Kevin D. Brown’s Page
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Welcome! First off, since there lots of people named
Kevin Brown, here’s a quick summary of me to make sure you’ve found the right
guy: ·
Silicon Valley
tech entrepreneur: o
CEO of Kidaro
(acquired by Microsoft, May’08) o
VP at Decru
(acquired by NetApp, Aug’05) o
VP/GM and part
of founding team at Inktomi (NASDAQ: INKT then acquired by Yahoo) o
For more
details, here’s my profile on LinkedIn ·
UC Berkeley
Haas School of Business, MBA’96 o
Fellow and
Advisory Board member, Lester Center for Entrepreneurship ·
Married to Jenny
Redo, and a proud dad of two
daughters ·
Drummer ·
Passion for
cooking and entertaining with friends |
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If you’ve
made it this far, I’m probably the KB you’re looking for. Here’s a little more on my interests…
Family
I’ve got a
super family, and I’m really enjoying a break in the action to spend time with
them. Our family site is at www.jennykevin.com.
Music
I’ve been
drumming for over 30 years now, with a heavy emphasis on progressive and hard
rock. Top musical influences include
Rush, Tool, Porcupine Tree, Led Zeppelin, Cream, Pink Floyd, Santana, and Peter
Gabriel.
I’ve had the
privilege of playing for most of those years with two of my greatest friends, Paul Lesinski
(lead guitarist for The Strangers, Colorfield, The Floydian Slips), and Tom Gutierrez (supergenius bass player, composer, and physics professor at
Cal Poly SLO). Our high school and
college-era rock bands included Osiris and Dark’s Ensemble. Here are a couple of videos from the 20-year reunion
show of Osiris, recorded at the Little Fox Theater in Redwood City, CA.
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White Room (by Cream)
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Smoke on the Water (by Deep Purple)
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I’ve also played
off and on for years with some other great bands, including The Unemployables (Mike and Phil, you guys rock), and
Port80 (Inktomi band, with notable gigs
at COMDEX ‘99 and at San Francisco’s legendary Great American Music Hall).
Cooking With Friends
I love being
a dad, but having two small kids really crushed our social life for a
while. We discovered the best way to
enjoy great meals and see friends was to do it ourselves. I’ve got some talented foodie friends --
including Mark Cashman, Robert Habibi, Eric Brewer, and OJ Nguyen -- and a
sense of friendly competition drove us to sharpen our skills for these
multi-course dining events. Here’s an
article from 2003 (“Kevin’s Kitchen”) in our local paper talking about
our culinary adventures.
Mark Cashman and I toast after
serving 200 guests at the Atherton Celebrity Chef event
The San
Francisco bay area has some phenomenal restaurants – some of our favorite
inspirations include The French Laundry (Napa), Restaurant Gary Danko (San
Francisco), and Michael Mina (San Francisco).
We also had a great culinary tour in New Orleans, including Commander’s
Palace and K-Paul’s (see picture below).
If you have any suggestions on great food, I’d love to hear from you.
New Orleans 40th Birthday
Bash with great friends: Jennifer
Cashman, Jamie Wright, Carl Wright, Jenny Redo, Kevin Brown, Mark Cashman,
Mozhi Habibi, Robert Habibi
Professional
“In business, more money is better,
but the greatest luxury is the ability to choose whom you work with, what you
work on, and the impact it can have on the world.”
I’ve been
extremely fortunate to work on some great projects, with great people, which
have made a positive difference in the world.
I really enjoy the early stages of creating a company and a market:
maximum innovation, minimum politics, high stakes, nonstop adrenaline, and
violent execution. Grrrr!
No surprise,
of all of the variables above, the most important is people. For my last two startups (Decru and Kidaro),
I’ve had the great privilege of working with two close friends, Dan Avida and
Carl Wright.
Dan is a
legend. He invented the Fiery print
controller at EFI, rose to become the company’s CEO, and grew them to $570
million in revenue and 80% market share, all in his mid-30’s. He quit EFI to start an incredible storage
security company called Decru, and I jumped at the chance to work with him as a
VP running Marketing/BD/Product Management.
We sold Decru to NetApp in 2005; while I stayed on as a VP at NetApp for
18 months, Dan became a general partner at Opus Capital, and his first
investment was in an Israel-based desktop virtualization company called
Kidaro. It was a brilliant idea, and we
engineered a way for me to join as CEO of the company. Dan was the best board member I’ve ever
worked with, and was instrumental in our successful outcome (Kidaro was
acquired by Microsoft in May’08).
Carl Wright
is another legendary operator. He
formerly served as Chief Information Security Officer of the US Marine Corps,
and we met him while he was driving about 90% of the revenue at Securify. Dan and I instantly loved this guy, and soon
we were able to recruit him to run our Federal business at Decru. Working with Carl, we were able to make Decru
the dominant storage security platform for the DoD/IC, which helped us achieve
a similar position in the Fortune 1000.
Carl was already consulting at Kidaro when I arrived, and he joined
full-time as the #2 executive at the company.
There is no substitute for hard work and winning with true friends at
your side.
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Kevin and Dan at the
market in Tel Aviv
Of course
there are many other close friends and war stories from the last two decades,
but I’ll share a quick thought on a concept we developed: the Pufferfish
strategy. When you’re in the business of
running startups, the world is against you – you’re small, customers are scared
to work with you, big vendors try to FUD you to death, and competitors are
constantly copying your strategies. In
nature, the humble Pufferfish evolved a strategy to survive in harsh
environments – when threatened, it swallows water to appear larger, and sharp
spines stick out on all sides. In
startups, we emulate the Pufferfish with a combination of aggressive direct
sales, strategic market positioning and business development tactics to quickly
build an outsized market presence.
Careful product management analysis and prioritization can enable
product differentiation that is very difficult for new entrants to overcome.
Recommended Reading
When you
spend as much time on planes as I have, reading can take on a new level of
importance in your life. I like a number
of genres, but science and science fiction appeal deeply to my inner geek. Here are a few I’d highly recommend – let me
know what you think:
Neal
Stephenson: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, Anathem
China
Mieville: Perdido Street Station, The Scar, Iron Council
Bill Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything
Magazines: Scientific American, Computerworld
If you’ve
made it this far, thanks for spending your time with my humble Web page. Even better, I’ll look forward to seeing you
in person soon…
P.S.
If you’re wondering what the graphic at the top of the page is, it’s a
close-up shot of a massive canyon on Mars, courtesy of NASA.