There are many challenges in building a new company. Possibly the greatest is recruiting a talented, energetic, and world-class team. Smart people are in high demand in Silicon Valley and, let’s face it, we’re in another boom in the tech world. I know this because it takes 45 minutes to go 10 miles on the 101 and because smart people are harder to find than they ever have been.

We’ve got a few silver bullets though, and we just added another one. We had wrapped our Series A, and were done thinking about financing for now. But when Mike Speiser from Sutter Hill Ventures reached out and wanted to chat, I couldn’t say no. We are huge fans on Mike’s work an CEO/entrepreneur (most recently at Pure Storage) and on the venture side, and he is one of the handful of investors that we’d go to extreme lengths to get involved at this stage.

Mike had done his homework on us, and in the blink of an eye we’d added another Series A closing to include Sutter Hill Ventures (bringing our total to $7.2 million) and added Mike to our board of directors.

One of Mike’s passions and talents is building incredible engineering teams – e.g. at Bix/Yahoo!, VERITAS/Symantec and Pure Storage. He has superb instincts and experience assembling remarkable talent that executes at a different plane than other companies. We’ve been living this philosophy since day one of Platfora, so together we’re going to go even faster as we bring together the best of the best in the face of this hyper-competitive market.

We’re very fortunate to have what we believe is the best group of investors on the planet. With Scott Weiss from a16z, Mike from Sutter Hill, T.J. Rylander from In-Q-Tel, and a group of the smartest and most passionate angels around.