Pure Storage started life inside a venture capital office under the code name OS76. Its founders believed the spinning hard disk, the workhorse of every corporate data center, was finished. Flash memory was getting cheap enough to replace it. When Pure filed to go public in 2015, it was selling all-flash storage arrays to big companies and fighting giants like EMC and NetApp. Investors had to decide whether a six-year-old company could take that market from the incumbents.

Born in a VC's Spare Room

John Colgrove, a founding engineer at Veritas Software, joined Sutter Hill Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence. There he met John Hayes, and in 2009 the two started Pure Storage in Sutter Hill's offices. Colgrove wanted to stay an engineer, so the company hired Scott Dietzen as CEO. Their bet was that flash could cost about the same as disk once software squeezed more data into it. Faster storage would then sell itself.

A Dip Below Seventeen

Pure priced its IPO at $17 a share in October 2015 and raised $425 million on the New York Stock Exchange. The stock fell on day one and closed at $16.01, down 5.8 percent. The company kept growing and sold storage for AI workloads. In February 2026 it renamed itself Everpure to reflect a broader push into data management. In April 2026 its ticker changed from PSTG to a single letter, P.

Cover: Stack of Wheat (Snow Effect, Overcast Day), Claude Monet. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a stored harvest under snow (data kept safe).