SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

686: $225M Raised by Data Focused Ex-Isralei Fighter Pilot, is Kaminario Next IPO? With CEO Dani Golan

10 Jun 2017

30 min

4519 words

2 speakers

10 Jun 2017

Audio

Description

Dani Golan who oversees strategy, a go-to market, and overall company operations at Kaminario. Previously, Dani served as president and general manager of Performix technology which was acquired by Nice Systems in 2006. Prior to Performix, he served as an executive responsible for leading new ventures at EMC. He holds a BSc of electrical engineering, summa cum laude at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Prior to his professional career, Dani served as a fighter pilot and officer in the Israeli Air Force. Famous Five: Favorite Book? – The Goal What CEO do you follow? – N/A Favorite online tool? — Skype How many hours of sleep do you get?— Quite inconsistent If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Dani would tell himself to focus on what's important Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:44 – Nathan introduces Dani to the show 01:33 – Being a fighter pilot and an entrepreneur are similar things for Dani 01:57 – Kaminario is an infrastructure for the cloud 02:47 – Kaminario brings efficiency to data sets, data centers and data bases 02:50 – Kaminario is the development of net generation data storage infrastructure 03:02 – Most of Kaminario's customers are net generation business models 03:13 – They needed a completely different data infrastructure that can grow with them 03:37 – Legacy enterprises generates more data 03:51 – Kaminario has raised a total of $280M including their latest round of $75M 04:30 – Kaminario is dealing with 2 of hottest markets in IT: flash and cloud 04:42 – Flash created the opportunity for Kaminario to be in the greatest revolution for IT 05:40 – If you're pushing your valuation to perfection, there is no perfection in IT 06:05 – Make sure you have a fair valuation for your company 06:24 – The sentiment of investors is that they appreciate the growth in the past but now they're asking for real businesses, especially when it comes to IT 06:49 – Investors want to see pass the profitability 07:09 – Kaminario is closed to profitability 07:30 – Kaminario's past investors have also participated and shared significantly 09:00 – Businesses should protect their employees 09:44 – When you are getting money for the company, 3 means you have to get $3M to the investors 10:40 – "Valuation is bullsh*t if you have crazy terms" 10:50 – Employees are far more important than actual valuation 11:05 – Kaminario was launched in 2008 on April fools' day which is the same as Apple 11:57 – Kaminario now has thousands of customers 12:21 – How fast a specific customer is going to buy more is one of the metrics that Kaminario measures 12:51 – Kaminario is doing serve and apply which is software, hardware and service 13:30 – Kaminario sells to cloud providers or to the SaaS companies 13:44 – The SaaS is the larger revenue source 13:57 – By 2019, the total cloud market will be 175B 14:03 – Around 120B are SaaS companies 15:32 – SaaS companies charge their customers monthly 15:37 – SaaS companies pay Kaminario a one-time fee for infrastructure 15:46 – There is an on-going payment for maintenance 16:20 – The expansion revenue 16:28 – If a SaaS company started with $300K, they will go over $1M by the end of 12 months 17:45 – Team size is 250 but the inside sales team isn't that big 18:17 – Kaminario has a presence in the market 18:57 – Data grows exponentially every year 19:23 – Normally, customers would start cautiously and would just eventually gain trust in Kaminario 19:55 – First metric to measure the 3x growth is by capacity 20:45 – Kaminario is the most scalable product in the market 20:50 – Kaminario can fit roughly 12 terabytes of 400K iPhones 21:48 – Kaminario has never lost a customer 22:00 – Kaminario is a big funnel 22:12 – Kaminario's revenue stream is 50% from new sign-ups and 50% from existing 24:04 – Kaminario's last round was closed in Q4 of 2016 24:41 – When you are in Kaminario's business, it's not a sprint, it's a marathon 25:00 – Kaminario's number one competitor is EMC 26:06 – The Famous Five 3 Key Points: Valuation is useless if you're aiming for perfection, there will always be flaws. Focus on keeping your employees and customers happy. A customer won't easily trust a product at first so you have to earn that trust, ensuring they stay longer. Resources Mentioned: The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you're doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he's driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

Chapters

1. What is the main topic discussed in this episode? 2. What similarities exist between being a fighter pilot and an entrepreneur? 3. How does Kaminario enhance data storage efficiency? 4. What capital has Kaminario raised and what markets are they targeting? 5. How important is valuation in the IT industry? 6. What metrics does Kaminario use to measure customer growth? 7. How does Kaminario's revenue model work with SaaS companies? 8. What factors contribute to Kaminario's customer retention and growth?

Featured

Nathan Latka

Dani Golan

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?

0.031 - 9.068 Nathan Latka

This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base.

Chapter 2: What similarities exist between being a fighter pilot and an entrepreneur?

9.529 - 18.364 Nathan Latka

You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk.

Chapter 3: How does Kaminario enhance data storage efficiency?

18.384 - 21.207 Nathan Latka

Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination.

Chapter 4: What capital has Kaminario raised and what markets are they targeting?

21.227 - 24.029 Nathan Latka

We just broke our 100,000 unit soul mark.

Chapter 5: How important is valuation in the IT industry?

24.049 - 42.527 Nathan Latka

And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. This is episode 686. Tomorrow morning, we talk to Jeremy. Monaco bored the heck out of him. He was living the life out there on that beautiful island. Now he places ads on digital billboards and makes a lot of money doing it with his company, Vistar Media.

Chapter 6: What metrics does Kaminario use to measure customer growth?

42.567 - 53.209 Nathan Latka

So how's he doing it? Good morning, everybody. My guest this morning is Danny Golan, who oversees strategy in the go-to-market and overall company operations at a company called Cominario.

Chapter 7: How does Kaminario's revenue model work with SaaS companies?

53.55 - 74.323 Nathan Latka

Previously, Danny served as president and general manager of Performix Technologies, which was acquired by Nice Systems in 2006. Prior to Performix, he served as an executive responsible for leading new ventures at EMC. He holds a BSc in electrical engineering, summa cum laude from the Technion Institute of Technology and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University.

Chapter 8: What factors contribute to Kaminario's customer retention and growth?

74.743 - 89.522 Nathan Latka

Prior to his professional career, Danny served as a fighter pilot and an officer in the Israeli Air Force, which means I can't mess with him too much. Danny, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. Hey, you're a tough guy. Air Force into startups, huh?

91.122 - 105.906 Dani Golan

They're very similar, actually. A lot of similarity between get the job done, be very focused, always have plan B, C, D, and so on, and think outside the box.

105.926 - 109.371 Nathan Latka

So tell us what Cominario does and what's your business model? How do you make money?

110.674 - 144.528 Dani Golan

Absolutely. So exciting times for Cominario business. Essentially, we are the infrastructure for the cloud. As we all know, we live in a world where around us we have data explosion. And that data needs to be stored, accessed completely different from how we used to manage data just a few years back. Just think about your personal life, your social media of choice.

145.189 - 162.404 Dani Golan

The amount of data that we're handling today, just three, four, five years ago, it's dramatically different. The same way happened to enterprises and next generation enterprises that are just handling much more data.

162.925 - 168.278 Nathan Latka

So you're helping bring efficiency to data sets and databases and data centers. Is that accurate?

168.528 - 196.746 Dani Golan

Yeah, so Kaminari essentially developed the next generation data storage infrastructure. So we provide our customers that are really, most of them, next generation business models. So most of our customers are software as a service companies, new application models, and they need a completely different infrastructure that can grow with them.

197.097 - 224.107 Dani Golan

So all of our customers grow dramatically faster than legacy enterprises. They generate dramatically more data. And they need the storage infrastructure to grow with them, to scale, and to do all of that in a far radically simpler way. and more cost efficient way than in the past.

224.609 - 229.585 Nathan Latka

And this is not a cheap business to build. How much capital have you raised?

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