How Poojan Kumar Turned $260 Million into Two Massive Exits
What does it take to build a company that industry giants want to buy?Poojan Kumar built and exited two enterprise infrastructure companies, PernixData to Nutanix and Clumio to Commvault.
He began his career at Oracle, where he wrote the original code for Exadata and helped scale it into a billion-dollar product line. But his real founder journey began when he left the corporate world to chase what he calls the “Discontinuity Thesis.”
At PernixData, that discontinuity was the shift from hard disks to flash storage. The company scaled to $25 million in revenue before being acquired by Nutanix. At Clumio, the discontinuity was public cloud. Clumio went on to raise $186 million to build a cloud-native backup and cyber resilience platform before being acquired by Commvault, where Poojan now serves as GM of the business line.
If you want to understand how enduring enterprise companies are actually built and acquired this episode is for you.
0:00 - Trailer
0:48 - 25 Years in Enterprise
03:02 - Founders Should Look for Discontinuity
04:25 - $25M ARR, $60M Funding & an Exit in 6 Years
06:28 - The Thesis Behind Clumio's Acquisition
07:36 - The Landscape of Data Backup
09:08 - What Should Founders in Security & Data Build?
11:48 - Cloud vs AI: The New Data & Storage Stack
13:59 - The Unanswered Questions Enterprises Have Today
16:38 - How Infra Changed Between Pernix, Clumio & Today
18:31 - Scaling to $25M Before Acquisition, Twice
20:43 - Why is AI Adoption Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down?
21:26 - Claude vs Codex vs Copilot
22:34 - When Cloud Outgrew the Backup Playbook
25:41 - Are Fragmented Clouds Silent Killers?
28:06 - Fundraising Takes You from Point A to Point B
32:29 - Selling to Commvault vs Nutanix
34:33 - What Leads to an 8-Figure Exit?
36:55 - How a Technical Founder Excelled at Sales
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