Stairway to Heaven to the Cloud: A storage story
Cloud storage may be boring but it's huge and getting bigger — and for Wasabi Technologies founder David Friend a rational step from working with Led Zeppelin and George Lucas.
David Friend began his career selling new-fangled synthesisers to rock legends like Led Zeppelin and The Who — and worked very closely with Stevie Wonder to enhance the technology. His ARP synthesiser created the iconic five note message to aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and R2D2’s distinctive vernacular. He has since launched and exited half a dozen successful startups.
Today, after a $US250 million raise late last year, the six-year-old Wasabi is a unicorn with customers in over 100 countries, including the Boston Red Sox, 1 Exabyte under management and 16,000 partners in core industries including sports, media & entertainment, video surveillance, education, healthcare, ransomware protection, backup and archive.
Wasabi Technologies is a Cloud storage specialist. Its main competitors are Amazon, Microsoft and Google. But first things first: Led Zeppelin? Stevie Wonder? George Lucas?
We were one of two big synthesiser companies in the 1970s, one was called MOOG. Before we came into the market, about 1971, synthesisers were kind of one offs, sold directly to studios and rich musicians because they were very expensive. I had this idea that if we could make them cheap and simple, we could sell them to every high school rock band through retail music stores. That turned out to be a good prophecy. I spent most of my time getting artist endorsements. I befriended Pete Townsend and Jimmy Page and probably 100 other rock bands and managed to talk them into endorsing ARP, my company. Obviously if somebody has a hit on my instrument, kids go out and buy my instrument.
