Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Garima Kapoor, Co-Founder of MinIO, located in Redwood Shores, CA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
MinIO is a high-performance, Kubernetes-native object-store. Optimized for the multi-cloud, MinIO delivers AWS S3-like infrastructure on public clouds, private clouds, Kubernetes distributions, and the edge. Enterprises use MinIO to deliver against ML/AI, analytics, backup, and archival workloads - all from a single platform. Remarkably simple to install and manage, MinIO offers a rich suite of enterprise features targeting security, resiliency, data protection, scalability, and identity management.
MinIO is open source under GNU AGPL v3 and has 10s of thousands of users. Commercial customers tend to be large enterprises with significant data footprints for which MinIO is a foundational element.
Tell us about yourself
Being an entrepreneur is not for everyone - you need to be comfortable with risk, and I have always been. I moved to the Bay Area in 2007. Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the startup world, and it was difficult not to feel the pull, the excitement, of these inherently risky propositions. At a certain point, I knew that I wanted to transition from investor to founder, and that was an exciting time. As we built the business, I found that success is a flywheel. You need to keep building the momentum. The more success you get, the more you want. We always knew we were in a really big market; our success has changed our thinking about how big we might become.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Our biggest accomplishment lies in what we have built. We are a product-first company, and developers, architects, and CTOs have adopted MinIO as the foundational component of their data strategy. We are still less than ten years old, but 77% of the Fortune 100 runs MinIO today. There are nearly 1 billion downloads of MinIO, nearly 1.3 million a day at this point. To have reached this level of enterprise penetration is pretty remarkable and pretty humbling. And we are just getting started.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
The hardest thing about being a founder is the responsibility associated with managing a team. You are personally responsible to them. This impacts everything - the culture you create, the people you hire into that culture, and how we interact with customers. A leader’s responsibilities do not end with the work day - they become all-consuming as their success is your success.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Do things you are passionate about.
- Hire people who are more capable than you.
- Be stubborn for the goals you wish to accomplish.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://min.io/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/garimakap
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garimakap/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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