This life Q Where do you live and why?
A I live in Atherton, a small town in the middle of Silicon Valley. I love the intellectual intensity of the Valley, and its diversity. Our property is private with beautiful old trees, and it’s a joy to BBQ with friends while the kids and dog go crazy.
Q Which storage companies have you worked at and how long for?
A My first experience with storage was on the founding team of Inktomi in 1995. Our technology grew out of UC
Berkeley’s Network of Workstations (NOW) project, and we were the first to commercialize massively parallel “scale-out” architectures to build huge search engines and CDN infrastructure. We used commodity hardware to enable a 10x price-performance and scalability advantage. After seven years at Inktomi, I joined storage security pioneer Decru, and stayed on as a VP at NetApp following our acquisition, for a total of four more years.
Q What is your life philosophy?
A Figure out what you’re great at. Then find the best place in the world to work on it, with people and a mission that you believe in.
Q Who has had the most influence on your career to date?
A I’d have to give credit to my bosses at Inktomi (David Peterschmidt, CEO) and Decru (Dan Avida, CEO). Both Dave and Dan believed in me, and continued to push me into critical parts of the business with steep learning curves.
Q Who do you admire in your professional life?
A That’s a tough one – I’m incredibly fortunate to have a board and advisory board including folks like our Chairman Audrey MacLean, Bob Kavner, Mark Leslie, and Charlie Giancarlo. If I had to pick someone I haven’t worked with, I’d give a nod to my competitor Joe Tucci at EMC, for buying VMware when no one else got it.
Q What storage technology development has made the most difference to your job – and how?
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KEVIN BROWN CEO, Coraid
A ATA over Ethernet is easily the most profound and disruptive technology I’ve seen in a decade. It
fundamentally eliminates the need for mainframe-era SAN architectures, which are complex and costly. It enables storage to follow the same evolutionary path as servers.
Q What were the last books you bought?
A Wired for War: The Robotic Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century by P.W. Singer, Daemon by Daniel Suarez (gift from Ashmeet Sidana) Anathem by Neal Stephenson.
Q What do you think are your greatest strengths in the workplace?
A Having been an entrepreneur for the past 15 years, I’ve got a pretty good sense of how to align a strategy across all
functional areas.
Q What are your weaknesses? A Limited patience with bureaucracy or B-players Q Favourite musical artist?
A So many. I’m a drummer, so I’d have to call out Neil Peart from Rush for the early influences.
Q What one possession would you take to a desert island? A Solar-powered iPod.
Q Which one person would you most like to meet (alive or dead), and what would you ask them?
I’d like to meet Leonardo DaVinci, and ask him what he’d invent if I gave him microprocessor technology, carbon nanotubes, and 4G Internet connectivity.
Q What are your current projects? Building a killer team at Coraid. Finishing up an
underground jam studio at my house. Practicing basketball with my two daughters.
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