I have interview scheduled at Cohesity. How is cohesity culture and how is total TC for ~10 yoe. Does it look they will make it to IPO or acquisition? Thank you.
Interested
Great leadership. In startup a lot of times the culture is top down. CEO himself is great individual and leader, he holds high standards and being very conscious about the mistakes he made. I've been in the company several years and I've seen many great things happening. I suggest you search Mohit’s interview in podcasts to know better of his vision and journey. Long term value wise, the company still have a lot of potential, we’ve proved to the market that massive data fragmentation is an issue and we are able to resolve it. You won't see many other company at this age able to attain big name customers like Amex with massive deployments. Now we are at second stage, which is continue to disrupt backup/archive space, expand to cloud, bring compute and application to the data and build eco system (marketplace) around data. When that matured you are looking at 10B+ company. If you join now you still benefit from 1B evaluation from last round, and internally we know we have being doing great, if we start a new round tomorrow it would be at least 2-3B of evaluation. Long-term you are looking 10x of return. Sometimes to join a startup you just need to buy into the vision and know the cake is big. We don't have any near term goal of IPO or, acquisition. As an old timer maybe my only concern is that Mohit himself may not have a lot of motivation of bringing company IPO soon, as he already achieved his financial freedom long time ago from Nutanix, if not Google. But he does have all the motivation to build a great company, not just product, a company.My estimate is that we will probably be IPO in 2-4 years, depends on the market condition at that time.
Thank you so much for detailed response. :)
Some truths. Mohit Aron the CEO still codes, and the code he writes is generally of the highest quality. There are some very smart individuals in the company - no two ways about it. There are also some people with very questionable credentials. There are plenty of them in Bangalore and now I hear Pune isn't much better either. In general teams are helpful and focused, although again, the mid-level management is very insecure. That Apurv guy from Blr - he may be brilliant but he is extremely arrogant. That culture is sometimes disturbing. The problem is that many newer folks are nowhere comparable but still try to emulate that arrogance. Go in for a fast paced year or eighteen months, learn stuff, then go elsewhere. They are somewhat stingy unless you're actually an IIT-ian or have extremely good credentials. You can survive there with some effort, but you can thrive there only if you're very good. I think the problem is that a lot of survivors are now filling up the ranks.
I have been with the company for a few years now. Engineering is awesome. They have good product out there. Most of the engineers are motivated and smart. I agree with some of the comments about arrogance. To add to that there are people who are close to Mohit and can tweak the system the way they want. This kind of culture is been seen at other startups as well - nothing new. Look at it from other angle - Cohesity has achieved quite a bit in the past couple of years. They have doubled the evaluation of the company in 1-1.5 years - which is amazing. Even when the market wasn't doing good the company has seen the strongest qtr in its history. Unlike some other startups there are too many distractions for engineering. One of the biggest one is that support wants to pull engineering in all most of the customer calls without debugging any issue. Most of the support that is hired at Cohesity in past 2 years is sub-par which puts a lot of pressure on engineering. Support doesn't add much value here. They are more like proxies. They cant solve technical problems, handle customer pressure nor can they set any expectations with customers - technically challenged. Upper management in support is technically sound but when it comes to strategy they don't know how to grow it. Support does not put much effort in debugging or even understanding what the use case is on escalations. Said that the support team hired when the company started are good. Overall company is doing good. If you are in engineering you will learn a lot.
Liked what u said. What is the learning for someone in their Sustaining Engg Team?
Bad
Have you worked there?