Mohit Aron, CEO of Cohesity, a company that caters exclusively to the secondary data storage market. Listen as Nathan ask Mohit about his journey up and through Google (including his decision to leave), his trial and error experiment in entrepreneurship, and how he came to create Cohesity.
Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who is regarded as the pioneer of hyperconvergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. Aron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyperconvergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. Aron worked as a Staff Engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company’s innovative Google File System. He also served as Architect at AsterData, a leading big data analytics company that was later acquired by Teradata. Mohit holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.
Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:08 – Nathan’s introduction
02:00 – Nathan welcomes Mohit to the show
02:22 – Why Mohit left Google?—life was too comfortable
03:30 – What Mohit gave up to leave Google—north of $500K
04:09 – You can’t make a big difference when you’re working inside a juggernaut
05:27 – Don’t make a decision purely on the money—look at all the elements in the equation
07:00 – “The Cliff”
07:40 – AsterData sold to Teradata for nearly $323 million
08:40 – Founding Nutanix and hyper-convergence
10:04 – Network speeds have only grown by 10K in the last 15 years, whereas disk speeds have grown by 1000x
11:02 – Once Mohit leaves a company, he cuts ALL ties
11:59 – Crossing the chasm
13:40 – Talking about Cohesity
13:55 – Mohit originally bootstrapped but ended up being funded by Sequoia
16:28 – Alpha phase v. Beta phase
17:45 -- Aron@cohesity.com
Famous 5
Favorite Book? – Crossing the Chasm
What CEO do you follow?— Steve Jobs
What is your favorite online tool?— Evernote
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?— No
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be?—Trust your gut
3 Key Points:
Don’t get too comfortable—ever.
Trust your instincts.
Once you’ve “crossed the chasm” it’s time to find a new challenge.
Resources Mentioned:
Edgar – Nathan uses Edgar instead of other scheduling tools for Twitter because Edgar cycles through content over and over (buffer/others you have to re-input content over and over – time consuming). In the last several months, Edgar has driven Nathan over 3728 clicks that he didn’t have to work or pay for.
Host Gator - Powerful web hosting made easy and affordable.
Crossing the Chasm – Mohit’s favorite book
Steve Jobs – The CEO Mohit adores
Evernote – The online tool Mohit can’t live without
AsterData – One of the companies Mohit worked with after Google
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