John Hayes

Founder & Advisor, Everpure

Search every verified John Hayes interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. At a 2015 Collision conference panel, John Hayes, co-founder and chief architect of Pure Storage, discussed enterprise technology and his company's approach. Hayes stated that Pure Storage's strategy was to "come out guns blazing" to challenge the idea that products could not be significantly better. He noted that the company hired a CEO because he and his co-founder are "tech people" who needed others to run sales and other functions. Hayes described Pure Storage's hiring process as testing skills over experience, explaining that they did not want people with "lots of storage experience" due to a perceived acceptance of the status quo. Hayes argued that enterprise and consumer products are becoming more similar, with enterprise purchasing decisions now being "bottom-up" and purchasers being 54% through their decision before contacting a salesperson. He said Pure Storage designed its product to be set up without a sales engineer, comparing it to the first iPhone's self-activation. Hayes also stated that CIOs spend 90% of their time on operations and that Pure Storage aims to reduce that to allow more time for innovation. He predicted that at least half of the top 10 software companies in five to ten years would be newer cloud companies, and expressed a desire for Pure Storage to be among them.