Balaji Ganesan

Balaji Ganesan is co-founder and chief executive of Privacera, a data security and governance platform that helps enterprises control access to data across clouds and applications. Privacera grew out of the same access-control ideas that became the Apache Ranger project.

Founding XA Secure for Hadoop Governance

His first startup, XA Secure, tackled access control and governance in big data environments. Hortonworks acquired the company and turned the product into the open-source Apache Ranger project, Ganesan told Cervin Ventures in a founder spotlight. At Hortonworks he spent years with large enterprises locking down Hadoop clusters.

Hearing Enterprises Ask for Broader Governance

Those customers kept asking to extend the same controls beyond big data to all of their data estates. Those conversations led him to co-found Privacera with Don Bosco Durai, building on Ranger's community work to cover wider cloud and analytics stacks. He has said the second startup was not easier than the first, only different in market, team and customers.

Aiming Privacera at Every Enterprise Data Estate

His stated vision is that every enterprise should be able to grant secure, governed access to data from any application on any cloud. He compares each growth stage of a startup to raising a child, with new problems at every age, and says he still wakes up focused on how much of that vision the team can cover in the next week and year.

Spending More Time on Early Customers

If he could restart, he told Cervin, he would spend more time on early market validation and talk to more potential customers before building. He survived US Airways Flight 1549, the January 2009 landing in the Hudson River, an experience he has written about in {L(BG_1549, "India Currents")} and connected to a focus on humility. He still keeps Privacera's public story centered on the governance problem enterprises face.