As president and general manager of government operations at AI software company MinIO, Cameron Chehreh leads what he describes as a team of “passionate problem solvers driving innovation to solve complex mission challenges.”
The company takes a customer-first, rather than product-first, approach to leveraging AI-enabled technology.
“Whether it’s diagnosing cancer earlier, protecting our borders, or providing better services to our citizens, MinIO is helping our customers use data-fueled technology to advance human progress,” he said.
His career has led him to roles at Intel Corp., Dell Technologies and General Dynamics Information Technology, among others. Chehreh said he’s spent his career on the “bleeding edge of technology,” exploring how each new capability can help solve global problems alongside customers from every background and mission.
“That’s why my conversations move beyond simply looking at technology and instead look at how we can use that technology in a meaningful way,” he said.
A Nontraditional Background
Chehreh’s knowledge runs deep. But his background isn’t typical. Studying audio engineering in college, he jumped when an opportunity came his way to become a professional musician — and a successful one. He made so much money, he said, he was sure he’d never have to work past age 21.
“I joined a band hoping to be re-signed to a record company,” he said. “I became their touring bass player and helped them land that record deal. For about three years, I got to live the rock-star life and beyond.”
That experience, he said, allowed him to have his “12-and-a-half minutes of fame” before an illness in the family prompted him to return home. Still, he wasn’t worried about his future.
“I figured, well, I’d already made it,” he said. “I made a ton of money, but being young and naive, I spent it all. But I got to be here through helping my family through that illness and tragedy. From there, I found myself broke, destitute and needing to go find another job. And what I found was there was a real creative element to technology that became fuel for my soul. Being a songwriter and musician and being creative on the technological side felt similar.”
From Musician to Technologist
Chehreh found that his background in audio engineering aligned with the Navy’s work in psychoacoustics, and his time with the band taught him how to unite a team around a shared goal. In technology, he discovered a new way to connect with people — through technical notes rather than musical ones. He completed a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer program and sought out anyone willing to mentor him.
“I grew up in the business very humbly and honestly,” he said.
Chehreh joined MinIO in May, a move he says takes him back to his software roots. His tech career began at USinternetworking in Annapolis, Maryland — the world’s first cloud computing company — where he was employee No. 5 on the PeopleSoft team. He watched the company grow from a handful of people to 2,000 worldwide before the dot-com crash cut it down to 600.
“The lesson it taught me was not only resilience — and you have to be resilient — it’s not good enough just to be at the top of your technical game,” Chehreh said. “You have to know the business. You have to know how businesses make money. You have to know how to sell. And you have to be in leadership and develop leadership skills.”
Add to all that the necessity of being well-rounded technologically speaking, and it’s a tall order. But it inspired him to grow not only in technology but also to round out his skills in leadership and finance.
Chehreh later joined Digex, where he helped launch a compute-as-a-service offering in 2001. His roles as divisional chief technology officer at Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics deepened his experience in the defense industrial base and prepared him for his current position at a venture capital-backed company. Throughout his career, the common thread has been using technology to serve the mission.
Being CTO at Dell for many years was a great opportunity, Chehreh said, but when Intel called, he felt pulled toward the work. Intel, he said, is one of only two companies in the world that can perform end-to-end work of this kind.
“It’s the company that put ‘silicon’ in Silicon Valley,” Chehreh said. “I felt like it was a little bit of a duty to go help try and reinvigorate that company.”
But at Intel, he felt his leadership limitations for the first time in his career. When MinIO recruited him to his current role, he welcomed the opportunity.
“This is going to be known as one of those unicorns that come out of Silicon Valley,” Chehreh said. “We do object storage, which was built for cloud scaling. People are finding it is the de facto standard for the future of data.”
Mission at MinIO
Chehreh’s top priorities and responsibilities now relate to MinIO’s overall mission and growth strategy in several ways. He was brought into the role to grow the company’s government business, focusing on giving the government access to the best technologies on the planet for mission execution and success.
“I’ve always been about the mission since entering this business,” Chehreh said. “Being able to do this using cloud-native capabilities and things that have become the underpinning for AI is extremely rewarding.”
AI today feels like the cloud discussions of 20 years ago — disruptive, life-changing technology on the cusp of stepping into its full impact. Fringe use cases are beginning to emerge. Society is paying more attention to the need for safety and responsibility.
“And we know that AI is fueled by data,” he added. “Being able to be that data platform for everything is pretty extraordinary because we are embedded in just about every successful AI company’s endeavor, whether it’s Air Force Platform One or others, we are the data management platform, the object store, for everything. It’s pretty exciting.”
Chehreh and his team see growth opportunities in what he describes as “the most-coveted customers,” including the intelligence community and DOD.
“They have a pressing critical mission need to get better decision advantages out of the data and information that they house,” he said. “But I also think it’s the greatest opportunity because of how easy we are to deploy, and how easy it is to unlock the value and capability of our software.”
MinIO’s function as a data aggregation platform to help organizations become AI ready is a critical key, a missing link to unlocking the potential of AI, Chehreh said.
“It’s not just about collecting and storing data in a traditional storage sense, but it’s about reading the metadata, getting contextual awareness around the data we’re collecting through the metadata, but, more importantly, exploiting it in near real time,” he said.
That includes being able to bring more advanced AI tools on top of it, like H2O AI and others.
“It’s about getting that near real-time decision advantage that the government’s always been seeking,” Chehreh said. “You have to have performance. You have to have capability. But, more importantly, it has to be immutable.”
This way, the government can check the sovereignty and pedigree of the data — where it’s coming from and what it’s used for.
“I think the critical inflection point is, ‘Can I trust the data?’” he said. “Then, more importantly, ‘Can I exploit it as quickly as possible for decision advantage?’”
‘Intelligence Analysis at the Tip of the Spear’
Because MinIO was built on open-source native code, its fingerprints are everywhere. With more than 2.2 billion downloads on GitHub, MinIO ranks among the world’s most popular open-source projects and is embedded in all upstream versions of Kubernetes.
“For us, the challenge is moving to an enterprise edition that’s got better security, built more for production environments,” Chehreh said. “That’s the journey our team is on — to get into these very sensitive mission environments and teach them about the new capabilities of the company and what we can do to extend and transform the mission.”
Many customers are trying to understand how to bring a hodgepodge of technology at the tip of the spear all the way into enterprise storage for further analysis because of how they deploy as a software layer, he said.
“We can fundamentally change that to allow more intelligence analysis at the tip of the spear,” Chehreh said. “And that’s really critical and fundamentally game changing for the missions.”
Looking Ahead
Chehreh still describes himself as “a little bit of an outcast” early in his career as a professional musician coming into a brainy business. He lacks the formal pedigree and training most people had coming into GovCon.
But his friends became his mentors, with some of them going on to work at Peraton and other larger integrators. Being open to mentorship is important, he added, and it’s critical to develop gentle confidence rather than unchecked hubris.
“You always need to be open to feedback — and the critical feedback — because it’s a journey,” he said.
While Chehreh still has a wall of guitars, and music remains part of his life, his passion today is serving customers.
“This is the best job on the planet,” he said. “I get to be in Silicon Valley at the pinnacle of where technology is, and I get to help the government at the same time. How cool is that?”