Ocient co-founder Chris Gladwin joins this episode to take us down his entrepreneurial journey, starting as a child born and raised in Ohio (7:07) to his days at MIT (14:02), including the internship that kicked off his entire career. He dives into his first few jobs: Evaluating information technology products for Martin Marietta (now Locheed Martin) (21:34) and then building ethernet into portable PCs at Zenith Data Systems (24:07). His first startup, Cruise Technologies, stemmed from his time at Zenith, developing Wireless Thin Clients (29:00) from which he shares lessons learned in building respectful relationships with investors (32:19). He then goes on to explain how those lessons enabled him to raise money for his next startup, a music subscription service called MusicNow, which he founded in 1999 (38:47). Yes, he founded this company just a few years before iTunes, and yes, that’s a frustrating subject Gladwin discusses as well (44:15). However, his experience with MusicNow created a natural bridge into his next company, Cleversafe, the largest data storage system in the world (45:50), which he sold to IBM for $1.3 billion in 2015 (55:00). Finally, he explains the purpose for starting his current venture, Ocient, where he’s building new technology to analyze the world’s largest sets of data, faster than ever before (56:12).

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Fritz Nelson
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Chris Gladwin
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