You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.

Today we have two fabulous guests. Our first is Mike Olson, who's the co-founder of Cloudera and the chief strategy officer.

He is a bachelor's degree and a master's from UC Berkeley. We also have Ping Lee, who's a partner at Excel Partners.

And Ping focuses on early stage software and data center investments, and he's on the board

of Cloudera. He is an MBA from Stanford Business School. So Ping is going to be interviewing

Mike. And without further ado, gentlemen, thanks.

All right. Well, Mike, thanks for doing this.

Good to see you, Ping.

Yeah. So I guess the first question is what's it like to be at Stanford being a Cal Guy?

I spent actually a fair bit of time on campus here.

You know, we're headquartered very nearby just across Page Mill Road right at the corner of Page Mill and El Camino.

And we get a lot of opportunities to come and speak on campus and to engage with

the students. And we've got a very successful internship program that recruits from here. And I

make it a point to donate a little bit extra money and time to my alma mater as a result of

my engagement down here. So it's good for everybody.

All right. Hopefully the audience will take it easy on you today.

So, you know, I'm sure a lot of folks have read about, you know, the founding of Cloudera

and how it got started.

But I'd love to hear it from your perspective and, you know, not the bloggers.

How do you, how would you describe the early days, you know, pre-funding, pre-everything?

Yeah, you bet.

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