But the cloud, it turns out, is not a light and fluffy place. Now every spring, summer, and fall, Wilson and his colleagues can look upon a Draper tradition as he welcomes incoming classes by plunging into the school's outdoor pool dressed in a suit and tie to teach "the value of jumping in."Īll customer data is safely tucked away in storage facilities in Sacramento, Phoenix, and Amsterdam. In 2012, Draper opened Draper University, a for-profit school whose mission is "igniting the entrepreneurial spirit," directly next door. The glass storefront window is still intact, allowing for plenty of natural light, and occasionally a peculiar view: a soaking wet Tim Draper. Today, the company winds around the entire two-story building, occupying all of the top floor, the back half of a furniture store, a former dress shop, and an old yoga studio and a dry cleaner-both conference rooms today. As the business expanded, the office grew like kudzu, attaching itself to whatever adjacent lease it could find. Since 2010, when Wilson finally got evicted from his apartment (the landlord discovered that the founders had crammed nine desks into Wilson's living room and drilled holes in the wall for wiring), Backblaze has operated out of a space above a beauty salon, giving the operation a vibe that's more Better Call Saul than Silicon Valley. The company headquarters remain decidedly non-VC. Both insights later became subjects of exhaustive, statistics-laden blog posts-which boosted subscriber numbers again when they went live. And the cheaper consumer drives actually performed and survived as reliably as the ones aimed at pros. The company calculated that the community harvested 1,838 drives, including 300 on Black Friday alone, and helped Backblaze save $1.1 million. When the drives arrived, staff pried them open-a process they called drive shucking-and put the guts of those hard drives into storage pods. Staffers asked friends and family and then eventually readers of the blog-the company had about 100,000 customers by then-to go to their local stores, buy as many drives as they could, and ship them to Backblaze's data center in return for a full reimbursement plus $5 per drive. Employees stopped off at Costco on their morning and evening commutes to pick up a couple of drives. So Backblaze decided to go drive farming. He noticed that while wholesale prices had spiked, consumer drives at Costco and Best Buy were still bargains instead of a price hike, the big-box stores limited sales to two drives per customer in tech-heavy areas. Instead, Wilson came up with a plan that turned the problem into a game. Sure, the hard drive humming beneath your hand is built with quality parts, but it's probably not top talent-you bought the thing for $65 at Best Buy. Now consider the scale of the game board: The heads on a one-terabyte hard drive must oversee more ones and zeros than there are stars in the Milky Way. A speck of dust can cover up kilobytes, and the read-write head might have only three nanometers of clearance above the platter, less than the depth of a fingerprint. But this densely packed little world is terrifically delicate. These days, a decent read-write head can read or flip 3.8 million bits during a single go-round. To store data, an actuator arm fitted with a tiny electromagnet called a read-write head must flip the polarity of specific grain clusters on the platter-the bits-in precise sequences as they whirl by, turning ones to zeros and zeros to ones. For a hard drive to work, the platters of magnetized cobalt alloy must spin, and spin fast (typically 120 rotations per second).
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