 How y'all doing? My name's Savannah Peterson, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan, where theCUBE is excited to be at KubeCon. Our guest this afternoon is a wonderfully brilliant woman who's been leading in the space for over eight years. Please welcome Garima Kapoor. Garima, thanks for being with us. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. Good to see you. Good to see you up to you. What's going on here at KubeCon? Saw you at VMware Explorer. Yes. Welcome back to theCUBE. What's going on for you guys here? What's the message? What's the story? So KubeCon, like I always say, it's our event. It's our audience. So, you know, Minayo, I don't know if you've been keeping track. Minayo did reach like a billion docker downloads recently. So, congratulations. This is your tribe right here. Yes, it is our tribe. We're going to have these native infrastructure. Come on. Yes. You know, this audience understands us. We understand them. You know, you were asking, when did we start the company? So we started in 2014. And if you see, Kubernetes was born in 2015 in all sorts of ways. So we kind of literally grew up together along with the Kubernetes journey. So all the decisions that we took were just, you know, making sure that we address the Kubernetes and the cloud native audience as the first class citizens when it comes to storage. So I think that has been very instrumental in leading us up to the point where we have reached the billion docker downloads and we are the most loved object storage out there. So do you like your younger brother, Kubernetes, or not? Is this a family like it's along? It does get along. I think in Kubernetes space, what we are seeing from customer standpoint as well, right? They are warming up to Kubernetes and they are using Kubernetes as a framework to deploy anything at scale. And especially when you're offering storage as a service to whether it is for your internal audience or to the external audience, Kubernetes becomes extremely instrumental because it makes multi-tenancy extremely easy. It makes access control points extremely easy for different user sets and so on. So Kubernetes is definitely the way to go. I think enterprises need to just have a little bit more skill set when it comes to Kubernetes overall because I think there are still little bit areas in which they need to invest in. But I think this is the right direction. This is the right way. If you want multi-tenant, you need Kubernetes for compute. You need Kubernetes for storage. You guys hit an interesting spot here with Kubernetes. You have a product that targets builders but also it's a service that's consumed. Yes, yes. How do you see those two lanes shaping out as the world starts to grow, the ecosystem's growing? You've got products for builders and products for people who are developers consuming services. How do you see that shaking out? Is there intersections there? You seem to be hitting that. There is definitely an intersection and I think it's getting merged because a lot of these users are the ones who dictate what kind of stack they want as part of their application ecosystem overall. So that is where, when an application, for example, in the big data workloads, they tell their IT or their storage department, this is the S3 compatible storage that they want their applications to run on or sit on. So the bridge is definitely becoming very narrow in that way from builders versus the service, consumers overall. And I think at the end of the day, people need to get their job done. From application users perspective, they want to just get in and get out. They don't want to deal with the underlying complexity when it comes to storage or any of the framework, right? So I think what we enable is for the builders to make sure they have extremely easy, simple, high performance software service that they can offer it to their customers, which is S3 compatible. So now they can take their applications wherever they need to go, whether it is Edge, whether it is on-prem, whether it is any of the public cloud, wherever you need to be, go be with it with mankind. I mean, I want to get your thoughts on a really big trend that's happening now that's right in your area of expertise. That is, people are realizing that, hey, I don't necessarily need AWS S3 for storage. I can do my own storage or build my own. So there's a cost slash value for commodity storage. When does a company decide to what to do there? Do they do their own? You see Cloudflare, you see Wasabi, other companies emerging. You guys are here, common services, then there's a differentiated in the cloud. What's this all about? Yeah, so there are a couple of things going on in this space, right? So firstly, I think cloud model is the way to go. And what we mean by cloud is not public cloud. It's the cloud operating model overall, right? You need to build the applications the correct way so that they can consume cloud native infrastructure correctly. So I think that is what is going on. And secondly, I think cloud is great for your burst workloads. It's all about productivity. It's all about getting your applications to the market as fast as you can. And that is where, of course, Minayo comes into play when you can develop your applications natively on something like Minayo. And when you take it to production, it's very easy, no matter where you go. And thirdly, I think when it comes to the cost perspective, you know, what we offer to the customers is predictability of the cost and no surprise in the bills when it comes, which is extremely important to like a CFO of a company because everyone knows that cloud is not the cheapest place to run your sustainable workloads. And there is unpredictability element involved because, you know, people leave their buckets on, people leave their compute nodes on. It happens all the time. So I think if you take that uncertainty out of it and have more predictability around it, I think that is where the true value lies. You're really hitting on a theme that we've been hearing a lot on theCUBE today, which is standardization, predictability. Yes. Everyone always wants to move fast, but I think we're actually stepping away from that Mark Zuckerberg parody of move fast and break things and let's move fast, but know how much it's gonna cost and also decrease the complexity for our teams. And jump break things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And try, you know, minimize the collateral damage. Yes. And yeah, I love that you're enabling folks like that. How is, I'm curious because I see that your background, you have a PhD in philosophy. So we don't always see philosophy and DevOps and Kubernetes in the same conversation. So how does this translate into your leadership within your team and Minaya's culture? So it's PhD in financial management and financial economics. So that is where my specialization lies. And I think after that I came to Bay Area. So once you're in Bay Area, you cannot escape technology. It is just the way things are. You cannot escape startups. You cannot escape technology overall. So that's how I got introduced to it. And yeah, it has been a great journey so far. And from the culture standpoint of you, I always tell like, if I can learn technology, anyone can learn technology. So what we look for is the right attitude, the right kind of passion to learn is what is most important in this world if you want to succeed. And that's what I tell everyone who joins Minayo. Two months, three months, you'll be up and going. I'm not too worried about it, but I think. And past pedigree doesn't always play into it because the changing technology, you could level up. So people can get into this and be contributing. I think one of the reasons why we have been successful, the way we have been successful with storage is because we've not hired storage experts. Because they come with their own legacy and mindset of how to build things. And we're like, and we always came from a point of view, we are not a storage company. We are a data company and we want to be close to the data. So when you come with that mindset, you build a product directly attacking data, not just like in traditional appliance world and so on, so forth. So I think those things have been very instrumental in terms of getting the right people on board, making sure that they're very aligned with how we do things and the DNF, the companies look for passion. And that's actually counterintuitive, but it makes sense. In new markets, it doesn't always seem you take the boilerplate, skill set, or person. We're doing journalism, but we don't hire journalists. No, it's adventurers and explorers and curious. Exactly, exactly. I think also for you to disrupt any space, you cannot approach it from how they approach the problem. You need to completely turn the tables upside down, as they say, right? You need to disrupt it and have the surprise element. And I think that is what always makes the technology very special. You cannot follow the path that others have followed. You need to come from a different space, different mindset altogether. So that is where it's important that you, like I said, adventurers and explorers are the people. That is for sure. Talk to us about the company. Are you growing, scaling? How do people find out more? Oh yeah, for sure. So people can find out more by visiting our website, min.io. We are growing, we just closed last year, end of last year, we closed our series V round, unicorn valuation and so on and so forth. She says unicorn valuation is so casually. I just want to point that out. That's probably like a true strong female leader. I love that, I love that. Thank you. Yes, so in terms of, you know, in terms of growth and scalability, we are growing the team. We are, you know, onboarding more commercial customers to the platform. So yeah, it's growth all across, growth from the community standpoint, both growth from commercial number standpoint. So, yeah. Congratulations. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, that's very exciting. Grima, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. John, as always, thanks for hanging out. And to all of you, thank you so much for tuning into theCUBE, especially for this exciting edition for all of us here in Detroit, Michigan, where we're coming to you from KubeCon. See you back here in a little bit.