 great well welcome we're really happy to be here thanks for letting us come up on stage I'm an investor at General Catalyst and but I was not when I first met you yes what's that how do we know each other what I think back in 2016 I very distinctly remember you coming to our Palo Alto office and I think within one meeting you very deeply understood and cared about the problem that we were solving and by the end of the meeting we knew that we had to work with you anyhow somehow and that's how we got started you join us as an advisor of the company long before you were part of GC and of course a year after as General Catalyst invested in us in series a you became part of the board yeah so it's been a great journey so why don't we just take a minute talk a little bit about what you're building and how that's going yeah so Minayo is the fastest and the most popular object storage out there for those who don't know object storage is the technology that powers the cloud so all the cloud services they consume underlying cloud storage or object storage as the as the primary data store such as you know analytics applications or AI ML applications or traditional backup applications it has become the primary storage for all the cloud services so that's what we do and we started back in 2015 ish and from zero lines of code to now we are a billion docker downloads and a million docker downloads a day so it has been quite a while right till now and it is amazing to see the traction that Minayo has gotten so far especially because we come from the infrastructure space and it's not considered to be very sexy to hack on so I'm very impressed how the developers have completely taken you know given us a lot of love when it comes to the object storage yeah so a million downloads a day yes that's that's that's a lot yeah so yeah it's been it's been great to see the progress and be part of the journey this talk is about focus and one of the things that's been very impressive as being part of what you guys been building is has been watching and following that focus you and your co-founder AB started beginning talking about liberating data yeah and as AB says like they're called data centers why is it mostly about compute not about data so how do we put the data back in the data center so can you just talk a little bit about how that focus has helped you start the company and then kept you kind of guided in the last you know many years now sure so when we you know as when we were starting or when we were thinking about doing a startup we were very clear that we wanted to pick an idea that is bigger and the problem statement that only not only gets bigger but also compounds over period of you know 10 15 years and we can hack on it for that long time and no matter what we did data was a problem that we thought is going to be relevant and data is a problem look around you all the devices producing data all the time and we knew that is a problem that is going to be relevant and that is going to grow over next 10 15 years so that's how Minaya was born right around that time AWS had convinced the world that as three storage object storage is the right platform to build to put all your blobs of data structured semi-structured data at scale and so we just wanted to be AWS S3 for rest of the world it was as simple as that and that is the foundation of how Minaya was started and from then till now we have been very very clear with that vision we were just going with our seed round deck that we built actually in the GC lobby you know back in back in the day and you know the first floor slides that we built they were actually you know same as we built for the series B deck that we were building it's all about having a land grab building the world's number one cloud storage or object storage technology and so that we have been very focused in our approach so far and when it comes to data liberation we knew that as the companies or as the businesses become data businesses you know you don't want to be held hostage by any one particular cloud that was very clear because if data is your business you cannot cannot hold cannot your data cannot be held hostage at any point of time and for with that problem statement when it comes to data liberation specifically we had two tenants one is the open source tenant and second is the open standards tenant and with open source it's it's a philosophy that we truly believe in it's not a business model for us it's more about that with open source is the right way to build the things build better products out there and you know right from day one our product has been 100% open source give more value back to the customers and if we wanted we we could have done better job with having simpler APIs but we wanted to stick to the industry standards when it comes to API so that the customers can standardize on one single API no matter where they go whether it is on edge whether it is private cloud whether it is public cloud and so on so that's the reason why we stuck to S3 API and even AWS acknowledges the fact that Minayo has done a lot more to make S3 API a standard than they could have ever done it by themselves so I think open source open standards are the two most important tenants when it comes to data liberation and that has been the focus of Minayo from day one just be very single see with the singular focus be AWS S3 for rest of the world as simple as that so it's interesting because the that focus ends up compounding and unintuitively maybe giving optionality and flexibility because you've had that focus so if you talk about being compatible with the API is it means you can run on any cloud you can run in private data centers and the reason getting a million downloads a day is be is in part because the optionality you created around open source where it's not just a matter of like subscribing to a service or whatever but developers can choose yes kind of kind of how they how they want to deploy it which has kind of led to this breadth of breadth of adoption that focus is also something you have reminded the board of from time to time so I remember once or twice being on the on the board and you know either either you Germa or AB would give the board a bit of a lecture we started pushing on different things like yeah hey this is going really well but like why not think about doing this or think about doing that and just like how did you guys know that sticking to that focus was was the right thing to do yeah I think the focus comes from the problem statement that we are going after it's a big enough problem I think the market is big enough for us to be distracted for and I think that is where really the focus comes from and you know every single thing every single iteration that we do in terms of building the product it reads to a better product in terms of you know how the software is consumed by the developers in terms of user experience and so on and I think it's the continuous iteration continuous you know rapid prototyping of the product overall that has that eventually leads to a product to to an exceptional product you were talking about focus has a compounding effect so if you keep working on one problem every single day and keep making progress on that particular problem over a period of year two years you will see a multiplier effect on that in terms of the velocity of the impact that you can create so I think that has been you know the tenants of what we do and it's also the DNA of myself and AB that if you picked up a problem we are going to stick to it and we are still if you see you know we are still baby steps we have a bigger adoption and bigger ecosystem than AWS when it comes to the cloud storage adoption but if you see from the commercial standpoint they are ten billion dollar run rate just for the storage services alone in one year and you know we are just still in our diapers right now so I think that gives us a lot of focus that there is still a lot more work to be done for us to claim as the number one storage provider out there when it comes to cloud storage so that gives us a lot of focus and with focus you know you were talking about having an impact on the developers I think focus also helps us when we are only hacking on one thing one thing at a time it gives us the ability to be best of the breed in that space if you see there are other bigger companies that we are challenging they are doing thousand things right and if we cannot claim that by doing one thing we can be better than them then we have no business being here so I think that is what focus gives you to do you know one thing one thing just better than the rest of the breed and there is no way that you will not succeed if you follow that path and journey yeah I mean you talked about focus compounding so you give the analogy a little bit of like a little bit of thrust a little bit of boost continuously over time like builds kind of momentum and speed yes it may be true like around the engineering work or maybe true around the developer community but what are they kind of the other ways it compounds whether it's brand or quality or anything else yeah so I think when you do things with focus it also helps you build simplicity in the product you know our goal has always been to make the product as simple as it can be and I think you know this but Minayo comes from the word minimalism so not many people know about that but our philosophy of a DNA has been to do do things in the most minimalist way and by minimal by minimalism what it means is that if you take one part away of the product it looks incomplete and if you add one additional feature to it it looks you know it looks opulent so that is you know when you have that kind of product it needs to look perfect from every single angle and when you have focus it enables you to do that you know it enables you to build enough simplicity in the product and that's the reason why we have so many downloads out there why the developers have just stuck to Minayo when they're building applications because of the simplicity and ease to get things started and get and you know get their job done I don't think so anyone wants to deal with the storage platform anymore or learn about storage they just want to download it deploy it and get their job done I think and that's the way it should be I mean nobody's expecting you to be a storage experts how it was in you know past days if you see EMCs and net apps of the world they made clunky appliances for an old-school world and they don't have a place in the new world anymore just because of the developers need for ease and simplicity and I think those are the very important tenants that come out from the focus the focus you've done a great job not just in terms of the the product and as you say like you have built something that is very turnkey very deployable yeah and you know a little bit like Google or I was at Dropbox for a number of years where Dropbox also has this characteristic of hiding a tremendous amount of implementation complexity behind a simple interface right it's like it looks very simple on the surface but there's a lot of paddling underneath the surface I think I think what you've built is no exception yes that but it's also been true I think for how you guys have run the company and you know when we walk into the board meetings we're not faced with a dashboard of 80 priority one things and KPIs yeah you guys tend to be very very focused and so just talk a little bit about that and how you've kind of created a culture a little bit around yeah you know extending that focus into how you run the team yeah you know talking of board meetings our goal is to just reduce it to one slide and just show the revenue number and be done with it in 10 minutes and go out for drinks I think that will be a really good board meeting to have so let's get to that stage sooner than later but yes in terms of building the culture I think you know as founders we are the captain of the ship if we don't know where the ship is headed it's just going to drift in all sorts of direction and when you're building an engineering first company it is very very important that you are over communicating with the team you're always telling them and bringing them back pulling them back why you're doing things the way you're doing where where you're headed as a company so everyone is aligned and the thing is that when you have very creative people in the team it is it becomes a little bit of a balance because you do need to give them a space to do their creative things and be excited about the job that they signed up on so you need to give them that much flexibility but also bring them back that you know this is the direction that we are going and whatever you do in the realm of you know whatever you need to do from engineering standpoint it needs to get aligned to that one singular direction and that's how we make progress together as a company I think when we started you know it was just three of us me AB and harsha for the longest time and it was just so easy things were just like so beautiful easy because we were talking all the time it was you know we hired the next set of three people again it was very easy because we were just sitting in one room talking communicating and making sure that you know there's almost like a mind-melt happening you know when you reach I think somewhere around 50 people it doesn't happen that much and you also tend to be like one step away from the hires that you have brought in to the team so I think it just becomes all the more important that in whatever all hands you're having we do have like all hands every single day so that helps in terms of making sure that the entire company is just aligned and making sure we have become we are making progress in the right direction so just a little bit of things here and there but I think the problem becomes becomes important as you scale the company and making sure that at that scale everyone is aligned towards one mission and and that's our job as founder it is exhausting to just keep on communicating the same thing over and over to the team because to you it might look repetitive but there is a lot of value in that to the new team members especially yeah it takes a long time actually for new ideas to really sink in across an organization yeah and then for people that are coming on you know they're hiring to get onboarded onboarding doesn't end you know in their laptop is provisioned and they're in the right depot it really ends when they're kind of really deep enough into the culture and understanding what the what their prayers really are yeah so one of the things that challenges focus a little bit people will say is like focus if like singular focus can end up being myopic you can miss things that are going on the world and trends etc and part of the magic I think you guys have achieved is this balance between leadership and management where leadership is like trying to push innovation drive change these opportunity and management's about kind of keeping things going getting things done etc so how how do you think about that tension and how does focus help you kind of navigate that yeah I think what is important that is that we always have our eye on the bigger picture and when you do that rest everything becomes a noise after that point right and they will always be things in terms of you know the smaller trends that keep on coming and going we need to be tactical on how we get to our end result or the goals that we have set out as a company for in the longer term and that's I think that really helps putting a not star in front of us and no matter what we do we need to make make progress towards that one particular goal so I think that keeps us very the team very aligned and in terms of management style I think we have a very flat organization structure and we want to scale that it that way we don't have SVPs and VPs and layers and layers of people as traditionally you know the organizations are built and the reason is that we want people to step up and become leaders we don't hire rockstars from other company we expect they'll be rockstars within Minayo that will go on to become greater things so that's the goal for us and as a founder that's also our responsibility to enable them to mentor them in whatever way to give them the opportunity to get to that level of course there are people who don't want to take that responsibility they just want to sit on one side and just hack all day that's completely fine that's completely fair but then there are people who want to take more responsibility and we do need to make sure that as we see those emerging leaders we groom them in a way that they not only become like an extension of us how we would react in situations they would react in a similar way eventually that becomes a responsibility of ours to make sure that that gets translated to them and also once you do that you know as they grow up and as they build their teams they will start mentoring their team in the similar way how we mentor them so you know it's leaders all the way down rather than having a traditional management structure or a team and I think that has worked great for us and that is I think that's the only way that we will scale the company as well just have more leaders in the organization give them power empower them let them do creative things make sure they're very aligned with the vision of the company very aligned with how we think about problem solving and we make progress together more leadership less hierarchy that's the way to go so talk a little bit about the threats to focus now we're at series B now in scaling yes like you said that the kind of the scale of the deployment of the company now in many has become a de facto standard for developers everywhere you know being an object store even to the point where my alma mater Microsoft recently announced that the database will be able to run yes object store which was a great thing for me to see personally the world's come together and it's kind of at a really great time in the world because as data doubles every year yes the cost of data management in every enterprise has gotten to the it's bubbling very close to the top dangerously to the top of operational costs for IT and we can't have enough a thousand next cost you know so here we are kind of building foundational technology that gives some flexibility and it creates a multi cloud fabric so surges in time but we still have to get it right yes what are the threats to focus now and how do you think about that in the coming next few years I think we are heads down focus the focused on building best-of-breed object storage and making sure whatever the workloads are they work natively on top of Minaya you mentioned Microsoft this week they announced SQL server coming natively and we were one of their first design partners to build it so if you see any new database or application that works with S3 98 percent of the times it will be built on Minayo so that's our land grab and that's our reach when it comes to developers and even the older applications like you know traditional applications like backup applications like Veeam or Commvault as they start testing and making themselves more cloud native by coming to S3 they start testing it on Minayo just because it's very easy simple to deploy down go to our website download the product and within five ten minutes you can have your own cloud storage so it's I think the ease and simplicity so our VR heads down focused on making sure whatever we can do to enable that experience make that experience better that is where we are focused and the as the as a company and data is going to get produced everywhere you know at the edge within private clouds within public clouds and it is very important for organizations to have that freedom from the cloud lock-in and what gives you the freedom is having standard set of APIs I think that is super important if you are and most of the businesses are going to become hyperscalar themselves in next five years so it becomes even more important from the cost perspective that you have complete control of your data and have because data has gravity applications you can move around you can spin around you can just you know containerize it and deploy it wherever it needs to be but data has gravity and storage you cannot move around so it's important that you remove the silos bring all the storage together in S3 compatible storage platform like Minayo and just run application stateless on top of it no matter where it needs to be and you can optimize your cost whether it needs to run on a high performance hardware whether it needs to run on a low performance hardware you can have mix of topologies there but yes I completely agree with you as you know the cost that organizations are becoming data organizations the cost is going to become a very important factor in determining who they partner with and who gives them the freedom the freedom in the true sense so I think that is where Minayo will play a very important role so quickly because we're going to be coming up on time here in a minute you and AB have done an amazing job about staying focused on kind of the right stakeholder because there's some companies that sort of tend to drift into focusing on competitors or the industry saying or customers etc how do you think about what you should be focused on as a company so I think from day one our competitor if you might want to call it has been AWS S3 so we have been telling the world either datasets on Minayo or datasets on AWS when we started it looked ridiculous because nobody would believe us when we would make those statements now it is of course lot more believable when we tell either you know you datasets on them or datasets on us so I think as we start getting more and more into the weeds within the organizations you know right now 10,000 organizations use Minayo in some shape or format 70% and Fortune 500 use Minayo so I think as we go more deeper into the weeds and become more and more established as a standard within enterprises themselves I think that will help us solidify our position when it comes to you know just AWS we don't consider legacy players like Dell's EMC's of the world as competition anymore they don't have a role I'm sorry if I'm offending anyone they are our investors as well but yeah yeah so we only have a minute left if if we take this topic of staying focused early stage as founder like what's the takeaway what's the kind of simplest way you can I think the simplest way is if you are starting starting off you need to pick a bigger problem when you pick a bigger problem it's very easy to hack on it for next like 10 to 15 years and also it is very easy to align it is easy to align get you know have a team that is aligned towards your vision even aligned the investors towards your vision because who doesn't want to work on bigger problems right so I think if you identify a problem that is going to compound and grow in next 10 years go latch on to it and I think you'll be just fine awesome thank you yeah thank you it's so wonderful to be here with you thank you