John Colgrove — Founder, CTO & Director at Pure Storage

Mr. John Colgrove, also known as Coz, founded PURE Storage, Inc. in October 2009 and has been its Chief Technology Officer and Executive Director since October 2009. Mr. Colgrove serves as a Strategic Advisor to select technology companies. Mr. Colgrove served as Vice President of Technology Strategy and Symantec Fellow for Parascale's Data Center Management Group (DCMG). Mr. Colgrove was one of the founding engineers at VERITAS Software (merged with Symantec in 2005), where his 20-year career culminated as Fellow and Chief Technology Officer for its Data Center Management Group. Mr. Colgrove served at Veritas/Symantec for more than 19 years and was a founding engineer of the original VxVM and VxFS. During this time, he made significant contributions to the many releases of the storage foundation products, the original versions of the NFS and database editions and the Volume Replicator products. Mr. Colgrove also built the performance lab at Veritas and has always been keenly interested driving the performance and scalability of products. He holds more than 50 patents related to storage and storage software. Mr. Colgrove was the Primary Architect for the hugely successful VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) and VERITAS File System (VxFS), and later served in various other engineering, management and consultative roles. During his time at VERITAS Mr. Colgrove became one of the industry's foremost experts on optimizing I/O streams and data structures for the unique idiosyncrasies of rotational hard drives, a challenge he's now re-solving for solid state Flash memory. Prior to VERITAS, Mr. Colgrove was with Amdahl Corporation, where he was a key contributor to the development of the UTS mainframe UNIX operating system kernel. After leaving Symantec in 2008 to pursue personal interests, he joined Sutter Hill Ventures in the role of Entrepreneur in Residence. It was there he observed the growing acceptance of solid-state storage by enterprises that led him to co-found Pure Storage with John Hayes, with the goal of fully exploiting the advantages of the new technology. He served as a Co-Chairman of PURE Storage, Inc. since May 2014. He served as a Member of Board of Advisors at Parascale, Inc. He holds over 70 patents in the areas of computer system and reliable data storage design. Mr. Colgrove is a graduate of Rutgers University.