Be humble and keep learning

When you're trying to do something for the first time that no one has done before, there's always going to be some mistakes. The important thing is that one who doesn't have the courage to make those mistakes will never get anywhere. Oh I think I’ve probably made every mistake in the book. As an engineer I used to think I could do everything myself. That has definitely changed, it’s a lot more now about the team. We are a lot about culture inside the company. And one of the favorite phrases that my employees have was "Be humble and keep learning."

Cohesity was built to solve a problem that we refer to as mass data fragmentation. Enterprise data today is fragmented all over our customer's infrastructure. Our mission is to simplify data management. Getting insights from your data is very very important. The success of the business these days depends on it. A lot of information can be extracted automatically from the data. Right? There's a lot of machine learning and there's going to be intelligent machines doing a lot of the work for us.

I think the role of tomorrow, I think SoftBank also says it is an AI world. You know when the first computers came out, people had the same fear that now computers are going to take away their jobs. But let's agree that I think computers were a partner. They made us do so much more. And I believe that to a large part AI is also going to be like that. Humans can now do things that were earlier not possible.

An entrepreneur and even the executive staff in a company, they need to have their eye on both growth and profitability. When entrepreneurs tend to move too much towards one direction. Maybe they think too much about growth and not enough about a fiscally responsible way to run their business. In my mind, deliberate irresponsible and that's where the criticism comes. I think the way that technology space ought to change is to basically take a longterm view at things. Have a good balance between growth and profitability. I think if more entrepreneurs do that, I think we'll just have less criticism in the technology space.

So SoftBank has a huge name and they're known to be big thinkers. The way Masa thinks, is 50 years ahead. He's thinking “How would the world look like 50 years from today, and what technologies does the world need to make that vision possible?”, and that rhymed very well with our own vision. Today the Cohesity brand is known throughout the world. Anyone in IT, I would be surprised if they don't know our name. Two years back, I would have been surprised if someone did know our name. That's all happened because of this financing. So it's been a great, great partnership.

I hope to be remembered for a person who started with just something very mundane, a simple problem, and then grew it to a vision that has far reaching consequences, 50 years from today or a hundred years from today. We can remain where we are with all the problems we have in the world today, or go to a better world. That's something that I aspire to do through Cohesity. Bring the data on one platform, make AI possible, make big data computations possible, and the world will be a safer place, a better place.