SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Inventor of Hyper-Convergence Sitting On $150m+ Valuation and $77m Raised with Mohit Aron of Cohesity EP 199
09 Mar 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: Why did Mohit Aron leave Google despite a high salary?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000 unit sold mark. And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, this week's winner of the 100 bucks is Dustin Goodwin.
Chapter 3: How did Mohit Aron contribute to the founding of Nutanix?
He's in the HR industry, specifically in the software as a service space, looking to increase his revenue. So congratulations, Dustin.
Chapter 4: What challenges did Mohit face after leaving Google?
For your guys' chance to win 100 bucks every Monday on the show to build your idea, simply subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. Coming up tomorrow, Morning Talk Tribe. And every morning at 9 a.m., you'll hear from Olivier Valise, where I basically asked him live, would you sell for $6 million today?
Chapter 5: How did Cohesity secure funding from Sequoia?
His answer will surprise you.
Chapter 6: What lessons did Mohit learn from his time at AsterData?
Okay, Top Tribe, good morning to you. I'm smiling big this morning as I hold my coffee because we've got a great guest on. His name is Mohit Aran and he is the co-founder of Cohesity. He co-founded Cohesity in June 2013. He is regarded as the pioneer of hyperconvergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization.
Ron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyperconvergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. He also worked as a staff engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company's innovative Google file system.
Chapter 7: What is hyper-convergence and why is it important?
He's also served as the architect at Aster Data, a leading big data analytics company that was later acquired by Teradata. Mohit, are you ready to take us to the top? Absolutely. What a bio, my man. You are in it.
Chapter 8: What is the current valuation of Cohesity?
Thank you. People are just too kind. Everyone, great to be here and good morning to everyone who's listening. So Google from 2003 to 2007. Walk me through, you know, most people, they go to Google, they love Google, they stay at Google, they get free salmon at lunch and ice cream for dinner. Why'd you leave?
So, you know, I've always subscribed to the philosophy that if I get too comfortable, something's wrong. And I got too comfortable at Google. Everything was kitted for. I was well-fed, free lunches. And life was just too comfortable. And I realized that to jump to the next level, making the next quantum jump in life, I can't be this comfortable. And so I left.
searching for that next quantum jump, which for me was to become an entrepreneur. Google is a great company and I had a lot of respect, but one thing that I was not learning in Google was how to
be an entrepreneur and i left google in quest of that that's the reason i left so walk us through after google 2007 you leave and then by the way i want people to understand mojito if you're comfortable sharing what you gave up a lot of people are listening right now sitting in their boring office cubicles or driving home on their horrible commute from their big boring office building going i wish i had the guts to drop out of corporate and give up everything and be an entrepreneur so give me an example of what you gave up what was your salary at google when you decided to leave
Um, my salary, you know, combined all the take home with all the bonus and, um, stock options and stuff. It was well north of, uh, half a million, half a million. Okay. Very good. And, uh, and, and I had, I left a lot of options on the table, uh, more than a couple of million worth, um, uh, yes. Uh, um, uh, stuff that was already given to me over the years.
I just left it on the table, which was unvested. But the quest more was, look, I've gone through the Google IPO. It's not so much the money that interests me. It's more the passion of being able to change the world. And I don't, you know, being in Google, it was already 20,000 big. There's no way you can make a big difference in what Google is, you know, from where you are.
So I left in quest of becoming an entrepreneur and then driving that big change in the world. So what was the next business? What was the business? Well, I first had to learn the ropes of doing a startup. And so the business was, you know, Astrid Data Systems. And that was not my company. That was a company done by some Stanford grads. Well-funded, you know, Sequoia was behind it.
So I joined that company in the hope of winning. How many employees were there when you joined? At the time, it was around 30 employees. And by the time I left the company, it grew to something more than 60, 70 employees. And how much funding did they have behind them when you joined? They had some 10 to $15 million of series A funding.
And then shortly after I joined, maybe within six months or so, they raised their next round, which was maybe 20, 30 million, if I remember the numbers correctly. So it was well funded and it had a good buzz in the market. And they were trying to kind of merge together the concepts of NoSQL and SQL databases. So that was kind of unique and bringing it out in a distributed system.
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