Collision 2015 - Lew Crine of New Relic, John Hayes of Pure Storage with Diane Brady of DBMedia

So our strategy was come out guns blazing, and that's because fundamental air product is really simple. And what we had to do was break through the idea that the products could be much better than they are. It took a lot to explain that, much more than you would think, because expectations say 10 times deeper. Well, everyone says that, so the question is how do you prove it? You have to say it over and over and over again and basically change the expectations for what people want. In our case, in storage, which hadn't changed for almost 20 years before, five years ago there was this great blossoming of new technologies and no one was prepared for it. It took a lot to push that into the market. We hired a CEO because, well, I'm not qualified. I'm a tech person. My co-founder John Colgrove also a tech person. We knew that we could push the implementation, build the products we wanted to build, but we also needed much more talented people than us to run the company, drive sales, drive all the functions of what we need to do to make our vision actually work.

So early on, we had to market on the things that were much, much better. Almost every company we sold into in the beginning had some very specific pain that they couldn't solve any other way. So that was the baseline. It was sort of the classic crossing the chasm, and it just takes time to build up a reputation. One of the differences with enterprise products is there's a great deal of trust involved because if you fail, you can take out their entire business. So you can't fail, and you have to earn a reputation for actually working. That's just a slow process to build up, and there's no way around it. At the same time, we had to make that real. We had to focus on the inside and get better all the time because every single failure is magnified much more than an incoming company.

So there's actually a really big divide in our company. Most of our sales staff is from storage companies, coming to storage companies. Almost none of our engineering staff is. We look for, we actually test skills and then fit. It's a very abstract process. It's kind of like more like an SAT than looking at someone's resume. One of the nice things about being in the middle of a technology change is everything is new anyways, so we actually didn't want people with lots and lots of storage experience because they're not going to disrupt. They have too much of a sense of the status quo being okay. Maybe it's my own bias. I'd never worked in storage before this either, and the structure of the product and the kind of company we wanted to build was very, very different. So you need different people to actually make that happen.

So there are definitely disadvantages with having perspective with your customers. Most of our early customers were actually like Midwest manufacturing companies, city councils, schools, very busy mid-range businesses that people don't think of as adopting new technologies well. The first thing is a business isn't innovative, a person is. So you have to find the person within that business. But it's also something that you have to make a deliberate effort in Silicon Valley to cultivate respect for your customers who aren't other tech companies. Even in Silicon, not only there's lots and lots of tiny sub-regions within. I think two miles of our office, there are 10 other storage companies. So even within Silicon Valley, these little super clusters actually exist.

No question. And I learned something quite stunning to me. It makes sense when you hear it. Because of the internet and how transparent information is compared to 10, 15 years ago, purchasers of enterprise technology are 54% through their purchasing decision before they engage with a salesperson.

Yes. So you can't be thinking about, I've got control over the message to the customer when they engage with me. It's far prior to the sales engagement. Often how they get their information is by trying out the product or trying out your competitor's product. So you want to obsess on that, how does somebody discover and fall in love with your product without somebody there to hand hold them? This is just a foreign concept from the incumbents. They are so into the PowerPoint presentation, then the white glove install, then the long negotiation, then the purchase. We designed our company from the ground up. The inspiration for it was I founded the company the year the iPhone came out, the first iPhone. That was the first phone you could activate on your own. You didn't need someone in the store to turn on the phone for you. I thought we should do that in enterprise software. We shouldn't require an SE to set up this software for me. People should be able to set it up. There's a joy in having the control over your own consumption experience. CIO or CTO to sell to, they show up, they got to think offense with software, not defense. They can't be thinking about cutting costs. They got to think about empowering the front line people to be as productive as possible. I think those are the CIOs that are growing in influence and they're getting promoted. Whereas the people that are all they're thinking about is how do I reduce the cost, do what I did last year faster cheaper, they're not going to have jobs in five years. I really believe that.

So I almost think that I'm the opposite. I love building the products so much. I love meetings? No, okay, no, I don't like these. I love building the product so much. I think it took me a while to figure out that explaining our product is really, really hard. The simpler it is, the more you have to explain. Avoid like something that will give us the one word. I think pure flash storage.

Okay, okay. What are you selling and when can I have it? What have you found hard to explain? I found hard to explain the things that you don't have to do anymore. So we focused on making products that are super, super simple. There's a huge list of things that don't take time anymore. So it shows up, you plug it in, you have storage. It works well in a market where most of our competitors market speed. We market simplicity because we think ultimately that's more important. To come back to Lou's comment on the CIO, a lot of CIOs spend 90% of their time just trying to operate what they have. How do we reduce that to like 70 so they have 30% of their time on innovation instead of 10% of their time on innovation?

So I think that the opportunity is that there's a technology change that makes the excuse to make a new product. But at the same time, cloud is a big force. It's a big force not because it's in someone else's data center versus yours, but because it's a massive change in usability. So I think that the existing companies, there's going to be incumbent, they're all tearing each other apart as well. We're just a part of it. But you're going to end up with at least a couple of new large companies in enterprise infrastructure.

Well, I can't predict which companies will survive, but that's what happened last time. That's how we have the current slate of companies we have. You go back to the early 90s, there's a big transition to open systems, and that formed the winners that we have today. They were all declared in the early 90s and they've been stable since then. It's going to be turned over again.

So enterprise products are more similar to consumer products. I go even further and say the way technology is flowing is from consumer to enterprise. Consumer has all the new technology and hardware today, and it's coming into enterprise. In addition, when you're marketing to enterprise, you have to think about how that affects every single constituent in the company. That's something that's very interesting. One person, you have to make one person love you, but you have to make five people understand you because there's five people who can say no. That's good. So make one person love you and five people understand you, and you're good to go.