Inventor of Hyper-Convergence Sitting On $150m+ Valuation and $77m Raised with Mohit Aron of Cohesity EP 199

Published: March 9, 2016, 3 p.m.

Mohit Aron, CEO of Cohesity, a company that caters exclusively to the secondary data storage market. Listen as Nathan ask Mohit about his journey up and through Google (including his decision to leave), his trial and error experiment in entrepreneurship, and how he came to create Cohesity.

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Cohesity was founded in June 2013 by CEO Mohit Aron, who is regarded as the pioneer of hyper\xadconvergence, the first architecture to converge compute and storage to simplify virtualization. Aron founded the infrastructure company Nutanix to bring hyper\xadconvergence to market and served as its CTO before leaving to build Cohesity. Aron worked as a Staff Engineer at Google from 2003 to 2007, where he helped design the company\u2019s innovative Google File System. He also served as Architect at AsterData, a leading big data analytics company that was later acquired by Teradata. Mohit holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

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Time Stamped Show Notes:
01:08 \u2013 Nathan\u2019s introduction
02:00 \u2013 Nathan welcomes Mohit to the show
02:22 \u2013 Why Mohit left Google?\u2014life was too comfortable
03:30 \u2013 What Mohit gave up to leave Google\u2014north of $500K
04:09 \u2013 You can\u2019t make a big difference when you\u2019re working inside a juggernaut
05:27 \u2013 Don\u2019t make a decision purely on the money\u2014look at all the elements in the equation
07:00 \u2013 \u201cThe Cliff\u201d
07:40 \u2013 AsterData sold to Teradata for nearly $323 million
08:40 \u2013 Founding Nutanix and hyper-convergence
10:04 \u2013 Network speeds have only grown by 10K in the last 15 years, whereas disk speeds have grown by 1000x
11:02 \u2013 Once Mohit leaves a company, he cuts ALL ties
11:59 \u2013 Crossing the chasm
13:40 \u2013 Talking about Cohesity
13:55 \u2013 Mohit originally bootstrapped but ended up being funded by Sequoia
16:28 \u2013 Alpha phase v. Beta phase
17:45 -- Aron@cohesity.com

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Famous 5
Favorite Book? \u2013 Crossing the Chasm
What CEO do you follow?\u2014 Steve Jobs
What is your favorite online tool?\u2014 Evernote
Do you get 8 hours of sleep?\u2014 No
If you could let your 20 year old self know one thing, what would it be?\u2014Trust your gut

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3 Key Points:
Don\u2019t get too comfortable\u2014ever.
Trust your instincts.
Once you\u2019ve \u201ccrossed the chasm\u201d it\u2019s time to find a new challenge.

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Resources Mentioned:
Edgar \u2013 Nathan uses Edgar instead of other scheduling tools\xa0for Twitter because Edgar cycles through content over and over (buffer/others you have to re-input content over and over \u2013 time consuming). In the last several months, Edgar has driven Nathan over 3728 clicks that he didn\u2019t have to work or pay for.
Host Gator - Powerful web hosting made easy and affordable.
Crossing the Chasm \u2013 Mohit\u2019s favorite book
Steve Jobs \u2013 The CEO Mohit adores
Evernote \u2013 The online tool Mohit can\u2019t live without
AsterData \u2013 One of the companies Mohit worked with after Google

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