Part 3 in my series on start-ups with which I am working closely brings us to SolidFire. Dave Wright, the company’s founder and CEO, is, arguably, the most promising hard technology entrepreneur in the city. When I say “hard technology”, I am talking about systems, platforms, etc that generally require hardware to work. So what are these guys doing? Dave has essentially built an architecture to manage solid state storage in a way that removes the cost barriers associated with using this kind of system. The system also makes it possible for the creation of cost effective solid state storage “in the cloud”. Solid state storage has traditionally been used for higher performance applications – it has always brought significant advantages with respect to performance, footprint, durability, energy consumption, etc. It has also brought with it a price tag that has essentially made it an unacceptable alternative to traditional spinning disk storage for basic applications. SolidFire is going to fix that.
So, why is SolidFire going to win?
1. The Entrepreneur – I have had the good fortune of knowing Dave for nearly as long as he’s been in Atlanta. His intelligence is completely off the chart. Like scary smart. Seriously. And that intelligence is broad – and this is a lesson to would be entrepreneurs – he isn’t just smart about building cool stuff that is hard to build. He does it in the context of a market need. This is an aspect of his intelligence he shares with Chris Klaus here in town. He also has the real skills to build each facet of what he has designed – what do I mean by that? When I first talked to him about this idea and he explained to me how he was doing early testing, I said to him – “So, Dave, I have a vision in my head of a bunch of empty Radio Shack bags on your kitchen table along side a smoking soldering iron. Is that about right?”. He nodded his head. He knows storage cold – he built JungleDisk from scratch (competitor to Carbonite and Mozy) and it was the first consumer storage app built atop Amazon S3. He knows the deep complexity of how all that works – huge advantage as he builds this system.
2. A Problem worth Solving – I love solutions that carry a sales question like this “what if you could get better performance, smaller footprint, higher durability and lower energy consumption in my solution than you could get with the other guy’s solution, all for the same price?” Yeah, that sales approach works really, really well.
3. Passion – If you know Dave, you know he is pretty darn cerebral. That isn’t to say, though, that he doesn’t sit on the edge of his seat when he starts to talk about certain things. When he starts to talk about this idea, he is on the razor’s edge of his seat. It’s almost like the incredibly large CPU in his brain can’t quite process the marriage of understanding and excitement that it’s trying to combine into words. He loves this stuff.
4. His Ecosystem and Market – Storage is hot and he has assembled a great investment team (Novak Biddle and Valhalla) and other folks around him who know how the market works and know how to position his solution. This team is only going to get larger and more helpful.
I am really honored to have a small piece of the company and to have played a tiny role in helping Dave get going. I believe strongly that SolidFire has a real chance to be one of the best start-up stories in Atlanta since ISS. Yeah, I said it.
Stay tuned…
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