Storage as the Data Foundation for Enterprise AI | Garima Kapoor, Co-founder & Co-CEO of MinIO
with Garima Kapoor — Co-founder and Co-CEO
Garima Kapoor, Co-founder and Co-CEO of MinIO, joins Nataraj Sindam to discuss how MinIO is building the data foundation for the AI era. From the founding thesis that bulk of data will be produced outside public cloud, to why storage is now the biggest bottleneck for GPU utilization, Garima shares a decade of building infrastructure at scale and offers a frank view on how AI is reshaping engineering velocity, SaaS economics, and the competitive landscape for startups.
5 Things You'll Learn from This Episode
- Why data gravity makes application portability more strategic than data migration for hybrid cloud architectures.
- How MinIO built a cloud-native object store without legacy baggage — and why that gives it a structural advantage in the AI era.
- Why storage, not compute, is becoming the primary bottleneck for GPU utilization in AI workloads — and what NVIDIA's STX Blueprint signals for the industry.
- How MinIO mandated AI tools across the entire engineering team and what a "no handwritten code" policy actually looks like in practice.
- Why AI has shifted business value away from code and toward customers, market access, and execution — and what that means for startups vs. legacy players.
About the Episode
Garima Kapoor founded MinIO in 2014 with a simple thesis: the bulk of the world's data would be produced outside public cloud, and developers needed a cloud-native object store that could go wherever the data lives. A decade later, with AI driving exponential demand for unstructured data infrastructure, that bet has compounded. In this conversation, Garima discusses MinIO's founding story, how the company navigated enterprise adoption of object storage, how AI changed the storage market, and why she believes legacy software companies face a two-to-three-year window to reinvent themselves before startups take their markets. She also shares a candid look at how MinIO is using AI internally — from mandating Claude across the engineering team to building custom marketing dashboards — and what the "opportunity cost of tokens" means for hiring decisions.
Timestamps
- 0:00 — Introduction and Welcome
- 1:00 — Why MinIO: Founding Vision and the Bet on Data Outside Public Cloud
- 3:00 — The Role of AWS S3 in Shaping the Object Storage Market
- 5:00 — What the MinIO Business Looks Like Today: Hybrid Cloud Deployments
- 6:30 — Data Gravity: Why Application Portability Beats Data Migration
- 9:00 — Finding Product-Market Fit Through Open Source and Developer Adoption
- 11:00 — Customer Acquisition Today: Bridging Bottom-Up and Top-Down GTM
- 13:00 — Competing Against AWS, Azure, and Google: The Multi-Cloud Reality
- 16:00 — How AI Changed the Storage Market and Why MinIO Was Ready
- 19:00 — Enterprise Customers and the Journey to AI-Ready Data Lakes
- 21:00 — NeoClouds, NVIDIA's STX Blueprint, and the Shift to Object-First AI
- 24:00 — Storage Demand Growth: Still in Infancy, With Physical AI Ahead
- 26:00 — AI Coding at MinIO: Mandating Claude, Zero Handwritten Code Policy
- 30:00 — AI Beyond Engineering: Custom Dashboards, Sales, and Marketing
- 32:00 — SaaS Disruption and the Build vs. Buy Question for Startups
- 35:00 — Token Spend vs. Hiring: Evaluating the Opportunity Cost of AI
- 38:00 — AI Is Not vs. Human — Which Humans Will Leverage It Best
- 40:00 — Advice for Early Engineers: Go Back to Fundamentals
- 43:00 — Where MinIO Is Headed: Execution, Innovation, and the Mammal Moment
About Garima Kapoor
Garima Kapoor is the Co-founder and Co-CEO of MinIO, which she founded in 2014 alongside her co-founder AB Periasamy. While MinIO operates in a deeply technical corner of infrastructure, Garima's role has been to shape the company's long-term strategy, enterprise growth, and positioning through multiple waves of technological change — from cloud-native to today's AI boom. She's known for taking a practical view of AI: rather than chasing hype, she focuses on the less glamorous but critical foundations that determine whether AI actually works in production. Over the past decade, she has helped build MinIO from an open-source project into a global enterprise software company with rampant adoption across the Fortune 100 and 500, while staying closely involved in product direction and customer strategy. MinIO is backed by Jerry Yang's AME Cloud Ventures, Dell Technologies, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Intel Capital, and SoftBank Vision Fund 2.
Co-founder and Co-CEO at MinIO
→ MinIO
About the Host
Nataraj Sindam is the creator of The Startup Project, a podcast featuring founders, investors, and operators building the future.
→ Website
Subscribe to Startup Project for more founder conversations!
#StartupProject #MinIO #ObjectStorage #AIInfrastructure #EnterpriseAI #DataFoundation #HybridCloud #S3 #GarimaKapoor #StorageForAI #NatarajSindam #OpenSource #CloudNative #AIEra #StartupStrategy