When Avere Systems began, Ron Bianchini, president, CEO and co-founder, says the company consisted of 14 software engineers and himself.
“Honestly, in the early days of Avere, I literally did two things — I would go out to customers and bring back feedback or I would be building desks so that our engineers had places to sit,” he says.
Today, after four rounds of funding, Avere has entered the “teenage” stage between startup and public company. Bianchini still considers Avere’s informal culture to be that of a startup, but with more than 100 employees, the logistics of getting together are becoming challenging.
And “as the fastest game in town” for on-premise and cloud data storage, where organizations need high-performance access to large amounts of data, Avere’s future looks bright.
Global technology companies use Avere’s technology to run mission-critical applications, and three of the six oil and gas supermajors have deployed its technology.
The top 12 blockbuster movies of 2013 rendered their special effects on Avere equipment, and the company recently moved into the health care vertical, where its technology is increasing the speed of genome sequencing in DNA.
From 2013 to 2014 Avere doubled in revenue, and Bianchini believes the pipeline for 2015 will be more of the same.
“So we’re in that fun hypergrowth part, where sales are doubling every year, every quarter is a record quarter,” he says. “It’s a lot of fun right now.”
All hands in
One key to success has been internal communication.
Every Monday at 10 a.m., Avere employees come to an all-hands meeting. Staff squeezes into the largest conference room, while the overflow uses the second largest conference room to dial in, along with the satellite sales force.
Each department rotates to give an update on what it has accomplished and problems it is trying to solve. Anyone can ask questions, which Bianchini says makes for a collaborative and innovative culture.
“We literally distribute all the information to all 100, and then the Q&A really can happen from anyone,” he says.
The challenge will be maintaining that community environment as Avere continues to grow.
“When you’re a 1,000-person company, you can’t have one all-hands meeting where everyone can talk. The meeting will never end, right? But also as the meeting grows people will probably feel less comfortable talking,” Bianchini says. “So I think the most important part of the all-hands (meeting) is it sets that culture.”
If the culture is set, when each individual department has a meeting, people already feel free to challenge each other, he says.
Drive innovation with university ties
Carnegie Mellon University has one of the best teaching programs on data storage and file systems. And that’s why Avere is located in Pittsburgh, says Bianchini, a former CMU professor who is on the university’s board of trustees.
Keeping that close connection helps with recruiting because students learn about cutting-edge technologies. Bianchini says adding knowledge to the company ultimately improves their products.
“The biggest reason for being by the university is all the new blood, all the new ideas, and it really helps drive that innovation,” he says.
Avere also uses its size — compared to its giant competitors — as a recruiting tool.
“If you go to a large company that has 3,000 engineers, at best case what you do as a new engineer is 1/3,000th of the product,” he says. “Whereas, at Avere, you know if we’ve got 50 engineers, you’re 1/50th of that product, and so your code is immediately in that customer’s hands.”
Customers first
Avere is the third company that Bianchini has helped start, and the biggest lesson he’s learned is that everything is about the customer, even when a business is in the early stages.
If you create your product in a vacuum, even if it’s based on the best technology in the world, you won’t have a successful company unless it solves customer problems, he says.
The problem with technology startups is that in the development stage they don’t actually have customers yet.
So, while Avere’s engineers developed their product, Bianchini hit the road — constantly talking to perspective customers. He’d show them what the company was planning on building, and ask for their level of interest and feedback.
Then at the early all-hands meetings, he would share what he’d learned.
“We really tuned the product quite a bit to the early feedback that I’d bring from the field,” he says. “You have to solve customer problems; it can’t just be a cool technology.
“That’s really the driving premise of Avere: We have to solve customer problems. No matter how interesting the technology is. It’s really about the customer.”
