RE: I'm a co-founder of a bankrupt storage startup, AMA
Virtualization technology, like VMware, time-shares a single computer to make it look like multiple computers. Each "virtual machine" is running a separate operating system and set of applications as if it was running on dedicated hardware. But really a "hypervisor" is controlling the virtual machine to give it a share of a host machine's resources such as CPU and memory.
A virtual machine may be connected to one or more "virtual disks", which again are an abstraction that looks to the virtual machine like dedicated hardware: a physical disk attached to a physical machine. But really these virtual disks reside on shared storage and look like files.
Tintri provides shared storage for virtual disks (and other files associated with a virtual machine.) Many other vendors do too--- any shared storage can be configured for use with VMware. But our technology treats each virtual machine specially, instead of operating at the "volume" or "LUN" level. That is, with conventional storage you get operations that control storage units which may contain many VMs. With Tintri, we can performs those operations on individual VMs and vdisks instead.
Why did it only take a year from IPO to bankruptcy?
The simple answer is that we were spending too much money.
The IPO was supposed to raise $100m but instead we raised $60m. This led to a cycle of bad news--- customers and employees questioned whether we would have enough runway to get to profitability. When we missed our first quarter projections, this continued the cycle of negative news. This made it harder to continue growing our revenue.
(Because Tintri was public, you can find our quarterly results during this period online: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001554875&owner=exclude&count=40)
Tintri's management said that there was a path to cash flow positive by the end of 2018. Unfortunately they miscalculated what it would take to get there, and our cash would not allow us to continue operations past the end of June 2018.
So you worked for 9 years to make a product and find some customers and now another company will reap the benefit?
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Yes, assuming DDN can run it as a profitable business! There's no guarantee that they will be successful, although they have a good history of running a storage business at a profit.
I have been paid a salary for the whole time, and managed to sell some stock pre-IPO, so I have benefited from Tintri as well.
This Q&A got 6 votes (even if two of them were mine) as of 6 days 10 hours, so you get the bounty, I'll send it shortly.
Great! It was nice talking with you.