======================================================



----- Forwarded Message -----
From: "David Flynn" < dflynn@fusionio.com >
To: "Sukanta ganguly" < sganguly@yahoo.com >
Cc: "David Bradford" < dbradfordvc@yahoo.com >, "Jessica Dunn" < jdunn@fusionio.com >
Sent: Sunday, February 8, 2009 1:31:40 PM GMT -07:00 US/Canada Mountain
Subject: Re: Company lands the Woz as Chief Scientist; opportunities

SG,


I'm impressed... You've correctly gotten the long-term vision for the technology.


We should talk. We are scaling out our Redwood City offices. So, depending on role, there may be some options.


Jessica, my admin, can let you know when I'm out that way next, and help us set up a time to meet. I'd love to get to know you.


-David







---------------------------
David Flynn
CTO Fusion-io
dflynn@fusionio.com


"The performance of a SAN in the palm of your hand"







On Feb 7, 2009, at 11:06 PM, Sukanta ganguly wrote:





David,
Thanks for your note. Fulltime and Utah would not be possible for me.

Hi David Flynn (had to use your last since two David's on the same email...),
Very nice to connect with you. I read the specs on your 80/160/320 Gig SSD's. Some real interesting applications can be built with them. A high-end persistent shared disk subsystem (real-time cluster) for higher thought put can be built using your SSD's. With some clustered software running over an IP network it can be very cheap way to create a high throughput system for Web based infrastructures. Today's Facebook's Hi5 and other high profiled network with several million connections a day serve a lot of data over the Web and they have orders of magnitude more hardware and software combo to address them and even then theay can't address the market's need hence you see tons of replication and redundant data bases for network segmented solutions are offered.
Really interesting product and lots of exciting things can be done with it.


Warm Regards
SG


From: David Bradford < dbradfordvc@yahoo.com >
To: Sukanta ganguly < sganguly@yahoo.com >
Cc: David Flynn < dflynn@fusionio.com >
Sent: Saturday, February 7, 2009 8:46:02 AM
Subject: Re: Company lands the Woz as Chief Scientist; opportunities

The answer is Yes we are looking for people - but not necessarily as Consultants. I have copied David Flynn on this note and you can share your background and Resume with him. We need people to drive hardcore day to day development here in Utah. Regards, David b

=======================================================