Have you read “2013 Silicon Valley Career Guide” written by Andy Rachleff, former CEO of Wealthfront and Elizabeth MacBride? If you haven’t read it, stop what are you doing, and download the pdf version, or you have an iPhone or an iPad ,you can download in that format too. Andy and Elizabeth made an incredible work here puting an outstanding pice of work in your hands with remarkable insights about to carefully select a company to work, how to deal with you compensation package and more great things.
Even, they provided their list of mid-size companies with momentum. I have written about several of them here: Lookout, HootSuite, HubSpot, LinkedIn, OpenDNS, Palo Alto Networks, RocketFuel, Dropbox, Cloudera, and more.
But today, I will concentrate in one of these companies, which is in the list too, and I’m particularly love, not just for their momentum, but for the people involved, their potential to become in a leader of their respective market not just inside U.S but making a global impact. This company is not just hiring in the valley, but in Europe and APAC too. So, for that reason I selected them. This company is: Pure Storage.
Pure Storage: ¨The Orange Wave¨ in Flash Storage
Like Andy wrote in the guide:
¨Success will propel your career. At a fast-growing company, chances are good you will have a higher position two years after join.¨
and Scott Dietzen; Pure Storage’s CEO haven been a successful guy. After he sold Zimbra to Vmware, he felt that was the time to try another journey in other field, and aside John Hayes (Chief Architect at Pure Storage) and , founded Pure Storage to take by storm the $30Bn Storage market using an unique technology: All-Flash Storage Array.
So, What is All-Flash Storage?
Disk-based storage arrays have dominated the Storage market for more than 50 years, but with the increasing needs for more storage, disk-based technology have grown in capacity, it’s getting slower with time for its mechanical dimensions and limited for the fundamental rotational physics. Then came to light SSDs and Flash/Disk hybrid technology, but with the characteristics to be very expensive solutions.
Based in all these problems, Scott and his team invented something remarkable: an All-Flash Storage Array called Pure Storage’s FlashArray and its tightly-coupled software, the Purity Operating Environment, delivering an amazing performance in term of costs and reliability.
Recently, they announced the new Purity 4.0 and the FlashArray FA-405 and FA-450, so innovation is coming almost every quarter:
More and more Enterprise customers are coming
Enterprise sector have responded very well to this unique product that Pure Storage is offering, and there are a lot of examples that could be mentioned, like Yodle, which replaced their development environment of 15K drives and RAM-laden servers with a much smaller and inexpensive server and a Pure Storage FlashArray. By doing so, their rebuild process dropped from 24 to 3 hours for the development environment, and from 7 hours to one for the analytics rebuild. This is one of my favorite examples because Yodle uses PostgreSQL, one of my favorite Open Sources projects (I’m a long and proud user of this database system since its version 8.0).
Or you can see how Mattersight saw a dramatic 9X Data Reduction in their Microsoft SQL Server Analytics Database:
“The first thing we noticed was the level of data reduction. Our 600GB database only took 65GB of space on the Pure Storage array…we were shocked!”
said Jeff Geltz, CIO of Mattersight.
So, this team have embraced success and they are working hard to expand the All-Flash Storage technology around the globe, opening offices in Singapore, Sydney, an more (their HQs are in Mountain View, CA). Recently, they raised a massive $225M investment thinking in all this, and it seems that they are planing an IPO in the next years.
Are you looking for a great mentor? Pure Storage is full of brilliant people
But, forget about that for a moment. It’s not just about the inmminent IPO; is about people to work with. Andy and Elizabeth mentioned a very important point on the guide: “Seek a mentor”, and if you want to become in an expert in a certain area, Pure Storage’s team is full of outstanding but at the same time humble people.
Examples? What about Vaughn Stewart, the PureStorage Guy? If you want to know more about virtualization technology, Vaughn is the right one; or if you want to have the chance to carry out a completed go-to-market strategy for the new Purity version, you could learn aside Matt (VP, Marketing & Product Management at Pure Storage) and Mike Kim; or if you want to become in a sales expert, Why not to work with Michelle in the process? Or if you want to learn more funding, VC deals, entrepreneurship, hiring/firing issues, product management, why not to learn from Scott? Simply awesome.
This could be the beginning of something unique
But I think that Pure Storage is just beginning in this journey. Why?
What about the companies that are using for example Apache Hadoop and HBase (others of my favorite Open Source projects) for Analytics? Do you think that Pure Storage’s FlashArray could increase the performance of HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System)?
I do think that; so Purity’s team have the opportunity to enter for the big door in the Big Data Analytics market forming critical partnerships with Cloudera or Hortonworks (Scott is part of the Cloudera’s board of management)
Final Thoughts
So, if you are considered to join to the company to work with Scott and all the team, don’t negotiate too much, get your surf table and mount in the “Orange Wave”; I will sure you that you won’t regreat. I will let you some interesting positions here:
