Dear Datera

Friends and colleagues,

After almost seven amazing years, I’ve decided that it is time for me to say goodbye.

I look back with so much pride. When we started Datera, the world was much different – public cloud was just getting early traction, and operating IT as an automatic service was unheard of outside the likes of Amazon, Azure and Google. We bootstrapped Datera out of my garage in Palo Alto, with early customers like Pure Storage, Buffalo and Pelco, and free equipment from first partners like Mellanox, Juniper and Supermicro.

In those early days, deciding our garage's precious power budget between code and laundry was almost as important as debating the best go-to-market strategy with our investors. Enterprise data infrastructure with a cloud-like consumption surface was novel and unclear in our industry at that time. Now, many customers tell us that they have been overwhelmed to see with how much force this new IT model has been transforming our industry.

I'm grateful and filled with joy to see how far we've come since then, how many Fortune 100 category leaders we can now count among our customers. In many of them, we replaced or complemented leading products from world-class competitors.

There are seven lessons I learned from our time together that I will always cherish:

1. Hire those with ideas and the drive to explore them. We attracted a unique team that combined deep hyperscale, automation and storage expertise with the ability to crack hard computer science problems. We gave them the space to experiment and learn, and they gave us a unique product, beyond anything that anyone else has imagined in our space. One of my proudest moments was when the Chief Architect of a leading computer systems company, a distinguished Japanese gentleman, gently bowed his head and said: “You have created magic. We could never have done this.”
2. Always listen to new ideas. Change is the only constant – we learned as we grew, stretched our product and direction, passionately kept pursuing our vision. We were fortunate to find amazing mentors who taught us intricacies of hyperscale data center design and successful enterprise companies. Because we listened, we built the product up from scale-out storage to a cloud-integrated autonomic data services platform, and we solved hard problems that most others couldn’t even see.
3. Trust is the core of all values. One of our early customers is now one of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world. They were re-imagining their own data centers, and we assured them they would be safe with us, and that was the beginning of a whole new tsunami of challenges and solutions. We promised them that there was no better product than ours to fulfill their vision. They trusted us and we delivered.
4. Know your customers and how to deliver value. Customers give companies their meaning. Many times there are multiple stakeholders with conflicting needs. You can't please all of them all the time. Learning how to balance their needs and achieve good business outcomes was critical for our success.
5. Cherish your employees. Amazing people will do amazing things. Let them! Without empowering and encouraging employees, giving them creative freedom, they feel they have no control and can only follow. Creativity and initiative will falter.
6. Never rest. Early employees hold the space, the energy, the map of where to go as we keep growing our family. And new employees need to feel they can impact change as well. Never lean on the status quo. Always push for new frontiers, new strategies, new thinking, new processes, new products.
7. Founders are keepers of the culture. We need to let it change and grow as needed. This includes holding our history and learnings, and realizing when it’s time to let go and allow others to step up and become the new leaders. I regret not building our culture more actively – I let it be defined by the battle too easily.

I accept not guiding Datera as well as I could have over the last year. I’m glad I was able to help us finding strategic partners that were necessary for our survival and growth. I'll always be grateful for what I learned at Datera, from all of you, and I hope I have given you what you need to succeed.

Now it’s time to let go. I look forward to exploring my creativity again. Building new things requires that we step back, understand what inspires us and match that with what the world needs; that’s what I love and plan to do next.

I remain excited about the future of Datera, and look forward to watching our innovative and extraordinary company grow up.

All my love,

?????????????Marc, Co-Founder