Richard Mataya, Vladimir Alves, and Nader Salessi of NGD Systems
An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with Nader Salessi (founder and CEO), Vladimir Alves (co-founder and CTO), and Richard Mataya (co-founder and EVP) of NGD Systems, which was honored in our:
Tell us the origin story of NGD Systems – what problem were you trying to solve and why?
We began the journey to create NGD Systems based on our engagements with customers, specifically our hyperscale customers, by providing a solution that was, at that time, not being provided. Customers were being told by vendors what they had available and not really listening to what they wanted from a solution in our space.
We took the opportunity to leave our current work and founded NxGnData (changed to NGD Systems in 2016) with the tag line “Bringing intelligence to storage”. Here, we developed a solution and platform that provided what was being asked for by the customers, not just showing them what we had to offer as a standard market solution. This involved developing unique hardware capabilities, like our intelligent storage controller design.
We had three layers to our approach to solve the customers’ storage needs and compute support through:
- Enterprise grade storage.
- Key enablers for quality of service (QoS) and data protection.
- Adding additional ability to compute data within the drive, eliminating IO, reducing energy footprint, and improving latency performance.
What was the biggest hurdle you encountered in your journey?
Being an Orange County based startup, the ability to engage local and remote investors. Convincing them that our solution wasn’t just hardware, as many investors were shying from hardware solutions and especially in Orange County, it was just not a focus area for investors.
Overcoming doubters and showcasing that this was a real and true innovation makes the process so much harder as well. It is very much a challenge to juggle the multi-faceted issues of raising money, finding keystone customers, and driving a new market awareness.
What does the future hold for NGD Systems?
Continuing to evolve the ecosystem for our solutions and drive new customer adoption is very key to the success of the company. Being a leader in the space, adapting quickly to customer needs, and driving future innovation is at the core of our efforts. This is focused on storage and compute markets, specifically around adding AI and ML capability.
We also look forward to finding ways customers can visualize and quantify the advantages of computational storage in their applications so that they embrace the technology while we continue to simplify the engagement and deployment model of the technology.
What are your thoughts on the local tech startup scene in Irvine?
Irvine offers a unique opportunity to balance work and lifestyle. It is a very popular location for many technology companies, big and small. It is evolving into a new technology power house, similar to the Bay Area being known as Silicon Valley.
There are local organizations like Octane that offer support and development resources to get going. In addition, the available resources at UC Irvine and other research and corporate development resources are important. The fact that there are theme parks, beaches, and other recreational activities a short drive away is beneficial.
There are also technical talents, from software to hardware to silicon, with many years of experience that make southern California more desirable for tech startup.
What’s your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
One of the best pieces of advice we can offer is to survive at all costs. Never let yourself run out of money. The fund raising effort never stops! As for other ideas, here are a few we can share:
- Know your investors.
- Know your market and keep a weather eye on it.
- Make sure you have a very strong partnership – it’s like a marriage.
- Diversify your founder team – best to have some overlapping skills with many that are complementary.
- Don’t grow too fast – closely control the burn rate and ALL expenses.
- Be prepared – things happen very dynamically in this stage of business and there need to be reaction plans in place to ensure you can maintain a normal regardless of the changes around you.
- Assemble the best team you can dream about.
- Most importantly: ENJOY THE JOURNEY.