5-6 pm PDT | 7-8 pm CDT
After the recent $370M acquisition announcement of Portworx, Chicago Booth alumni Jai Das '99 (lead investor), Sarvesh Jagannivas '98 (CMO), and Patrick Zanoni '00 (CFO) reflect on what went right.
Event Details
Portworx was a well-funded startup that provides a cloud-native storage and data-management platform based on Kubernetes. It was acquired in September of 2020 for $370 million in cash by Pure Storage (its largest acquisition to date), marking how important this market for multicloud data services has become.
In this deal talk, we will hear the Chicago Booth alumni perspectives on why Portworx, why now, and what we can learn from their experience from a marketing, investing, and finance point of view.
Current Portworx enterprise customers include the likes of Carrefour, Comcast, GE Digital, Kroger, Lufthansa, and T-Mobile. At the core of the service is its ability to help users migrate their data and create backups. It creates a storage layer that allows developers to then access that data, no matter where it resides. Pure Storage will use Portworx's technology to expand its hybrid and multicloud services and provide Kubernetes-based data services across clouds.
Registration
Register Online
Zoom information will be shared after registration.
Deadline: 11/12/2020
Speaker Profiles
Jai Das (Speaker) '99
President and Managing Director, Sapphire Ventures
Jai is a managing director, president and co-founder at Sapphire Ventures. He invests in startups which he believes are developing ground-breaking products and services, and have embarked on their journey to become a company of consequence. He has more than 15 years of experience helping companies innovate their product and marketing strategies in order to scale and become market leaders. Twelve of Jai's investments have become publicly traded companies and 15 have been acquired. Jai is currently a member of the board (director or observer) at Catchpoint, CircleCI, Clari, DataRobot, Narrative Science, OpsRamp, PubNub, Punchh, Splashtop, ThoughtSpot, UJET, and Uptycs. He also led the firms's investment in Netskope. Prior to joining Sapphire Ventures in 2006, Jai worked at Oracle, Intel Capital, Agilent Ventures, and MVC Capital. He has a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Brown University and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Sarvesh Jagannivas (Speaker) '98
CMO, Portworx
Sarvesh joined Portworx in November, 2018 from CoreOS, where he served as vice president of marketing. At Portworx, Sarvesh oversees global marketing strategy. Sarvesh brings nearly two decades of experience building go-to-market strategies for leading enterprise software companies, including Oracle, MuleSoft and CoreOS (RedHat). At CoreOS, Sarvesh led marketing and the company's go-to-market strategy, including one for CoreOS Tectonic, a leading Kubernetes product. Sarvesh applied his knowledge of leading several of the world's most successful technology companies to create new go-to-market strategies for attracting top-tier partners, customers and boosting brand visibility as Portworx achieved its next phase of growth and acquisition. Over his tenure, he has held senior business and marketing positions at Mulesoft, Agile Software (Oracle), EdgeSpring (Salesforce), Picarro Inc., and Aristasoft after a successful stint as a business consultant at Bain & Company. Sarvesh has a Master's of Science in Industrial Engineering from Oklahoma State University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
Patrick Zanoni, CPA, CFA (Speaker) '00
CFO, Portworx
Patrick is a finance, accounting and M&A professional with 25 years of increasing responsibility in the technology industry. Patrick joined Portworx as CFO in May, 2019, bringing with him more than 20 years of experience building and transforming organizations as CFO, CAO or a senior leader of companies including Exabeam, CipherCloud and Fusion Systems. As a corporate finance professional, Patrick has successfully raised capital for large and small companies through IPOs, secondaries, and unregistered stock offerings as well as various debt instruments and facilities. He has also built and led all operations of venture-backed growth companies and boot strapped start-ups. Patrick has led multiple companies through their first financial audit with Big 4 Audit firms and has received clean "unqualified" opinions on such audits. Patrick started his career as a computer programmer in the late 1980's and worked in technology thereafter. In the 1990s, he lived in Japan for 7 years before returning to the U.S. in 1998 to begin studies at Booth. He has a BBA in Systems Analysis and Design/Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.