Dancing with Giants: How Guru Pangal and CloudSimple Succeeded Among the Titans of Tech
Summary
“We would have these CIOs come in and say, ‘In the next two years I’m moving all my digital workloads out of my data center to the cloud.’” They all wanted the flexibility and innovation the public cloud offers. “But then two years would pass,” he says, “and less than 20 percent of their workloads moved.” Pangal knew that enabling clouds to provide the right platform to enterprises to move their traditional applications could be a game changer. “And that was kind of rough.” What Pangal learned was to block out the noise, keep his engineering team focused, and to continue to execute on his product development no matter what. The software giant also kicked in a substantial amount in the next fundraising round, eight months later, helping Pangal make strategic early hires, among other things. “The VCs all looked at it and said, ‘Hey this is great, we know you guys will land a lot of customers, but we don’t see how Microsoft is not going to acquire you.’” Having the right relationships at this moment helped.