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

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:

1. Valuation is useless if you're aiming for perfection, there will always be flaws.
2. Focus on keeping your employees and customers happy.
3. 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