Chess taught PernixData's Poojan Kumar to play start-up game

The classic Valley success story goes like this: a geeky kid falls in love with computers, learns to code, invents something cool in college, and drops out to do a startup.

That’s the exact opposite of how Poojan Kumar came to be CEO of a hot storage startup called PernixData, which has raised $62 million in funding.

Kumar grew up in a middleclass family in India. His dad, who had grown up in Russia, loved to play chess. He taught the 12-year-old to play and soon Kumar was beating his dad at the game. Kumar won a local tournament, which earned him the "budding Grandmaster award".

"And that kicked off the most interesting three years of my life," says Kumar. The teenage Kumar started playing chess professionally. His dad hired a chess tutor. At age 15, he was on track to make chess his career, when his dad pulled the plug. "He never anticipated it as a career path for me," says Kumar.

His dad worried about how hard it was to make a living playing chess. "One thing in common in all the players I saw — they were all poor," says Kumar.

After his chess training ended, Kumar applied his problem-solving skills to get into IIT and later pursue a masters from Stanford, where he met Satyam Vaghani. Vaghani and Kumar started PernixData in 2012.

The company solves an interesting problem related to flash storage. It takes all the flash storage that companies have across all of their computer servers and turns it into one giant pool of very fast flash storage that can be used for a company’s business apps. Kumar says, "New companies like us have the opportunity to become the next billion-dollar companies."