Poojan Kumar
Chief Product Innovation Officer, Commvault. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineercommvault.com ↗
Poojan Kumar is an enterprise infrastructure entrepreneur who co-founded and served as CEO of PernixData and Clumio. Earlier in his career, he wrote foundational code for Oracle Exadata and worked as an engineering leader at VMware.
2shows
2appearances
28statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
Everything Poojan Kumar said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kumar: PernixData and Clumio raised Series A rounds off pitch decks alone
“And in Pernik's case, we went and there's 11, seven million dollar series A with basically a PowerPoint deck with all the three things. And then Clumio did the same thing.”
Kumar: Founders should pitch lower-priority VCs first to refine their deck
“I tell folks, don't go to your Perfect target in the first testing. It's okay, you've got to burn a little, you know, burn a couple folks to perfect it.”
Kumar: Public cloud backup requires fundamentally different architecture than on-prem
“And the scale and the architecture needed to go and, you know, provide backup and cyber resilience for them was very different than an architecture needed to go backup, you know, on-prem or even backup SaaS applications, right?”
Kumar: Every enterprise security workflow is being rethought around AI agents
“Every, every use case in security also is getting, you know, rethought, like, how can I build a, you know maybe an agent, right, that can do this automatically versus relying on how it was being done before. So every workflow is being, being reinvented and eve…”
Kumar: Agentic AI apps in cloud will require increased data protection
“These agentic applications in the cloud will also need, you know, protection, right? And if at all, we'll need more of it because the chances of things going wrong could be higher, right? You can imagine, right? With all the stuff happening in an agentic world…”
Kumar: Modern AI data stacks replace VMs with distributed serverless architectures
“Gone are the days that you're going to run, you know, applications sitting in big virtual machines and, you know, attaching storage to it and so on and so forth, right? You know, you're basically going to build an architecture that can, you know, scale up and …”
Kumar: No vendor has yet holistically solved AI agent data lineage
“I think that is very early days. I don't think anybody has really tackled this holistically yet, but this is I think important.”
Poojan Kumar: Successful AI startups scale through bottom-up adoption, not top-down sales
“The ground up adoption is how you have to target it. You have to essentially think about how are you going to essentially get this thing in the hands of your end user, make it very easy and essentially make sure that it's something that is, is, is loved by the…”
Kumar: Claude Code's Grassroots Adoption Replicates AWS Winning Cloud Architects
“It's like, ah, it's like the equivalent of the developer for, A cloud code is exactly how, you know, you can say, you know it was a cloud architect for AWS, right? Or a DevOps person in the AWS world, right? So on and so forth. It's like, if I think there's a …”
Kumar: Startup M&A works like closing a long-term enterprise deal
“When somebody is you know, is looking to buy a company at the end of the day, you know, they're buying, you know a platform, a company, to essentially make it part of the bigger entity and really grow it, right? And so I think it's a large deal at some level, …”
Poojan Kumar: Connecting Engineers to Customers via Slack Drives Contract Expansion
“In the case of large customers that have scaled with us, even though it has started small, one thing that we have done is we've kept close. Like we would create a Slack channel between The customer and the folks on the customer side, the users on the customer …”
Kumar: On-Prem Data Center Architectures Cannot Be Retrofitted to the Cloud
“Can I take a on-prem architecture, data center architecture and really retrofit it to the cloud? Not really.”
Kumar secured Pernix's first $15k customer by pitching a competitor's booth attendee
“That
Guy, whom I actually caught at the booth, became our first customer, first paying customer at Purnix.
More, 15,000 dollar deal.
He bought it for two servers.
First paying customer.
And not only that, he actually went ahead and joined the company also as o…”
Kumar: Enterprise tire-kickers will not spend time testing free software
“These folks, at least in the space we play in, they won't give you the time. They don't have the time to give you. You're asking for real time, right? Maybe one hour a week, You know, installing the software in their environment, asking for feedback and all of…”
Kumar: Enterprise PMF Is Reached When Sales Reps Predictably Close Deals
“I think product market fit in a, in both cases, like it's about finding the repeatability. Can you hire You know, a new sales rep, and can you point them in the right direction, which they call, say, an ICP, ideal customer profile, and train them on the two or…”
Poojan Kumar: Enterprise startups must be built on major sector discontinuities
“Whenever I, you know, look at starting something, at least in the enterprise, you have to look at what's the big discontinuity happening in the sector, right?”
Poojan Kumar: PernixData reached $25M in revenue before its Nutanix acquisition
“Yeah, it was about, ah, you know, twenty-five million of revenue.
Independently, yes.
Ah, when we got acquired, we're about twenty-five million of revenue.”
Poojan Kumar: PernixData had close to 900 paying customers at acquisition
“We had, you know, operations, ah, you know, in multiple countries, you know, around the globe, and, ah, close to 900, you know, paying customers when we got acquired.”
Kumar: Enterprises actively adopt AI agents in support and legal verticals
“So, you know, for example, support is, is, is an interesting vertical, right? Which is a lot of stuff happening within support where, you know, the ticket deflection and automatic resolution of tickets, these are things that whether somebody builds it themselv…”
Kumar: Cloud Durability Guarantees Do Not Protect Against Accidental Data Deletion
“The cloud vendor is making sure that I have 11 nines of durability. That's awesome. But that doesn't prevent from a deletion happening. Because if I ask a cloud vendor to delete something, guess what? The cloud vendor will delete it. Because you asked me to de…”
Kumar: Ransomware Attacks Both Primary Data and Backups
“Obviously a typical ransomware, you know, is going to essentially go and, you know, attack your primary, but they also will attack your backup. If there is a backup, because that is your resort to go and recover, right? So then, you know, that became an import…”
Poojan Kumar admits raising far more capital than his startups actually needed
“I think, you know, I, I've made my fair share of mistakes there too. When you raised, you know, way more capital than what you needed, right?”
Kumar: Clumio secured its first five alpha customers from 20 conference meetings
“At Clumio, we went to a big conference and I basically had set up, you know, 15, 20 meetings based on LinkedIn.
And, you know, of course I had my past background also at play.
And then between those 15, 20 meetings over those three, four days over lunches and …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Poojan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 NEON SHOWLEDGER | Chief Product Innovation Officer, Commvault | 1 | 20 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Neon Show → |
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Chief Product Innovation Officer, Commvault | 1 | 8 | — | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |