If Data Is King, This Man Protects the Crown Jewels/Sanjay Poonen - Cohesity, RAG model, Servant ~ Spark of Ages Ep 16
May 24, 2024Season 1Episode 16
Rajiv Parikh
Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com Find more great content like this at: https://www.position2.com/ If you like what you here, please drop us a comment!
Episode Description: Ever wondered how the titans of the tech industry navigate the intricacies of data management and transformative mergers? Strap in as I, Rajiv Parikh, engage with Sanjay Poonen, the visionary CEO of Cohesity, in a riveting discussion that spans from personal triumphs to the avant-garde of data security. Get a front-row seat to Sanjay's insights on the Cohesity-Veritas merger and its colossal impact on the future of data protection, all while drawing from his wealth of experience at VMware and academic ventures at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth.
Peel back the layers of cybersecurity with us as we address the pivot of ransomware targeting secondary data. We're not just discussing the 'what' of this revolution; Sanjay and I are delving into the 'how,' with behind-the-scenes looks at strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM that are crafting a more fortified cloud hardware and software ecosystem.
It's not all tech and tactics, though. Prepare to be moved by stories of empathy and leadership that echo the profound human journeys behind the tech empires. From Bangalore to Silicon Valley's boardrooms, Sanjay's narrative is a testament to the transformative power of service and the importance of grounding innovation with a human touch.
Email us with any feedback for the show: spark@postion2.com Find more great content like this at: https://www.position2.com/ If you like what you here, please drop us a comment!
Episode Description: Ever wondered how the titans of the tech industry navigate the intricacies of data management and transformative mergers? Strap in as I, Rajiv Parikh, engage with Sanjay Poonen, the visionary CEO of Cohesity, in a riveting discussion that spans from personal triumphs to the avant-garde of data security. Get a front-row seat to Sanjay's insights on the Cohesity-Veritas merger and its colossal impact on the future of data protection, all while drawing from his wealth of experience at VMware and academic ventures at Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth.
Peel back the layers of cybersecurity with us as we address the pivot of ransomware targeting secondary data. We're not just discussing the 'what' of this revolution; Sanjay and I are delving into the 'how,' with behind-the-scenes looks at strategic partnerships with NVIDIA and IBM that are crafting a more fortified cloud hardware and software ecosystem.
It's not all tech and tactics, though. Prepare to be moved by stories of empathy and leadership that echo the profound human journeys behind the tech empires. From Bangalore to Silicon Valley's boardrooms, Sanjay's narrative is a testament to the transformative power of service and the importance of grounding innovation with a human touch.
Hello and welcome to the Spark of Ages podcast, where we're going to talk to game changers of all kinds about their big, world-shaping ideas and what sparked them. I'm your host, Rajiv Parikh, and I'm the CEO and founder of Position Squared, a digital marketing company based in Palo Alto. So, yes, I'm a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but I'm also a business news junkie and a history nerd. I'm fascinated by how big world-changing movements go from the spark of an idea to an innovation that reshapes our lives. In every episode, we're going to do a deep dive with our guests about what led them to their own eureka moments and how they're going about executing it. And, perhaps most importantly, how do they get other people to believe in them so that their idea can also become a spark for the ages.
Rajiv Parikh:
This is the Spark of Ages podcast. In addition to myself, we have our producer, sandeep, who will occasionally chime in and make sure we don't get too in the weeds with our tech jargon. Yes, and I have a task cut out for me today, because I know nothing about data security and management.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah, we do.
Rajiv Parikh:
We talk today about cold secondary storage. Yes, but somehow… but just by security and AI. It's going to be freaking cool, but somehow it's still sexy. It's still sexy. Storage becomes sexy.
Rajiv Parikh:
I think we're going to be in good hands because, according to CRN. com, "data management specialist Cohesity has landed one of the hottest executives in the IT industry, hiring former VMware superstar, sanjay Poonen, as its president and CEO. Sanjay is going to help us understand why it's a really interesting category and why it's so important to how we live our daily lives. So let me talk about my buddy, Sanjay. I've known him for so many years. He's an amazing person and I'm just totally blessed to have him here with us. He's the chief executive officer and president of Cohesity, and the mission of Cohesity is to radically simplify how organizations manage their data and unlock limitless value.
Rajiv Parikh:
Sanjay is a proven business executive with over 25 years of experience in scaling multi-billion that's, b illion-dollar businesses and building extremely strong teams. Most recently, Sanjay was the COO of VMware another very fast-growing company, hot company in the world, where he saw sales, marketing and services and alliances, and he enabled VMware to double its revenue from $6 billion to $12 billion in revenue during his time. Sanjay began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft and Apple and has an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated with a Baker Scholar I can't believe it a Baker Scholar that actually became a business leader, which designates his position in the top 5% of his graduating class. He has a master's degree in management, science and engineering from Stanford University and a bachelor's degree in computer science, math and engineering from Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, sanjay, welcome to the Spark of Ages.
Sanjay Poonen:
Thank you, Rajiv and Sandeep, really delighted to be on your show and we know each other for many years, including from the educational context. That's very gracious, you didn't need to read all of that out, but I'm honored.
Rajiv Parikh:
Let me just say it's pretty embarrassing to have Stanford up there. I mean, it's not an Ivy like the other ones, that's pretty.
Sanjay Poonen:
I don't know that's a pretty dark mark on your record there, and I do wonder about that management and science degree. I mean I kind of wonder if that's a real thing. We can go anywhere you want to in this conversation.
Rajiv Parikh:
So, Sanjay, really glad to have you here. You and I, like you say, have known each other since our time at HBS, and I and I've been tracking your career and your career rise. You were originally a software engineer and over time you built your own companies and then you got into executive management and now you're leading this amazing company that is currently private and may one day go public, and so I'm really excited about having this conversation because there's so much to learn. So let's start off with Cohesity's big news. A few months ago, you announced the merger with Veritas, and how does this change your business and how do you see it reshaping your industry? Thanks Rajiv. You know, I got here 21 months ago in August 2022. This sector which is protecting data from attacks but then also providing insights.
Sanjay Poonen:
Our mission has been to manage, protect and secure the world's data and provide insights into that. That's kind of what we've done for 10 years, but it's a very fragmented industry. We're number eight in that industry, growing the fastest of anybody, and probably the one that everyone thinks has the best technology, as sort of evidenced by the customer base. We have 4,500 customers and the who's who, 45% of the Fortune 100, some very big names but we're still number eight in the market even though we're growing the fastest. The number one in the market is 11%. So in a fragmented market like that, we asked ourselves how can we, if our goal is to get to number one, how do we go faster to that future? And Veritas I'd worked at Veritas, actually 20 years ago, so I know the company very well. I've not been in this space, but I'd followed it a little bit from the outside. The last eight years I was at VMware, so I'd lost a little bit of touch of what had happened in the space. But as I looked at the space, I remembered Veritas and they were sitting inside Carlisle who owned them, and we had a discussion, you know, starting about october, november 2022, and then it took us several months almost 12, 15 months to put this announcement together. I think it's one of the most uh, seminal announcements in our space.
Sanjay Poonen:
The biggest transaction, certainly the data protection industry. It's a seven billion dollar deal where number eight is technically acquiring the data protection assets out of Veritas and spinning out some of the remainder of it into a company called Dataco. So we announced that on February 8th. It's a very creative structure. It's a combination of debt and equity, but it'll put together number eight plus number three will put us in number one. We are obviously working through the regulatory process to get all the approvals. We expect it to close in the early fall and it puts us in a much better place. So our choices were to go public this year on our own. That's right. Really good set of numbers that could have gotten us there. We are imminently pre-cash flow positive, growing fairly fast, but we thought we'd go out. One of our I call them honorable competitors, rubrik, went out in the last few weeks. Commvault was another competitor who had been around public for another I think 15, 20 years already.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah they've been around forever, for quite a while. So there are comparables in this space and we want all of the space to do well. So we wish all of them well. But we felt we'd be in a much better position to go public at more than twice either of their sizes. The big difference is we would be a lot more profitable. So you'd be taking the fast growth of Cohesity combining with the I mean Veritas is immensely profitable and you get a company that's easily rule of 40, 27% free cash flow margin growing about mid-teens. That's a very profitable company. The revenue of the pro forma revenue will be 1.6. So going into next year we'd easily be a $1.8 billion company.
Sanjay Poonen:
If we forward 12 months from there, let's call ourselves a $2 billion company. A $2 billion revenue company at sort of 27% pre-cash flow margins, growing, let's say, mid-teens, is a very attractive company to the public and while we had to load up a financial structure to make that happen, the feedback from customers has been immensely positive about the roadmap, the innovation and speed that Cohesty is going to bring to the scale and the customer base that Veritas has. So I'm very excited about it. The advisors, the bankers, the lawyers who helped us on. This is very creative deal-making. I'm not a deal-making junkie, but if you are, this is one of the most creative deals done in the last.
Rajiv Parikh:
I'd say 10, 15 years. The interesting part is you're buying a company much bigger in revenue than you are, although I think you guys, as Cohesity, were growing much faster in your younger company. You're also taking over. You're the fast emerging player taking over. So if Tom's is like, I want to buy Nike, so I'm just curious, how do you have this sort of audacity, the bravery as the CEO to be like, yeah, we're going to do this.
Sanjay Poonen:
Salim, that's actually a really good question and in fact I told my wife I'm an immigrant, I came to this country and I mean only in the United States could a sort of smaller, poorer company? We don't have a lot of cash on our balance sheet. We have some, but it's usually a kind of fund cash flow for operations. We are imminently cash flow positive this quarter, so we don't have a lot of cash to do this deal. How can we buy a company twice our size? We're about circa 540 million run rate there, about 1.1 together well, 1.6. So one third is us, two thirds are them.
Sanjay Poonen:
Listen, debt and equity can buy anything, theoretically speaking, but you have to make sure that the new entity can service the amount of debt that you are paying. So you can only do this if the asset that you're buying is extremely profitable, unless you're profitable already. If you're profitable, doing well, you probably would go public. But we are not public and I think it also works well with two private companies. When you're public, you have to deal with shareholders and shareholder approvals and stock prices that go up and down, and then a rumor happens, the stock price pops up.
Rajiv Parikh:
Hitting your quarterly by a penny right.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah, and quite frankly, you're worried about a leak. We were worried about a leak for 15 months. But listen, the price was decided fairly on and we weren't greedy about the price because inside that $7 billion is the price of us and the price of them. But we felt the more important factor was not. We could have argued it's not worth seven, it's worth eight or nine, but that's like paper money. I'd rather value it at some money that's not under what we are we should be worth, or also extravagant. I don't believe in these sort of extravagant valuations that are for private companies. I'd, more importantly, want to go public at 14, 15, 18. I mean just kind of create a 20, $25 billion market cap only to go public. Which next year? I think the situation for Veritas sitting inside Carlyle. Their only option was to go public or get sold, and I think it was a tougher path for them to go public because they weren't growing as fast. That's probably what created a necessity on their side.
Rajiv Parikh:
Kind of why they were bought by Carlisle in the first place right In the first place.
Sanjay Poonen:
The hope was, when you buy a company private, you can sell it to somebody else or you take it public. I don't know if they had shopped it to other people. I think we had looked at them at VMware, but I think, listen, then the rest of a dynamics or deal is friendships. Right, it's all you know. The other deal is two sides who like each other, who believe the common vision, and that's really. You got to take weeks and months and you know both. Patrick McCarter, who is the partner from Carlisle, greg Hughes is the CEO of Veritas. We've been I mean, greg and I have been friends for 20 years and we're egoless about it. I don't care if I'm the ceo, he's the ceo. We believe that the combination of cohesiveness could help customers, could help our employees, and the joint company would be a better ipo than either of us on our own. That's like when you see that and you're egoless about it, hey, a deal could happen but why isn't it like veritas buying you guys as the smaller company?
Sanjay Poonen:
it'd be too hard for them because they'd have to take a lot more cash to buy us out right, I mean a private equity company. They've already made that. They've already taken debt to do their deal. They'd have to take more debt to buy us out. The only way you'd do that is you'd have to buy us. They've already got a deal that's got debt.
Rajiv Parikh:
Because Cohesity is growing so fast and has in its market a strong position and Veritas does as well, they command a higher valuation relative to Veritas' revenue, so they'll have a much higher valuation. So for them to do it the other way around, they'd have to, as Sanjay said, load themselves with so much debt that it would be very difficult to pull off. So Sanjay could, or his advisory team could, construct a really interesting debt and equity transaction that puts it together, that packages it so that when they go public they're getting some of the best of both right. So if you think about some of this, there's because of the higher revenue and the higher eventual and the fact that it's profitable, there'll be more investors that will be interested in buying that public entity than maybe just necessarily the super fast turbocharged cohesity company yeah, cohesity entity well said, private equity firms take debt.
Sanjay Poonen:
They finance a deal through debt and equity and they make that happen. That's been six years ago and for a variety of reasons. You have to then ask yourself, when that debt matures, what do you do with the company? You refinance and so on and so forth. And the debt on Veritas was done in very attractive terms. But I think these are all aspects of timing of a deal. The timing of the deal was good, the friendship between the two firms were great, our common customer base was helpful and we had a common vision of what we could do as a bigger company together. That brought innovation. This is, I mean. While we're talking a lot about the financial aspects here, the bigger aspect is we will have an engineering team. That's twice some of our other modern competitors. These are honorable competitors, but we'll be bigger than Rubrik and Conval's engineering team put together.
Rajiv Parikh:
Can you talk about that innovation and what led you to coming to Cohesity in the first place? Right Like, explain the story, because I think it's a really cool story of how what could have been just a bunch of tape storage devices managed into something much more interesting because of today's more open and need to be secure environment.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah, I think, as you put it, 20 years ago when I was at Veritas, it was a storage discussion. What has changed in the last five years is ransomware attacks. Every ransomware attack right now is going after what's called secondary data. Think of data like an iceberg. Primary data is where you store your databases, things that are hot for a day, week, month, and then, as it ages, you push it to the bottom of that iceberg. It's called secondary data. Backup, archive, vaulted data is all there. The bad guys decide, hey, the secondary data is just a historic time series index of everything you've kept. Let's go off to the secondary data because that's all your data. It's going to probably cause more pain and they do everything, from what's called single extortion to double extortion to triple extortion, which is I'm going to corrupt that data, I'm going to exfiltrate that data, I'm going to affect the supply chain of that data. So secondary data has become the most common attack vector backup data and, as a result, this has transformed from a storage discussion to a security discussion, and every CISO has budget to protect their data. Data is the goal. So, as they think about that, this has quickly transformed and I saw that happening.
Sanjay Poonen:
All of us in our space right now are talking about terms like data security and cyber resilience. So it's not just us, everybody is doing that which is good for the industry. We're all collectively now approaching the cso a lot more than just the infrastructure person having in anything. That's one that I saw that coming in and was part of the reason. Uh, you know, when a boardroom topic yes, I'm on a couple of boards are very much about cyber security and ransom, this topic is relevant. But the other thing I didn't see as clearly I had some inklings of it in August 22, was, I felt, the data. If all the world's data. Remember our mission is to protect, secure and manage the world's data and provide insights into it. That provide insights part. If all of the world's data sits on our platform, hundreds of exabytes, in due course that should be a treasure trove of analytics, because all of your historical data sits there at a bank or a hospital or the government or whatever have you. You should be able to search and analyze it just like. So we become, in some senses, the snowflakes or data bricks of secondary data.
Sanjay Poonen:
I felt that was an important opportunity and I called it at the time I joined analytics, I didn't call it AI, I called it analytics. What happened last year was something that was remarkable. When ChatGPT came out, I was playing with ChatGPT to ask it to summarize speeches. I'd given 15, 20 years at SAP on analytics. That was pretty remarkable. And then I would ask it to summarize. You know other people. I respected how they spoke. It was very amazing. I found it to be the world's best summarization tool of some large amount of data. So I was like who's gonna win in this? Clearly, the companies will build great open AI. Now, of course, you've seen you know Omni and all the kinds of new stuff with-.
Sanjay Poonen:
Really amazing stuff. Yeah, it's amazing. But the companies are gonna win are the companies who have the data. Google, microsoft, have a lot of data in their systems, the snowflakes, the data bricks as they use these tools. Well, if the world's data is on our platform, do you think it's possible for us to build a copilot, chat, gpd that can search and summarize cohesive based backup data?
Sanjay Poonen:
So I went to Microsoft I know Satya Nadella very well and asked him you know is, do you think that GPT-4 and at that time, gpt-3, openai? He said, yeah, there's this technique in computer science called retrieval augmented generation, rag, which I knew nothing about. I thought RAG was a piece of cloth you wipe your windshield with. That's all I knew about RAG. So we came back and we studied everything we could download about RAG from the computer science papers. We looked at computer science research on how to do it for structured data and we found it to be remarkably powerful to the way in which we could build that for our system without requiring rehydration of data. So we implemented that.
Sanjay Poonen:
And then along came NVIDIA towards the end of last year and said listen, we're amazed at what you're doing, we'd like you to take an investment from us and we'd like you to build the product. It's called Gaia, a generative AI app. Gaia is also kind of a Greek goddess of motherhood, so we did that. March this year, jensen, in his speech at GTC which is just like, if you look straight across there, it's the SAP Center talked about Cohesity as the only company in this space and why they were making investments. His words were Cohesity is sitting on a gold mine of data Hundreds of exabytes. We're excited that NVIDIA is going to be working with Cohesity to build Gaia on top of the NVIDIA GPU set.
Rajiv Parikh:
In a way, when I think about RAG and RAG is a term used in the industry you guys were really early in it. Nowadays it's become as part of what these large language models like OpenAI, chatgpt, anthropic, our friends at Cohere they've basically built as the business application. So, because you guys were early and you're sitting on so much data, in a way you're building. You're building the ability to get access to much more intelligent analyses of your information that you ever had before and I wonder if you could you just give up? So you know, when you talk about primary and secondary data to us geeks, we get it, but if you were to say like I don't know, I'm a company, get it.
Sanjay Poonen:
I'm a company. Someone that didn't get it wants to know more about it explain.
Rajiv Parikh:
Explain it to my mother, not your mother, because your mother's really bright and sharp, hey my mom's really sharp too, but I but she would want a more straightforward explanation.
Sanjay Poonen:
So all of your data that you use an email, I think not necessarily consumer data it could be consumer data too but your enterprise data. If you're a business and you're sending emails at some point in time, that emails get archived into kind of what's called a backup or a vault or an archive, a snapshot. That's typically where it goes below that line of the iceberg. That line of the iceberg and the policy of when you make that is a function of when people say, well, it's no longer being searched, it's no longer active. It could be a month, it could be a year, but we still have to retain those emails. We can't delete them. So you probably don't have your 10-year-old email sitting in the active system, which you can do, because people are like I'm not looking for my emails from 10 years ago, can you bring those back?
Sanjay Poonen:
So at some point in time, every company emails just form one form of unstructured data All of your Word files, your PDF files if you've been at a company 10, 15, 100 years is all there, but all of it doesn't need to be in some OneDrive location where you can get to it At some point in time. It will set a policy that basically backs that up. You can think of secondary data as all your backup data. Very simply put For both unstructured and structured data are things like databases.
Rajiv Parikh:
It's put into a database, a structure. So you can imagine a company has tons of transaction data and tons of unstructured data, emails, documents, whatever. It doesn't make sense to put it in your expensive disk-based servers or flash drive-based servers. You're going to put it in what they call secondary storage in a lower-cost place.
Sanjay Poonen:
You're putting it in the basement.
Rajiv Parikh:
You know what? I got a question. Maybe there's a lawsuit, or maybe there's some IP I created 10 years ago and I need to support that filing. And then the AI capability on top of it is letting you ask questions of it in a way that you couldn't ask before. Is that?
Sanjay Poonen:
fair.
Rajiv Parikh:
So my brain works in analogies. This is what I'm imagining, and you tell me if I'm right. You have a bunch of data. It's very important to keep it secure. So you hire these security guards to walk through your treasure trove of data and make sure that, hey, there's no bugs in here, there's nobody sniffing around, nobody hiding in here to steal your data. But while those guys are down there, they're not just buff security guards with awesome armor, they are also brilliant, turns out. They are chess players as well, and they're analyzing your data while they're keeping it safe, and sort of setting up the Dewey Decimal System for you so that you can really easily access the important parts of your data while making sure there are no nasty bugs in there. Is that something like?
Sanjay Poonen:
that? Yeah, absolutely so. Rajiv used the term structured and unstructured data. Think of structured data as data that sits in a. It's like a spreadsheet. It's a database. So anything that sits in a set of cells in an Excel spreadsheet is usually when you have lots of it it's called a database. Unstructured data is like your emails and your Word files and all your documents. All of that data at some point in time gets stored in a bag. In the old days it used to be tape. In some places it's still tape, but it can be stored in what's called colder storage. It doesn't need to be in the hotter storage that needs to be actively accessed.
Rajiv Parikh:
And the idea is that that stuff is still vulnerable.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah. So the first thing you have to acknowledge is it's very vulnerable because the bad guys decided you've got a lot of security defenses around your primary data. You're doing that, you're actively looking at it, because that's your snowflake, your Oracle databases, your Word files, all that's active there. You've got lots of defenses around that, but you could be a little lapsed. All that data on your secondary data, on your backup data, it's sitting there in a vault. Someone attacks it and the sophistication of ransomware attacks was oriented around that, because it's all your historical data and at some point in time someone does ask a historical question what did I do five years ago? What did I do 10 years ago? And in many cases, you are required to keep that data. So the first thing you have to do is make sure that data is secure. This industry is called data protection. You got to protect it and the advances in security have had to be significantly strengthened. That's why I said this has become a security problem. However, just keeping that data secure on its own without ability to get access to it, now the reason it was very hard to search and analyze that data. You have to understand that everybody in industry takes secondary data and they do what's called compress the data by doing what's called dedupe. So you remove a lot of the duplication of ones and zeros and you compress it into something highly compressed. That's really, by the way, what happens on a tape. You take this very expansive data, you compress it and put it into it. So when you want to recover it, you first have to do what's called rehydrate the data. You've got to take that data, unpack it, rehydrate it and then you can search it. That's an expensive proposition in time, not expensive in computer resources and as a result, it takes much longer to search it. Genitive, ai and chat, gpt and this is the breakthrough. So we have a patent, pending on the way in which we use RAG, to be able to directly search our backup data.
Sanjay Poonen:
So Rajiv may ask a question, exactly like he pointed out. Hey, 10 years ago I wrote a bunch of risk documents or we had a bunch of loans that we offered 10 years ago. This is a financial services, a bank. Can you summarize for me what we did? Or maybe you have hundreds of contracts from the past and you want to know the terms you offered particular vendors and so on from those contracts? It's all in documents, chat, gbt and retrieval of intergeneration, combined with LLMs, is the best summarization tool. I've never seen anything as powerful in AI at summarizing a vast amount of data.
Sanjay Poonen:
So there's a lot of technology behind this, like vector databases and so on, but we built that capability really fast last six, 12 months patented, applied for a patent on it because we expected our competitors would try to copy us, kept it under stealth and then at the GTC event with Jensen, both announced the investment of NVIDIA in our company. So all of this is happening. By the way, march is a month after we announced Veritas. We've had just a kind of a rolling thunder. In February we announced Veritas, march we announced this investment and the big Gaia launch with NVIDIA. Around April, ibm says they're investing in us and then hopefully by August, september, october, we'll close this deal. So I think it's an exciting time and we're just trying to basically make these two vectors security and AI the two vectors that drive our innovation. Nobody else in our industry are taking advantage of those innovations as much as we are.
Rajiv Parikh:
I love that. I love the way you explain it and the example and the technology behind it, because you're right, I mean you would think of storage as not as unsexy. And then you add the security element and it becomes much more interesting because people are finding a way to get into it. And that was some of the genius of your co-founder, mohit, who is a really incredible entrepreneur right, who saw this opening right coming out of his background. And then you add AI to it and then you even add way more value for what people would consider, like you know, you're talking about cold storage. This is really exciting.
Sanjay Poonen:
It's really transformed this. I give a lot of credit to Mohith. He invented hyperconverged. He doesn't get enough credit I think he deserves, for inventing HyperConverged and Nutanix and then taking that same invention to secondary stores in our segment. And then, of course, everybody in the industry has emulated that architecture. A year after us Rubrik was formed, they copied this architecture. There was a company called Hedwig that Comwell acquired, copied this, and even Veritas built an appliance that was copied out more it's more than invented. The way in which you do this in 2013, that spawned every company since then and their innovations, whether it was rubric, whether it's common, whether it's even parentage and you, ultimately, you can't invent even what we're doing in general. Everyone will have a patent, but everyone will eventually emulate it. You want to be the first in an industry to do something that's what innovators really thrive on, and, as as long as you can, you want to be the first, and only right now we're the first and only doing this generative ai stuff. At some point in time, we'll be first and everyone copies.
Rajiv Parikh:
That's okay after they hear this podcast. Probably it's hard to.
Sanjay Poonen:
You need a very sharp engineering team. That I mean. There's a lot of innovation and how we built rag for backup. That requires you to have a file system that we've got. So it is a lot.
Rajiv Parikh:
There's a lot behind it. And then here's the other one. And so when I think about all this innovation that you've built up, there's also a point of view that you have as a CEO and you've been in this industry a long time in the technology industry and the various players in the industry industry a long time in the technology industry, and the various players in the industry. And so I think about, like you mentioned, hey, my investors include IBM, nvidia, hp, cisco, amazon right, you have all these players who are in it. And then there are security players that you're playing with. You're working with Tons of competitor and potentially competitors. There are firms that you're cooperating with. How do you think about the the industry like that? Because a lot of times in the industry, especially in the tech industry, it'd be like java versus you know sun, java versus microsoft, or you know this competitor versus that competitor, and they try to knock each other out. But you've taken a more just a, a more expansive point of, and maybe you could describe that.
Sanjay Poonen:
That's a great question, rajiv. It's a, you know, for me I don't have any. I mean, there was competitive rivalry between us and Rubrik when the company started. You know, what I'm told is that when Cohisti started, you know, some of the folks at Rubrik were on the board of Nutanix, you know. So there's a little bit of rivalry that started from the butt of this company, of Nutanix Conocati. So there's a little bit of rivalry that started from the birth of this company.
Sanjay Poonen:
But I don't have anything personal in this industry. I want everybody to be successful. We certainly have to show to the market and to customers why we're the best tech. But it's a little bit like the car industry. Let's just say we're Tesla. Are you going to go and tell a person who has a Ford or a GM or a Toyota that they have a bad car? No, it's a great car. You want to show them why your car is better.
Sanjay Poonen:
Ok, so I always when, when the first off I've put into the company's DNA, we will call our competitors honorable competitors. I mean, they are good cars, it works for companies and we're going to be respectful, compete with dignity, but then differentiate. You have to differentiate Right. We differentiate and we often talk about them in your mean, rajiv. You're a marketing expert, so you'll appreciate this. We talk about five S's that make us unique, and none of the S's have to do with Sanjay. Okay, I'll give you. Number one is speed, number two is scale, number three is security, number four is simplicity and number five is smart. And each of those have a simple way by which our sales teams and marketing teams can articulate that. And I start with that perspective because, while it's a competitive industry and, yes, we're going from number eight to number one we have very clear confidence as to why we're different, but we also believe that our competitors are worthy Competitors are doing good stuff.
Rajiv Parikh:
Yeah, you hear that, elon. None of those S's were sexy. So Elon, back off with that. Simplicity might be the closest decision.
Sanjay Poonen:
I think that then you basically look at the ecosystem, which is, I think, the heart of your question, and ask yourself how should you sort through the ecosystem? So I start with probably the most important ecosystem in any company right now is the cloud ecosystem, because they are the biggest Amazon's $100 billion. Aws is a $100 billion revenue company. Aws is an investor in us. Four years ago they looked at the space and decided Cohesity was the winner and we've done a lot with them. Google's also an investor in us. Microsoft's partnering more with us. So the public cloud players AWS, azure, google, if you count the private cloud being VMware, nutanix, red Hat that cloud ecosystem is super important to us, whether it's private cloud, vmware, red Hat, nutanix or public cloud, aws, azure, google. And, if you want to include a fourth, oracle. We haven't as yet figured out our China strategies, whether we go with Alibaba, but those are the cloud players.
Sanjay Poonen:
Secondly, you look at sort of the I would say the hardware players and ask yourself because many of these places we are sitting inside server, not all the way down to the chip level, except for NVIDIA. So HPE, dell, cisco, lenovo, hp and Cisco have invested in us. Dell is also a partner of ours. We work with all of them. So we have to work with those hardware players, in some cases also white box, super micro capabilities, and similarly, the storage players NetApp, pure, vast variety of storage players, emc very important to our ecosystem because we have to integrate with them. And then, similarly, you can go down to even the chip level NVIDIA in the case of GPUs and Intel in the case of CPUs and AMD, because there are things we can do with confidential compute and security there. So that's how I would describe everything in the hardware.
Sanjay Poonen:
And then the final group of ecosystem players among the tech players is the software security players Palo Alto, crowdstrike, zscaler, so we've ranked the top five, 10 security players. So those are the ecosystem of cloud hardware, software, and we have a very large envelope. We have one of the best ecosystems of any player in our industry and that takes personal work on my part to call those CEOs, build them. For example, ibm decided they're a competitor of ours 15 months ago. I began talking to Arvind and the team. They decided to stop investing as much in Tivoli, their product Spectrum, protect their product in this area Right and OEM Cohesity as their. So number four in the space. Ibm is now partnering with us. It's a huge game changer and our partnership is just going month to month to month, quarter to quarter. They're now investing in us.
Rajiv Parikh:
So they started as competitors and then they moved into this partnership.
Sanjay Poonen:
They've been in the space for 50 years. They had a product called Tivoli that they acquired in the 1990s. That became a storage manager. It used to be called Tivoli Storage man at TSM when I was at Veritas in 2004,. 20 years ago, our arch competitor was IBM. Now they've fallen off and not invested much and these newer companies like Cohesity have been taking share from them.
Sanjay Poonen:
And I called Arvind and said listen, why do you want to fight us? You're not really present in that world. You're donating to that. Why don't we partner? And his team looked at us and said we respect you as having the best tech. The biggest customers were picking Cohesio, so they knew we were the best tech. And I said listen, what do we not have? Distribution we're not in Latin America and Europe and APJ we have a good presence in North America. You are there. What do you need? Our tech? Let's work together to find. And as long as you don't want to build that tech yourself and they're willing to partner and then not just partner but potentially also invest in us as a company, we'll partner with you and we will let you take the lead at those customers and sell.
Sanjay Poonen:
So they created a product called Defender Data Protect IBM Defender Data Protect, which underneath covers just Coviste, and they sell Defender DataProtect, which underneath covers just Cohesity, and they sell Defender DataProtect to their customers. And I make sure that at those accounts, if it's an IBM centric account, our reps help them sell Defend and data protect. Don't collide with them with our own. I mean, what's the point in selling your own car against it? They're selling your car. No, we may get a little less out of that as opposed to going direct, but every time you work with IBM they're bringing you into 10 new deals and it really helps our reps because in many cases we don't have the distribution we need in these countries. We're a much smaller company without the brand and IBM is such an incredible brand they have access to all the executives and all the it.
Rajiv Parikh:
Top it all, the executives, they're working them.
Sanjay Poonen:
And the ibm, right, everyone's just had enormous renaissance of the company. It's now approaching 200 billion. So it's the same way. There you kind of go and ask every company it's important to space, hey, can we partner with you? What's the way in which we?
Rajiv Parikh:
angle it like shack and kobe, going at each other for years and eventually being like, hey, let's just be on the same team.
Sanjay Poonen:
No, I just said listen, you know, if I haven't been 20, 30 years in the industry, I have relationships with CEO levels of everyone in these tech companies. You know Rajiv. You know Andy Jassy was a classmate of ours.
Rajiv Parikh:
Managing in the market space.
Sanjay Poonen:
So I can get a call, in a meeting with any of them and then you work on it hard.
Rajiv Parikh:
I think your point about this we had a growth marketing summit and one of the folks that spoke and you might know him Avinash Sahai. He talked about the importance of building ecosystems. Right, because that's what he's been doing all his life and part of the ecosystem is saying well, I win by making my partners win, and I have to have an expansive enough view so we know where we compete, where we partner, where the edges are, but in the end, you have to make both sides win and you have to tilt it in such a way that it works. So I love that point of view.
Rajiv Parikh:
It's a really interesting point of view and what I want to do is kind of shift over to what sparked you to think like this and what sparked you to get into this whole world that you're in today. You went to great schools, you were able to come to the US and take your natural inclination or your natural desires forward, and you also went into data analytics as part of your journey. What kind of got you to that point? What made you say this is the kind of path I want? Did you think about it early on or did you let it flow as you went?
Sanjay Poonen:
I think it's more of the I mean listen, I mean I think at the core of it, my mom was a big influence in my life. She's a very humble person. I think everything I get about how I deal with people it's a good story. My mom's a good story. My mom's a doctor in India. We just moved them from India to the US four or five years ago to live here as they've gotten older. But they've lived most of their life and my dad and mom have been involved in social service a lot of their life and my dad's helped plant a number of churches in India.
Sanjay Poonen:
But my mom was a doctor who left one of the top medical schools in India, a school called CMC in Ballor, and went to serve in a leprosy hospital near Mumbai. And leprosy is now more or less eradicated from the world, but in the 1960s there's still a fair amount of leprosy. And she's really been doing medical work all of her life, not for money but to help society and help people. I mean without and really hasn't done it for much of a fee. So I saw her serve the medical profession in India. I mean, yes, you can make money off it, but there's so much disease and so much of you know challenges that people have with poverty, that you do it for a cause, not because you're trying to make a career I mean you, yeah, in a famous hospital, not today, but some of the most strangest diseases you will see in countries like India and Africa developing countries. So I saw that and I mean she really, you know, taught us all like, listen you, you, you help the poor and you help the people who are underprivileged. You help the people who have less than you and you help the people who are underprivileged. You help the people who have less than you and you don't get your identity in life by. You know, when we die we're not going to be able to take our title and our bank balance into the grave. It's like, what impact did you have on society? How much character did you leave back with your kids, your family, your friends? Those are things that really matter, but I think those are the soft things that really influence.
Sanjay Poonen:
On the business side, rajiv, I didn't know I was going to go to Harvard Business School. I wanted to really study engineering. I came to the US because they offered me a scholarship to study computer science at Dartmouth. I thought I'd never been to Hanover, new Mexico. Can you imagine a boy from Bangalore with really warm-. I grew up in New Hampshire.
Rajiv Parikh:
It's so cool. I fell in love with it when we were seven years old. When I was seven years old, and and I was in Manchester, new Hampshire, which was a city, and Hanover is really out there, coming from a town at the time bangalore's 45 million really warm, freezing cold in New Hampshire, oh my god.
Sanjay Poonen:
I mean, yes, I did speak English, because a lot of Indians speak English in India, so the language is okay. But I was. There was a culture. I mean, if you've seen the movie Animal House, it's about Dartmouth, it's done by Dartmouth grads, about Dartmouth, so it's a complete culture shock.
Sanjay Poonen:
But I think when I came out of Dartmouth and I did, between my junior and senior year, about six, eight months at Microsoft was my first exposure to a tech company that was doing really well, and then I wanted to come to Silicon Valley to work at Apple and it was my dream job.
Sanjay Poonen:
I came to work at Apple. My only thing that I wanted in the 1990s was write good code and be an engineer, and I was the youngest engineer at Apple in my group, learning a ton, but around 95, the project we were working on at Apple was not going anywhere and my uncle, who was also the same uncle who lived in boston, that advised me to, you know, kind of consider coming to dartmond. So hey, why don't you take some time off if you haven't figured out what you want to do and go to business school and you know, listen, I mean I don't know. I tell people some of these admissions to schools is not intuitive. I applied to a whole bunch of business schools, got rejected at every place except dark, except harvard. I got rejected at 10.
Rajiv Parikh:
So it's because the rest of them heard you got into Harvard so they're like forget it.
Sanjay Poonen:
Okay, it is what it is, because they wanted you to hang out with me, because that's the only school I applied to.
Sanjay Poonen:
So I think when I went to business school I began to see a different side of tech, which was more the business side, and I got intrigued by it.
Sanjay Poonen:
So my favorite classes were finance and competitive strategy and marketing. And I came back after business school and became a product manager at Alpha Blocks and that's where I began to really get really intrigued by the business aspects of tech. But prior to that there was no master plan, it was just the river was flowing, and then the river flowed a different way. And then, of course, since 97, 99, the year 2000, and I would say the two formative careers were my eight years at SAP and my eight years at VMware. That really helped me learn a lot about what it meant to run a global company, ie SAP, and then, where we took the company from 10 to 20 billion I was president there and then to really help VMware scale that was an applications industry but then the infrastructure and learn VMware COO, where we were very fortunate to grow the company from 6 to 12. Those I would say 16 years were immense learning.
Rajiv Parikh:
Is it fair to characterize it as you were sort of. It seems like you were sort of driven by empathy, in the sense of wanting to impact the most amount of people. If you're growing up seeing your mom help these people with leprosy, and if that's really what drove you, then is that what sort of carried you through wanting to go to business school, wanting to do all this stuff? I'm curious what's the why behind making these big jumps?
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah, I mean, by the time we were born I'm the oldest of four boys. Why, behind making these big jumps, I'm the oldest of four boys. My mom had stopped working. That was before she got married. I think by the time we were born my mom was just doing medical work, kind of a more ad hoc to help people, I think the basis of caring for the underprivileged, the underdog. I mean.
Sanjay Poonen:
Growing up in school I wasn't very popular. I was bullied, I had thick glasses, so I learned that my home was a kind of a tower of refuge in the midst of. I mean, I have a lot of empathy for kids who are being bullied, because I was bullied and it created a sense of like. Even though I was not popular at school, did well academically, I was safe at home, and it made me really realize, hey, listen, that's kind of what I want to have when I have a home and my kids are not popular at school, that they're bullied, they're going to know that they're completely safe and that parents love them. And and I think when you mean, let's imagine you're getting bullied by someone who's like well, I don't know bigger than you or richer than you, uh, when you compare you a lot to people who are less than you. Okay, like your bullying, like fades away. I mean it's like you're so thankful, like you. You know I always was, I was.
Sanjay Poonen:
I think part of the the aspect of being content is not to compare yourself to people more than you, but to compare yourself to people of less than you, and when you compare yourself to people less than you, you're thankful. Most discontent happens because people are greedy about what. They want more. They want more. And we're born I mean listen, we're born as grabbers. But I think the world is a much better place when you're a giver than a grabber. I love that. And you give your time, your talent, your treasure. That's right. I mean, talent and treasure are the three things we can all give, right. Treasure is money, talent is the gifts that you've been given, and time is, you know, 24 hours a day. So I think that's kind of how I've sought to live my life.
Sanjay Poonen:
Now. Those are, I would say, the impermeables, that when you now put that into an engineering context, you're just writing code. You're trying to help people in society, but in a managerial role, ultimately, as a CEO. Now you have a lot bigger of a platform. You know you can. Now, when I talk about that, now we talk about a servant leadership. People want to listen, people want to hear and I do leadership classes that I call Leadership. Now that I've done from my SAP VMware. I teach those classes myself. I probably put 2,000 or 3,000 employees between my SAP VMware and Core SD years through those. The most amazing thing employees tell me is Sanjay, you're willing to spend eight hours of a day teaching us. I said, yeah, why would I outsource that to someone in HR? I want you to learn and we're learning and teaching. Yeah, it's not like I'm, like you're building it together and you're sharing it and you're driving it.
Sanjay Poonen:
Sharing experiences with me. One of the things we do in our leadership classes is amazing. We run Experiences with me. One of the things we do in our leadership classes is amazing we do this exercise called a leadership journey. You plot on an axis the X axis is time and the Y axis are your highs and lows in life and I tell people, just for 10 minutes, tell us the story of your life. You can go way back to when you were born, but just plot when there were high moments in your life and when they're long. Tell us the story of your life. Yeah, and I start by emulating that myself and I tell people if somebody's life story is just one up into the right vector, they're being faked that.
Rajiv Parikh:
That's not real. That's not real, it's a real challenge.
Sanjay Poonen:
Some people say oh my, you know yeah I think.
Rajiv Parikh:
I think they want to characterize it as such, but we get stronger through these challenges you think I mean I.
Sanjay Poonen:
everyone sees my trajectory and says, oh, you were CEO of Embrace. Your life must have been up and running. I say no, no, Let me tell you the values of my life.
Rajiv Parikh:
This is one of our favorite parts of this. This is something that we do uniquely. Sundeep creates a game, okay, well, well, so you've you've been on spark of ages, but now you're in the spark tank, okay, so, uh, we're gonna play a game today.
Rajiv Parikh:
We're diving deep into the digital trenches with a mind-bending game of two truths and a fish okay okay, the cyber security edition here, so you're gonna have to determine which one of these of the three is the fish. Okay, two of these are actually true. So joining us here today, of course, in our battle of wits, is our special guest the CEO of a top tier data security company, a veritable cyber century, guarding the gates against digital doom. And, not to be outdone, my brother and co-host who thinks resetting his router is the pinnacle of tech support.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yes.
Rajiv Parikh:
All right Round. Number one Sony. Oh, poor, poor Sony. Which of these Sony hacks didn't actually happen? Number one in 2014, a hacking group known as the Guardians of Peace infiltrated a Sony Pictures Entertainment Studio, leaking entire movies, personal emails from executives and other sensitive data. Studio leaking entire movies, personal emails from executives and other sensitive data. Number two in 2017, hackers infiltrated Sony's music digital streaming platform, allegedly leaking unreleased albums from major artists like Beyonce and Kendrick. Number three in 2011, hackers accessed the Sony PlayStation network, compromising the personal data of approximately 77 million accounts, exploiting an outdated web applications to gain access to the network, bypassing security measures and leaking personal data, names, addresses and credit cards.
Sanjay Poonen:
One is definitely true. That happened. I can't decide of three and two. I think two is false. Three is accurate. I think two is false. Three is accurate.
Rajiv Parikh:
I actually had the same answer as Sanjay. I think I remember one. One is definitely true, okay, here we go, ding ding ding. You both get a point, well done.
Sanjay Poonen:
Hey, look at that. Yeah, even the router resetter got the point, all right.
Rajiv Parikh:
Number two these are more outlandish hacks. In 2014, a security researcher managed to hack the controls of an airplane mid-flight through the entertainment system on his seat. He claimed he issued the climb command which briefly changed the plane's course before the pilot regained control. Number two 2008, a teenager managed to hack the email account of then US Vice President candidate, sarah Palin, using information available on the internet to reset her password Password. I love the word. I think she probably just guessed password. One, two, three, all right. Number three 2018, a notorious hacker group successfully accessed the control systems of over 50 commercial satellites, orchestrating a satellite blackout, turning them off simultaneously for a brief period, causing global disruptions in communications and weather forecasting services.
Sanjay Poonen:
In 2018.
Rajiv Parikh:
Mm-hmm.
Sanjay Poonen:
I'm going to lock in my answer now. I got yours, I got mine. I think three was false. One and two may have been true, I don't know. I don't remember.
Rajiv Parikh:
Yeah, so I feel like it's number three as well, because if it had happened, we would have heard about it by now I would have heard about it, I don't remember.
Sanjay Poonen:
I mean when you go back to 2011, I forgot, but 2018 is like six years.
Rajiv Parikh:
the folks who designed the planes were dumb enough to connect the systems together. Especially if they're on the plane. You guys, ding, ding ding are again neck and neck because you're picking the same answers. Congratulations.
Rajiv Parikh:
Number three is the lie. Well done, all right, it was probably a Boeing plane that was hacked anyway. All right, round three Early hacking pioneers. In 1988. This is going back Robert Tappan Morris created the first known computer worm on the internet, the Morris worm. It was originally intended to measure the size of the internet but ended up causing a significant disruption due to a programming error, leading to thousands of computers being shut down. In 1983, a group of high school students from Milwaukee known as the 414s gained notoriety after hacking into systems at institutions like the Los Alamos National Library the.
Rajiv Parikh:
Sloke-Hettering Cancer Center and Security Pacific Bank and their exploits highlighted the vulnerabilities in early computer networks, raising awareness about the need for digital security. In 1972, a group called the Cambridge Consortium allegedly used ARPANET, the precursor to the internet, to infiltrate and manipulate the stock market transactions on the NASDAQ.
Sanjay Poonen:
These were all before I was born. Dude, I was born after 88.
Rajiv Parikh:
You're so young? You're younger than me. Wait a second.
Sanjay Poonen:
I'm kidding dude, I was born before. I'm just trying to fake my age here? I don't know, man. I'd have to look it up on google. That would be cheating. Yeah, you gotta get. What's your gut saying? I don't know? Oh gosh, I'm gonna guess. I'm just purely guessing.
Rajiv Parikh:
I have no basis of saying you get to guess first and rajiv has to guess something different, so we have a winner oh yeah, okay, I'll guess something different I'm gonna guess again.
Sanjay Poonen:
The third one is wrong. First you, you are right, but this one has no basis of.
Rajiv Parikh:
I actually was going to say number three too, but I'm going to support this point. I'm going to say it was. The person's name sounds too accurate, so it was number two. That's wrong. It's number two.
Sanjay Poonen:
Okay, we picked number two is wrong, I picked number three is wrong. Who wins bro?
Rajiv Parikh:
As we say, you know, as as Indians, guest is God, the winner is our guest, sanjay Poonen, number three the guest always wins, damn it.
Sanjay Poonen:
I had no idea I figured the way. One and two felt believable. The number three felt a little bit positive. Hey, Sandeep, I've got to listen to this podcast again to copy those three. Good research on your part, Very well done.
Rajiv Parikh:
Thank you, thank you, well, thank you so much, my pleasure.
Sanjay Poonen:
How much fun that last five minutes was, the forget listening to my own story. I like the last part, the last five minutes is the best five minutes of the show. Well.
Rajiv Parikh:
Sanjay, I want to really thank you for spending the time with us today sharing your life experiences. What got you here, how you see the transformation in the industry. I think there's so much for that budding entrepreneur someday, or even the person that's out there in daily life. But I want to really thank you for being here and what I learned from you, sanjay, before you go, is that I'm going to just remain customer-obsessed with maniacal focus and keep things Sesame Street simple and say vectors a lot that. I know that's the vector. We want to stay on focus and keep things Sesame street simple, so and and say vectors a lot that that, that that I know.
Rajiv Parikh:
So thanks so much. Okay, that was awesome, first of all, not just because he said, um, that was that were the most hilarious podcast ever, but I did like that. I think we are. My ego got really stroked there.
Rajiv Parikh:
I'm going to start with my takeaway, which is a couple things. One apparently you can buy bigger companies than yourself. I know that you guys in Silicon Valley do this stuff all the time, but I get it now. I didn't get it before, but now I get it. This stuff all the time, but I get it now.
Rajiv Parikh:
I didn't get it before, but now I get it as like, okay, if you are the first round draft pick, rising star like Webinyama or whatever, it's going to take a lot to pry him from the organization, right? You're going to have to sell the farm because they're buying into the potential, right? Whereas if you're like Al Horford, savvy veteran or whatever, it's like, hey, you know what he may be quote, unquote bigger in a lot of senses, but it's going to be easier for you to get him on your team rather than him getting you to come to his team. Yeah, and I think it's just like that. Al Horford, he was not worth as much to other teams, but to the Celtics he's worth a ton because of the way he plays in that system.
Rajiv Parikh:
And I think this is the game to understand is that when you're a savvy industry veteran like Sanjay, knowing what pieces to put together with what kind of pitch that meets everyone's needs at the right time. So, as he mentioned, like Carlisle needed to exit their investment from VMware, carlisle needed to exit their investment from VMware, cohesity needed to continue its scale and growth and get into various countries around the world and diversify its portfolio, and by putting together the right deal structure, you can enable everyone to win, even though you're taking on a much bigger player. And what he didn't mention is that he's managed much bigger operations before, and so for him it's a straightforward situation where everybody can win, and so one of the things I really took out of him and his life is that empathy that he has. That came from his mom and serving people. You're a doctor, so your level is, you're elevated in society, but you're serving the poorest and most challenging people, people who you don't want to touch.
Rajiv Parikh:
She's serving them and then she's bringing that home the lepers of the world yeah, right, she's bringing that home to her son, and her son, sanjay, sees that and says this is my example in my life, and then, when he becomes a leader, he expresses himself in what he's great at, which is these immense technology businesses. He can then bring that message to so many people. All right, hey, before we sign off, I had one more round. That I think is kind of cool. Do you want to play it real quick, the tiebreaker round? All right, let's go play the tiebreaker, all right? All right, because I think it's fun, okay.
Rajiv Parikh:
In 2019, a group of hackers successfully infiltrated the US Department of Defense using an AI-driven drone that mimicked the appearance and signature of a known maintenance vendor's vehicle. That's one Number two. In 2017, researchers demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack where they encoded malicious software into a physical strand of DNA. When this DNA was sequenced and processed by a computer vulnerable to the attack, it allowed them to gain remote control of the computer that was processing the DNA DNA. In 2013, hackers used the smart thermostat in a fish tank at a casino to gain access to this network. This unusual entry point allowed them to extract data from the casino's high roller database, demonstrating how seemingly innocuous devices could serve as gateways to more valuable digital resources.
Rajiv Parikh:
All right, so is it the DOD AI driven drone? Is it the physical strand of DNA? Or is it the fish tank at a casino? All two of these are true. Which one is the fish, I think? I think it's the single strand of dna, one that doesn't make sense to me. I feel like the drone is doable, because the drone may not have the right protocols. I mean dod, you think they have better security protocols, but maybe in the early days they didn't, and I could see, uh, casinos, folks all trying to figure out how to get into them. But the DNA one sounds difficult. Well, guess what? I'm wrong. You're wrong. It was in fact the DNA one. Is true, it did happen. This was researchers demonstrating a proof of concept attack, and they were able to successfully do it.
Rajiv Parikh:
Okay, I didn't hear that. Okay, got it yeah so that was the tricky part, so the one, that was the lie or the fish was Okay, yeah, go for it, you can call me double idiot, okay, so.
Sanjay Poonen:
Yeah, I'm happy to.
Rajiv Parikh:
Can't wait. Okay, I'm going to go. Is it the fish tank or is it the air driven drone? I think it's the fish tank. Is the lie? It's the lie. Am I wrong? Again, it gives me great pleasure to call you a double idiot.
Sanjay Poonen:
It is actually. You're such a goddamn moron.
Rajiv Parikh:
It actually is the yeah, the US Department of Defense. One is complete fish.
Sanjay Poonen:
That sounds so easy to do the actual fish tank is real they did hack a smart fish tank.
Rajiv Parikh:
I guess there'd be fewer security protocols on that, so that's probably easier than a DoD thing. Dod probably has a lot more restrictions on it. So there you go. I mean this is the creativity of hackers.
Sanjay Poonen:
Man.
Rajiv Parikh:
This is why you need Cohesity. Alright, thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the pod today, please take a moment to rate it and comment. You can find us on Apple, spotify, youtube, amazon and everywhere podcasts can be found. That's right. This show is produced by myself, sundeep Parikh and Anand Shah, production assistance by Taryn Talley and edited by Sean Maher and Aidan McGarvey. I'm your host, rajiv Parikh, from Position Squared, a top-notch growth marketing company based in Silicon Valley. Yes, we have AI too. Come visit us at position2.com. Yes, and I am AI, and this has been an F and Funny AI Production AI. We'll catch you the next AI time and remember folks, be ever curious with AI. You.