Disrupting the Cloud Storage Market with Ben Golub

This conversation covers:

• The advantages of using a distributed data storage model.
• How Storj is creating new revenue models for open-source projects, and how the open-source community is responding.
• The business and engineering reasons why users decide to opt for cloud-native, according to Ben.
• Viewing cloud-native as a journey, instead of a destination — and some of the top mistakes that people tend to make on the journey. Ben also talks about the top pitfalls people make with storage and management.
• Why businesses are often caught off guard with high storage costs, and how Storj is working to make it easier for customers.
• Avoiding vendor lock-in with storage.
• Advice for people who are just getting started on their cloud journey.
• The person who should be responsible for making a cloud journey successful.

Links:

• Storj Labs: https://storj.io/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/golubbe
• GitHub: https://github.com/golubbe

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier. I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Ben Golub. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Ben: Oh, Thank you for having me.

Emily: And I always like to just start off with having you introduce yourself. So, not only where you work and what your job title is, but what you actually spend your day doing.

Ben: [laughs]. Okay. I'm Ben Golub. I'm currently the executive chair and CEO of Storj Labs, which is a decentralized storage service. We kind of like to think of it as the Airbnb of disk drives, But probably most of the people on your podcast who, if they're familiar with the, sort of, cloud-native space would have known me as the former CEO of Docker from when it was released up until a few years ago. But yeah, I tend to spend my days doing a lot of stuff, in addition to family and dealing with COVID, running startups. This is now my seventh startup, fourth is a CEO.

Emily: Tell me a little bit, like, you know, when you stumble into your home office—just kidding—nobody is going to the office, I know. But when you start your day, what sort of tasks are on your todo list? So, what do you actually spend your time doing?

Ben: Sure. We've got a great team of people who are running a decentralized storage company. But of course, we are decentralized in more ways than one. We are 45 people spread across 15 different countries, trying to build a network that provides enterprise-grade storage on disk drives that we don't own, that are spread across 85 different countries. So, there's a lot of coordination, a lot of making sure that everybody has the context to do the right thing, and that we stay focused on doing the right thing for our users, doing the right thing for our suppliers, doing the right thing for each other, as well.

Emily: One of the reasons I thought it’d be really interesting to talk with you is that I know your goal is to, sort of, revolutionize some of the business models related to managing storage. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Ben: Sure. Sure. I mean, obviously, there's been a big trend over the past several years towards the Cloud in general, and a big part of the [laughs] Cloud is storage. Actually, AWS started with S3, and it's a $90 billion market that's growing. The world's going to create enough data this year to fill a stack of CD-ROMs, to the orbit of Mars and back. And yet prices haven't come down, really, in about five years, and the whole market is controlled by essentially three players, Microsoft, Google, in the largest, Amazon, who also happen to be three of the five largest companies on the planet.

And we think that data is so critical to everything that we do that we want to make sure that it doesn't stay centralized in the hands of a few, but that we, sort of, create a more, sort of, democratic—if you will—way of handling data that also addresses some of the serious privacy, data mining, and security concerns that happen when all the data is held by only a few people.

Emily: With this, I'm sure you've heard about digital vegans. So, people who try to avoid all of the big tech giants—

Ben: Right, right.

Emily: Does this make it possible to do that?

Ben: Well, so we're more of a back end. So, we're a service that people who produce-consumer-facing services use. But absolutely, if somebody—and we actually have people who want to create a more secure way of providing data backup, more secure way of enabling data communications, video sharing, all these sorts of things, and they can use us and service those [laughs] digital vegans, if you will.

Emily: So, if I'm creating a SaaS product for digital vegans, I would go with you?

Ben: I would hope you’d consider us, yeah. And by the way, I mean, also people who have mainstream applications use us as well. I mean, so we have people who are working with us who may have sensitive medical data on people, or people who are doing advanced research into areas like COVID, and they're using us partially because we're more secure and more private, but also because we are less likely to be hacked. And also because frankly faster, cheaper, more resilient.

Emily: I was just going to ask, what are the advantages of distributed storage?

Ben: Yeah. We benefit from all the same things that the move towards cloud-native in general benefits from, right? When you take workloads, and you take data, and you spread them across large numbers of devices that are operated independently, you get more resilience, you get more security, you can get better performance because things are closer to the edge. And all of these are benefits that are, sort of, inherent to doing things in a decentralized way as opposed to a centralized way. And then, quite frankly we’re cheaper. I mean, because of the economics and doing this this way, we can price anywhere from a half to a third of what the large cloud providers offer, and do so profitably for ourselves.

Emily: You also offer some new revenue models for open-source projects. Can you talk about that a little bit more?

Ben: Sure, I mean, obviously I come from an open-source background, and one of the big stories of open-source for the past several years is the challenges for open-source companies in monetizing, and in particular, in a cloud world, a large number of open-source companies are now facing the situation where their produc...