If You Knew What Could Go Wrong, You’d Never Start - The Founder’s Leap | Sujal Patel (Part 2/4) скачать в хорошем качестве

If You Knew What Could Go Wrong, You’d Never Start - The Founder’s Leap | Sujal Patel (Part 2/4)

Part 2 of 4 of our series with Sujal Patel, co-founder and CEO of Nautilus Biotechnology. In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we dive into Sujal Patel's bold decision to leave RealNetworks and co-found Isilon Systems, a distributed storage company built to solve a problem he witnessed firsthand — enterprise customers spending millions on storage systems that simply couldn't handle media files. Sujal shares how a pair of scissors on his desk became the unlikely symbol that pushed him and co-founder Paul Mikesell to finally take the leap. Sujal recounts the harrowing experience of launching a company at the peak of the dot-com collapse, watching his RealNetworks stock fall from $100 to $8, and still managing to close an $8.4 million Series A as the only such deal in Seattle that year. He walks through Isilon's early growth, landing marquee customers like Kodak by overdelivering on impossible timelines, and the painful but necessary decision to fire both the CEO and CFO of a public company — all while his wife was pregnant with twins — on the same day Lehman Brothers collapsed. Key Topics Covered: The "Scissors of Opportunity": How co-founder Paul Mikesell's challenge pushed Sujal to finally leave RealNetworks and bet on his distributed storage idea Fundraising in a Collapsing Market: Navigating 50 VC introductions, relentless pitch meetings, and a dot-com bubble in freefall to close Seattle's only Series A of 2001 Building Isilon from Zero: Using $400K of founders' capital to hire a team, build an alpha product, and hit milestones that unlocked Series B funding CEO Transition & Public Company Turbulence: Firing the CEO and CFO of a public company during the 2008 financial crisis and rebuilding the entire executive team The Path to Acquisition: Transforming Isilon from a -40% operating margin to a billion-dollar run rate in just 23 months under Sujal's leadership as CEO Subscribe to the Podcast: Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2PSL162... Youtube:    / @thebiotechstartupspodcast   Website: https://www.thebiotechstartupspodcast... Find our guest, Sujal Patel at these links: LinkedIn:   / patelsujal   Website: https://www.nautilus.bio/ Find our host, Jon Chee, at these links: LinkedIn:   / jonchee   Learn more about Excedr: LinkedIn:   / excedr   Website: https://www.excedr.com Intro & Outro Songs Created by OkKyojin, Owned by Excedr: Website: https://flow.page/kyojin Resources & Articles: Distributed computing (overview): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrib... Distributed file system (how scale-out storage works): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrib... SATA / Serial ATA :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA Minimum viable product (MVP):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum... Revenue recognition: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/... Chapter 11 bankruptcy (context for “Lehman Monday”): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/... ​ Companies, Universities, & People mentioned: NetApp: https://www.netapp.com ​Kodak: https://www.kodak.com ​Corbis: https://www.gettyimages.com/collectio... Rob Glaser:   / rob-glaser-431687   ​Craig Sherman:   / crsherman   ​Jeff Rothschild: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Ro... ​Dan Warmenhoven:   / danielwarmenhoven   ​Don Valentine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Val... ​Pierre Lamond:   / pierrelamond   Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:51 Spotting the Gap: Enterprise Storage Failing Media Files 07:04 The "Scissors of Opportunity" and Leaving RealNetworks 07:42 Day Zero: Taking the Leap During the Dot-Com Collapse 17:12 Building the MVP and Racing to Series B 21:03 Disrupting the Storage Market and Landing Kodak 26:04 Finding Early Adopters and Building Champions 28:06 Isilon's Growth Trajectory and Hiring a CEO 29:39 Going Public, Revenue Recognition Issues, and Firing the CEO & CFO 35:46 Navigating the 2008 Financial Crisis and Rebuilding the Team 40:24 The George Bennett Story: Recruiting the Transformative VP of Sales 43:45 Outro #TechEntrepreneurship #StartupFounders #BiotechStartups #RiskAndResilience #ScalingAStartup The Biotech Startups Podcast is powered by Excedr—helping life science startups accelerate R&D and commercialization with founder-friendly equipment leasing.