Thirty Minute Mentors Podcast Transcript: Pure Storage Co-Founder John Colgrove

I recently interviewed John Colgrove on my podcast, Thirty Minute Mentors. Here is a transcript of our interview:

Adam: Our guest today co-founded a technology company that disrupted the way companies store data. John Colgrove is the co-founder and chief visionary officer of Pure Storage valued at more than $7 billion with more than 4200 employees and operations in more than 30 countries. John, thank you for joining us.

John: Thanks for having me.

Adam: You grew up in New Jersey and studied Computer Science at Rutgers. You knew exactly what you wanted to study, and you knew exactly what you wanted to do, which is rare for most people these days. Can you take listeners back to the early days? What experiences and lessons were most instrumental to shaping your worldview and to shaping the trajectory of your success?

John: I mean, it's interesting, just even to start you mentioned, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I didn't know exactly that when I was a kid. I mean, when I was a little kid, my first introduction to computers was, of course, watching something like Star Trek, where you just ask a computer a wrong question, and it blows up. I always liked science. My dad was a research chemist at DuPont. And he and I were very close. But it was when I got to high school. And our high school had a computer and I was in an accelerated math program and spent the first two months of that program, my first year of high school, doing some programming in basic, and I just really loved doing stuff on the computer. And my mom could never figure out how I could stand it because my room was always the biggest mess you could imagine. And when I finally got her to take an intro to program for us, because I said, computers of the future, you need to know this, it would drive her nuts that you had to get every semicolon and comma in the right place that she could not figure out, could stand it. But I fell in love with computer science right away. I think it's the element of creativity and art of creating a beautiful program with the engineering discipline and exactness of it. And so I just loved it from day one. And did as much as I could all through high school, went to college, and actually started working at the help desk at college. And then I ended up working at Bell Labs. My first job at Bell Labs was tearing the paper off a line printer and putting it in output bins for researchers. It was a lot better than working at McDonald's and I got to use their computers to do my homework and had a blast. And then I advanced through that I became an operator running their backup programs, and eventually became a system administrator for one of their large data centers. And then when I graduated, I'm like, okay, do I stay at home? Or do I move away? And I decided to move out to California because if I didn't, it was too easy to stay at home, keep eating my mom's cooking, not pay a lot of rent, and I didn't think that'd be good for me. So I moved to California and said I will try it for a year no matter how much I missed the East Coast. And I did miss the East Coast. But I've been out here now for 35-36 years, and I love it. If you're going to work in tech, this is the place to work.

Adam: And I can't speak to New Jersey versus California. I actually can't speak to it. I don't know why anyone would want to live in New Jersey or California. But I can speak to the appeal of mom's home cooking, no matter who your mom is. What were the keys to developing and rising in your career? And what can anyone do to develop and rise in their career?

John: So early on, I actually had a friend who was a few years older than me who advised me I wanted to learn more, for example, about the operating system I was using. And he advised me it's like okay, look, there's here's the source code, go read the source code, study it, and rotate each line. What is it doing? Why is it doing it? Learn to do that. And I started to do that. And then as I was talking to him more in talking to some other people. Somehow I picked up this habit. Every engineer I worked with had something they did really well. And I worked with some really good engineers really smart guys. And I attempted to take one thing that each of them did well and add it to what I did. and you'll look at any statistic around how much code an engineer writes, or more software rather than hardware. And the amount of code that people write in a year is amazingly tiny. And part of that is because well, you write the code, and then you spend a bunch of time debugging it. And then you realize, hey, I could have written it a lot better if I did it this other way, and you spent a lot of time changing it, and adding a ton of extra care to thinking about the code you're writing, as you're writing it, and to developing it. And another thing that I picked up from one of the senior guys at Amdahl, is single stepping through my code on a computer in the debugger the first time, because most of the bugs you write, aren't because you were thinking about it wrong. It's because the code isn't doing what you thought you were writing it to do. And so incorporating these techniques really helped me be a lot more productive, and do a lot better. And then that allowed me to learn a lot more about other aspects besides just the coding.

Adam: And so many of the lessons that you shared are applicable to anyone listening, whether they're interested in becoming a software developer interested in working in technology, or interested in being successful in anything.

John: Absolutely true. I was one of those people. When I came out of school, I was arrogant enough to think that well, engineers were so fantastic. And they're what mattered, and nothing else mattered in a company. And when I went to Veritas, Mark Leslie, the CEO there, and Fred VandenBosch, who ran engineering, and the guys who were in sales and marketing, I learned so much from them, about how much every organization contributes to a company. And there are so many things to learn about all of those aspects. But basically, I think the notion of if you're earlier in your career, coming along with a mindset of I'm going to learn, I'm going to do really good at what I do. And I'm going to try to find all these people that know more, whether it's more about other fields, areas I might want to go into, or more about my own area and learn from them. That mindset, I don't even know exactly where I picked it up. But that mindset is the biggest thing towards growth.

Adam: Just to reiterate, a number of key points you made. The importance of learning something that you shared, which I love. Early on in your career, you are laser-focused on identifying what is the one thing that each person around you, does exceptionally well. And how can I learn that from them? Recognizing that we all have strengths, we all have weaknesses. But what is that great strength of each person around me? And how can I learn that from that person? That's critical. Caring about your craft, taking pride in what you do, taking ownership of your work. That goes a long way, no matter what you're doing. The last thing you said, which I think is so important, taking a deeper look, analyzing, and not accepting things at face value.

John: Interestingly enough, as I listened to you say that back to me, you just described almost exactly, our company values here at Pure. And this is the first time I ever realized that the drive to learn and improve really translated almost directly into our company values.

Adam: Can you talk a little bit more about that? What have you done at Pure to build this incredibly successful culture? We're going to talk more about how you came up with the idea and how you built a successful company. But before we do that, how have you created this culture that has fueled the success of Pure?

John: Well, there's a couple of key principles that went into it. So before Pure, I worked at Veritas for about 20 years, and Veritas had a very strong and positive culture. And I love the culture there. When I started Pure, there are elements of the Pure culture that I took from Vera Toss, but I did not try to recreate Vera Toss or copy it. And I think that's a big key thing. I see many people, people that have left Pure as groups of pure people that said, oh, I really loved the culture here at Pure, I'm gonna recreate it. You can't recreate it because every team is different. So when I started Pure, I teamed up with my co-founder, John Hayes. He was obviously very different than me and had a different background. And then as we brought in the next few people, we didn't write down the values or whatever, but we definitely created a culture that was oriented around that People thinking and using their creativity and, and such, and then about a year in Scott Dietz, and we'd hired him as our first CEO at that point in time. And he's like, you need to write down the elements of the culture. Because as we grow, we have to be able to explain it to people, it can't just be observing you guys. And so John and myself got and Matt kicks smaller, and a bunch of the other early people, we sat down and we created our values. And there were a couple of principles in it. So our basic values, persistence, aka, we value hard work and creativity, we hire our people to think and to use their brains. And that creativity isn't just engineering, it's in marketing, it's in HR, it's in whatever you should be not doing roadwork, you should be making your life better. Teamwork, I can be the most brilliant individual in the universe, the company will get very far because the team is what does it. And then ownership because we all take responsibility for more than just, you're not working in a box, you are an owner of the company, you're responsible for the whole thing. And then customer focus or customer first. And again, you think about those values. There are a lot of things reminiscent of Vera Toss. There are a lot of things to reminisce about other cultures that we came from, but we formed a new team, with these values, and with a very expansive view of the values, not unlimited. Oh, it means exactly this. No ownership generally means you're taking responsibility. That will change when we're 20 people, 200 people, 2000 people, the level of responsibility you take for doing things, the expansiveness you put on your job changes. But that core value stays the same. And that's one of the big key things, our values stay the same, and the way in which we express them changes as we grow because it has to.

Adam: I love that. When you said you can't recreate it, that's universally applicable, you can't really recreate anything. When you think about the experiences you've had in life that are most memorable, that are most meaningful, as nice as it would be to be able to recreate them. You can't, doesn't work that way. It's all about moving forward, learning from the experiences that you have had. And taking that experience taking that knowledge, taking that with you. And being able to enjoy new experiences. You spoke about the key values that you emphasize here. Persistence, creativity, teamwork, ownership, and customer-centricity. I want to talk about a few of those. Let's start with teamwork. How do you create a culture that enables teamwork that emphasizes teamwork that fuels and rewards teamwork?

John: Well, number one by continually reinforcing it, when you're hiring a manager, or a leader, part of it is making sure they understand that when their team is successful, that's when they look the most successful not when they did the work. A lot of managers in the tech, the first-line engineering managers, often were one of the best engineers, and then they moved over to be the team leader, the manager. And when you're a manager, and you did all the work to achieve some hard thing, or you were the lead worker on it, you're not actually as successful as when your team did all the job. And you sat back and did nothing but enabled your team. And you got to keep emphasizing that with all your leaders and with all your managers, their primary job is to make the people they work with successful. And that's when they look the most successful not when they've done something. And it's no different if you're a parent, man, do you feel proud when somebody says something good about your child, you feel way prouder than if they said something good about you. It's that kind of thing you hire people in and you have to work really hard to make them successful. And that's when you look your best. And if you can emphasize that in the culture if you can reinforce that in the culture. And if you can get people to understand that and operate to that. You'll naturally build a culture of teams.

Adam: What do you believe are the key characteristics of a great leader? And what can anyone do to become a better leader?

John: The biggest characteristic of a great leader is they have the respect of their team and they have an honest relationship with their team. And when you are hired into a role, you stay in that role, because you have challenging work. Because you like the people you work with. And because you respect the people you work for. And you're not going to be best buddies with your boss which creates all sorts of awkwardness and problems or your boss's boss, you're naturally more naturally going to be friends, with your peers, but you need to respect the people you work for. Now, how do they earn that respect, part of the way they are in that respect is through making sound decisions involving people in the decisions. If I decide something, I just tell everybody what to do. That's not nearly as effective as if we can have a discussion together and evolve the best ideas together, and then decide what we do. And somebody who's comfortable doing that. That's part of how they earn respect, I'd be very comfortable talking with you and saying, oh, your idea is better. Let's go with that. So that's one part of it. And I think the other big, big key is you have to have as open and honest a relationship as possible because that also helps build respect and trust. Sometimes that means you have to deliver bad news. But that also helps build it up for when you can't deliver the news. We're a public company, there's information that I know that I cannot tell other people, for example, about our upcoming earnings reports or things like that. But I have to have a good enough relationship with people that they trust me when I tell them, I can't tell you that. Not that I'm doing some power grab and try and keep the information secret that it's like, yeah, I'd tell you if I could, but I can't. And that sort of open relationship. One more example, you see some companies, where the employees get all up in arms over, oh, these benefits have been taken away, or that perk has been taken away. We're a company, we need to make a profit. And we owe that to our shareholders, we also owe it to the employees that we are providing jobs for. And we need to keep growing because that's we're valued based on our growth, we're ambitious, and we want to grow and become a much bigger, more successful company. And that sometimes means you can't do things the way you used to do them. So we start in downtown Mountain View. And it was really nice. Now we have to move off of downtown Mountain View, because we're too big, and we're in too many buildings. And some people like the move, because it'll give them a better commute and some people, don't. But you need to make that decision. And you need to be able to be honest with people about why you're doing it. And then they don't get all up in arms over it because they understand why you're doing things. And I think that honesty and respect are the two keys to any really good leader.

Adam: I love that. You bring up the importance of leaders being able to earn and cultivate respect. We were chatting off the air about some of the teachings I do at UCLA. And the other week, one of my students asked a guest speaker I brought in who's a CEO at a really large leading association. The question he asked was, “Would you rather be feared or loved?”. And the CEO responded, “I want to be respected”. The student wasn't expecting that answer. Leaders need to build trust. How do you build trust? By being honest by being transparent by being true to your work? That's the way to do it one step at a time to actually

Adam: Another key element of leadership that we haven't touched on yet, is vision. And you're the chief visionary officer of Pure Storage. You're one of the leading visionaries in the world of tech. You set your company's vision. What advice do you have for leaders on how to formulate and articulate a winning vision?

John: Oh, that's an interesting question. One thing you have to be able to let's call it look far enough out. So a man, imagine you're sitting there at the bottom of a mountain, and you've got your kid who's five years old, and you want to climb up that mountain, you have to be able to set the vision of, we're gonna get to the top, see that peak way, way up there, we're gonna get to the top. But you have to then be able to break it down into some intermediate goals that are reachable, oh, see that tree over there, we're going to hike up to that tree. And then we're going to take a rest because I know you're going to be tired. And then you get to the tree, and then it's like, we see that rock over there. After you rest, we're going to go to that rock. So you got to be able to paint the long-term picture. And you have to be able to break it down into sensible intermediate steps. If there aren't any sensible intermediate steps, then either your vision isn't long-term enough, or nobody's going to be able to come along on the journey with you because they can't see the path. That's a big key to it. Long term. Here's the vision and the exciting thing you can paint. And think of some of the inventions that have changed our lives, smartphones. I think of all the things on your phone, all the amazing things it does. And if you could go back in time to when Steve Jobs was telling people inside Apple, we're going to build this phone. And here's what it's going to he could not possibly get anything sensible out of he told them what the phone does today. Right. And I wasn't there. I haven't talked to him. I don't know. But for all but I'm assuming from the way he used to talk about things. He had a vision of what the phone has done for us today. But he had to break it down into these steps along the way that helped bring people along because if you can't bring people along on your vision, you won't get the followership.

Adam: How did the idea for Pure emerge and how did you actualize it?

John: So I had worked in storage for a long time. Let's call it system-centric stuff. When I was at Amdahl, a friend and I were the first couple of engineers at Veritas. And I stayed there for 20 years doing storage stuff. And then I kind of burned out a little bit and I took some time off and built the house. If you want to talk about construction stuff, we can cover that too at some point. And after a break, I was really ready to get back into tech and Mike Spicer at Sutter Hill Ventures got me to come and work with him. And he asked me what something that's going to completely change the data center. And been in storage a long time, I had looked at the trends, and I'm like, well, the disk has been getting exponentially better for the last 50 years. But it's starting to run out of steam. And so if it's going to flatten out, it's time now finally for some new media to take off. And so it really was kind of over many years have seen the amount of improvement the disk was doing, having seen what the future of disk looked like, and seeing the flash and the possibilities of flash driven largely by consumer devices getting into a scale technology. Because as much as technologists, as much as we'd like to think it's all about the tech, there's a certain amount of economics that plays into all this. And so I saw that crossover happening. And I said this is a chance to fix everything that's annoyed me about the storage industry for the last 20 years. Because as the media changes, we produce these new products, we can fix all this other stuff. And so you look at our evergreen business model or our customer-centric focus. And we pride ourselves on having an NPS score of over 80%. That's a net promoter score for anyone who doesn't know the acronym and would like to look it up. The average for high tech is down in the 20s or 30s, high tech companies were not generally known as great customer service companies. And think about some companies. Why do I buy so many things from Amazon? It's because I know if I have any issue with any product, they will take care of me like that. There are just no questions asked. It's like, oh, you want to return it? No problem. It came in defective. No problem, we'll replace it. It wasn't quite what you wanted to order because the shirt didn't fit right, return it with no problem. Great customer service that helps their business. I wanted to build a company that had great customer service. I wanted to change the lifecycle of buying tech and throw it out every few years because it was now obsolete. And that's the evergreen business model that allows us to well the product is being used without any outage or downtime. Just replace all the hardware parts, upgrade all the software parts and just keep it moving forward. And those pillars, were enabled by this, the catalyst of this change from disk to flash that allowed us to enter what was really a conservative market that wasn't very innovative at the time.

Adam: Listening to you tell the story, so much of the vision was you, but the execution was we. How were you able to successfully surround yourself with the right people? You're this visionary technologist, but you need to have the right people around you to complement your skill set. How did you do that? And what advice do you have for anyone listening on how to find the right partners and the right teammates?

John: So one of the things as an engineer, I've always believed that every engineer, myself included, has blind spots. You go down these alleyways, you have this thing you like too much, and you make mistakes. So you have to team up with somebody. When I was at Veritas, there was a, my partner in crime, as it were, it was a fella named John Carmichael. And we complemented each other very well. And I had experienced that. And so I was looking for that. So as soon as the idea for the company came along, and was ready to start it, the first thing to do was to find somebody else to be my partner in crime, as it were. And Mike Spicer introduced me to John Hayes. And John was brilliant. He was not a storage person. And that's something that I think was just a great strength, we did not hire a bunch of storage people. We were trying to change the storage industry, the data storage industry completely. And so we didn't set out early on to hire a whole ton of storage people. We just wanted to hire smart engineers. And there were a few of us, myself, and a few others that had experience in storage to make sure that we didn't make rookie mistakes. But we hired all these people that complimented us. I'm a sports fan. And think about all of the great baseball players out there. Well, if I formed a team out of nine of the greatest pitchers wouldn't do very well. You need complementary skills. And that was something that John, who was really smart, didn't know the story would like, would that work great with us? And then as we set out to grow the company, I didn't go and hire all my old people, cronies that I used to work with, we went out and we just said, We're gonna hire smart people. I got lucky and lost some arguments early on. For example, in a lot of our interview process, John Hayes had a lot of input into that a couple of other early hires had a lot of input into that. We started with an open office culture that added a lot of energy and teamwork to a startup, I come from a culture of Veritas that had engineers had their own office, so I lost that argument. And I purposely lost that argument. I mean, John and I were arguing about it. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to be busy with a lot of other things. Besides just coding the product, you're going to be writing most of the code, I'll let you win that, and I consciously decided to let him win that argument. And man, am I glad I did. It was a very energizing, very energetic office setup. And I think that really helped us in the early years. And so a lot of it was knowing when to win an argument and when not to win and getting lucky on some of those.

Adam: You don't have to win every argument. And oftentimes, by not winning an argument, you win.

John: Absolutely. I've been married for 25 years, and I can't count but I'm confident my wife has won more arguments than I have. And I'm also frankly confident that she deserved to win more than I have. But if you don't have a reasonable balance, if she won 90% of the arguments, I'd probably be resenting it, you got to have that balance. And that's true in any relationship.

Adam: Something you shared early on in our conversation is the importance of creativity. A key focus in your culture, clearly a key focus and your career central to your success. How do you get to a place where you're able to be at your best, most creative self able to do your best, most creative work? And how can leaders create a culture that fuels innovation and creativity?

John: Well, okay, I'm gonna actually take the last part of that answer first. The way you feel the creativity in your organization is you make sure that people have a little bit of time to be curious. I can't tell you how many times I've seen something. For example, an engineer wondered why the system behaved like this. They had a little bit of time, they got curious, and they spent the time they figured out why. And they realized, oh, we can make this major improvement. Because now I understand this thing that was buried in there that nobody knew. giving people time to be curious. And I don't mean the, hey, we're going to allocate one day a week or two days a month, but making sure they're not so overworked, that they occasionally have time to just indulge their curiosity about things and encouraging that curiosity. And then when you see they're actually on to something, make sure your leaders understand again, indulge that curiosity and support it. Another aspect of that is learning how to appreciate the people that won't take no for an answer. One of the things we built the company on is early on our data reduction helped lower the price of flash relative to disk, it was a key feature. One of our engineers had an idea for how we could do our data reduction much, much faster. And a whole bunch of other engineers were telling him no, no, it's too complicated. It won't work. You'll never get to work. No, he would not take no for an answer. And there are times when that works out great. There are times obviously, when knowing the right answer is no, and you got to learn to distinguish them. But allowing people the freedom to argue with you like that is another key aspect of it with me as to how I do it, it's, I usually take a break, I cannot tell you how many times I've been working on a problem, beating my brains out about trying to figure out how to do something, and I can't make any progress. And I'm like, okay, I'm gonna drive home and do something else. And then it's like, I'm in the shower that night. Or maybe he's in a gym, or sometimes I read a book one time, years and years ago, I was actually just, this was before I was married, I was visiting my mom in New Jersey, and it was two in the morning. And I'm just flipping through channels. And I came to this PBS show that was actually teaching Intro to Computer Science. And I watched it for a few minutes, laughing a little bit at how they were teaching it. And I got brilliant inspiration on how to solve a big concurrency problem while doing that, right? It's just letting my mind float freely after it's worked on the problem of it because you're still turning it around. You can't remember a word for something or the name of something, and it's driving you bananas. And of course, now you just look it up on your smartphone. But before you had smartphones, it would drive you bananas, and then you'd finally give up, and then 10 minutes later would suddenly come to you. And for me, I've always worked that way, I think and I think and I'll beat my brains out. And if I don't make progress, I'll find that when I'm taking a break or doing something else that's semi-mindless, the answer will just come to me.

Adam: What can anyone listening to this conversation do to become more successful personally and professionally?

John: The biggest thing would be to think of what you really love to do. How do you do more of that? And then what do you have to do to set yourself up to get there? So if you are a programmer and you love to write code, why do you want to go be a manager just figure out how to go be a better programmer. If on the other hand, hey, yeah, this programming is okay. But I really wish I was outselling or I really wish I was a manager because I love people. Okay, what skills do I need to work on to get better at that? It goes back to what we were talking about early on about learning. I loved writing code, I loved designing, and architecting programs and products. And I worked at getting better. In essence by finding other people who were doing things well and learning those techniques. I then learned about a whole lot of things besides writing code and stuff from Mark Leslie and a bunch of the other senior execs at Veritas, who taught me a lot of things, and a lot more respect for all the other things that I didn't know about. One of the big things about our product is we tried to build a really simple and easy-to-use product. So think about it. You go to rent a car somewhere you get in the car, and you can drive it without needing to read a manual, you buy a new smartphone, and you can use it without needing to read a manual. Why shouldn't enterprise tech be like that? So I get inspiration on how to do a lot of things and how to make a lot of our features work by observing. How does my car work? How does my phone work? How do my light switches at home work? What's good about them and what's bad? If you're an entrepreneur and you want to design products, you're using products every day. Figure out what's good about those products, figure out what isn't good about those products, and learn how you can incorporate what's good about them into your thoughts and designs.

Adam: Thank you for all the great advice and thank you for being a part of Thirty Minute Mentors.

John: Thanks a lot for having me. It was an interesting conversation.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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