Update: Scott Dietzen, co-founder President and CTO of Zimbra, is headed to a hot stealth-mode startup, PURE Storage, a company started by John Colgrove, a veteran of storage industry and founding engineer at Veritas, a storage software company.
PURE Storage, according to industry sources, is said to be working on an SSD-drive-based network attached storage and has developed unique software to enhance the performance and dependability of these expensive storage systems.
According to SEC filings, PURE Storage seems to have raised about $25 million in funding, and Silicon Valley sources peg the valuation north of $50 million. It seems the initial funding for the company came from Sutter Hill Ventures, led by Mike Speiser, who was listed as director and an executive officer in the SEC filings.
Speiser is a big believer in the solid state future. The company was using the code name, Os76 Inc. until recently, and was started in 2009 in the offices of Sutter Hill Ventures.
The company has raised $18.4 million of the total $20 million it plans to raise in total as part of its Series B funding. The latest investors in the company include Aneel Bhusri of Graylock Ventures and Mark Leslie, the founding CEO of Veritas.
Dietzen is a good catch for the company, as he has a long history in the software business. He was CTO of BEA Systems, and he joined that company after helping built WebLogic, an app server startup. He was president and CTO of Zimbra, and later joined Yahoo (s YHOO), before helping sell Zimbra to VMware (s VMW).
Earlier this year, Stacey wrote about the growing number of storage startups, which are all trying to tackle the growing problems of data deluge. Many of these companies are skewing toward using solid state storage and moving away from disks.
Update: I had erroneously referred to Scott at co-founder of Zimbra. Error is regretted and has been corrected.
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check your facts. Scott Dietzen was not a co-founder of Zimbra.
Joe Blow
Thanks for pointing out my errors and I deeply appreciate your help. I have corrected the post to reflect the facts.
@Joe Blow: you sir are 100% correct, but then again accuracy is not exactly a hallmark of this site is it?
I was the ceo/co-founder of Zimbra and I can say that Dietzen was as good as a co-founder in the company. So while technically inaccurate, Ross, Roland and I always considered him as our co-founder.
another factual error: Scott did not help build the WebLogic app server. He was VP of Marketing at WebLogic, Inc., and was hired after the product was already built.
I am guessing that you have history with Weblogic etc. So clearly you know more than outsiders like me. On a larger scale, are you should I take it from your comments that you view the contributions of marketing or business development different from your definition of building a product/company?
Perhaps the confusion stems from the fact that there is the product known as the Weblogic App Server, which was built by engineering not marketing, and then there is the company Weblogic Inc that had 100+ employees and which, as I’m sure Scott himself would be the first one to tell you, was a group effort by many people in many departments, including marketing.
I wonder if you would write, for example, “Eric Schmidt built the google search engine.” (sorry, I don’t know who the vp marketing is for google).
This takes nothing away from Scott’s contribution to the company, which is undisputed, but as written it’s factually wrong, or at least ambiguous.
Point well taken and language changed.
100% agree with Satish
I’m afraid I have to plead “no comment” on the subject of the original article. But on the underlying theme of the commentary—who gets the credit for successful startups, I remain convinced that those like me that end up in a spokesperson role tend to get more credit than they deserve. What I most love about the tech industry, is what a small but passionate and deeply talented team can accomplish, and I have had the great fortune to work with truly gifted teams. When I walked in the door at Zimbra, WebLogic, and Transarc before that, I likely lowered the average IQ of each. When teams are collaborating well, it is hard to discern where one’s ideas leaves off and another’s picks up. As Reagan said, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.” In my own case anyway, I freely admit I have been riding on the coattails of gifted teams, and simply doing what I can to help ensure team success.
Scott
Thanks for stopping by. If there is someone to be blamed it is me, for my poor choice of words and hence I have corrected it accordingly. Apart from that, I would say that it is refreshing to find someone so grounded as you are. Good luck with everything.