The Founder Formula

Renen Hallak - Co-founder of VAST Data

• Trace3 • Episode 24

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On this week’s episode of The Founder Formula, we talk with Renen Hallak, Founder and CEO of VAST Data. In 2019, he was honored for entrepreneurship by Goldman Sachs at their annual Innovator Summit.

His company also recently made the news by raising $100M in Series C Funding — so it’s safe to say that Renen knows a thing or two about being a successful founder.

Our conversation was incredible, and we were fortunate that Renen was very generous with his time.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Renen Hallak:

Having this war chest of $140 million in the bank shows them that we're here to stay. And the high valuation, the $1.2 billion, means that there aren't that many companies that are able to acquire us anymore.

Outro:

The founder formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future-leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast-paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created, and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, everybody, welcome back to the show. We are super thrilled. To be here, we've got another great episode of the Founder Formula for you. Episode 24. We've been doing this for 24 episodes. My name's Todd Galena, and with me is Tony Olzak. He's the Chief Technical Officer here at Trace3. Tony, how's it going?

Tony Olzak:

Hey, Todd. Happy Friday.

Todd Gallina:

Hey, man. So perhaps you'd like to share with the audience what's going on in your home office this week.

Tony Olzak:

Apparently, there's...

Todd Gallina:

Weird stuff going on?

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, that's what you want to talk about. Yeah. So interesting scenario. My wife, who used to be a dog person, after getting her first cat, decided to get two more. So I've got three cats, which puts you in an interesting scenario because when you tell people about it, you almost don't want to say the number because then you're that person. You're the cat people. And... She left town and normally she and the kids would be pouring attention out of the cat. So not big of an issue, but they're so lonely that they will not leave me alone. And I'm sitting here in meetings or these recordings and I've got cats crawling all over me, crawling on the chair, on my desk, all over the mics and even on video calls. And people are like, is that a cat? What's going on? Yeah.

Todd Gallina:

You know, what's weird is that, so we're all on Zoom and we're all having these issues. And I will tell you, every now and then, a pet will be involved. It's just the world we live in now. So there's this thing where it's like one cat is kind of acceptable. But in your case, there's a second and potential third cat. And I agree, that's when you enter the weird cat person category.

Tony Olzak:

Oh, it's, you know, they get jealous is what it is. So, you know, the one hops up on the desk and the other two are like, hey, hey, buddy. What's the story? Where's our desk time? We want to be up there too. Yeah. And there definitely is a cat threshold that is healthy where you can come up conversation like one cat. No problem. Two cats. Yeah. You don't want the one cat to be lonely. Three cats? Is there something you want to tell us about? What's the story there?

Todd Gallina:

Because even that's weird. It's just like, why would you throw a third cat into the mix? You have two. They can play with each other. And then once you have three, it's like the door's wide open. There's nothing to stop you from getting four, five, six. And suddenly you're that old creepy grandma on The Simpsons. Oh,

Tony Olzak:

yeah. Just an army of cats everywhere. Just amazing.

Todd Gallina:

The crazy thing with your cats is one of them literally likes to play with the cords behind your computer and your mic and your video camera and all that stuff. That's what I'm gathering as we've been on these calls together.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, mics are cutting out. I think everybody's so used to all the technology difficulties these days with the different collaboration platforms, though, that it's still understandable. I don't necessarily read them in about the three cats thing. So thanks for bringing them up on the podcast. But yeah, that's what's going on. So next time I cut out, just imagine the three cat party that's happening over at my house.

Todd Gallina:

Oh my gosh. You're safe. Everyone's going to understand. And by the way, when your wife gets back, you know, you'll be back to zero cats involved in your, in your conferences. Yeah. That's the key to success. Yeah. Unless, of course, she went to California to get some additional cats.

Tony Olzak:

Oh, if she comes back with more, it's done. We'll have to buy a second house so that the cats have their own place.

Todd Gallina:

Oh, that's great. All right, man. You ready to get to our guest? Let's do it. I'm excited. All right, cool. Okay, our guest is the founder and CEO of Bass Data. a New York-based technology company that specializes in bringing storage on demand to enterprise companies. In 2019, he was honored for entrepreneurship by Goldman Sachs at their annual Innovator Summit. Recently, his company made some news by raising $100 million in Series C funding. Please welcome to the show, Rennan Halleck. Welcome, Rennan. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, really excited to have you. It's awesome you can make some time for us today. Hey, Renan, as we kick this thing off, for those who don't know anything about Vast, if you could spend a little bit of time telling us about Vast Data and why you started it. Of

Renen Hallak:

course. So Vast is a five-year-old startup. We're not really a startup anymore. We're in the infrastructure space. Specifically, we're starting from storage. And our history is with the different founding members of the team. We all come from different backgrounds. companies and we all have our different experiences and we came together to build something new. Today the team is just under 200 people, split between Israel where our R&D center is and the U.S. where everything else is. Our go-to market is out of New York City, that's where I am right now, and we have operations and support in the Bay Area. What we were built to do is develop new infrastructure for a new generation of applications. Our backgrounds are from different types of storage systems, all flash storage systems. And when we started, we interviewed a lot of customers or potential customers at the time. And we asked them, what is it that you're missing that nobody can provide today? What are your biggest pain points that you see right now? And what will you see in three to five years, do you think? And all of them said pretty much the same thing. They said the current situation storage systems and current infrastructures were okay for the applications they have now for their legacy applications. But as more and more analytics-based applications become available, and what today is known as AI and machine learning and deep learning, the existing infrastructure doesn't hold anymore. These new applications require fast access, not just to a little bit of your data at the tip of this pyramid, where you have many tiers of slower storage underneath, they require fast access to the entirety of the data set in order to be successful. And so a new paradigm is required to allow access to all of this information. And that's what we've built. We were fortunate to start at a time where we could see into the future a little bit. We were talking to the different hardware vendors like Intel and Mellanox And they were showing us in their roadmaps how things like Optane memory will be available and NVMe over fabrics. And we immediately thought, how can we architect a new type of system based on these new hardware technologies that will solve these big problems that the customers are complaining about?

Todd Gallina:

And that's what we did. You mentioned getting feedback from customers, basically, hey, What do you want us to build? And if we build it, will you buy it? A lot of people are not going to get that type of access to their target customers. Was it hard for you to get that access? How did you get it?

Renen Hallak:

The first few were hard. And the way I got it was I reached out to everybody that I knew on the go-to-market side. My background is in engineering. And I reached out to the people that I worked with in the past, salespeople, marketing people. and asked them for introductions to customers who they thought were forward-thinking. And those first few were hard to accumulate. But then once I started talking to a few, I always ended with, who else do you think I should talk to? And every single one of them had between two and five friends or colleagues or people that they respected that they said I should talk to. And so it grew from there in a very organic way.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, that's great. That's smart. Well, you know, one of the key things I think would be interesting is, you know, since you're in the hardware space, which obviously does require software play, you're talking about how you got access to roadmaps and we're looking at the future, you know, do some client conversations. How far out do you need to be with a hardware play startup like that to take the market? Does that differ greatly from a pure software company or love to hear a little bit more about that?

Renen Hallak:

Yeah, so everything that we develop is software. All of our IP is software. In fact, if you went to our Tel Aviv office, where we have a little more than 100 developers right now, 98, 99 of them will be software developers, and we have one or two hardware people. What we do is we try to leverage new hardware technologies and new hardware pieces in a way that couldn't be done before. And so we built the new software architecture on top of these pieces and we built new algorithms and metadata structures that weren't possible before. They weren't possible on RAM or on Flash, but they are possible on Octane. This new architecture was not possible before NVMe or Fabrics was available. And so we tried to leverage the new hardware pieces and build a system on top. I'm a big believer that innovation doesn't happen by having the smart person think for a very long time about how to solve a problem. It comes from the rules of the game being changed and the constraints being changed and trying to solve a problem that nobody else tried before or in a way that couldn't be done before because the underlying constraints were

Todd Gallina:

different. That's great. That's great, Renan. Hey, let's rewind the clock a little bit. Let's take our listeners back to your early beginnings. Can you tell us a little bit about what in your background made you think you could start a successful company and what type of environment kind of encouraged that?

Renen Hallak:

Well, I grew up in Israel, which some people call a startup nation. You find two people in Israel, you have three companies there. in between them. I never thought that it could be successful, but I was also from a personality perspective. I think I'm one that doesn't take direction very easily. And so I'm a little bit hard to manage and I don't fit in very well in large organizations. So ever since I started, Basically, ever since I was discharged from the military in Israel, everyone does a few years of military service after high school. I looked for small places. And the smaller, the better. And the earlier, the better. Because I always liked to build something from nothing. And those types of things attracted me. And I think I'm one of those people that's a bit of an odd duck that is very well suited for the startup life. And wouldn't have been able to succeed in a large corporation. In fact, my previous job was at EMC. After an acquisition, they acquired our company, Extreme IO. And so long as they kept it separate as a separate entity and gave us autonomy to do our own thing, it was okay. But once the integration into the big corporation started, I felt that I needed something smaller.

Tony Olzak:

Awesome. Renan, when you finally decided to form Vast Data, how did you go about forming your founding team? You mentioned earlier that you all knew each other. Was it just through previous work experience? We'd love to hear about how that experience went down.

Renen Hallak:

Yeah. So when I started, it was just me, unfortunately. I don't recommend that. I think a founding team is very important. And I did start, somebody gave me the advice that, It takes about six months to raise money. And so I said, I'm not exactly sure what I'm building yet. I don't know who I'm going to build it with. But if it takes six months to raise money, I better start now because I don't want to waste any time. And a few weeks into it, I found that it didn't take six months. It took two or three weeks. And so I was with quite a bit of money in the bank account without any co-founders and without a very clear idea. of what it is that we're going to do. And so I took that first almost year. I started in the beginning of 2016 and up until the very end of 2016, we didn't really start development work. It was more research. It was, as I said, talking to customers. It was looking for those co-founders that will join me in building this company. And the first one I knew I needed was someone on the business side. Because as I said, I came from engineering. I knew very little about business. So I needed someone that could be a one man go to market army. And that was Jeff Denworth, who I was introduced to through a mutual acquaintance. And when I met Jeff, I knew immediately that he's the right guy. It took me a while to convince him to join. But once he did, it was validated that that was the right choice. The other thing I knew, and I was living back in Israel at the time, is that I need to relocate to the US because I've seen so many Israeli startups build the most amazing technology, but then not find the market for it. And I knew that that was a trap I did not want us to fall into and that being close to the market, close to the customers is the best way to offset that. And so I needed a very strong engineering leader to build the R&D team and enable me to move out here. And that was Shahar, who leads our engineering team, our VP of engineering. The other few people that I hired at the very beginning were all very strong architects and developers, the type that can do anything. They are still the pillars that Vast Data is built on top of today. And I can't imagine the company without them.

Todd Gallina:

You mentioned spending the first... six months raising money, just looking at your rounds, you were able to secure 15, 25, and then 40. Can you tell us about raising this recent 100 million? And did you have to pitch all four times? And which pitch was the hardest?

Renen Hallak:

Yeah, I'm not very good at pitching. In fact, I find that when I come to an investor and I'm asking them to invest it rarely ends well. It needs to happen the other way around. And so this I found out accidentally, actually. The very, very beginning, I wasn't yet sure that I was ready to start the company. And I had investors approach me, investors that previously invested in Extreme.io, as an example, and other companies, and ask, what is it that I'm working on? Because they heard that I left my previous job. And I really left to spend time with family. But the fact that they started approaching me and I quickly realized that the more I tell them I'm not really working on anything yet, the more interested they got. And it's this reverse psychology that many times works better than going out and pitching and looking for money. And then every round that we had was very similar. It was always interest that came in inbound from new investors that heard about company, heard about a customer that we're at or some success that we've had. And it was always from a point of strength, from a point of we don't need this investment that allowed us to get better terms and that allowed us to ultimately grow in the way that we did. This last one specifically, the $100 million, we weren't even at a point where we started using the money from the previous round. And the main reason that we raised this big round is to enable two things with customers. The first is we saw customers are starting to make bigger and bigger investments with us. When we started, there were $1 million deals, $2 million deals. More recently, we see six and seven and $8 million deals being closed. And we saw that the biggest obstacle for those bigger deals to close is the confidence that the customers have in the company. And they needed to have confidence that A, we were here to stay and that we will support them forever. And B, that we weren't about to be acquired by someone else who would take the company in a different direction. And I think this round achieved both of those objectives because having this war chest of $140 million in the bank shows them that we're here to stay. And the high valuation, the $1.2 billion means that there aren't that many people companies that are able to acquire us anymore. And so we were able to knock those two out and that led the way or paved the way to us having that confidence in closing larger and larger deals.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, that's really smart. We get asked all the time during the evaluation process on, well, how confident are you that these guys are going to be around? I think we're going to be so I have technology that gets abandoned or who's acquiring these guys and how do I feel about who's going to acquire them? So that's really smart about the timing and what you guys did with that round. Now, does that come with any additional pressure? So you raise a round of that magnitude. How does your situation change in the way that you think about the business or just or any other pressures that are brought to the situation?

Renen Hallak:

I try to ignore external pressures. I think we put enough pressure on ourselves to succeed. And we've been given this opportunity, not just from a funding perspective, but it really feels like the stars are aligned, both from field perspective and customer base. And we're solving a problem that is real, that customers really do need to solve. And we're not seeing as much competition as maybe we should have been. And so all of these stars are aligning in a way that are allowing us to grow very quickly and to be very successful. And that I think in and of itself creates the pressure of, we don't want to screw it up. Any external pressure on top of that doesn't really add much. And I think the right thing is to stay calm and calculated and and make decisions based on actual information and data and try and grow in the best way possible. Growing too fast is also sometimes problematic. And so external pressures just need to be ignored.

Todd Gallina:

Renan, we ask a lot about founders choosing their founding team and you shared that story with us. What we haven't asked about is selecting a board. You have Tom Mendoza on your board and he's a good friend of Trace3. He's keynoted many of our conferences and he's been a lifetime achievement winner for us. Are you involved in choosing the board or is it the people who've made the investment like NorWest and Goldman Sachs and Next47? Do they secure your board members? So the

Renen Hallak:

original board members in the company are the people who made the investments. And I think the most important thing is to choose them wisely because they are ultimately your partners. And if you don't get along with them, or if you chose wrong, there's not much you can do about that. You can always fire an employee, not that I think you should do that often, but you can't fire a board member or an investor. And so choosing the right investors in the early days is key to having success. And I think On that front, we've done very, very well. I always looked at the person before I looked at the brand. And if you choose the right people, then everything else takes care of itself. What happened more recently is we suddenly realized that we are a billion-dollar company, and none of us have done this before. We've never built a $10 billion company before. And we thought that it is a good time to go out and look for people who did in order for them to guide us on this journey, especially to point out obstacles and roadblocks and make sure we don't make the same mistakes that they made when they built very successful companies. And so that caused me to go out and look for those types of people. And the first person that I found that I really, really liked and that has that record is Tom Mendoza. And so that was our decision. It was myself and Mike Wing, our president, who approached him and ultimately convinced him to join. We're very, very lucky to have him on board. And going forward, we're looking for more people of that ilk. Tom obviously has the go-to-market experience. He's built one of the best companies in the world from a sales perspective. And so I think we need others who were just as successful, but bring other things to the table. Maybe someone from the finance perspective or someone from the marketing perspective or a very, very good CEO that can guide me into building this company. So that's what we're looking for as we mature and as the board is required to mature with us.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, that's great to hear. I mean, it sounds like you guys have a very purposeful plan of how you're trying to build that out. And one of the things we're always curious about is, you know, what point does company culture come into play and how purposeful have you guys been about it? And then how do your people play a role into that?

Renen Hallak:

I think culture comes into play on the first day. A company's culture, I think, is similar to a person's personality, right? And every person has a personality and every company has a culture. I think the way to build the right culture is by a combination of bringing on the right people, the people that you like to work with and the people that share the same values as you do, but also people with diverse experiences. The more experience you have around the table, the better decisions will be made. And the second piece I think is by leading by example. And people will look at you and will look at what you do and they will imitate that. And if you treat the company as if it's your own, they will treat the company as if it's their own. And if you treat company money as if it's your own money, they will do the same. If you take big audacious goals and try to reach them, they will know that that's something that's not just allowed, but expected. And if they see you fail and they see you come back up and try again, then they'll know that failure is also okay so long as you learn from it. And so I think a lot of example and choosing the right people is what builds the right culture. And as the company grows, it becomes more and more important because when you're 10 people in the same room, you're with each other all day long and it's easy. It's contagious. But when you get to 200 people and now we're starting to think about 500 people, how do we make sure that that culture remains and dissipates into new recruits, that's something that I think you need to start working on more than we did in the beginning.

Todd Gallina:

It's not only companies aren't only growing, but under COVID, everyone's separated. It's almost like it's an assault on culture in some ways because those groups of people that used to hang around with and solve problems with are all in disparate places. Have you seen some additional complexity around culture with the virus? Definitely. I

Renen Hallak:

can say that we kept all of our offices open throughout the entire thing. We weren't all able to get to our offices at any given point in time, but whenever it was possible, we kept that option for people who wanted that and who needed that. And so every person in the company made that decision for themselves. And we obviously relied more on technology, a lot more Zoom, a lot more Slack. It's not the same as face-to-face and it's not the same type of interaction, but it's keeping us at least until the day where we can all get back together again. I hope that day is not far away. Yeah, I can't wait.

Todd Gallina:

Renan, real quick, you mentioned at the beginning that you went out to customers and asked for their advice on what to build. Have you had an opportunity to circle back around and say, hey, we built it. You bought it. You're using it. What do you think of it? Have you had any gratifying moments from these customers that you originally surveyed? Yes.

Renen Hallak:

Every step of the way. When we first came to those customers with a PowerPoint and asked questions and they said, yeah, we don't like that idea. We don't like that story. We're not really going to buy that. We went back afterwards when we fixed our story and we asked them, what about this? And what about this? Until they said, yes, yes, yes. If you build that, we're going to buy it. And then in some way, we told a story that was too good and we weren't sure how to build it. And so it took us a couple of years to actually build something that we thought was close to the story that we've told. And I'm a little bit paranoid. And I felt that when we actually come to them with an alpha product, they'll be disappointed. because it's not as good as the PowerPoint. And so when we finally came to the first few alphas, I was very fearful of that. And when they came back and said, this is just what you described, I felt, okay, we did something good. And then I, of course, went back to being paranoid and I said, well, nice words are cheap. They don't need to pay for it. They're just testing it. Let's see if someone actually buys. And then a few months later when it was GA, All of them wanted to buy. And I said, that's encouraging. But then I convinced myself that we're very good salespeople and they just bought because we convinced them. But I wasn't sure that the product is actually as good.

Todd Gallina:

You really are

Renen Hallak:

paranoid.

Todd Gallina:

The more

Renen Hallak:

I hear this. I am. But the gratifying moment was when the first customer decided to buy again. And it was about six months after the first purchase. And I remember getting that email saying that they want to expand their system significantly. And I remember talking to them when they purchased originally, and they said their buying cycle is about every three years. And so we should expect that cadence. And six months afterwards, they come back and say, we want to buy a system that's five times bigger. I immediately hopped in my car and drove down to talk to them to see what's going on. Did they make a mistake? And what they told me was, ever since they deployed VAST, They never had a single complaint about it. And these are storage experts. They have all of the different storage systems on the floor. And they said they've never had a storage system that for the first six months did not cause any complaints. And that was very, very gratifying. And then I asked them, well, why are you buying more? And they said, everybody that complains on every one of our other systems, we just move that workload onto VAST. And we stopped hearing from them. And so we made a strategic decision to stop buying everything else and just buy more vast. And that was when I knew that we built something really, really good for the customer and built what we intended to build. That's the moment that I remember.

Tony Olzak:

That's fantastic. In that story, you were talking about how they were describing some of the competitive solutions that were out there as well. And do you guys actually... track competitor feedback and what's going on in the rest of the competition? Or are you basically just laser focused on improving what you have and what the clients are telling you?

Renen Hallak:

I don't, personally. There are people in the company that know what's happening with competition. Personally, I think it's a distraction. I don't like to look to the sides. I like to look at first principles, what is possible, and then how far are we from the optimal. And that's how I measure myself and that's how I measure the team. I want us always to be as close as possible to the optimal, never look to the sides because I find that subconsciously, if you start looking at your competition, you'll end up building a product that's similar to what they have. And if you don't, then you may be off on a tangent, but you also may be 10 times better or 100 times better without noticing it. So I don't like to look at the

Todd Gallina:

competition. I'm sorry, Brennan and Tony, I have to rewind really, really quick to that previous story that you told about, you know, being paranoid. And it's like, I could imagine somebody standing next to Renan and they've got like a bottle of champagne and they're trying to, they're ready to pop the cork and they're, and he's like, all right, we sold it. And they're like, yes, they bought it. Can we pop the cork? No, not yet. Wait a second. Okay, they bought more. Can we pop a cork? No, I have to find out why they bought more. It's like the events team over there. The party room has all the streamers and balloons, but not really willing to pop a cork just yet. So I'm wondering, was there a moment where you're like, yes, we got it? Not yet.

Tony Olzak:

Only the paranoid survive, Todd.

Renen Hallak:

I can tell you after our last round when we raised $100 million and it was in the middle of the pandemic and it was... very stressful. It was not clear that the investors will follow through with what we agreed to because the world was changing and they had every right to change the terms or to back out. And after that round, I remember a few of us went down to a bar and somebody asked me, is it time to celebrate yet? I said, uh-uh, we're just getting started. And so I think we have a lot to do and I'm always excited Maybe too much looking at what could go wrong and how do we protect ourselves. And I don't think it's time for celebration yet.

Tony Olzak:

But you guys must be on a great track because I know in the middle of everything that's going on in the VC community is that the investments won't necessarily slow down, but they're going to be doubling down on the ones they think have tremendous upside. So the fact that you guys pulled that off in the middle of all this speaks volumes, I think, about your future trajectory. and the belief that people have in you?

Renen Hallak:

We put a very aggressive plan in place in order to warrant that funding round. And again, the pandemic hit and it was hard to know if we'll meet it. But fortunately, we have. We've exceeded our goals every quarter this year. We are on track to exceed $100 million run rate this year. It's the second year that we've been selling. And with a very small team, we have less than 10 people 10 salespeople in the field right now. And so I think we're definitely going in the right direction and we're now doubling down and hitting the gas and we're growing in order to accommodate the growth that we expect of ourselves next year. So it's a very exciting time.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, so this is an exciting time and we're really excited for you. Knowing that you kind of have this founder mentality and this is only a tough, Always a tough question to answer, but is this it? Is Vastata the company? Are you building a lifestyle company for the long haul? Do you have an exit plan? Have your investors put an exit plan on you? No.

Renen Hallak:

Well, no to the second two questions. I don't have an exit plan, and the investors have not discussed this with me. I don't believe that you can build a company with an exit plan in mind. Whatever happens, whether it's an IPO or an acquisition, or anything else, you need to build the company with the long term in mind. And that gives you options. You never want to be in a situation where you're at the mercy of an acquirer. And so my belief is we're building it for the long term. We're going to take over the world. And that's the mindset that you need when building a company. I'll also say that being acquired isn't the most fun thing in the world. In many senses, it's the beginning of the end. You know that people are going to start leaving soon. You know that innovation is not going to keep accelerating at the pace that it was before. And so the longer we can keep this company independent, I think the better it is for us, the better it is for our customers, the better it is for our investors because it'll keep growing in value and they will gain the benefits of that.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, Renan, really appreciate the time. Want to be respectful for your time. I know it's getting a little bit late where you are at versus the West Coast. You know, as we close this out, is there anything else that we didn't ask you that you'd love to share?

Renen Hallak:

I want to call out to Trace3 for being a great partner and for being an extension of our sales team. We could not have done any of what we did without the support of the channel community. Thank

Todd Gallina:

you. You're welcome. With that, I'm going to put my Goldman hat on, if you don't mind, Renan. And when it does become time to celebrate, can Tony and I be there? Yes, you can.

Renen Hallak:

I'll let you ring the bell.

Tony Olzak:

Todd only rings cowbells. Oh,

Todd Gallina:

Renan, this has been great, man. Thanks so much for hanging out with Tony and myself. It's been a blast. I enjoyed it. Thank

Tony Olzak:

you. Yeah, so I think, Todd, what I learned today was the key to success is you have a successful exit, spend time with your family, and you do nothing. And when people ask you what you're doing, you tell them that you're doing nothing. And when investors say what you're doing, you tell them that you're doing nothing. That's the key to success. That's how you get that initial interest. Have you seen that movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall? Yes, no, the one with the puppets. The puppets

Todd Gallina:

in Forgetting Sarah Marshall? I just ruined your joke. Yeah, that's the one where he wants to do a puppet show with vampires. Oh,

Tony Olzak:

yes, yes, you're totally right. I forgot about that part. It's like his dream come true. But there's like this surf scene where it's a surf instructor scene with Paul Rudd. And he's like, do less. No, no, no, no, do less. And then he's like, I'm doing absolutely nothing. He's like, do less. I just kept thinking about that.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, no, he hasn't figured out. That's true. Oh, my gosh. What are you doing? Nothing. Do you have any plans on doing anything? No, not at all.

Tony Olzak:

What if we gave you money? Could you do something? The mystique is just too much to handle. That's great. trick

Todd Gallina:

it works for him boy 180 million dollars raised that's that's nutty

Tony Olzak:

yeah that's pretty incredible those guys are on a great trajectory if you've paid attention to what's been going on with them but lots of really interesting conversations out in the field with trace three field teams yeah

Outro:

no

Todd Gallina:

rooting for them for sure

Outro:

Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast. You've been listening to The Founder Formula, the podcast for all things startup from Silicon Valley to innovators across the country. If you wanna know what it takes to lead tomorrow's tech companies, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time.