FEATURE : INNOVATION

John Colgrove co-founded Pure Storage and holds over 300 patents in the area of computer system and reliable data storage design . In discussion with Managing Editor , Arun Shankar , he shares his thoughts on how to manage growth , innovation , open communication , product complexity and sprawl , software development , in Pure Storage that he cofounded more than a decade ago .

Managing growth , delegation , change

Innovative and technology organisations are constantly changing to improve products , services and the value they offer to existing and new customers . Fundamental requirements to deliver this is an organisation that is well connected top to bottom and a driver of change and a driver of advocacy .

“ I get involved with lots of different things because I am still passionately committed to growing the company and growing the company is a lot of fun . I decide the things that are important . One of the things that I do spend a lot of time on is trying to continually improve the company . We are a company that is still growing at a good clip and when you grow , things have to change ,” says Colgrove .

BY ARUN SHANKAR

Prior to Pure Storage , he was the Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures . It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises . Coz was also one of the founding engineers at Veritas Software , which merged with Symantec in 2005 , where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for the Data Center Management Group .

He was the primary architect for the hugely successful Veritas Volume Manager and Veritas File System and later served in various other engineering , management , and consultative roles . Prior to Veritas , Coz worked for Amdahl Corporation where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel .

It is really important to keep evolving the way a business does things . And every high-tech company knows you need to keep evolving the products and you need to keep improving the products .

The most important aspect is how to organise the business as customers you sell to evolve and their use cases evolve . You have to keep changing the sales team , and changing the marketing message . How information is disseminated inside the business needs to keep changing . This continuous change is something that needs to be driven from the top . As you get larger , a lot of people are afraid to change things .

“ The company has a way of doing something and while we like it , it works for us ,” explains Colgrove .

If you want to develop a product in a robust fashion , you make sure that the lead engineers who are designing it and driving it , are responsible for the whole thing . They need to be able to jump into whatever piece of it they want .

Up and down the organisation , if you want to develop a really healthy , really strong organisation , you want your best people to be completely free agents to jump in

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