(bright music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this a "Cube" conversation. >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this special "Cube" conversation here, in the Palo Alto "Cube Studios". I'm John Furrier, the host of "theCube", where a special guest, "Cube" alumni Carl Eschenbach was a partner at "Sequoia Capital", former head of "VMWare", running all the fields, COO, many tiles of "VMWare", great to see you Cube alumni. Thanks for coming in. >> It's great to be here, it's always fun to join you on "theCube". We've done a number of these and it's always good to do 'em in different settings and talking about different topics and companies. >> Love the studio love to talk about "VMWare", what they're doing "VMWorld's" right around the corner, it's here, >> Yep. On our doorstep. The market's changing, you're now doing a lot of investments at "Sequoia Capital", you're on a lot of big company boards. Cohesively you eye-path, you're on the front end of all the new trends, on the new waves. So, dated management has become super hot again, we were just talking some editorial around big data, early days had duped, how that kind of went its way but "Cloud" brought in a whole 'nother level of focus on data management. Really, it's still just as important, I've been seeing a lot of investments in this space. What's your view of the current landscape of the data management space right now? >> It's a great question, clearly, you know, there's a tremendous amount of data being created each and every day and the more data there is there's more opportunity to manage it and analyze it and actually use it to help drive your business into the future and drive revenue growth. So there has been a lot of investments, from the likes of "Sequoia", now there's around data and data management specifically like we did with "Cohesity." But I think data, just because there's so much more being created at such a rapid pace it's just become so valuable and every company is becoming a data and data management company because it's one thing to centralize your data. It's another thing to get it into one repository, but really what you want to do is to be able to manage it, analyze it to future predict where you're going to take your business going forward. >> You know, and one of the things that we're hearing all the time is that you don't want to bring data and dump it into a whole new system. It's got to not be non-destructive, that's been a very key thing. "Cohesity" has been one of those companies that just has risen really fast from start up to a rapidly growing company to a really strong high valuation, customer success has been phenomenal. You guys are in that, you're on the board of "Cohesity", was that obvious with those guys when you saw them, when the investment was there, what was the-- what interests you about "Cohesity"? What's the big focus? >> Yes, so there was a couple of things, let's start with-- always when you're doing an investment you want to look at the founder. What is the founder and what is his or her experience and what have they done in the past? And when you look at Mohit, there a very few founders of his caliber when it comes to infrastructure, data, data management. If you just look back, he was a rockstar at "Google", and in fact, you could-- many people can say he wrote the distributed file system for "Google" that it still runs on today. He left there after doing an amazing job and became an entrepreneur and co-founded "Nutanix", and wrote the, you know, file system for hyper converged infrastructure and then he said, "you know what? I've done that, I'm going to go do my third thing and I'm going to go and now build a company. And build a company that's going to disrupt a very fragmented market, starting with data storage and backup, but really build a platform for data management." And I think "Sequoia", I wasn't there when they led the initial investment and Bill Coughran, my partner, led the investment said, "you know, this guy is a rockstar, technically, there's not many better than him, and if he can achieve what his vision looks like today, he's going to build a big valuable company." And that's when we leaned in. So it started with the founder, it started with his experience, and then it started with what was he disrupting, and he was disrupting a legacy market in the infrastructure space that hasn't had a lot of innovation. So if you think it's the competitors of "Cohesity", its fun to compete in this market because a lot of them are legacy and they're trying to protect their legacy and they're not innovating and this is something that Mohit has done time and time again. In fact, it's probably the third time he's done it. >> He's a unicorn builder as we say here in "theCube" team, we loved him, he's been on "theCube" many times. But you're the new guy at "Sequoia", so they say, "Okay, Carl, you know the enterprise, you take it." >> Yeah. So you get on the board, it's interesting because his-- he's been on "theCube" and he's told me here, in studio that, you know, executing the entry strategy of the market with data backup and the normal-- the team was huge. But he had the vision, he saw that it wasn't going to be about data management backup and recovery, all that kind of categorical venture. He saw it as a bigger cloud place, sort of as a platform as you said. >> Yeah. What is the success formula for that because a lot of people try to compare, you know, this company that company and "Cohesity" has a unique differentiation. What's your take on that? >> The thing that's really unique about what Mohit and the team at Cohesity have created here is the fact that they've truly built the platform. A lot of people talk about building platforms and platform is like the holy grail in the enterprise because it's very sticky they've done it. Yes, they can do backup, but the fact that they have a distributed file system is scales, like, at web scale that can be used on premise, in the cloud in hybrid environments, the duplication, can do replication can do snapshot and cloning all that but most importantly what he's built is this platform that takes a very fragmented set of data, centralizes it, manages it, but then more importantly a lot of people say where's your data and where are you applications, he's built this platform to centralize data, and now what he's doing completely different than anyone else can do here, John, is he's bringing the actual application to the data. So you can now start to run applications on top of his platform, not just centralize your data, no one else can do that in the industry. >> I think that's one of the key things you see in these successful companies, and then Mohit again talked about-- you enter the market on a known beach head, good tan, but that's just the backup plan of it. >> Yeah. >> But they've been successful. And this has been a formula only a few companies have pulled off, "VMWare" was one of them where you were involved in from the beginning and "VMWare" virtualization has changed the game. And so I got to ask you being to having that "VMWare" history and legacy pedigree, as former CEO of "VMWare", where you've seen it from, you know, few employees to where it is today or when you left. What does "Cohesity" do for those customers 'cause remember "VMWare" was a very ecosystem friendly company. >> Yeah. But that ecosystem has been evolving, what does "Cohesity" bring to "VMWare" customers? >> It's really interesting because if you look at the workloads that are being backed up, supported, or the data that's being centralized on their platform, probably I'm guessing maybe greater than seventy percent of the workloads are VMWare workloads. So there's a tight relationship with VMWare technologically speaking because the amount of workloads and VMs that are being backed up on the "Cohesity" platform. But it goes further than that, there's a lot of commonality around how they go to market. They have a common set of channel partners that resell their technologies that do integration for customers, we have a lot of certifications. With "VMWare" we're VMware ready and certified on "vSAN" same with their hyper converged infrastructures stack. We're even supported are with the "VMWare" on "AWS" platform, we're "VMWare" ready certified for that too, to backup both on premise and off premise. So there are so many different areas we're integrated with VMWare both on go-to-market side and technically speaking, and then like I said, look at the amount of workloads that we're supporting, probably seventy percent plus are "VMWare" environments so, I think it's a really strong partnership and I'd say it's one of the stronger ones that "VMWare" has when it comes to building a data management back-up storage solution. >> The "Amazon" relationship with "VMWare" is certainly critical and "Cohesity" plays what, on both fronts there? >> Yes. So, actually there's three different solutions here. We are supporting "AWS", so "Cohesity" runs on "AWS". We support and we're certified with "VMWare", and then the three of us have come together and we're supported on the VMWare platform running on AWS to do backup and storage recovery for that as well. So there's three different ways those partners are in for. >> So Cohesity is not a public company yet so, and you're on the board so I'm going to ask you the board question. You're sitting in the board meetings, you know, CEO comes in, we're going to take that hill, this is where the future growth it. What is that conversation like? Where is the future growth for "Cohesity"? What does the future look like for them? What do they need to do? >> Yeah so, I do think it is around data management. We're still on the early innings, John, around data management. Backup clearly, I think they can crush the market and I think they're doing a good job competing against the more traditional players and even the emerging ones. We can differentiate ourself, but I think the real opportunity is to really go in with a point solution and then very quickly from that vertical entry go to a horizontal play and do data backup data recovery and data management and the more data we can take from this fragmented world and centralize it and then start to think about, wow we can bring things like "Splunk", bring applications to the data. Now try to move the data around to meet the applications, I think that is a rich opportunity and if you look at the go-to-market strategy of "Cohesity" one thing that's been very impressive to me having grown up for thirty years in the enterprise world, they started out selling to the enterprise, they're landing fortune five, fortune ten companies at scale with multimillion dollar deals as an entry point just to completely redo their backup architecture and how they're going to do data management. You don't see that too often. In three years, the revenue ramp this company's experienced is quite impressive, and I think they have a long way to go, and it's going to be on the back of data management going forward. >> You know, one of the things also they've done real well is they align with the community, they have great events. Their parties at "VMWorld" are legendary, reinventing. So, you know, they always-- they align, they work hard, they play hard but they get the job done. >> Yeah, no, they're known from what I understand, you know, they have a great CMO who you've met many a times, Lynn, she is not only a great CMO and a marketeer, but she knows how to throw a good party and there's always lines waiting outside the doors. A board member, I'm like, "Oh my god, how much did that cost?" But the amount of leads we get out of it, it's a no-brainer. >> Final question, how's it been as a VC? What's it like there? How's life been for you? >> Oh, I feel very fortunate, John. To be a partner at "Sequoia." It's one of the greatest, if not, greatest venture capital firm of all time, forty six years of rich history and to be part of it has been a blessing for me, and I get to bring all of my many years of operating skills to many younger companies. I get to see a lot, get to learn a lot, get to invest in some of the most exciting up and coming companies like "Cohesity" or "Snowflake" or "UiPath" or "Zoom" that's now gone public. I couldn't be happier and be more excited with what I'm doing and the ability to learn everyday from some great partners at "Sequoia." >> You surely got the mightiest touch and great experience in the enterprise; the company's lucky to have you like "Cohesity," congratulations . >> Thank you. >> Thanks for bringing the insight here on "theCube," I'm John Furrier, you're watching a special "Cube" conversation here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (lively music)