Pure Storage’s Scott Dietzen And Sutter Hill’s Mike Speiser To Talk About Building For The Long Term At Disrupt SF

Pure Storage is upending the enterprise storage industry by fully utilizing flash memory technology into their product. Scott Dietzen, the current CEO of Pure Storage, and Mike Speiser, managing director at Sutter Hill Ventures, are working together to grow Pure Storage into an industry leader in flash-based enterprise data storage and they’ll be joining us onstage at Disrupt SF 2014.

Dietzen and Speiser will talk about what it means to build an enormous, sustainable business in the face of today’s pump-and-dump culture. Especially one that is challenging such enormous, embedded incumbents.

As the bigger companies like EMC, Intel and others struggle to adapt to a changing market built on faster flash-based storage, Pure Storage hopes to seize on what some analysts believe will soon become a $60 billion market.

In April, Pure Storage raised a $225 million series F round at a $3 billion valuation. It will use this funding for R&D, sales, and marketing on its way to hopefully becoming an industry standard.

So far, Pure Storage has been immensely successful at growing the business, with 700 percent year-over-year growth and over 50 percent quarterly growth on a consistent basis. The Series F round came on the heels of August 2013’s Series E round, where the company raised $150 million from T. Rowe Price and others.

The two rounds bring the total Pure Storage has raised to nearly $475 million, and the latest round puts them in a cash-positive position. And it’s cash they’ll need if they’re going to disrupt a market controlled by a handful of incumbents.

Dietzen is a three-time entrepreneur, having helped to build WebLogic, Zimbra and Transarc, and currently serves on the board of Cloudera, an enterprise software company. As the president and CTO of Zimbra, Dietzen helped it to become a pioneer of Web 2.0 and OpenCore paradigms until the company was acquired by Yahoo and VMWare in 2010. He also helped build Weblogic from $61 million in revenues to over $1 billion before it was acquired in 1998.

Speiser is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, and counts Pure Storage as one of the companies he directs and advises. Before joining Sutter Hill, Speiser was Yahoo’s VP of Community Products, a role he took on after Yahoo acquired Bix, the company he led as CEO. Before that, Speiser was VP and Technical Adviser to Symantec’s Chairman and CEO, and was VP of Product Marketing and Product Management at Veritas Software. And he also cofounded epinions.com, a consumer reviews platform based in Australia.

Come hear Dietzen and Speiser talk about their vision for Pure Storage’s future at Disrupt SF 2014. Tickets are now on sale, with early-bird pricing now through September 1. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor, reach out to our sponsorship team for more information.