Episode Details

This conversation covers:

• The advantages of using a distributed data storage model.
• How Storj is creating new revenue models for open-source projects, and how the open-source community is responding.
• The business and engineering reasons why users decide to opt for cloud-native, according to Ben.
• Viewing cloud-native as a journey, instead of a destination — and some of the top mistakes that people tend to make on the journey. Ben also talks about the top pitfalls people make with storage and management.
• Why businesses are often caught off guard with high storage costs, and how Storj is working to make it easier for customers. 
• Avoiding vendor lock-in with storage.
• Advice for people who are just getting started on their cloud journey.
• The person who should be responsible for making a cloud journey successful.

Links:

• Storj Labs: https://storj.io/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/golubbe
• GitHub: https://github.com/golubbe

Transcript

Emily: Hi everyone. I’m Emily Omier, your host, and my day job is helping companies position themselves in the cloud-native ecosystem so that their product’s value is obvious to end-users. I started this podcast because organizations embark on the cloud naive journey for business reasons, but in general, the industry doesn’t talk about them. Instead, we talk a lot about technical reasons. I’m hoping that with this podcast, we focus more on the business goals and business motivations that lead organizations to adopt cloud-native and Kubernetes. I hope you’ll join me.

Emily: Welcome to The Business of Cloud Native, my name is Emily Omier. I'm your host, and today I'm chatting with Ben Golub. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Ben: Oh, Thank you for having me.

Emily: And I always like to just start off with having you introduce yourself. So, not only where you work and what your job title is, but what you actually spend your day doing.

Ben: [laughs]. Okay. I'm Ben Golub. I'm currently the executive chair and CEO of Storj Labs, which is a decentralized storage service. We kind of like to think of it as the Airbnb of disk drives, But probably most of the people on your podcast who, if they're familiar with the, sort of, cloud-native space would have known me as the former CEO of Docker from when it was released up until a few years ago. But yeah, I tend to spend my days doing a lot of stuff, in addition to family and dealing with COVID, running startups. This is now my seventh startup, fourth is a CEO.

Emily: Tell me a little bit, like, you know, when you stumble into your home office—just kidding—nobody is going to the office, I know. But when you start your day, what sort of tasks are on your todo list? So, what do you actually spend your time doing?

Ben: Sure. We've got a great team of people who are running a decentralized storage company. But of course, we are decentralized in more ways than one. We are 45 people spread across 15 different countries, trying to build a network that provides enterprise-grade storage on disk drives that we don't own, that are spread across 85 different countries. So, there's a lot of coordination, a lot of making sure that everybody has the context to do the right thing, and that we stay focused on doing the right thing for our users, doing the right thing for our suppliers, doing the right thing for each other, as well.

Emily: One of the reasons I thought it’d be really interesting to talk with you is that I know your goal is to, sort of, revolutionize some of the business models related to managing storage. Ca