While research and academia often focus on different goals, there is no clear boundary between the two.  In this talk, I would like to share my personal journey in commercializing research to industrial products as well as how to get research inspiration from industrial problems. More specifically, I will share a few lessons in how to take  a research prototype to build a commercial product, become a product that has been deployed in large companies, and later pushed into thousands of data centers (after the acquisition by VmWare).  Moreover, I will also briefly describe how my past startup experiences had inspired me to change my research area from storage systems to tackle software reliability and diagnosibility from a new perspective.