VMware's Famous Engineer Is Now A VC And He's Looking To Fund Two Kinds Of Startups
That engineer, Steve Herrod, joined General Catalyst. At the time, his departure was considered a big loss for his former company where he was CTO. At VMware, he helped win a bidding war and purchased a tiny startup named Nicira for a $1.26 billion.
Buying Nicira put VMware on a collision course with one of its former partners, Cisco; rumor had it that Cisco was also bidding on Nicira. Buying the startup was a bold move by Herrod and VMware all the way around.
Herrod was one of the first 60 VMware employees and he worked there for 11 years. Business Insider interviewed him about his work at VMware and his new career as a VC. He says he looks for two types of startups to invest in.
Here's the lightly edited Q&A.
Business Insider: In its 16 year history, VMware has had rocky times. There were a few years when it looked like Microsoft would crush it. Why do you think VMware ultimately survived?
Steve Herrod: To [VMware co-founder] Mendle's credit, he came up with mission statement from the first day that said, 'We aim to be software that's running every data center everywhere.' It was kind of ridiculous to say that that early on. But unlike a lot of startups who like to talk about "pivots," it was actually a pretty straightforward goal.
So we decided from Day 1 that our biggest advocates would be developers. We would make an awesome workstation product that would let them test their software in different ways and let them have fewer machines under their desk. Software developers used to have to have a Windows box [computer] and a Linux box [under their desks].
We thought, "If we make the developers love us, they'll tell their managers and they'll tell the CIO and we'll ultimately be in the data center." And it really panned out.
BI: What technologies excite you today?
In the consumer world, everyone talks about social local mobile (SoLoMo). The enterprise equivalent is big data, mobile, cloud. We need an acronym for that.
BI: 'BigMoCo'?
SH: [Laughs] Let's assume those make it into core enterprise. What's next? There are two areas I'm most excited about. We're in the early beginnings of enterprises writing mobile apps ... just like they write their own Web apps.
That creates opportunities for writing apps and test/development for enterprises for what I call "mobile-first infrastructure." So, Appurify, Google just bought them last week. They test apps in different locations; that's a good example. And just like developers tied web apps into the database, they'll want their mobile apps to talk to the same data, so they'll need formal connections called APIs. Apigee, Mashery and Runscope are examples of very developer-friendly companies for writing apps and testing APIs. [Herrod was part of a $6 million series A in Runscope, $7.1 million raised in total] BI: So, you're still trying to make developers happy. What's the second startup investment area you're interested in? SH: Security. You need new approaches to security that wrap up an app and protect it wherever it happens to reside, as opposed to protecting it in a physical place [like a corporate data center]. Illumio, I invested in, is an example. [Illumio is a security company still in stealth founded by folks from VMware, Cisco, Juniper and Nicira.] BI: Any technologies you wish people would stop pitching to you? SH: I don't need to see any more "software-defined storage." Keywords I see all the time: "flash-based, distributed, x86 storage, with VM-awareness." "Flash storage" is very well funded these days and it's not something I would invest in.