flash-storage
(3)
Thomas Isakovich
Thomas Isakovich is the founder and CEO of Nimbus Data, the flash-storage company behind the ExaDrive DC100 - the 100-terabyte solid state drive that, years after its 2018 debut, still has no equal in capacity. He built and sold his first storage system as a teenager, launched TrueSAN Networks from his Stanford dorm room, watched it collapse in the dot-com bust at age 26, then started over with Nimbus Data and self-funded more than 90% of its growth into a profitable global business spanning 200 customers in 12 countries. He is a rare bird in Silicon Valley: a hardware founder who turned down the venture-capital playbook, kept the company his own, and went back to finish his Stanford degree purely because he missed thinking.
Hao Zhong
Hao Zhong is the CEO and Co-Founder of ScaleFlux, a San Jose-based fabless semiconductor company that builds computational storage drives and CXL memory solutions for cloud, AI, and data center workloads. With 20+ years in flash storage and LDPC technology — including stints at LSI, SandForce, and Fusion-io — Zhong co-founded ScaleFlux in 2014 to rethink what a storage device can do: compress data in hardware, cut write amplification, and deliver 4x effective capacity at roughly half the price of standard NVMe SSDs. ScaleFlux has raised $288M in funding and posted record-breaking growth in 2024.
George Kurian
George Kurian is the Chief Executive Officer of NetApp, the $20B+ enterprise data storage and cloud infrastructure company, where he has led a decade-long transformation from legacy storage vendor to AI-ready data platform. Born in Pampady, Kerala, he arrived at Princeton at 17 with a partial scholarship and a twin brother — Thomas Kurian, now CEO of Google Cloud — making them one of the rarest pairs in tech: identical twins who both run major Fortune 500 companies. Under his tenure since 2015, NetApp has posted record revenues of $6.57B in FY2025 and positioned itself as critical backbone for enterprise AI workloads.