Dani Golan who oversees strategy, a go-to market, and overall company operations at Kaminario. Previously, Dani served as president and general manager of Performix technology which was acquired by Nice Systems in 2006. Prior to Performix, he served as an executive responsible for leading new ventures at EMC. He holds a BSc of electrical engineering, summa cum laude at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Prior to his professional career, Dani served as a fighter pilot and officer in the Israeli Air Force.

Famous Five:

Favorite Book? – The Goal
What CEO do you follow? – N/A
Favorite online tool? — Skype
How many hours of sleep do you get?— Quite inconsistent
If you could let your 20-year old self, know one thing, what would it be? – Dani would tell himself to focus on what’s important

Time Stamped Show Notes:

00:44 – Nathan introduces Dani to the show
01:33 – Being a fighter pilot and an entrepreneur are similar things for Dani
01:57 – Kaminario is an infrastructure for the cloud
02:47 – Kaminario brings efficiency to data sets, data centers and data bases
02:50 – Kaminario is the development of net generation data storage infrastructure
03:02 – Most of Kaminario’s customers are net generation business models
- 03:13 – They needed a completely different data infrastructure that can grow with them
- 03:37 – Legacy enterprises generates more data
03:51 – Kaminario has raised a total of $280M including their latest round of $75M
04:30 – Kaminario is dealing with 2 of hottest markets in IT: flash and cloud
- 04:42 – Flash created the opportunity for Kaminario to be in the greatest revolution for IT
05:40 – If you’re pushing your valuation to perfection, there is no perfection in IT
06:05 – Make sure you have a fair valuation for your company
06:24 – The sentiment of investors is that they appreciate the growth in the past but now they’re asking for real businesses, especially when it comes to IT
- 06:49 – Investors want to see pass the profitability
07:09 – Kaminario is closed to profitability
07:30 – Kaminario’s past investors have also participated and shared significantly
09:00 – Businesses should protect their employees
09:44 – When you are getting money for the company, 3 means you have to get $3M to the investors
10:40 – “Valuation is bullsh*t if you have crazy terms”
10:50 – Employees are far more important than actual valuation
11:05 – Kaminario was launched in 2008 on April fools’ day which is the same as Apple
11:57 – Kaminario now has thousands of customers
12:21 – How fast a specific customer is going to buy more is one of the metrics that Kaminario measures
12:51 – Kaminario is doing serve and apply which is software, hardware and service
13:30 – Kaminario sells to cloud providers or to the SaaS companies
- 13:44 – The SaaS is the larger revenue source
13:57 – By 2019, the total cloud market will be 175B
- 14:03 – Around 120B are SaaS companies
15:32 – SaaS companies charge their customers monthly
- 15:37 – SaaS companies pay Kaminario a one-time fee for infrastructure
- 15:46 – There is an on-going payment for maintenance
16:20 – The expansion revenue
- 16:28 – If a SaaS company started with $300K, they will go over $1M by the end of 12 months
17:45 – Team size is 250 but the inside sales team isn’t that big
18:17 – Kaminario has a presence in the market
18:57 – Data grows exponentially every year
19:23 – Normally, customers would start cautiously and would just eventually gain trust in Kaminario
19:55 – First metric to measure the 3x growth is by capacity
20:45 – Kaminario is the most scalable product in the market
- 20:50 – Kaminario can fit roughly 12 terabytes of 400K iPhones
21:48 – Kaminario has never lost a customer
22:00 – Kaminario is a big funnel
22:12 – Kaminario’s revenue stream is 50% from new sign-ups and 50% from existing
24:04 – Kaminario’s last round was closed in Q4 of 2016
24:41 – When you are in Kaminario’s business, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon
25:00 – Kaminario’s number one competitor is EMC
26:06 – The Famous Five

3 Key Points:

Valuation is useless if you’re aiming for perfection, there will always be flaws.
Focus on keeping your employees and customers happy.
A customer won’t easily trust a product at first so you have to earn that trust, ensuring they stay longer.

Resources Mentioned:

The Top Inbox – The site Nathan uses to schedule emails to be sent later, set reminders in inbox, track opens, and follow-up with email sequences
Klipfolio – Track your business performance across all departments for FREE
Hotjar – Nathan uses Hotjar to track what you’re doing on this site. He gets a video of each user visit like where they clicked and scrolled to make the site a better experience
Acuity Scheduling – Nathan uses Acuity to schedule his podcast interviews and appointments
Host Gator– The site Nathan uses to buy his domain names and hosting for the cheapest price possible
Audible– Nathan uses Audible when he’s driving from Austin to San Antonio (1.5-hour drive) to listen to audio books

Show Notes provided by Mallard Creatives

686: $225M Raised by Data Focused Ex-Isralei Fighter Pilot, is Kaminario Next IPO? With CEO Dani Golan

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders