We recently spoke with the chief executives of companies that participated in the AWS Startup Showcase: New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics and Cloud Management Tools to find out what drives them and learn about their visions for the future. This feature is part of theCUBE’s ongoing CEO Startup Spotlight series.

As a young man, Suresh Vasudevan (pictured) excelled at engineering. However, when he was awarded a place at a top university in India, Vasudevan was hesitant to accept. He wanted to stay in his hometown of Hyderabad where his closest friends were going to school, but his mother encouraged him to be more adventurous.

“She always kept pushing me to try and explore boundaries and take more risk, and almost every time I did that it worked out well,” said Vasudevan, chief executive officer of container intelligence company Sysdig Inc.

His father also had motivational advice, but it was of a different kind. 

“My dad used to say this: ‘If you can’t make it through education, I’ll buy you a few goats, and your life is going to be around making a livelihood out of livestock,’” Vasudevan said.

Instead of becoming a goatherd, Vasudevan graduated with a bachelor of science degree (with honors) in electrical engineering and went on to get his master’s in business administration from the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta.

It wasn’t the only time that taking unsolicited but wise advice changed Vasudevan’s life. He hadn’t been working in Silicon Valley very long when he was offered the chance to be promoted to vice president in a role overseeing alliances and corporate strategy. He saw it as a big opportunity, until a mentor pointed out that it would move his career away from his true talent in engineering and product. 

“That’s seniority, but that’s a dead-end for you,” the mentor told him, advising that instead, he waited for the same opportunity to arise in the field he loved.

“If I’ve learned one thing, it is that almost nothing that has worked well in my life has worked because of me,” Vasudevan told theCUBE. “There’s always someone giving you thoughtful advice and shaping you. I think it’s important to keep that in mind. It’s hard to be successful alone.”  

A journey from India to Silicon Valley via Gary, Indiana

India was undergoing an economic transformation at the time that Vasudevan graduated from university. After the country gained independence from England in 1947, the economy was essentially closed. Foreign investments were discouraged, and restrictive tariffs were imposed on imports. This changed in the early 1990s, and multinational companies started to establish offices in India. One of these was the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co.  

It was a pivotal time both for India and for Vasudevan. In quick succession, he was awarded his master’s in business administration, married, and gained a highly prized job working at the newly opened offices of McKinsey India. The position exposed him to the international business community, and after four years at McKinsey he accepted a job working in the United States. 

“It was not some dream,” said Vasudevan, explaining how the move was supposed to be temporary. “I thought I was doing a one-year stint in the U.S. when I came here, and it’s now 30 years,” he said.

If settling in the U.S. wasn’t something Vasudevan had considered, a career as a Silicon Valley tech executive was even further from his mind. His first job in the States was as a consultant for a steel company in Gary, Indiana. He didn’t like it.

“The employment rate seemed like it was 30 or 40% … and it was about taking costs out of a place that was already decimated with unemployment,” he said.

Drained by the depressive atmosphere of the declining steel industry, Vasudevan and his wife decided to return to India. But first, he took a vacation to California to visit a friend who had just started working with a networking startup called NetApp. He ended up meeting CEO Dan Warmenhoven, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“When I had my interview with Dan, he was talking about how this small company was going to take down HPE and IBM, and the whole energy in the hallways was really palpable,” Vasudevan said. He realized there was another side to America than the Gary steel mills, and he wanted to be part of it.

“I called my wife from vacation and said, ‘We should really stay on and move to the Valley,’” Vasudevan remembered. “We decided to do that, and it’s the best decision I ever made.”

Breakneck innovation speeds energize Vasudevan’s career

During his 10 years at NetApp, Vasudevan put his engineering background to good use, helping the company develop its unified data storage portfolio, and he found his niche as a competitive innovator. 

“This is a space where the innovation is at such a breakneck pace that it keeps you really energized every day,” he said, describing the constant challenge as “a beautiful chess game.”

Taking his own advice to “always seek a point of discomfort further out,” Vasudevan eventually left his role as senior vice president of product at NetApp to lead digital content storage and processing systems startup Omneon Inc. Despite having a solid product and customer base, the company’s previous leadership had been through a series of unsuccessful IPO attempts. Vasudevan stepped in and took a different route, negotiating a successful $274 million sale to Harmonic Inc.

After Omneon sold, Vasudevan joined Nimble Storage as CEO. When theCUBE interviewed Vasudevan during the Nimble Storage Adaptive Flash Platform launch event in 2014, he talked about how he encouraged a collaborative, “no jerks” culture that kept the company on the innovative edge.

“I’m still very proud of the fact that almost everybody that worked [at Nimble] would say it was one of their top two working experiences,” he told theCUBE during his interview for this feature. “That’s probably the biggest compliment, not just for me, but for the entire leadership team and for everybody there.”

Supportive, collaborative attitude is a key factor to CEO success

Hitting business milestones is unimportant if you don’t have a loyal and enthusiastic workforce, according to Vasudevan. He attributes his desire to “win, but carry others with you,” to his upbringing in India. 

“When you grow up in an Indian culture, I think you’re celebrated less for individual success … and more for what you’re seen as having done in the community [and] for the community,” he said. “So if you’re successful, your role is to lift everybody around you.”

This supportive and collaborative attitude may be a factor in why so many Indian-born executives have risen to the top of U.S.-based technology companies. Vasudevan is part of a group that includes Satya Nadella of Microsoft, Shantanu Narayen of Adobe Systems, Arvind Krishna of IBM, Sanjay Mehrotra of Micron Technology, Nikesh Arora of Palo Alto Networks, Raghu Raghuram of VMware, Anjali Sud of Vimeo.com, and the newly appointed Twitter CEO, Parag Agrawal.

At Nimble, as with Omneon, Vasudevan built up the company’s profit margins, market share and product portfolio. In December 2013, Nimble went public with a successful IPO. 

“We had a great time at Nimble, it grew extremely quickly. I think it was the third-fastest company to go public from its inception,” Vasudevan said. 

After six years at the helm, Vasudevan negotiated a successful sale to Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. for $1.2 billion.

“Suresh has a talent for successfully scaling young companies into robust organizations,” Sysdig board member and Accel Partners LP partner Ping Li said in the press release announcing Vasudevan’s hire. “That talent combined with his deep knowledge of data management, security and cloud infrastructure makes him a perfect fit to lead.”

Vasudevan searches for early-stage opportunity in a chaotic market

After tenures at Nimble and NetApp, Vasudevan had many opportunities to join companies in the storage market. But even though Nimble experienced rapid growth under Vasudevan’s command, he didn’t feel the sense of accomplishment that he expected. 

“One big ‘Aha!’ that happened for me at Nimble was that I quickly realized flawless execution still doesn’t get you enough rewards when the market is one that is not an emerging, growing market,” he said.

For his next company, he knew he wanted to join an industry that was in its “chaotic, early days,” where he would have the opportunity to shape not just the company, but the market itself. Container security was a perfect fit. And open-source-based Sysdig, which had taken an early bet on Kubernetes, offered an exciting opportunity.

Sysdig stood out for personal reasons as well. Venture capital firm Accel Partners, which had funded Omneon and Nimble, was an investor. This meant that Vasudevan had a long-term relationship with their board members, which understood his strategic logic.

The final factor in Vasudevan’s decision to join Sysdig was his synergy with founder Loris Degioanni.

“We had lots of discussions, and I just found it extremely easy to not just like what he’s building, but think of him as a friend and someone I want to spend time with,” Vasudevan said.

Outsider bet on Kubernetes pays off as Sysdig’s TAM expands

Sysdig’s early decision to build its container security platform on Kubernetes was visionary. Pre-pandemic, Sysdig’s customer base was “expert but narrow,” according to Vasudevan. But in 2020, Kubernetes adoption “started to take off,” and the last two years have been “the knee of the curve on the hockey stick upswing.”

Kubernetes will remain the “spider in the middle of the web” as the world undergoes a platform shift to containers and microservices, Vasudevan predicted.

“[When] someone is building a new application, three out of four times or more they are going to pick Kubernetes as the underlying technology with which to build applications,” he said. “There’ll be technologies that leverage Kubernetes more and change it, but I don’t think you’re going to see something come in a fast-paced manner and transplant Kubernetes – at least for the next decade.”

The increased awareness of open-source vulnerabilities in the wake of the Log4j incident has also boosted Sysdig’s market position by highlighting the importance of having comprehensive visibility across all environments.

“It was remarkable how many customers started by asking, ‘Tell me where my vulnerabilities lie,’” said Vasudevan, explaining how despite knowing that Log4j was vulnerable to exploit, customers had no idea how to find the potentially thousands of instances in which that code was deployed.  

Sysdig’s philosophy of coupling security at the source and in run time means its platform can track vulnerabilities across both development and production environments, making it attractive to companies looking for a holistic replacement to their current collection of point tools.

“We fortunately have evolved in a direction where we can deploy our solution in the pipeline, in your registry, in on-prem hosts, in cloud hosts, and in containers and Kubernetes, of course,” Vasudevan stated.

Cloud security pivots on containers

Looking toward the future for container security, Vasudevan predicted that the company that “owns the big intellectual property” for Kubernetes and container security will end up being the biggest winner.

“For us, container security is the fulcrum around the broader cloud security problem,” he said. 

Enterprise adoption of open-source has led to Sysdig emerging as a thought leader in the container security market, putting the company in a position to strengthen its lead. Its aspiration for the future is to leverage its open-source foundation and product portfolio and become “the unequivocal leader of cloud security,” Vasudevan stated. “Having done that in container security, we’re off to a really good start. And the momentum we’re seeing puts us in a good place.”

If that goal is achieved, it will be a triumph shared by the entire Sysdig workforce, thanks to the collaborative culture that Vasudevan supports. 

“Company building is the ultimate act of creation. It is creation involving hundreds of people,” he said. “The sense of accomplishment comes not from results only, but from feeling like you’ve just set yourself on a really interesting problem and that was an experience you would do all over again.”

Photo: Suresh Vasudevan