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About Executable #1:



Hear how Phil Soran, current Founder and CEO of  Compellent, walked away from his job at IBM selling storage systems to launch his first startup Xiotech.

Together with friends, Phil managed to convince early investors to back the venture (with no product) and build Xiotech for 5 years before selling the company to Seagate in 1999 $360m. In this interview, Phil discusses how he convinced those first investors, acquired the first customer and talks about the experience of selling to a big company — which would set the stage for  his second startup and MHTA member company Compellent.

*Special thanks to Stemmler Productions for the video production services

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Casey Allen

Casey is a St. Paul native and is currently trying to launch his sixth startup, OpenSwipe.com. He tends to bleed all things MN even though he's not really on the "buy local" bandwagon. He's schooled in economics and passionately believes the net societal value of Foursquare is negative.

  • We use Compellent hardware in the data center of Minnesota-based W3i. In our September board meeting in Silicon Valley, I mentioned to our board that we were using Minnesota-based hardware.

    Their response- “Does it actually work?” I smiled, and said YES.

    Let’s put Minnesota high tech on the map! Go Compellent!

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