To the Employees, Partners, and Customers of Pure Storage:

Congratulations!  Although Pure is already a few years old, we are just at the beginning of building a company that will change an industry.  We cannot wait for more customers to have the “aha” experience that our beta customers have already enjoyed with our first 100 units.  In the coming years as competitors try to replicate what you have done by building (or more likely buying), you will continue to invent and reinvent the future.  As investors in Pure Storage, we are honored to be part of the extended team.  And it is a team that we expect to be part of for a long, long time.

All great companies start with great Founders, and Pure is no exception.  While most people place much emphasis on the “idea” — as if it is some secret formula that anyone can use to build a great company — the reality is that the most important thing Founders bring to a startup is leadership.  Founders are the seed from which a culture and company springs.

Our Founders, John Colgrove (Coz) and John Hayes are amongst the top technical professionals in Silicon Valley.  Coz was a Founding Engineer and Fellow of VERITAS Software over the course of his 20 year career there — the products he built there reached over $1 billion in revenue and served a large fraction of the top companies on the globe.  I worked in product development at VERITAS Software and watched Coz predict and invent the future over and over and over again.  He has superb intuition about what problems are worth solving — probably because he has spent his entire career solving problems in storage, going all the way back to his early career as a system administrator at Bell Labs (which he did while he was getting his degree in computer science).

John Hayes comes from a totally different domain — his previous role was at Yahoo! where he worked as technical staff on infrastructure for the distributed systems that serve hundreds of millions of customers.  One thing that I did not fully appreciate when the two Johns Founded Pure is just how much we would benefit from having someone from storage systems join someone from a very different technical field — a field that is pushing computer science to the limit to solve incredibly hard problems brought on by massive scale.  Some of the core of what we’ve built in the past few years is evident in our GA release which is being announced today, but future releases will showcase just how different we really are.  That would not have been the case had Coz started Pure Storage without John Hayes.

A core belief that the Founders had at the start of the company was that in order to do something truly great, we would need to assemble one of the greatest technical teams Silicon Valley has ever seen.  They developed a process to screen candidates that has helped us get off to a very good start — thus far we have touched more than 200 resumes for each employee we have hired.  The result is that we have a wildly talented team, the best retention I have ever witnessed in my career, and a product that will change our industry.  And a team that finds a way to have fun along the way (see the embedded video below).

Modern data storage started with a device — a disk drive.  It then moved to an “array” of drives leveraging primarily hardware innovation.  The current data storage leaders realized that as disk reached a level of maturity, we could do much more by focusing the innovation on systems software.  Performance, reliability, and availability reached new heights thanks to the move to software.

In the solid state world, most innovation to date has been on hardware — first at the device level and increasingly at the array of devices level.  And just as the past few decades have been about going from systems hardware to systems software around disk, so too will the coming decades see much of the innovation moving to systems software around solid state “disk”.  And just as the current players completely changed customer expectations of what data storage is by adding many features only available as a result of disk + systems software, so too will Pure Storage show the industry what is really possible as a result of solid state disk + systems software.  Today’s release is just the beginning.  We can’t wait.

Thanks again for letting us be part of your extended team.

– Your Friends at Sutter Hill Ventures