Ben Golub Executive Chairman and Interim CEO, Storj Labs

Storj Labs, Inc., in decentralized cloud storage, announced that Ben Golub, former CEO and co-founder of Docker, has been appointed executive chairman and will serve as its interim CEO.

He joins the company as it experiences growth, driven both by demand for decentralized, secure, and performant storage services, and by a compelling economic model that benefits customers, the company, and a broad community of partners and storage providers. He plans to advance the Storj platform, drive revenue growth, and help the company scale its network to the exabyte range and beyond.

“Storj has developed a powerful platform to support some of the most important trends in computing today, including the explosion in data, the demand for decentralized computing, and the rise of decentralized trust technologies inspired by blockchain and distributed ledger,” said Golub. “Having had the privilege of working at companies that were leaders in previous computing revolutions, such as cloud, open source, internet security, and containerization, I know the power of having a talented team addressing big opportunities with a uniquely compelling and disruptive solution. Storj delivers in all of these areas.“

He was most recently CEO and co-founder of Docker, Inc., the company that is credited with making software containers mainstream for developers and operators. He grew Docker from a small, open source project to a cloud leader with hundreds of G2000 customers, a broad partner network, over 400 employees, nearly $250 million in funding, 3,000 contributors, and 12 billion downloads.

He will now lead Storj Labs as it continues its growth in adoption, revenue, and community engagement. The company’s cloud storage network is now storing more than 60PB of data from over 70,000 customers across 150,000 storage nodes operated by tens of thousands of independent ‘farmers.’ Farmers are individuals and organizations who rent their excess hard drive capacity in exchange for STORJ tokens – the company’s own ERC-20 utility token on the Ethereum blockchain. By bringing together a large and growing community of customers, farmers, and developers, Storj has created a large decentralized cloud storage network without ever owning a data center.

The company supports customers at the confluence of three industry challenges: user privacy and data security; the proliferation of data; and the growing demand for open source platforms and decentralized applications.

In his role, Golub will focus on meeting these customer needs, which will inform the development of Storj Labs’ technology and operations.

“Ben brings an ideal skill set to his new role at Storj Labs. His combination of business and technology acumen is exactly what Storj needs during this pivotal moment of growth,” said Shawn Wilkinson, founder and chief strategy officer, Storj Labs. “Our work today and in the coming months will result in a new platform that will help customer build and deploy decentralized apps with decentralized storage. Now is the perfect time for Ben’s important contribution to our work.“

Prior to Docker, Golub was president and CEO at open source storage company Gluster, which was acquired by Red Hat in 2011. He was also CEO at Plaxo, Inc., where he helped build a community of 20 million users and led the acquisition of the company by Comcast. He has also held executive-level and product management positions at VeriSign, Avid Technology and Sun Microsystems.

With more than 70,000 API registrations, Storj is one of few start-ups in the blockchain ecosystem with an operational, distributed platform and is leading the decentralized cloud storage market. The company’s platform aims to differentiate itself from legacy cloud storage providers by being more reliable, secure, performant and affordable. With Golub at the helm, Storj intends to drive long-term sustainability through its open source model and its first-mover advantage.

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