There were dark nights when I regretted starting my own company, especially when funding dried up and the runway was short.

When faced with the decision to lay off employees, my co-founder George and I chose to uphold our core values instead and kept the entire team together, asking everyone to take deep cuts to weather the storm.

During the toughest times, we found our product-market fit when we received our first call from A&D networks asking for help.

I learned to embrace ambiguity early in my life, which changed my career trajectory after spending a year studying in Japan.

While working at DataCore, I realized my job was becoming repetitive and I wasn't growing, prompting me to seek new challenges.

A friend encouraged me to join the Sloan Fellowship program at Stanford, which led me to start my entrepreneurial journey at 48 years old.

When my co-founder George called me with an innovative idea, I was blown away by the demo he showed me, which led us to explore starting a business together.

Our technology allows data to be stored where it is, while presenting it as if it is local, solving performance and collaboration issues without moving data around.

After graduating from Stanford, I faced numerous rejections from venture capitalists who believed my idea for a cloud-native file service would never work. Despite 33 rejections, I had to believe there was something they didn't see, as I was a specialist in storage and understood the problem firsthand.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we had to pivot quickly. Instead of laying off our team as advised, we chose to be transparent and asked everyone to take pay cuts to weather the storm together, which ultimately helped us find our product-market fit.

During the pandemic, we received unexpected calls from companies like A&D Networks and Viacom CBS, who needed our help with remote collaboration. This led us to redefine our service from a general file access platform to a creative content collaboration tool, significantly increasing our annual recurring revenue.

Believing in your product and having resilience is crucial as an entrepreneur. You must dig deep when no one else believes in your vision and ensure your team shares that belief.

Growth is often painful and challenging, but it's essential to develop habits that encourage you to take the right path, not just the easy one. Small decisions, like choosing to go to the gym instead of skipping it, build the muscle to challenge yourself.

How you do one thing is how you do everything. Consistency in making the right choices, even in small matters, shapes your ability to face larger challenges.