David Friend is having the time of his life.
At age 69, the Carbonite co-founder could have retired when he stepped down as CEO three years ago. Instead, he's launching a new startup with his longtime co-founder, Jeff Flowers, to directly compete with three of the largest tech companies in the world: Amazon, Google and Microsoft.
More specifically, Friend and Flowers are planning to compete with the Big Three in a field where they have quite a lot of expertise: cloud storage. And they claim it’s going to be way cheaper and way faster than their competitors — which Friend believes can spur more innovation for smaller and larger companies that are handling increasing amounts of data.
Say hello to Wasabi, which claims it costs a fifth of Amazon's popular S3 cloud storage service and runs six times faster. The Boston startup, which is expected to officially come out of stealth mode Wednesday, plans to specifically court Amazon S3 customers in the coming months with aggressive advertising campaigns. The startup was previously known as "Blue Archive” in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — a name Friend said was meant to mislead people.
"I didn't want them to realize it was going to not only be cheap but also far faster and so now, at the very last minute, we're going hot" — hence the name, "Wasabi," Friend said. (The company arrived at Wasabi after going through 200 names.)
Friend confirmed that the startup has raised $8.5 million to date — something that BostInno has previously reported. For the first time, Friend said, he took no money from venture capital firms and only relied on angel investors, many of whom invested in his previous companies. They include Sycamore Networks founder Desh Deshpande, former Data General CEO Ron Skates and longtime Greylock partner Howard Cox.
"I had talked to some of my old VCs and they thought I was nuts to go up against Amazon, Google and Microsoft."
"I had talked to some of my old VCs and they thought I was nuts to go up against Amazon, Google and Microsoft," Friend said of two VC firms that had previously invested in Carbonite, "so I said, 'you know what, I'm not going to convince these guys because the common wisdom in Silicon Valley is that Amazon will put everyone out of business.'"
To give you an idea of how much Wasabi will undercut Amazon's cloud storage pricing, Friend said Wasabi will only cost $50,400 annually for a petabyte (1 million gigabytes) of storage whereas Amazon's S3 would cost $276,000. The same storage on comparable services for Microsoft and Google would come out to $249,600 and $240,000, respectively.
That puts Wasabi’s pricing at a flat rate of .0039 cents per gigabyte. Unlike Amazon, Microsoft and Google, Wasabi has no pricing tiers because Friend believes storage should be treated like a utility, he said. The only other thing Wasabi charges for is the bandwidth when files are taken out of storage, unlike other services that “nickel and dime” you, he added.
Beyond the speed and low cost, Wasabi also touts a feature called "immutable buckets," which means it will protect files from accidental deletion and allow for policies that call for deletion of certain files after a certain period of time.
If you’re hoping to learn how Wasabi has engineered a cloud storage service that is one-fifth the cost of Amazon S3 and six times faster, prepare for disappointment: Friend said he isn’t giving away Wasabi’s secret sauce (one of Wasabi’s ads is even so bold as to ask, “Does it matter?”). However, Friend did provide a few broad details.
Wasabi uses a software-based approach to control how data is stored on disc drives, Friend said — “it’s about how you pack the data on disc” — and it has made several tweaks in that respect to make it cheaper and faster.
For skeptics, Friend said Wasabi will publish its own benchmark tests.
“I think if someone who really understood storage sat down and tried to figure out theoretically what could you do if you had all the software, they'd see that it's possible,” Friend said.
By dramatically lowering the cost of cloud storage, Friend thinks Wasabi will be an “innovation driver” for companies, especially early-stage startups that are running on a tighter budget, because of how much money they’ll be able to save moving to an inexpensive cloud storage service.
“I think this will be an innovation driver because there are a lot of things you would like to do that you just can’t afford to do” with higher cloud storage costs, Friend said.
One big way Wasabi plans to hook S3 customers is by being 100 percent compatible with S3's API, meaning that customers don't have to write any new code by switching over. Wasabi also will work with a number of other cloud services.
Friend said it will be hard for incumbents like Amazon and Microsoft to compete with Wasabi’s aggressively low price, at least in the immediate future. That’s why he thinks the startup could be an attractive acquisition target for a company that wants to “poke a stick in Amazon's eye.”
I was surprised that Friend openly talked about the possibility of getting acquired, even before it has signed up any customers. But Friend said this is likely his last venture, though that certainly isn't the first time he's said that. As for whether Friend would consider taking the company public, he said it’s something he’s not personally up for again.
However, he added that if his eventual successor wanted to go that route, he would have no problem with that. In stating so, Friend referenced his successor at Carbonite, Mohamad Ali, who he hired so he could leave and start Wasabi.
“If I have another Mohamad come in and run this company, he may just decide, ‘this is too good, I can raise a lot of money and will just build thing into a giant cloud storage business,'" Friend said.
