This past weekend, I had the privilege of being a speaker at Entrepreneur Trek ’09, a conference held at Stanford Graduate School of Business featuring many of the leading lights in Silicon Valley. Participants were a diverse group of mainly MBA students and recent graduates from around the country. I met folks from Stanford, Duke, Wharton, Chicago, Northwestern, and other schools, all of whom had gathered to learn from VCs, entrepreneurs, and other movers and shakers in the high tech industry.
What struck me the most about the weekend was the enthusiasm among these students, who refuse to be daunted by the down economic news that is filling the airwaves. The discussions were almost all in a forward looking mode, with plenty of excitement about potential new business models that are emerging from social networking and other Web 2.0 advances.
In my workshop, I gave the inside story on what led me to found my company Ocarina Networks, which is the leader in content aware compression and deduplication for online storage. I described my philosophy as a serial entrepreneur, a concept I have dubbed “SDBS” or “Sell, Design, Build, Sell.” This is a disciplined and structured way of selecting ideas that are worth pursuing that first identifies a real need and then builds a business around that, rather than the other way around. I suggested they contrast this with the far more common “DBS” or “Design, Build, Sell” approach — otherwise known as “I have only one idea and so I’m going to start a company around it.”
As I told the students, an idea is a dangerous thing if it is the only one you have! Much more important is to strongly validate a customer need and market for your idea, evaluating it while simultaneously championing it. In this way you are approaching your business in a much more curious and open minded way, with the result being that you can be of far more service to your customers and are more likely to build a winning business.
When first developing what would become Ocarina Networks, my co-founders and I ran a competition, or what you might call a kind of “American Idol” of entrepreneurial ideas. After gathering input from trusted sources, we came up with three ideas that we considered the “finalists,” and then competed them against each other by surveying customers and thought leaders in the industry. What we discovered was that of the three, the idea of shrinking down storage was far and away the winner. You might even call it the “Kelly Clarkson” of technology ideas.
The storage reduction idea won for a simple reason: customers voted overwhelmingly for it. They let us know loud and clear that their most pressing problem was how to manage their ever-increasing storage needs.
At the Stanford event, I spoke with a number of people who instinctively got how important it is to keep storage costs and data footprints under control, and why a new approach was needed. A fellow panelist at the event, Peter Pham, CEO of BillShrink, told me that he immediately recognized Ocarina’s benefit while at Photobucket, which he helped grow from infancy to the 61 million users it had when he left.
For me, the greatest pleasure of attending such an event is that I have the opportunity to meet tomorrow’s businesspeople today. I have no doubt that groundbreaking ideas will be coming from the many bright thinkers I met this past weekend, and I wish them all well on the entrepreneurial road.
Murli Thirumale is the CEO of Ocarina Networks.
