Siddhartha Ahluwalia 0:48
Hi, this is Siddhartha Ahluwalia, your host at NEON Show and managing partner at NEON Fund, a fund that has invested in some of the best enterprise AI companies between the US and India corridor like Atomicwork, SpotDraft, CloudSEK.
Today I have with me Poojan Kumar. Poojan, welcome to the NEON Show.

Poojan Kumar 1:05
Thank you, Siddhartha. Thanks for having me.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 1:06
You have built multiple companies recently. You sold Clumio to Commvault. Today, you know, you are the GM for the entire Clumio business line for Commvault, right? The previous company you sold to Nutanix, right? So it’s been an amazing journey. And you are one of the folks who worked on the data storage, data warehousing for a long period of time. How did in your life you decide to commit to this vertical? Maybe you can start with your Oracle journey where you led the product.

Poojan Kumar 1:37
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s been 25 plus years in the enterprise. Started off at Oracle as an engineer. And then I would say, you know, sometimes, you know, the right things happen, right place at the right time. We ended up working on something brand new and built it from scratch. That became Exadata, which essentially was the first integrated hardware software appliance that Oracle shipped for data warehousing before data warehousing moved to the cloud.

That was the data warehousing play within Oracle. Still doing really well. And it was one of the fastest growing products, getting to a billion dollars of revenue at Oracle while I was there. Now, obviously, it’s much bigger. But that was my first this thing of seeing something beginning from scratch to, you know, from an engineering writing code to seeing what happens when, you know, the right product market fit happens. And of course, in that case, within Oracle, and with, you know, 10,000 plus sellers selling it and but really got an opportunity to see when, you know, the product and technology meets the business of technology.

So that gave me the drive and the spirit to go and say, I want to do this myself. Obviously, doing it yourself outside is very different and much harder, much harder to do than doing it within a safe listing of Oracle. So I started Pernix, that was my first journey as founder CEO.

And anytime, you know, when I think about starting.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:02
And which year was this when you started?

Poojan Kumar 3:04
This was early 2012.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 3:05
And you were already spent like 10 years with Oracle.

Poojan Kumar 3:08
Yeah, this was already, I think, you know, about, you know, 10 years at Oracle and couple years at VMware also back then. So from Oracle, I had gone to VMware, and then started Pernix. And, you know, whenever I, you know, look at starting something in at least in the enterprise, you have to look at what’s the big discontinuity happening in the sector, right?

Back in the day, you know, in the storage space, Pernix was at the intersection of virtualization and storage. And so back in the day, the big discontinuity was a shift of from hard disks to flash, right? And, you know, flash was much, much faster, and, you know, economics were getting better and better.

And so that was a time when, you know, companies like Nutanix and Pure and all of these, you know, also were built. Fusion IO was a big player in the flash play. So we are really building, you know, software that would make virtualization and flash in the server meet and make virtual environments, you know, operate much, much faster using flash in the server. So that was the thesis using the discontinuity of hard disk to flash. And then essentially, that was the thesis behind Pernix. That was about, you know, almost a five year journey. And ultimately, that got acquired by Nutanix, which is where I spent some time in Nutanix, you know, both integrating the Pernix, you know, stack into Nutanix.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:25
If you can give a rough idea of what scale did Pernix achieve before the acquisition?

Poojan Kumar 4:29
Yeah, it was about, you know, 25 million of revenue.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:33
Wow, independent?

Poojan Kumar 4:34
Independently, yes. When we got acquired, we’re about 25 million of revenue.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:38
And how much you had raised at Pernix?

Poojan Kumar 4:40
Pernix was about funded about 60ish million.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:43
Very efficient.

Poojan Kumar 4:44
Yeah, that was pretty, pretty efficient. Absolutely. Yeah. And we had been operations, you know, in multiple countries, you know, around the globe and close to 900, you know, paying customers when you got acquired.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 4:55
And how much period of time you took it to from starting with 25 million in revenue?

Poojan Kumar 5:01
Four and a half years from beginning to acquisition. Yeah. And then a lot of it was, you know, also, I think it became very clear that yeah, this would thrive much better as part of a bigger, bigger company. And so that’s, that’s what we did. And that was when Nutanix was doing extremely well back then. And this was a good fit from a team perspective.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 5:20
This is when Nutanix had already scaled to a billion in revenue or before that?

Poojan Kumar 5:24
I don’t think that got to a billion. This is pre-IP on Nutanix. As far as I remember, if they hadn’t got to a billion, but I might be wrong on that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s all, I’m jogging, jogging my memory. It’s, it’s almost 10 years, 10 years ago, right?

The acquisition happened in 2016, if I remember right. That was that and then Nutanix, you know, was, was a great company and spent a good amount of time, both with the Pernix side, but also looking at a few new initiatives within Nutanix. You know, a couple of them are still around and doing well as far as I know.

But then again, in 2017, I got to a point where, you know, the big discontinuity happening in the sector back then was public cloud, right? You know, it was, you know, still, you know, relatively early days, you can say a public cloud, you know, AWS had done well, and then Azure was trying to do and GCP was, you know, significantly behind, but again, you know, early investments in GCP. And then, you know, these companies like Snowflake and Datadog were good inspiration, they’re not gone public yet.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 6:24
They were very early back then.

Poojan Kumar 6:25
Yes, relatively early. And so, you know, that became a motivation like, okay, can you know what can be done in the public cloud? Can you, can you rethink an enterprise use case that would basically the public cloud economics, the public cloud scale would change it, right?

So, that was the thesis behind the Clumio idea, which was really about, can we build a backup, you know, data protection and cyber resilience platform in the public cloud, taking advantage of the primitives of the public cloud and ultimately going and catering to applications built in the public cloud, right? So, that was the beginning of the journey at Clumio that was late 2017, early 2018 is when we got started with Clumio. And that was about a seven year journey to acquisition by Commvault almost a year and a half ago.

But the journey continues. You know, we’re now part of Commvault, still kind of running the Clumio initiative and focusing on exactly the mission we started off with, and really going and continuing to build the business with Clumio, but as part of Commvault.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 7:36
Understood. So, if you can share more about, you know, the landscape of data backup, which are the largest companies there, where was Clumio solving a unique niche? And right, and how did the acquisition happen?

Poojan Kumar 7:51
Yeah, data backup, I think, has obviously been around and there’s multiple players in the space. You know, one of them, you know, Rubrik just went public about a year and a half ago also. So, in general, I think you’re going to break it up into, you know, historically, companies focusing on backing up data center and on-prem environments really well.

And then came public cloud, where the hyperscalers themselves will provide, you know, backup and data protection for workloads in the public cloud. And then, there is SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and so on and so forth, that also require backup. And so, if you look at it, you know, these were essentially three use cases, and some companies, you know, trying to do one or two, or in some cases, trying to do all three of these use cases.

Clumio was squarely focused on the public cloud use case, like more and more applications built in the cloud, and the scale and the architecture needed to go and provide backup and cyber resilience for them was very different than an architecture needed to go backup, you know, on-prem or even backup SaaS applications, right. And so, that’s what we did at Clumio. But then if you look at, you know, the other players, including Commvault, it’s more of a broader platform trying to cover SaaS, on-prem, and then also, you know, cloud use cases, right.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 9:11
If you had seen, you know, how the trends are shifting now, what would you suggest, you know, that an entrepreneur who has similar background as yours in virtualization, in data storage, would build it for an AI world?

Poojan Kumar 9:25
Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think today is a very, very different world of AI. And in fact, we ourselves asked this question to us repeatedly, like, if you were building, you know, Clumio today, how would you build it? Right?

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 9:35
We’d love to answer that.

Poojan Kumar 9:36
Exactly.
How would you essentially think about, you know, AI and agentic and of course, you know, now with the world of data protection and security, you know, kind of adjacencies happening together, where customers are also asking us for, you know, security feature sets on top of the protection platform, how would you essentially, you know, kind of marry all of these three things together, right? The AI agentic stuff, the security stuff, and then your traditional data protection. And I think that is where I would say, irrespective of the field, that is where the opportunity exists, right?

Because these are all very, very large markets, right? And technologies to build it is, are very deep, in most cases, right? But then, you know, how do you essentially take advantage of what, you know, AI can, can give you and essentially, in some cases, even build faster, right?

And also, in some cases, think very different in terms of how, how you would essentially, you know, build it, like, for example, you know, back in the day, you would essentially, you know, say, okay, how do I build a platform, which is very easy to use, right? Somebody can go come to your website and start using it, and even start consuming it, which is, you know, how Snowflake did it, which is consumption oriented. We are truly also did it the same way, right? Consumption oriented, right? And then again, now, how do you take it to the next level, where you make that whole thing very agentic also, in terms of how, you know, the customer interacts with the platform, and so on and so forth, right? So it’s time for any use case.

And that’s what happening in security, if you see, right? Every use case in security also is getting, you know, rethought, like, how can I build a, you know, maybe an agent, right, that can do this automatically versus relying on how it was being done before. So every workflow is being reinvented, and every use case is being rethought.

And that’s how I would say, anybody should think about it, take a large problem, take a, you know, reasonably big market to go after, and essentially look at, okay, how would you essentially tackle it, if you’re building from scratch? That’s the advantage a startup has, because you don’t have any legacy to deal with, and you can be very nimble and agile and really go and do something that, you know, typical last vendors can’t do it very easily.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 11:46
And let’s say today, you have to explain the entire data and storage stack for AI world, how would you explain it to a layman?

Poojan Kumar 11:55
Yeah, like the data and storage stack for an AI world, I think is more and more, I think, if you look at AI applications are being built in the cloud, right. And so the stack in the cloud looks very different than an application that was built in the data center, right. And so this is a stack that is, you know, using very cloud native primitives, right, which is where I think, you know, architecturally, how we have built Clumio and all also matters, because these applications, these agentic applications in the cloud will also need the protection, right.

And if at all will need more of it, because the chances of things going wrong could be higher, right, you can imagine, right, with all the stuff happening in an agentic world, you might want to go back in time and so on and so forth, right. But the primitives are more, you know, serverless architecture, the primitives are more, you know, scale technologies like, you know, S3 that Amazon provides object storage, right. You know, gone are the days that you’re going to run, you know, applications sitting in big virtual machines, and, you know, attaching storage to it, and so on and so forth, right, you know, you’re basically going to build an architecture that can, you know, scale up and down as needed, can run anywhere around the globe in any region that the cloud provider provides it, and an infrastructure that can just come up, you know, basically, a bunch of terraform that can bring up the infrastructure, the application and do its thing, and essentially use the primitives that the cloud provider provides, in terms of large scale storage, like S3, for their persistence, and so on and so forth. So that’s how, you know, these, these new applications, you know, look like now good news is, as they are built, at least from, you know, selfishly from a, you know, from a cyber resilience platform perspective, you know, all these applications in the enterprise will still need, you know, protection and cyber resilience and all that. So, so that’s, that’s, that’s a benefit, like, and as the applications are built in the in the cloud, more and more and built for scale, and so on and so forth, you know, you have to go and rethink how you’re going to protect them, and which is where platforms like us come in, come in place.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 14:00
What are the unanswered questions that enterprises have today, in terms of storage security, when, when they are deploying agents?

Poojan Kumar 14:07
I think we think about it, right? I think there’s like, you know, if you’re, if I’m sure if you’re a CIO of any of the large companies today, and you’re thinking about AI adoption, you know, this whole thing around, you know, sure, I don’t know, like, my who is, who is, who is using what, like what what data is going where in the enterprise from from my endpoints from from from all the employees to agent applications and, and, and these agents, you know, how are they interacting with in MCP servers, you know, out there, and then what data they’re sharing with those MCP servers, and how is the data flow happening between, between all of these MCP servers and within my own agentic application?

I think all of these things are real unanswered questions. And I think as as more and more of this is going to happen, I think, you know, somebody needs to go and look at this holistically and make sure that if you’re a CIO of a company, you can essentially, you know, have full visibility into, you know, my from my endpoints, you know, accessing, you know, these models out of the outside world, or all of these, you know, agentic applications that are interacting and even sharing data sharing my data with MCP servers, and what’s being shared and, and track the lineage of what happened when and what got shared in case I have to go back in time and see it. I think that is very early days. I don’t think anybody has really tackled this holistically yet. But this I think is important.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 15:38
But do you think enterprises are proactively deploying agents today? Or not yet?

Poojan Kumar 15:44
I think it’s, it’s depending on who it is, I think, obviously, there is, there is one thing that’s definitely happening, which is adopting, you know, services that, you know, is abstracting it for you, right. So that’s, that’s happening already, like, you know, people, you know, definitely doing it for their own use cases, right. So, you know, for example, support is an interesting vertical, right, which is a lot of stuff happening within support, where, you know, the ticket deflection and automatic resolution of tickets, these are things that whether somebody builds it themselves, or uses a third party platform available out there, I think that’s a vertical that you’re seeing all of this happening, like we’re seeing in the legal vertical, you know, the Harvey’s of the world, right. So, so I think there are different verticals, depending on the things. So it’s happening, whether using a third party application, or in some cases, building it yourself.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 16:38
When you started Pernix Data versus when you started Clumio, between both these worlds, and today, how did the infrastructure change across these three worlds, Pernix, Clumio and today?

Poojan Kumar 16:52
I think it’s, it’s, it’s a whole different world, right. And I think between Pernix and Clumio also, you know, I felt it was very different where, you know, back in the day, it was super early days of the cloud, public cloud. So in early 2012, obviously, nobody was talking as much about the public cloud, I think, in 2014, 2015, the first time AWS came and talked about that, and how they’re doing with the public cloud, as far as I remember.

But, but when I started Clumio, I think it was a like cloud first world, even like, you know, Pernix, I had a data center in my own office, right, you know, and stuff like that, obviously, I had to test out all the storage, and I had, you know, VMware servers.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 17:29
And that would have been really expensive.

Poojan Kumar 17:31
Yeah, super expensive. I had, you know, when I moved offices, also, remember, I had to make sure I need any, you know, space for a data center, and so on and so forth, all the testing is to do. But Clumio, we just started in the laptops, and everything was in the cloud, right. So it was just a very different world. And fast forward now, I think, if you’re starting today, you’re even going to the next level, even, you know, using, you know, tools like, you know, Anthropic Claude Code, and stuff like that, and really starting, you know, from the scratch, with the tools like that, and how you are scaling your organization, how even, you know, the assumptions of the business model, and how fast you can scale your business in the AI world, I think, is very different sky is the limit, right, in terms of, you know, how fast you can scale how fast you can build things, right?

I think it’s different. I thought, between Pernix and Clumio, it was a different world. But I think it’s vastly different. If you start a company today versus, you know, in a few years.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 18:32
So in Pernix, also, you scale to 25 million before acquisition. In Clumio also, I think the public numbers are you scale to $25 million of revenue before the acquisition. So how is scaling different in both these companies? What was required to scale in both these companies?

Poojan Kumar 18:47
I think it’s very different, right? I think, you know, in the traditional data center world, it was, you know, again, it was really about, you know, at the end of the day, you know, hiring your sales team and going after the traditional buyer and stuff like that. Even from that to Clumio, the buyer profile really changed, right?

Because firstly, it was very consumption oriented, you could actually go and start using the platform and scaling yourself like people used public cloud, right? And started using like how people are doing, you know, with AI today, right? And stuff like that.

Nobody is necessarily talking to a salesperson to start using some of these things. So that had already started happening between I would say, in a Pernix and Clumio where people would essentially start, you know, using the platform and without needing to talk to anybody in the company, right? And that mindset was super important. And you know, obviously, folks like AWS that pioneered that and folks like Snowflake that also did that. And so, but today, that’s a given, right? You know, today’s buyer, you know, out there is essentially going and doing their own, you know, research and going and figuring it out even in wanting to try out things themselves.

And maybe when it comes to a point that they’re doing a broad scale adoption and the CIO gets involved and it’s a bigger, this thing, that is when I think in a sales and the traditional that stuff is there. But otherwise, the ground up adoption is how you have to target it. You have to essentially think about how are you going to essentially get this thing in the hands of your end user, make it very easy and essentially make sure that it’s something that is loved by the end user. And that’s how, you know, I think all the successful companies today in the AI space are pretty much that, right? I think they’ve seen adoption ground up and it’s not really top down.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 20:43
And why is adoption ground up and not top down today?

Poojan Kumar 20:47
Because I think this is the day and age where, you know, people want to be able to touch and feel the things. It’s not something that, oh, I’m using this because I was told to use this because, you know, somebody told that, you know, I shook hands with somebody else and decided to use this platform. The end user wants to essentially go have, you know, use the thing they want to go and use, right? And they will go and do their own thing and go figure it out. And you cannot essentially, you know, if you try to do anything top down, you’re going to have either people who are unhappy or essentially it’s not going to succeed. I think the right way is to see what is getting adopted.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:25
Yeah, I think the right examples there could be Claude versus all others, right? Claude versus Cursor and Codex and Copilot.

Poojan Kumar 21:34
Yeah, yeah.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 21:34
Like, because all these three companies, Cursor, Codex by OpenAI and Copilot by Microsoft, they have all sold to the enterprises. But developers are not using them.

Poojan Kumar 21:46
Correct. Exactly. And if you see, like, look at what Claude has done, right? It’s just mind-boggling, right? It’s the scale is the scale is mind-boggling. And I’m sure it’s continuing to scale up to that.

But, but again, that’s that’s the thing, right? It’s like, it’s like the equivalent of a developer for a Claude code is exactly how, you know, you can say, you know, it was a cloud architect for AWS, right? Or a DevOps person in the AWS world, right? So on and so forth. It’s like, I think there’s a lot of analogies you can draw. That’s exactly how, you know, these things got very successful. They built an honest product that worked, right? That, you know, when developers wanted to try it, they could try it and they fell in love with it. That’s that’s how it works.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 22:35
And how do you because you have seen the entire journey? When and how did cloud outgrew the backup playbook?

Poojan Kumar 22:43
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, obviously, initially, it was all AWS, right? And then, you know, Azure came in, and then GCP, and of course, you know, we have GCP, we have, we have Azure, we have AWS, and we have OCI. So I think today, it’s a very different world than it was, you know, back then. But, you know, one thing was very clear, I think, as, you know, as more and more mission critical stuff started going to the cloud, right? Where, you know, I cannot lose this data. This is customer facing data, right?

I cannot have like, and the infrastructure was essentially, you know, something that was not managed by clicking buttons on a UI, but by code, right? And, you know, mistakes can happen, right, where you can essentially go and I wanted to delete this by mistake, I deleted something else, right? So stuff like that, you know, when all of that stuff has started happening, and when, you know, you know, mission critical application, customer facing application started moving to the cloud, it became very clear that, okay, I need to make sure that the underlying data has has a copy, right? Just in case of anything bad, obviously, the cloud vendor is making sure that I have 11 nines of durability, that’s awesome. But that doesn’t prevent from a deletion happening. Because if I ask a cloud vendor to delete something, guess what the cloud vendor will delete it, because you asked me to delete it.

And once you delete it, it’s gone. That durability does not help you with deletion, right? And so this is where you need to have a different copy. And then of course, with the, you know, the whole thing around ransomware, and stuff like that, like, you know, obviously, a typical ransomware, you know, is going to essentially go and, you know, attack your primary, but they also will attack your backup if there is a backup, because that is your resort to go and recover, right? So then, you know, that became an important thing where, okay, I need to keep my protected copy in a security domain, which is separate from my primary, right? So that basically means I have to somehow keep it either with a third party or make sure that the security of that is not compromised if the security of this is compromised.

And also, you know, backup also and data protection also became a way of detecting some of the bad actors, because guess what, when a bad actor comes and starts encrypting a bunch of data, the protection and this resilience platform that is packing it up also notices it and can see anomalies and detect it and say, oh, by the way, I’m seeing this, is this expected and can alert the user. So I think all of these things came together. And it became a thing where, okay, irrespective of the destination of the data, where it’s sitting in a SaaS provider, like Microsoft 365 or Salesforce or sitting in a data center sitting in the cloud, I still need to think about, you know, cyber resilience as a holistic thing. And so that’s what has happened over the last, I would say, you know, five to 10 years.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 25:42
You have previously had your opinion on multi cloud and you have said fragmented clouds are silent killers. What do you mean by that?

Poojan Kumar 25:49
Yeah, no, I think ultimately, you know, if you look at it, historically, people would essentially look at, you know, build on a single cloud, right? The reason to go multi cloud has been very, like, in some cases, it’s been more, you know, business.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 26:07
Yeah, you’re getting partnerships from all three of clouds.

Poojan Kumar 26:10
Exactly. Some cases being, you know, I bought something that is built based of a different cloud and stuff like that. But I think, you know, no matter what, you really have to go and figure out which public cloud, you know, is the right one for you and which application is the one you want to put like, okay, maybe in some cases of analytics thing, you want to maybe go GCP, maybe, you know, something else, you’re going AWS, and so on and so forth, right?

But net of it is, I think, you know, very rarely do you see, you know, this fragmentation happening that, oh, you’re running, you know, everything everywhere that’s that doesn’t make any sense. And you’re basically inviting more, you know, issues for you and, you know, the automation and because the infrastructure in the public cloud, the way you’re using it, you know, it’s just a piece of code, you know, spinning up infrastructure. So management becomes a headache, you know, costs and so on and so forth, right?

So this fragmentation doesn’t really make too much sense. But having said that, you know, the largest, larger enterprise today, as you know, are all multi cloud. And that is, that is, that is a new reality. And, and that’s, that’s great. Because, you know, for, you know, the cyber resistance, the play for folks like us, at the end of the day…

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:17
Yeah, you provide that you provide solutions on from managing multi cloud.

Poojan Kumar 27:21
That’s the thing. But again, that doesn’t mean it’s as fragmented. But at the end of the day, as far as you have some meaningful stuff running everywhere, it makes more sense.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:29
But I think some of the folks started for optimizing costs across the three cloud. But ultimately, you end up with more costs, because your risk, security and compliance across all three clouds triple up.

Poojan Kumar 27:41
Exactly. And that’s exactly what it is. That’s why I think you have to be very thoughtful in terms of why you’re doing it.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 27:47
And cost cannot be the only factor.

Poojan Kumar 27:49
And sometimes you’re not in control, as I said, I think in a lot of, you know, large clients that we have, and you know, I’m sure others see the same thing. You know, you acquire companies, and those companies have been built on a certain cloud, you’re not going to change those things.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 28:00
Certain architectures are there.

Poojan Kumar 28:02
Architectures, exactly. They’re already existing. So you end up, you know, living through that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 28:07
In your journey, you have today raised almost $260 million combined across both your companies, right? Had two very successful exits. So how would you advise first time founders on first, raising money and second, the process of raising money and second on exploring M&A opportunities, how to do that, how to build relationships with your prospective buyers?

Poojan Kumar 28:31
Yeah, I mean, I think it’s two different things. I think in terms of raising money, you know, obviously, I think the world has changed, you know, what used to be seed, when I started Pernix is very different than what is what is seed today, right? And series A and so on and so forth.

But ultimately, I think at the end of the day, it’s, it’s very important to go raise the right amount of money to be successful, right? I see fundraising is more of a thing that gets you from point A to point B. And you have to be very clear what the point is, what the point B is, and what it takes to essentially get there.

And, and I think sometimes having too much is also a problem, because you can get distracted and do things that you typically would not have done. So I think that’s something that is super important. I think, you know, I made my fair share of mistakes there too.

When when you raised, you know, way more capital than then what you needed, right? So I think that’s something to keep in mind. Also, obviously, whom you want to raise it from the right partner matters a lot, because, you know, if you’re taking a long term point of view, you want somebody who’s taking a long term point of view, and so on and so forth.

And, and also getting the right partner so that, you know, you’re essentially getting what you need from from that individual or that firm, right? Those are the other things. M&A completely different, right?

I’ll compare it to a large deal, right? If you’re, if you’re, if you’re trying to sell a large deal to a customer, you’re essentially going to internalize, it’s going to take time, it’s not going to happen overnight, right? If somebody is going to make a big purchase, they’re going to want to, you know, get to know you, the team, get to, you know, use the platform.

And, you know, there’s a trust that is also established over time. And somebody is, at least early on before you become a well known brand and stuff like that early on, if somebody a CI or whoever, a customer in their shoes is making a big bet on you, there’s the trust that takes time, right? To establish.

Same thing, I would say for from an M&A perspective, right? When somebody is, you know, is looking to buy a company at the end of the day, you know, they’re buying, you know, a platform, a company to essentially make it part of the bigger entity and really grow it, right? And so I think it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, a large deal at some level, right, it’s similar to a large deal. So I think that it takes time. It takes time, whether you’re working with, you know, the product owner or the CEO on the other side, if you’re a founder, CEO yourself, if that’s your goal, I think you need to take the time to make the relationship to make sure that there is a good fit from both sides and there’s alignment in terms of because the job is not done the day the acquisition happens, you know, there’s a different job that starts, but it starts the day and, and so there’s to be alignment in terms of what that journey looks like post acquisition, especially for a founder, you’ve created this, this is your baby, and you’re essentially, you know, going as part of a maybe a larger company and merging, it’s still your baby, and you need to make sure that there’s alignment in terms of what that baby’s future looks like, as part of the bigger company, I think, and all of those things, I think in both ways, I think somebody acquiring also at the end of the day, they’re, they’re spending money and they’re investing even after the acquisition, you know, they are trusting you for, you know, what you created and what you’re going to continue with, you know, up to a certain point, I’m sure you know, and, you know, things can change over time, but at least, you know, for some, you know, sometime post acquisition, you know, there has to be the exact alignment in terms of what that looks like, right.

So, so all of those things, I would say, is what you should think about, especially, you know, when you’re looking not just to optimize the, the price tag, but really optimizing the fact that what you created continues to live on, and continues to delight customers, you know, in a different form factor, but continues to do that, that mission should not change.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 31:42
In your journeys, how did the first relationship with Nutanix happen? And the second journey, how did the relationship with Commvault?

Poojan Kumar 32:37
Yeah, I mean, I would say, Commodore was unique. Nutanix was the easier one, I would say, because again, firstly, our companies were right across each other. But more importantly, the founder, CEO of Nutanix, I’m a big fan of him, Dheeraj, is doing a new company called DevRev right now, he’s somebody, you know, I’ve known from my Oracle days, right.

So I obviously saw Nutanix from its early days, and had a lot of respect for, for him and what he had created. And that relationship at some level is already there.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 33:06
Okay, so you knew him for, from Oracle?

Poojan Kumar 33:09
From a long time, exactly. We pretty much grew up together at Oracle, right. And then we shared our same investor and in terms of light speed, and so on and so forth.

A lot of things were common. Commvault, on the other hand, was very different. I did not know the CEO, Sanjay, it is an East Coast based company.

So nothing in common, I can say, you know, East Coast, West Coast, it was not, not, not a CEO, I knew, no investors in common, and so on and so forth. But that’s a relationship that I took time to build. And, and I would say, I think there’s a lot of, you know, cultural elements that were very common with the two companies, the mindset, the customer first mindset.

And I really clicked with Sanjay, I really am a big fan of what he has done over the last six plus years at Commvault. And I genuinely felt that, okay, if, if this were to happen again, it was, I think it was a year and a half before the acquisition is when I met him for the first time.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:03
Okay, so you knew him for one, one and a half years?

Poojan Kumar 34:05
Yeah, but before that, I never met him. So it was the thing I knew him for a year and a half, we had kept in touch. But more importantly, I think it was, it was very clear from, from meeting one up until the day of acquisition.

And even more true today, there’s a lot of alignment in terms of what the future looks like. And I think I felt that this is a place where, you know, the, the, the platform will thrive and do really well. And we continue the journey to delight customers. And that’s what we’re doing today.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 34:34
One of the very important points I want to bring up is, you sold a eight figure deal, you know, in your second company. So how did you, you know, as a founder, learn from the selling to from four figure to five figure to six to seven to eight? How did that journey happen for you?

Poojan Kumar 34:54
Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think, you know, irrespective of the size of the deal, means every any deal, whether it became, you know, six figures or seven figures, at the end of the day, it started small, right? Everything started small, right? Obviously, in some cases, the customer itself is not very big.

So obviously, there’s a certain, you know, scale, it can get to we know that in some cases, you know, we know, the customer is large. So, so obviously, it can, it can get much bigger. But in all cases, I would say, I think, the number one thing that, you know, we would always focus on is to make sure that what we said we are going to do, we deliver that, right?

What the, you know, as I always joke about, it’s very easy to build products in PowerPoint, right? But then it’s very hard to build products in reality and products that work well in a customer environment, solve the customer pain and continue to scale as the customer scales as the demand scale, right? And that is what we take a lot of pride at.

So in the case of large customers that have scaled with us, even though it has started small, one thing that we have done is we’ve kept close, like we would create a Slack channel between the customer and the folks on the customer side, the users on the customer side and our own engineers and, and SEs and stuff like that. And so there’s real time communication, right? And that builds trust and our responses on all of those.

Until today, we do that with our large customers, right? With our large customers, it’s the relationship is a very intimate relationship. And that gives the trust to the customer.

And obviously, the product and the platform has to work and continues to scale. You combine that along with the responsiveness and all of those things and, and staying on top of issues. And again, things happen, but how you deal with them when things happen, that matters a lot.

You do all of those things, right? Automatically, you know, the, the deal sizes go up in the sense that the customer scales and you essentially go scale with them. I think that just, that just happens as I say, do the right things.

And some of these things just happen.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 36:57
And you were a technical founder, right?

Poojan Kumar 36:59
Absolutely.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 37:00
When you were at Oracle, how did you graduate to learn sales?

Poojan Kumar 37:02
No, I think it was hard. I would say, you know, I joke about it, right? First time as a first time CEO at Pernix, I was totally clueless, right?

Didn’t even know how to go about hiring my first salesperson, what to even ask. And so this is where, you know, I would essentially surrounding myself with people who had done it before in the form of advisors. And the good news, at least in Silicon Valley for people in Silicon Valley, I think there is so much out here and so much, you know, access to people and, and founders who have done it before and, and, and people who are willing to give back to the founders of today, right?

So I think that, that, that exists, at least in Silicon Valley, it exists. So I would basically do that, surround myself with folks like that, who would essentially, I know are, you know, are my advisors at Pernix, at least like literally would help me even in interviewing, you know, our head of sales in and before even we had a head of sales, you know, interviewing with, with the reps. And in some case, you know, you know, VCs who have essentially neither been operators themselves or have essentially been in startups for long enough, they would also essentially be folks who would help you with all of these things.

So I think just just making sure that you have the right ecosystem of people who can complement you in places that you don’t know, like, you know, I know what I’m building, I know how to go and build a world class engineering team, and build the product and stuff like that. So maybe I don’t need as much there, but everywhere else, marketing, how to launch the company, sales, all of those things, at least doing it for the first time, you want to surround yourself with folks who can help you with that, and then be very, you know, grounded and be humble and listen, and take it all in. And that’s how at least I have been able to, you know, adapt myself and learn and do some of these things.

And this is what I tell, you know, whenever I help any founders today, I also basically tell them the same thing, right? Yeah, just any place that you feel you don’t have the right skill set, and you don’t know what you don’t know, that’s okay. There’s enough people out there who know it and you just got to get you know, around yourself with those folks.

And that’s it. It’s as simple as that. I think the key is to have the humility to do that.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:20
Thank you so much Poojan, I loved the interaction.

Poojan Kumar 39:23
Thank you. Thank you very much. I really appreciate this.

And, you know, I’m super excited in what you folks are doing with the Neon Fund and where you’re going with this.

Siddhartha Ahluwalia 39:32
Thank you so much. It means a lot.

Poojan Kumar 39:34
Thank you.