 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto at the CUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with two great guests, Carl Asherbock, partner at Sequoia Capital on the board of Cohesity as well as the CMO. It's Lynn Lucas. Lynn, great to see you. Carl, thanks for coming back on. Great, appreciate it. So Lynn, we've been following you guys for many, many years, watching the rapid growth of Cohesity, funding round after funding round, Unicorn from a smart startup to, going through the atmosphere, heading into orbit, nice growth. Mid-sized company, I'd say now, yes. Growing like crazy. Longer startup. Yeah, no longer startup, yeah. Good round, good financing track. Thanks to Sequoia. We're proud and happy investors and partners of theirs, that's for sure. One of the things we're super excited about right now, Lynn, I want to get your thoughts on this, is that how do you maintain the growth because cloud is an ever-changing landscape. Data management's really hot and changing. What's been the success formula for you guys as staying ahead? Both in terms of continuing to push the brand, push the message, and success. What's been the formula? Well, I think it starts with our founder, Moet Aaron, and his vision and strategy, which if you go back, he's been extraordinarily consistent on and he saw this massive opportunity to take hyper-convergence, which of course he really is the father of, from Nutanix, and bring it to this whole other area of data, the vast majority of data that enterprises have, that is in all of these different silos. And so, really, I think that Cohesity has this opportunity to be a once-in-a-generation platform company, much like VMware, and really change the way enterprises protect, manage, store, and ultimately do more with their data. So I'm going to say it's less about the brand. I'm proud about the brand, but it's really about that. You did a great job with the brand, but I think the execution is, I think one of the things I love about this market cloud and the next 10 years ahead of us is that you can come into the market with a feature or a specific thing like backup and turn it into a broad-ranging, high-growth billion dollars of value. I think that's what you guys are on. But we have Carl here, I want to put him on the spot because he was experienced at VMware. And now it's a Coyah. What's he bringing to the table for Cohesity? What's his operational knowledge? What are some of the things that Carl brought to Cohesity? Oh my gosh, what has been brought? Well, Carl is obviously incredibly experienced and brings a wealth of go-to-market knowledge and connections and advice for us. I think instrumental in helping us see how to scale as well as change and shift the business model over to software and subscription, which is what Cohesity did last year and is right in line with the move towards the cloud. Yeah, Carl, your thoughts. I would say one of the things, just to echo, thank you for those kind words, but quite frankly, it's all about execution and these folks at Cohesity know how to execute. If you just look at their scale over the last three years and their ability to execute, it's pretty impressive. Not on the technology side only, but if you think about their go-to-market motion and what they've done both here in the U.S., internationally, all over into Asia and in Japan with the joint venture they have with SoftBank and some of the others, it's been amazing to watch them scale on the go-to-market and also the ecosystem that they started to build around them and leveraging partners like HPE and Cisco as Cohesity has transitioned from being an appliance solution to being a software and data management platform and moving the hard work to other partners. It's been amazing to watch that transformation happen. So it's technology, yes, but it's also every other component in piece of the business that's been able to scale through good execution. Well, let's talk about the ecosystem because I think it's the super important. It's an ever-changing conversation, especially as the bigger players get bigger and then the mid-sized folks like you guys get bigger as well. The relationships change. You've certainly seen your share, Karla, the VMware at VMworld every year. The ecosystem has its growth, it changes over, new value propositions are coming in. You have a constant rotation through of ecosystem dynamics. What are some of them going on now that Cohesity has taken advantage of? What are they paying attention to? So because Cohesity is actually building a true platform as Lynn was articulating, if you're a platform in a data center, it means two things. You have to partner with people on the southbound side of the platform and the northbound side of the platform because everything's going to go through a platform. And because of that, you form a very rich ecosystem but you also form sometimes competitors. In this world, everyone I think describes it as friends and enemies, they're frenemies. And they've done a very good job at that but at the same time, they've really focused on key partners like an HPE or a Cisco or many others that can really differentiate themselves and allow them to focus on what they truly are is not a data management software company. So I think they've done a really good job navigating the ecosystem and building off of it and aligning with the right people. For example, you sit here at VMworld today, look at the partnership they have with VMworld. They have the ready certification across BSAN or infrastructure platform, the cloud director, AWS, you name it. So I think they've done a great job and that's thanks to people like Lynn and the team. Lynn, talk about the ecosystem dynamic because you guys are actively marked to get a big booth every year at VMworld as well as Amazon reinvent all the shows. You have to be out there. What are you hearing? What are some of the dynamics that you're working through? Well, speaking of VMworld and VMware, they really were the original ecosystem partner and I think we believe that north of 70% of our customers are VMware customers and they're getting better value out of that. But we haven't talked a lot about the cloud and that's obviously a massive ecosystem that's continuing to develop and bringing those two things together is something that Cohesity specializes in with our native capabilities with Amazon, Azure, Google. But the other third piece of the ecosystem that we're now developing is the applications and that's unique to Cohesity really redefining data management. Just announced Cohesity Cyberscan based on Tenable running on the Cohesity platform prior to that, Splunk running on the platform. So we're developing these ecosystem partnerships in new ways with application providers. So when are we going to see Cohesity world? I am just so happy to be at VMworld. It's a great place for us to meet a lot of customers and partners. So we'll stay with that. Carl, you were talking about, before we came on camera, about your first VMworld and you go, oh my God, it's huge and now it's even bigger. This is the opportunity for companies like Cohesity. If they continue the momentum, building out applications, which if you think about it, that's an enabling technology. You can enable developers to be successful. That truly is a testament to what a true platform is. Again, I think, you know, she said they don't have a big user conference yet. I don't think it'll be long before we have such momentum in the market that we will have a user conference at some point where we will see a large turnout of people using the technology, people from the ecosystem there and then developers as well. And lastly, you'll start to see application vendors like a Splunk or a Tenable who are actually now running their applications on top of this. This isn't just data management, but it's also supporting applications. And when you pull those three different, you know, constituents together, you have a pretty big opportunity to pull off some type of a platform show. When I got to put you on the spot here for a minute, you got Carl, he's also a partner at Sequoia Venture Capital. What are the pros and cons of working with a big time tier one for now in BC like Sequoia? I mean, Sequoia is, I mean, Don Valentin's well-documented story. Meritz goes on, look at the young guns in there now, get the operating experience from like the Carl's. They're pretty established. You've got a great business model, you know that. What's the pros and cons of working with a big time Sequoia? Not seeing any cons. Pros are, as you said, the operating experience. I think also the experience in guiding a company through this hyper growth. Cohesity is now well over 1200 employees last year when you and I sat here, much less than that, right? And they've seen it and done it before with other partners or with other portfolio companies. That I think is one of the best pieces of advice as Carl has given us coming into our company is how to maintain that culture and that focus on the mission as we move through this tremendous growth phase. So. It's interesting. Sequoia loves you when you're growing, but they've seen success. The cons haven't come yet. But if you continue to grow, there'll be no cons. Everyone's happy growing. But I want to get your thoughts because Sequoia also builds world-class companies and they also come from the Apple. The names are legendary. Your founder on theCUBE told me that he doesn't want to just get an exit. He wants to build a world-class company. Well, exit is not as important, not like an M&A, but going public, that happens. But he's not in it for the cash. He wants to build a durable, world-class company. That's exactly right, right? Moet has had a number of successes, Google, Nutanix. So he's not in this for the short return. And we really are focused on building a culture and a set of values and a long-term sustainable business. And he really means what he says about, he's here to change the world. And data is the foundation of what most businesses are going to compete on. And he believes he can really empower organizations to do that. And we can build a great culture and a great company while we're helping. I want to piggyback off what Lynn just said. And it's exactly what Lynn articulated about Moet wants to build a big, enduring company that stands a test of time. If you look at our ethos at Sequoia, we want to partner with founders from idea to IPO and beyond. We're not looking for a quick win. We want to be with them through IPO and beyond and build big, legendary companies that stand a test of time. And in the form of Cohesity, we have that opportunity and we're well on that path to build a legendary platform company that will serve as both the enterprise and the cloud companies into the future. That's our mission, so I think our missions are aligned. Well, you just answered my question I was going to ask you. That is music theory, this is the kind of model that you guys want. Certainly you guys do a good job of exiting out on M&A and making your LPs money. Yeah, at some point we got to pay our LPs back, right? But a lot of people think when our companies go public, this is an exit for us, it's just an event. And if we believe in the companies, we're going to hold them long into the public market from that idea and that seed investment like we did here at Cohesity, well beyond the IPO. There's a renaissance going on and I love it because two things are happening in this next 10 years. You're seeing a systems platform mindset come back versus the quick hits. And also people want to build big companies. They don't want to just do the quick flips anymore. So a lot of young entrepreneurs are in it for a mission. This is a new vibe. What kind of advice do you give entrepreneurs that are looking to bring that Cohesity model and get the attention of Sequoia? What are some of the things that you see as success for those young entrepreneurs out there? Yeah, so it is around the word mission. Like we want to partner with people that are mission driven that are going to have a huge impact on business and society as a whole and even the social efforts in our world. So we're looking for people that want to change the trajectory of whatever is they're addressing. And we think for example with Cohesity, there's a radical transformation taking place in the infrastructure. And someone's got to innovate because a lot of innovators today are not coming from the incumbents. It's coming from the next generation of founders like Mohit and he's very mission driven. Build a big company, service a community of people, change the way people store and think about data and manage it. And that mission centric founder is one we love to partner with. Final question, I'd love to get both your take on this question, Lynn and Carl is. When you meet someone that may not be in the inside the ropes of technology like the enterprise tech like we are in the cube and others and they ask you the question, why is Cohesity so successful? How would you, how do you describe the dynamics of the marketplace and Cohesity's role in it on its success? What's, what is the answer to that question? I think it's really two things. So one is I think that there is this generational shift in the architecture that underpins data and we've got a perfect storm with data doing the exponential growth. And as Carl's been saying, there really hasn't been a lot of innovation in the infrastructure in more than a decade. Mohit saw that, but then that's combined with a mission, a passion for customers and sticking to that execution of serving the customer and that's making us successful. Carl, your thoughts to add to that. Listen, it starts with technology and to have great technology, you have to have a great technical founder and we have that in Mohit time and time again. I can go, we've all talked about Mohit and how special he is. At the same time, you need to build a company that has a special culture that can stand the test of time, that is resilient, that has grit and has passion and perseverance for what they're doing around their mission. And I think we have all of that in Cohesity and that's a lot of it's because of Mohit and people like Lynn that he's brought in around this executive team and you can just see that permeate through the entire organization. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing the insight. Carl, great to have you comment here with Lynn on Cohesity. Great to be back. I know you're on the board. A lot of great things happened. Look and see what's happening at the VMware parties. Thanks for hosting some awesome events for the community, Glenn. Can't wait to be back, bring some of our customers on. Thanks for spending time. Just a cute conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.