Sara Lindquist:

I am Sara Lindquist from FUSE. We're an early stage venture firm based right here in the Pacific Northwest. And just like the founders in our portfolio, we are just getting started. We believe that founders deserve more, more urgency, more community, more expertise, more reliability, more of everything, and we aim to deliver. Join me as I introduce each of our portfolio companies in the FUSE family to date. Today you'll hear from David Rhodus, founder and CEO of Sumi. Join us as David discusses his prior experiences in blockchain, including his time at Ethereum and what led him to create Sumi. This product is revolutionizing storage. Let's get started. David, thank you so much for joining me here today.

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David:

Happy to be here and thanks for inviting me.

Sara:

Well, I so appreciate you taking the time and I'm excited to dive in and give you the opportunity to share a bit about your personal journey of course, and then also the Sumi journey. To kick things off, it would be great if you could share the quick overview of what Sumi is and how it's serving customers.

David:

Sumi today is now a decentralized storage platform. It's more performant than the current centralized storage offerings. We are providing an SDK that allows developers to come on and really easily build on top of the Sumi storage. We're currently talking to about a dozen or so startups that are trying to pivot and start to use Sumi storage. Internally, we're actually doing some sales and onboarding ourselves. We've got a couple of Fortune 500 companies that are looking to move part of their storage workloads from AWS and Google to Sumi right now.

Sara:

That's great. It would be super helpful David, if you could zoom out for a second and explain the problem at large with typical storage, where the product started and how you decided that this was the key problem to go after and why it's been challenging for others to do so.

David:

I think our product's very unique in multiple ways. It actually ties back into the blockchain technology, which I've been following essentially since it started 14 years ago just as a technology enthusiast. I previously worked at Ethereum and built a bunch of POCs and different things for some pretty large companies. And a lot of those ended up having scaling issues, typical things with current blockchain technology. And during the last down cycle of blockchain, I spent a lot of time just experimenting with connecting distributed systems to blockchain and how you can control those systems using a blockchain. And that's kind of where I came up originally with the idea of Sumi Notes. It's like a decentralized communication protocol that can replace existing systems such as email and centralized messaging apps.

And we built that and then we started hitting some issues like scaling past, I think it was like a hundred thousand messages a second. And the issue was decentralized storage just wasn't there. So we paused for three or four months and we're like, "Okay, we'll just build our own storage system and we will build it a level above what Amazon and Google are currently offering."

Sara:

Yeah, that's really, really helpful. And so tell me a little bit about forming the company. And I know you've started to build out the team a little bit. I would love for you to articulate why do you think you and your team are the group to do this?

David:

Most of the team I've known for quite a while. I've recently got some principal engineers from Amazon to come over and help because they're really fascinated by the technical challenges and they see the demand for what we're building. We've got some people helping us that have worked in the government space before with operations, and they've really set a neat mindset internally of how we should operate and just be extremely efficient. It's been really fascinating to see the culture, I guess you could say, or the team kind of come together that way.

Sara:

Yeah. Well that's great. And it leads into my next question for you, as you're leading this team, is there one word or a few words, how would you describe the culture you're trying to build at Sumi?

David:

It's kind of fascinating. We're all basically extremely driven individuals that are part of the team. So we do a lot of self-management and I guess you would say if we weren't building Sumi as a team, probably each of us would be out building something else.

Sara:

Yeah, that's where you've got a good group.

David:

Yeah, so I guess I would say if I was trying to describe the Sumi culture, it's just very driven, a highly driven team.

Sara:

Yeah, that's fantastic, David. Thank you for sharing that and excited to meet more of the team. We're super excited to see your team continue to build a really disruptive and transformative product. So I want to ask you about the startup journey as a whole next. You've certainly had significant experience your time at Ethereum and just your own personal interest in the space for so many years. Obviously, Web3 ecosystem at large we've seen a lot in news recently. So in the midst of all of it and all the time you spent in the space, what keeps you going and excited about tackling this particular problem, especially when others have shied away from it?

David:

For me, I've never had an issue trying to solve what seems like unsolvable problems from a technology standpoint because it's essentially just a bunch of math and several iterations to make something that works extremely well. Definitely I can see people moving away from especially Web3 technologies during the down cycle. But I guess previously talked about, especially myself, like I've got that entrepreneur spirit, so I just don't really understand the concept of giving up when I want to build something.

Sara:

Amen to that. That's awesome. Kudos to you, David, for yes, continuing to forge ahead despite all the noise, signal and noise, but that's fantastic. So in closing, I have one final question for you. So what right now do you need more of? How can any listeners tuning in right now, how can they help or get involved?

David:

We definitely have some amazingly large companies starting to test and we're looking to onboard more companies, I think is the main thing. So I would say that we're looking for more companies to come and use Sumi, primarily large companies that are looking to deploy at least one petabyte of storage. And that's kind of like our starting process and we're looking to make it just extremely easy to onboard these companies into Web3, make it really easy to start to move part of your Web2 infrastructure over. And if that sounds interesting, you can definitely reach out, send us an email at hello@sumi.network. And we're really driven by technology, so we're always happy to chat and get down into the weeds with anyone.

Sara:

Well, David, thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing the journey and it was great to have this time with you, and thank you for allowing us at FUSE to be a part of it.

David:

I really appreciate you all's help and guidance on the journey as well. Thank you.

Sara:

If you're interested in trying out Sumi's decentralized storage platform, please feel free to reach out to David and the team. We at FUSE can help get you connected as well. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time!