On June 18th, Infostrux CEO, Goran Kimovski (Kima) sat down with S. Somasegar (Soma) to discuss Soma’s experience and lessons as a board member and early investor in Snowflake. Kima and Soma discuss the concept and value of the data cloud and why data exchange will be as important as data warehousing. As an active angel investor and seed investor, Soma describes what makes a great investment and what he looks for while investing in both enterprise and consumer segments.
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Kima: With your time at Microsoft, which platform or product were you most fond of, that brings good memories of releasing it?
Soma: It’s like asking what baby do I love the most. If I think about it, I would probably say Visual Studio or .NET Framework. Microsoft has always been a platform company, first and foremost. When you think about the world through a platform lens, what you really are focused on is providing a set of services, a set of tools, that enable others to be able to build some phenomenal experiences on your platform.
There was nothing better than running the developer division. It really focused on how to take care of the developer audience, which is probably the most strategic and the most important audience for all of Microsoft. So being able to deliver a world-class tool in Visual Studio, and .NET Framework that really took the enterprise world forward in terms of making it easy to be able to build a line of business applications or enterprise applications. So I feel really proud of the work we did there.
Kima: I’m probably going to upset half of the audience, but I can probably say that Visual Studio has been the best idea that was ever released. I had a chance to work with the C# team when I was part of Business Objects releasing Crystal Reports, which was embedded inside Visual Studios. They earned a lot of respect from me. The team was very pretty outstanding.
