Today, Storj announced exciting news that will shape the next chapter of our growth. I am honored to step into the role of CEO and energized by significant advances our company has made in transforming the future of distributed cloud services. As I transition from Chief Revenue Officer to Chief Executive Officer, I want to share my perspective on what’s next for Storj in light of our journey so far, and share a few thoughts on how we’ll continue to build on our strong foundation.

Early steps in distributed storage from Space Monkey to CrowdStorage.

First, I’ll share a snapshot of what led me to my present role. In 2014, when I was responsible for Strategic Business Development at Vivint, the CFO asked my analyst team to conduct due diligence on a company called Space Monkey, founded by Alen Peacock and Clint Gordon-Carroll. Space Monkey built a network storage device that was used to store consumer photos and videos. Instead of backing this data up to the cloud, Space Monkey backed it up to the other Space Monkey devices on the network.

I’d often provide tours through the Vivint building, and at the top floor I’d invite visitors to look across the valley to the NSA data center. I’d explain how expensive it was for them to procure the land, build the infrastructure, hire the employees, secure the data and premises, cool and maintain the servers, and the myriad of other costs associated with data centers. Space Monkey’s strategy of storing data across the network of devices eliminated most of these costs. So we scaled the Space Monkey technology by building a network of hundreds of thousands of devices to create an S3 compatible object storage solution with a capacity of hundreds of petabytes and performance similar to Amazon S3.

Seeing the greater potential of this distributed storage approach, Jacob Willoughby, Bryan Mangelson and I decided to spin out the technology to serve more organizations with this solution to launch a company called CrowdStorage, which I led as CEO. We achieved early success with Western Digital using our technology to back up data for their MyCloud Home device. Throughout this time, Storj was always in our field of vision.

I knew Storj was the only company in the world that presented formidable competition to us.  Other providers like Sia or Filecoin generated buzz but lacked the consistent performance that Storj had. In 2019, after learning more about Storj I decided it would yield a more powerful and strategic advantage to join forces with them and we were acquired in February 2019.

Continuing the distributed journey at Storj.

I want to acknowledge the remarkable work of Ben Golub, CEO of Storj since 2018. The opportunity to work with him was a key reason that drew me to Storj. He’s an exceptional leader and mentor, and has given me freedom and independence to grow our direct sales and channel teams to achieve results far beyond what we initially perceived as aggressive targets. Under his guidance, Storj has achieved transformative milestones, from an innovative product portfolio that now encompasses cloud storage, file storage, compute and other technology accelerants. I’m grateful he’ll remain closely involved with Storj as Executive Chair of our Board.

Ben’s work was foundational, and mine will continue to reinforce this strong foundation while shaping our next phase: cultivating sales and partnerships, integrating our recent acquisitions, expanding our market reach, and scaling our customer base while ensuring our customers’ experience inspires them to be loyal, enthusiastic Storj evangelists.  

My mission goes beyond increasing revenue—it’s about understanding the changing dynamics of the market landscape and how best to serve our customer’s current and future needs, propelling our brand equity and making Storj the market leading and best choice for distributed cloud platform services. As a company, we know that our success will also help planet earth by reducing the carbon emissions created to support innovation.

What’s next for the distributed cloud.

The opportunity ahead is immense. We’re well known for distributed cloud object storage, and now we have a GPU offering and a file mount solution that enables local access to cloud object  storage. Each of our products is poised for explosive growth, which will be even faster and higher-impact when they’re positioned together as part of the Storj distributed cloud platform. Over the past year, we’ve grown over 5x and we’ll continue accelerating our growth through the coming months and years.

Here’s what you can expect as we move forward:

1. Focused growth strategy: We will target markets where data needs to be distributed and expand our customer base, emphasizing cost-effectiveness, coupled with security, performance and sustainability benefits.
2. Enhanced customer engagement: We will continue listening to and closely collaborating with our users to refine our products and ensure we meet their evolving needs in the most efficient and sustainable  way possible.
3. Expanding partnerships: I see great potential in forging new alliances and collaborations, particularly with enterprises and developers looking for an innovative cloud platform with disruptive solutions.

Storj’s coming chapters are a huge inspiration to me. With a passionate, skilled and creative team, an innovative product, and a clear vision, we’re ideally prepared to continue disrupting and reinventing what is possible with the distributed cloud. I offer sincere thanks to our team, our customers, partners and colleagues in the industry for your enthusiasm and support as we prepare to make meaningful advances to support the future of data.