Inside Teradici: Getting to know Dan Cordingley, co-founder and CEO and the passion behind the company

1. What inspired the creation of Teradici?

Creating Teradici was a lifelong dream and something I was very fortunate to be able to do.  As an Entrepreneur in Residence at a major VC in the valley, Foundation Capital, co-founder Dave Hobbs and I were looking for a really tough problem to solve. Dave had some ideas for remoting a PC user experience – including high resolution display, USB, audio, and so on – over the network with amazing fidelity and the utmost security. We found many enterprises, OEMs, and ISVs were very interested in moving applications and entire desktops into the data center, as long as they could deliver an outstanding user experience for their users.  Thus Teradici was born.
 

2. What is your favorite part about your job?

For me, it is the best job I could ever have.  I get to work with so many smart, innovative, dedicated and passionate people at Teradici.  I get to meet with many customers and partners who are trying to do really disruptive things for their businesses as they move to the cloud.  We are fortunate to work with some of the biggest names in cloud and enterprise IT – Amazon, Dell, HP, LG, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, VMware and many others. We also get to work with great companies across all industries that use our PCoIP technology to do amazing things. I love the job because it is always interesting, exciting, and challenging – I learn something new every day.

3. If you could give your 25 year old self one piece of advice, what would it be?

It would be something I got from Yoda: “Do or do not. There is no try.” But also I’d tell myself to be grateful for all the help and support you get in life, and return the same to others.

4. Teradici's Cloud Access Software is all about making cloud solutions that were previously impossible, possible. Was there a moment in your career where you thought something was impossible that you made possible? 

When I was a little boy I took swimming lessons and gradually moved up the different levels, usually without much trouble.  But when I got to a certain level that you had to pass in order to start the training to be a lifeguard, I took the test and failed, and it was a big shock to my confidence. When the time came to take the test again, my father, who saw I was very nervous, told me that often it is simply believing you can do something that determines your success. He helped me believe in myself and that I could pass the test – and I did.  I have always carried that advice from my Dad with me, as it really is true – if you believe you can do it or it can be done, then others will believe it too, and you will succeed. 

...if you believe you can do it or it can be done, then others will believe it too, and you will succeed.

I got similar advice when we were incubating Teradici, from a very successful technology executive and investor, Mark Saul. He told me that the company to start is one that you believe in with every fiber of your being. That is the one to put your time, energy and passion into, since you will face many challenges and people will tell you it will never make it.  For me, that company was Teradici. I never doubted that what we were doing would be really useful to customers. 

Later, as we were trying to raise our first round of funding, I met with several well known venture capitalists on Sand Hill Road, and some very smart, very successful people told us that what we were doing could not be done, or there was no market for it, and that the PC would be around forever. This was before cloud, before tablets, smartphones, before so much of what we use today instead of a physical PC. And look where we are now. Yet if it were not for my father and Mark’s advice, we might never have persisted and started Teradici. 

Gathering, processing, and applying vast quantities of newly available industrial data will have a transformative effect on how we work. The key enabler is the cloud: there’s no other way that we can make all of this economically possible.

5. By the year 2020, what do you hope Teradici has accomplished?

Our vision is to be the leading technology for the way people access rich applications securely from the cloud.  As client computing and the data in the devices that we use moves to the cloud, we want Teradici PCoIP to be the technology that enables this.

Our vision is to be the leading technology for the way people access rich applications securely from the cloud. 

PCoIP delivers rich, vivid, highly interactive user experiences on any device, with the utmost security since all we send is encrypted pixels. Teradici will continue to be dedicated to empowering consumers and enterprises to fully embrace all that the cloud has to offer, including applications we have not even thought of yet.  And that is really exciting. 

>> Get to know other members of the Teradici team...