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Our premier executive interview episode is an interview with John Colgrove, CTO and co-founder of Pure Storage. Rob sat down with Coz (as he’s known) to talk all things Pure. And in true Coz fashion, the conversation led to some great stories and wandered in interesting directions!

Coz digs into a variety of topics in this episode: from Pure’s recent 10-year anniversary to our recent Pure//Accelerate event and everything in between. You’ll hear about the two decades of “a-ha” that led to Pure’s creation. (Hint: It’s related to the laws of physics and aerodynamics.) He shares how we approached solving an outage with an early (and large) customer, averted potential product disasters, and how Pure had to be “way, way better” than our competitors. Along the way, there are fun side conversations about car radios and hotel bathrooms! 

One thing we learn about Coz is that he never thought of himself as an entrepreneur, but rather a problem-solver. When he looked for companies to work for, he wanted to work on problems that needed solving. He realized that no one was doing what needed to be done or had grossly underestimated the amount of work necessary to do it. So he set out to solve the problems himself. As Coz puts it, he needed to “fix everything stupid” the storage industry had been doing for years. 

Coz has so many stories to share that we’re spreading his story across two podcasts. Listen to Part I now.