Tintri filed for bankruptcy about a year after it went public. The company built storage hardware for the age of virtual machines. Older systems thought in disks and volumes. Tintri's systems understood each virtual machine, so administrators could see and tune performance one application at a time. By the time Tintri filed to go public in 2017, storage was moving fast toward flash and cloud services, and its rivals were larger, with deep pockets.

A VMware Veteran's Fix

Kieran Harty, a former VMware engineering leader, founded Tintri in 2008 with a small team of storage engineers. Virtualization had changed how data centers worked, and storage had not caught up. Their bet was that storage designed around virtual machines would be simpler to run and faster to fix. Tintri raised large venture rounds and won hundreds of enterprise customers.

Twelve Months to Bankruptcy

Tintri cut its price range and priced at $7 a share in June 2017, well below its early hopes. The stock fell soon after. Losses were heavy, competition grew and cash ran short. For a company that had raised so much venture money, the fall came fast. In July 2018, about a year after its offering, Tintri filed for bankruptcy. DataDirect Networks bought its main assets and kept the product alive.

Cover: Thames Warehouses, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for riverside warehouses (storage).