Thomas Isakovich

The Profile

The biggest drive on Earth came from the smallest cap table in storage

In March 2018, Nimbus Data slid a 100-terabyte solid state drive onto the table and the storage world blinked. Years later, it is still the largest SSD ever shipped. The company that built it answers to exactly one boss, and he wrote most of the checks himself.

That boss is Thomas Isakovich. He runs Nimbus Data, the flash-storage company he founded and then funded - more than ninety percent of its growth - out of his own pocket. No venture syndicate. No board pressuring him toward an exit. While the rest of Silicon Valley raced to raise the next round, Isakovich did the unfashionable thing: he kept the company, and he made it profitable.

The headline product is the ExaDrive DC100. One hundred terabytes of flash in a single 3.5-inch shell, launched on March 19, 2018. The number is almost absurd - it is the kind of capacity that used to require a refrigerator-sized array. Isakovich's bet was that the industry had its priorities backward. Everyone was shrinking drives to 2.5 inches and chasing raw speed. He went the other direction and chased density, efficiency, and capacity, because those, he argued, are what actually move the cost of storage. The drive used a scale-out architecture inside the SSD itself, patented, and according to Isakovich tough for rivals to engineer around. The proof is the calendar: years on, the title still hasn't changed hands.

Nimbus Data today is not a single drive but a stack - the ExaDrive line, FlashRack systems, HALO management software, and patented Iridium controllers - aimed at the workloads that eat storage alive: AI, cloud, enterprise databases, and edge infrastructure. It runs from Irvine, California, with more than 700 installations across 200 customers in a dozen countries. For a hardware company in a field littered with venture-funded flameouts, the quiet fact of its profitability is the loudest thing about it.

As flash memory prices decline, capacity, energy efficiency, and density will become the critical drivers of cost reduction and competitive advantage. Thomas Isakovich, on why he went big

To understand why Isakovich plays the long game with his own money, you have to rewind to the time he lost everyone else's.

Origin Story

He started a company in a dorm room. Then the bubble took it.

Isakovich sold his first storage system as a teenager, before he could legally buy a beer to celebrate. By the time he arrived at Stanford, the wiring was already set. His first two years were a study in double exposure: dawn rowing practice on one side, late nights launching a data-storage startup from his rooms in Larkin and the Theta Delta Chi house on the other. Somewhere in between he found time to work at IBM's Almaden Research Center and in Oracle's Network Computer division.

Something had to give, and the grades gave first. When his adviser laid out the math and told him to choose between the business and the degree, Isakovich chose the business and stopped out. His father, unimpressed, told his son that if he ever wanted to come back to Stanford, he would be paying for it himself. Isakovich, running a venture he insisted was already profitable, took the deal.

The company was TrueSAN Networks, founded in 1999, a storage-software play stitching together virtualization, device management and resource management. It caught the updraft of the dot-com boom and raised tens of millions of dollars. Then the boom became a bust, the funding dried up, and TrueSAN collapsed. Isakovich was 26 years old and watching a company he'd built since his teens come apart in real time.

The day-to-day running of a business, there's a part of your brain that sort of slowly dies. Thomas Isakovich, on why he went back to school

Most people would have either fled the industry or doubled down on the next raise. Isakovich did something stranger. He started Nimbus Data in 2003 - and then, in 2004, he went back to Stanford to finish what he'd left. Not for the credential. He said he missed the intellectual engagement, the part of the brain that the daily grind of operations slowly switches off.

And he didn't return to engineering. After sitting in on a guest lecture by Condoleezza Rice, he switched his major to political science. He wrote an honors thesis, graduated in 2006 in the top ten percent of his class, and calls it one of the accomplishments he is proudest of - a storage engineer who left to build a company and came back to argue about geopolitics.

100 Terabytes / Single Drive

The ExaDrive DC100

Launched March 19, 2018. The largest solid state drive ever built - and years later, still uncontested.

3.5-inch form factor. Patented scale-out architecture. A complement model, the 64TB QLC, arrived to undercut it on price without ceding the capacity crown.

The Contrarian Playbook

What he refused to do is the whole point

The easy way to read Isakovich is by his products. The truer read is by his refusals. He refused to give the company away one funding round at a time. He refused to follow the industry into smaller, faster, lower-capacity drives. He refused, even after a public failure, to treat the dot-com loss as proof that he should hand the wheel to professional money.

That posture shows up in how he talks about competitors, too. He has publicly forecast trouble for legacy flash-array vendors as the market shifts toward disaggregated, software-defined storage - the lane Nimbus Data has been carving for years. It is a confident position for a 14-person company to take against the giants. It is also the kind of bet he has earned the right to make, having already been wrong once, expensively, and survived it.

The throughline from the teenager selling storage systems to the CEO shipping 100TB drives is ownership in the most literal sense. Isakovich owns the patents, owns the company, and owns the consequences. In 2024 he was still on LinkedIn announcing the next thing - FlashRack, a new all-flash system - with the energy of a founder who has no intention of cashing out and calling it a career.

ExaDrive DC100

100 TB

ExaDrive 64TB

64 TB

Typical enterprise SSD

~16 TB

Typical consumer SSD

~2 TB

Relative capacity, illustrative. The DC100 held the "world's largest" title for years with no challenger.

In His Words

Three sentences that explain him

“

As flash memory prices decline, capacity, energy efficiency, and density will become the critical drivers of cost reduction and competitive advantage.

“

We're trying to provide the most efficient, high-capacity flash storage possible.

“

The day-to-day running of a business, there's a part of your brain that sort of slowly dies.

“

Graduating from Stanford with honors - one of the things I'm most proud of in my life.