Vineet Jain: Eliminating the Costly File Server

Vince Thompson: Hi. Welcome to Dog and Pony. I'm Vince Thompson. File storage is an issue for many businesses. All of them, looking for a simple and cost-efficient solution. Vineet Jain is the CEO of Egnyte, a company helping small businesses ditch their costly file servers. Talk to us a little bit about the service you provide.

Vineet Jain: Teams are getting more distributed where not everyone has to work off the same office. Somebody could be working off at home, people could be traveling, they're on the road. They need a solution which can be leveraged for both their environments and replacing their file server is a big part of their problem. Here, we are talking about a centralized file storage for all your corporate data. And that is basically the most important asset especially for information-centric businesses, given that a small business doesn't have the IT competency, or the capital expenditure like a large company. Our solution replaces that with this Cloud-based file server.

Vince Thompson: Okay, explain what Cloud means?

Vineet Jain: Cloud is essentially, it's a hosted application, so you're not running anything in your environment in terms of any hardware box or any specific software. Egnyte provides this file server which is represented like a drive of your computer, similar to your C drive, or if you are working on a Mac through your finder. And it provides you with storage, collaboration framework and an ability to back up your employees' computers on to this file server.

Vince Thompson: You're a Silicon Valley company in the technology sector, bringing this solution out to hundreds, if not thousands of businesses as quick as you can. How do you keep this from becoming a commoditized product?

Vineet Jain: Technology is just one part of the puzzle and I learned just doing the early start-up is you need to know what exactly is the pinpoint you're addressing and are you addressing at the right price point? And also, who are you addressing it for? So when we say we are a solution for the small businesses, we are truly focused on saying a 1 to 99% group is the small business definition for us. That does not preclude us from selling it to large enterprises where it could be a departmental solution. We have a large number of customers of that type, that's not the core focus. So the technology of the market focus we believe is the key to success. And ultimately you have to keep on differentiating and adding value-added layers to stay away from the competition.

Vince Thompson: What have been your greatest challenges in growing this company?

Vineet Jain: I think the biggest challenge for us at this point is, here we are as a young company coming and telling our customer, trust us with your data. Of course we have a security-wide paper, we address all your security concerns, but still the brand name is not known yet. But as people get to know more about Egnyte, that comfort level rises and I just exemplify this with an example of if you come to our webinar, which we now do once a week, the chances we'll have you sign as a customer is not of 75%. So what that is indicating is the brand awareness is the most important problem that we have to address. Of course the technology has to keep up.

Vince Thompson: Vineet, you have been a successful entrepreneur before. You've raised capital from first top-tier VCs, you built a company up to about an eleven million dollars in sales and then you sold it. What did you learn from that experience that you can apply to your company today?

Vineet Jain: That's a lot of hard work, and you have to be a glutton for punishment. The biggest learning I had was and I was a first time entrepreneur at that time, what it takes to build a successful company is a combination of technology, very good marketing and of course sales. But at the same time, all of those things have to be duck-tailed and focused on is the opportunity out there. So the opportunity assessment to me is key to success for whatever you are trying to do.

Vince Thompson: So you're born and raised in India and went to school there. You worked in London, you were a consultant for KPMG, you came to the United States, you live in Silicon Valley, the most competitive place on earth, how does an entrepreneur or CEO of a start-up company in Silicon Valley have a life beyond business?

Vineet Jain: I dont think you should ask my family members that, especially my wife. You know, the culture in Silicon Valley is definitely unique. We all know about that, and there is a lot of drive and energy and everyone thinks they have the smartest idea. The eco-system there provides an environment where you'll find people with brilliance, in different levels, whether it's engineering, whether it's marketing and the focus there on how you build a solution which is radically different or it's not being done before, I think there is something in the air. It's very hard for me to put my finger on it, but that wide, that energy you get there is just astounding.

Vince Thompson: Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Vineet Jain: Thanks.

Vince Thompson: As always if you have questions, comments or ideas for guests, please shoot us an email. You can do that at info@dogandpony.com. I'm Vince Thompson, thank you for watching.