May 19, 2020 · 25m · top-founders
1760 $20m To Build MVP: Does Carbonite Founder Have Another Billion Dollar Idea?
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this interview, host Nathan Latka speaks with Wasabi co-founder and CEO David Friend about scaling a disruptive cloud storage provider to 15,000 customers, achieving a 170% net retention rate, and competing against Amazon S3 through proprietary file system architecture and capital-efficient channel economics.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Nathan holds 38.3% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Nathan as informed peer 6.0 Guest teaching 4.2 Guest disagreement 3.0 Nathan pushing back 4.7
speaking balance: gold is Nathan, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 7:06 Refusal to disclose private revenue figures
David directly rejects Nathan's persistent mathematical trap to disclose revenue, asserting Nathan is trying to force confidential disclosures.
Hardest push from Nathan ▶ 6:52 Nathan insists on multiplying stated numbersNathan repeatedly refuses David's deflection by pointing out he is merely multiplying hard data points David already gave him.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:29 Explaining custom disk amortization and multi-billion incumbent barriersDavid educates Nathan on why the Amazon diaper analogy fails, explaining custom disk life-extension techniques and AWS revenue cannibalization risks.
Nathan holds their own ▶ 18:38 Translating cohort numbers into 170% NRR benchmarkNathan demonstrates deep SaaS domain mastery by converting David's ambiguous cohort growth into an exact 170% net retention metric and framing it against industry percentiles.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Nathan as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Nathan pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Guest Welcome and Entrepreneurial Background | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | The interview opens collegially as Nathan establishes David's track record with Carbonite and digs into pricing and customer economics. David clearly articulates Wasabi's cost advantage against AWS S3 and durability figures. | |
| Competitive Advantages Against Amazon S3 | 6 | 6 | 4 | 6 | Nathan challenges Wasabi's defensibility, arguing Amazon could undercut them on price like diapers. David schools Nathan on the structural economics of enterprise storage and explains their custom proprietary file system. | |
| Debating Top-Line Revenue and Customer Segmentation | 7 | 5 | 6 | 8 | Nathan aggressively multiplies customer counts and ARPU to deduce run-rate revenue, which David repeatedly refuses to confirm. Nathan also drills into CapEx and clarifies that Wasabi owns hardware and cages rather than physical real estate. | |
| Early Customer Acquisition and Channel Evolution | 5 | 4 | 2 | 3 | Nathan explores Wasabi's transition from direct B2C/B2B advertising to MSP channel partnerships. David describes their channel margins and utility pricing commoditization model. | |
| Headcount Distribution and Regional Sales Organization | 7 | 3 | 2 | 4 | Nathan presses for precise cohort retention metrics, successfully clarifying that 70% expansion equates to 170% net revenue retention. He also pushes David on debt capitalization versus equity dilution. | |
| Year-over-Year Velocity and Scalability Limits | 6 | 3 | 3 | 5 | Nathan expresses skepticism that Wasabi can sustain 5x annual growth at higher revenue scales, while David asserts storage demand enables rapid capacity additions before moving through the Famous Five. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Friend: Wasabi has 15,000 customers and 1,700 partners
“We have about a hundred employees now. We have about 15,000 customers and about 1700 channel partners and technology partners, people who sell wasabi bundled with various products.”
Friend: Wasabi charges $6/TB/month versus Amazon S3's $23
“Wasabi is six dollars a terabyte per month compared to 23 dollars per terabyte per month for Amazon S III, for example.”
Friend: Wasabi sells a petabyte of storage every couple days
“A petabyte of data used to seem like an unimaginable large amount of storage, but we sell that much storage every couple of days now.”
Friend: Wasabi provides 11 nines of durability matching Amazon S3
“We have what's called 11 nines of durability, which is the same as Amazon S III.”
Friend: Wasabi built proprietary file system leveraging new storage tech
“And the technology advantage is we've written our own file system, which takes advantage of some new kinds of storage technologies.”
Friend: Carbonite backed up 500 million files every day
“And at Carbonite, where we were backing up a half a billion files every day, we learned how to do storage really, really well and really efficiently.”
Friend: Amazon is unlikely to drop S3 prices against Wasabi
“For Amazon to simply drop price, they could do it, but unlike diapers, you know, storage is a multi-billion dollar product for Amazon, and it just seems unlikely to me that they're going to do that.”
Friend: Wasabi targets customers in the 10 to 100 terabyte range
“We have lots of small customers. We have a small number of big customers. But the customers that we like, the customers that we go after in that sort of 10 to 100 terabyte range, that's where most tend to end up. We don't actually go after smaller customers”
Friend: Wasabi spent $10M-$20M building its cloud storage MVP
“Yeah, yeah, that's right. In that range to build a product.”
Friend: Wasabi will hold hundreds of millions in CapEx within years
“We'll have hundreds of millions of dollars worth of CapEx on our balance sheet. You know, within a short number of years.”
Friend: Channel partners only show interest after startups prove customer traction
“I was just going to say, you have to get some customers before the channel partners are going to get interested in you, but we're a completely channel focused company.”
Friend: Wasabi storage costs less than equivalent hardware maintenance
“Typically, you can store a petabyte of data in Wasabi for less than just the annual maintenance on a, on the equivalent amount of hardware.”
Friend: Wasabi's 2018 cohort expanded storage 70% year-over-year
“The 20 18 cohort of customers grew 70% from 2018 to 2019. And it looks like they're going to grow about the same amount from 2019 to 20 to 20 20 as well.”
Friend: Wasabi secures debt from lenders who profited on Carbonite
“We have good relationships with lenders who made a good amount of money on carbonite, and they're back to the next thing.”