In 2008, I started working with Kieran Harty on a startup focused on storage for virtual machines, called Tintri.
We got venture capital funding and built a successful product that our customers love. We completed an IPO in 2017.
That was actually somewhat of a rocky process, and Tintri was in non-stop crisis mode through mid-2017 until we declared bankruptcy in July 2018. Another storage company, Data Direct Networks (DDN) has completed its purchase of Tintri's assets, and will operate Tintri as a subsidiary, continuing product development and support.
I thought I'd try opening up a Q&A thread here; I'm happy to share what I can of my experiences over these ten years, although there are plenty of things I can't answer and a few that I probably won't.
If you have a question, post it as a comment below (and please upvote this post) and I'll do my best to give a straightforward answer. I'll also kick in a 0.10 SBD bounty for the highest-upvote question (counting question upvotes and answer upvotes combined.)
What is a virtual machine and what does it take to store one?
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Virtualization technology, like VMware, time-shares a single computer to make it look like multiple computers. Each "virtual machine" is running a separate operating system and set of applications as if it was running on dedicated hardware. But really a "hypervisor" is controlling the virtual machine to give it a share of a host machine's resources such as CPU and memory.
A virtual machine may be connected to one or more "virtual disks", which again are an abstraction that looks to the virtual machine like dedicated hardware: a physical disk attached to a physical machine. But really these virtual disks reside on shared storage and look like files.
Tintri provides shared storage for virtual disks (and other files associated with a virtual machine.) Many other vendors do too--- any shared storage can be configured for use with VMware. But our technology treats each virtual machine specially, instead of operating at the "volume" or "LUN" level. That is, with conventional storage you get operations that control storage units which may contain many VMs. With Tintri, we can performs those operations on individual VMs and vdisks instead.
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Why did it only take a year from IPO to bankruptcy?
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The simple answer is that we were spending too much money.
The IPO was supposed to raise $100m but instead we raised $60m. This led to a cycle of bad news--- customers and employees questioned whether we would have enough runway to get to profitability. When we missed our first quarter projections, this continued the cycle of negative news. This made it harder to continue growing our revenue.
(Because Tintri was public, you can find our quarterly results during this period online: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001554875&owner=exclude&count=40)
Tintri's management said that there was a path to cash flow positive by the end of 2018. Unfortunately they miscalculated what it would take to get there, and our cash would not allow us to continue operations past the end of June 2018.
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So you worked for 9 years to make a product and find some customers and now another company will reap the benefit?
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Yes, assuming DDN can run it as a profitable business! There's no guarantee that they will be successful, although they have a good history of running a storage business at a profit.
I have been paid a salary for the whole time, and managed to sell some stock pre-IPO, so I have benefited from Tintri as well.
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This Q&A got 6 votes (even if two of them were mine) as of 6 days 10 hours, so you get the bounty, I'll send it shortly.
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Great! It was nice talking with you.
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How long and how much did it take you to go from idea to product?
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Kieran and I got sort of a slow start. Kieran had been working on the idea for at least a few months before I joined him in May 2008, and he was Entrepreneur in Residence at NEA at the time. We got funding in August of that year, hired our first engineers in early 2009, and the first betas of the product went out to customers in November of December of 2010. So development took about two years, which is about what Keiran and I predicted at the time--- writing a new file system from scratch takes time. But more like two and a half if you count time spent working on the idea and validating it.
Our initial funding round was $4.6 million from NEA (New Enterprise Associates) We raised another round lead by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2009, for $12 million. That got us through initial product development.
Series C was in June 2011, not long after our public launch of the product, for $18m: http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/tintri-closes-18-million-series-c-funding-1526907.htm There were three later rounds prior to IPO.
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What led you to start an AMA at this point ?
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Right now is a transition point. I was hesitant to talk about the business and the bankruptcy while the process was still ongoing. (And I wasn't on Steem a year ago for the actual IPO.) I'm no longer a Tintri employee as of yesterday, and today I'm not yet a DDN employee. So an AMA seemed like a good way to celebrate (or at least note?) that transition.
I did a session at Minnebar last year about the IPO process and this felt like the flip side of that. But I'm happy to answer questions about the whole period.
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Thanks for reply..
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Sorry to hear that happen. Usually when a company can get to IPO it's a big boost and in this case it didn't meet expectations. It seems you do have your next step in place. I think it's great you're so open about to teach others. No questions, I know how hard it is when a venture you've worked so hard on and believe in falls apart and there's not much you can do. Luckily someone did buy your company. I simply had to close my doors and had to donate all my inventory :(
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Sorry to hear it.
I was certainly aware that Chapter 7 was possibility; we were fortunate to get an introduction to DDN through one of the Tintri employees they were trying to hire. Once you declare bankruptcy everything has to go through the courts and the primary debtholder (who provided debtor-in-possession financing), so it's a real feeling of loss of control. Day to day you don't really know what's going to happen.
It's also very strange being much more open about everything than we were even as a public company. Lots of stuff appears in the open court documents: http://www.kccllc.net/tintri/document/list/4716
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It definitely is. I made bad choices, even though I knew better. My ex-husband was adamant about not filing bankruptcy. No clue as to why, but he was a real control freak. I wanted to see if someone would buy it and he was against that too. Oh well that was 25 yrs ago. Live and learn.
Wow that is a lot to go through. That has to be a stress all is own.
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