Common sense advice: Never set up a meeting for Friday 4:45 pm

Have you ever heard the expression “we do not remember days, we remember moments”? Looking back, this was especially true for me as one of my professors spoke on a specific class of differential equations. He announced, “my way is the only way to solve this problem”. My immature mind interpreted this as a challenge to find a different way. Afterward, he pulled me to the side commenting: “you are lucky to score well on this test”- and went on to warn me that I would never pass his class if I did not follow the program. After working hard to answer stepping up to the challenge – I earned an A in that class - and that feeling of satisfaction jump-started my passion for innovation.

The concept and drive behind HiveIO would be molded from several such moments over the course of my career.

One such moment surfaced after I finished managing a multi-day outage at one of my previous bank positions. After the dust settled, the root cause was simple automation gone haywire that applied patches and rebooted desktops in the private cloud. It occurred to me that manual process still was unable to manage the complexities of enterprise operate. (quality assurance, stakeholders and sub-committee checks)

Two weeks after the release, an outage was reported which affected a large number of desktops. Post review of the problem: the automation issued a reboot storm due to a faulty loop condition. Ultimately, the only way to resolve the boot storm was to assign Datacenter Technicians the job of physically rebooting the Virtual Centers or watch the reboots as they cycled through. In the end, we were able to stop about half of the reboots before the cycle finished.

Afterward - having only grabbed short naps during the outage my daughter looked at me and asked: “Dad, can we watch the show we started three days ago before you had to go back to work”? The answer was obvious:

Discovery was broadcasting a documentary about the ocean and one particular image stuck in my head: a school of fish that formed a ball to ward off predators and then organically changed shape when attacked. This reminded me of swarm math and how appropriate this would have been in solving my outage. The real issue behind the outage was that the process, technology, physical access to the datacenter, and architecture was too complex and at the same time rigid. We needed to be more nimble specifically: we needed to remove layers and manual people checks. 

Swarming in nature is based on the rule of minimal intelligence at every node that follows a collective behavior without a leader – or in this case a central manager. For instance, the behavior of ants, bees or birds as individuals possess a fraction of human intelligence but together the “swarms” perform incredible feats that many mathematicians quantify through long and complex mathematic expressions, e.g. chaos math and tensor analyses.

I logged this in the back of my head to think about catching up on some sleep.

Later, I served as a research & development head: My team and I were courted by many vendors in the cloud, security and data spaces. After some time the vendor pitches became incredibly predictable. The debate on price and the reasons why vendor A versus B was better seemed interminable. We could almost provide the pitch decks before the sales teams entered the room. I especially remember – on a Friday at 4:45 pm – listening to a cloud vendor utter their differentiator “we are cheaper and provide better performance.” Honestly, I could not get out of the meeting quickly enough. It felt as if we were fixated on the same problem space without hope of getting to a conclusion, and I thought to myself ‘there has to be a better way’.

Some days later, while sitting in traffic, I was mulling over the fact that we had been collaborating with and purchasing from the same private datacenter vendors for years and that maybe we needed to step back to understand our opportunities for innovation. It seemed that we should be looking to the public markets to understand true capacity, scale, and cost. This thought prompted me to head west to visit Google, Microsoft, VMware, and Amazon.

The journey proved to be enlightening in many ways. Every large cloud vendor employs thousands of developers that think about and design software around the clock. The lifestyle includes social circles and even open hackathons that focus on pushing the envelope on making ever increasingly more polished developers and product. Looking at this, it seemed obvious that banks and enterprises, in general, could not afford to employ the same development lifestyle. The point being: maybe it was time to make a career change in favor of front line innovation. 

I had learned so much over the years and had worked for some wonderful companies, which provided the expertise needed to create my own innovation opportunity: a “better way” of reducing complexity starting in mid-2015.

Initially, HiveIO attacked the cloud space opportunity by releasing an appliance built from the ground up, removing all 3rd party vendors. During the course of initial testing, we discovered eye-opening measurements: incredible performance, build and teardown was epically more efficient, and the removal of complexity achieved by a zero vendor stack. My co-founder and I officially opened doors in mid-2015 and started to build on the foundation. We worked tirelessly in removing the need for management appliances, layers, storage, and specialty headcounts.

One day while working through the management API I thought about my days working with Equity Derivatives and it hit me that MQ was that answer. MQ is a message bus architecture that is designed to pass massive volumes of data across networks in broadcast channels. When a client wants data, they listen via a socket connector and draw as needed. This concept set up the HiveIO Message Bus based backbone built into every install. Message Bus differentiates HiveIO because it allows all of the HiveIO appliances to connect in superclusters seamlessly whilst easily sharing telemetry such as forensics, inventory, KPI and controls instantaneously. Soon afterward, we broadened the architecture by adding a REST API plugin that connects the HiveIO MB.

Today, we are now in our third year with forty employees and eight hundred customers spanning multiple verticals and a rich product portfolio. We offer real innovation through our product that services cloud on private and public data centers. Our strength is based on amazing employees, team effort, great company identity, product simplicity/ completeness, and stability. To round of my thoughts on life moments, I visited one of our customers at a teaching hospital to witness doctors, nurses and clinic specialists use our product. Listening to and witnessing each scenario was eye-opening. In this case, we are being used by doctors, nurses, and caregivers that require and depend on Hive to always work. One particular phrase especially caught my attention when we asked one of the nurses how things were going: “We are able to help 2x more patients because my Hive Desktop works so effectively.” For me, I knew we were heading in the right direction because I heard “my Hive Desktop” and “works so effectively.”

I am now the guy with the elevator pitch who is talking about price and value differentiators that I hope resonate with potential customers. And one moment that still sticks with me today: never set up a meeting for Friday at 4:45 pm.