When I met Midokura last year, its U.S. workforce consisted of three people couch-surfing around the Web 2.0 offices of downtown San Francisco.

Actually, they worked from home. But for the times when they needed office space, they would camp out at Rackspace and later, when Rackspace ran out of room, DreamHost.

But every successful startup has to get a place of its own someday, which Midokura and its San Franciso team (now eight people) are doing. And they'll soon have a real live sales force to help fill the space.

That's because Jim Lenox, a very early VMware employee, has joined as vice president of worldwide sales, as Midokura announced Thursday. His mission is to build up a sales force beyond Midokura's existing base in Japan.

Lenox spent 13 years at VMware, meaning he joined when the company was roughly 2 years old. He built out the company's first field sales operations, eventually helping turn a small company into a huge one — giving him experience that Midokura hopes can be applied again. (Lenox left VMware as senior director of cloud services sales.)

Midokura was founded in Japan by Tatsuya Kato and Dan Mihai Dumitriu, who wanted to build a cloud service along the lines of Amazon Web Services. What they ended up doing was focusing on the networking piece — particularly the network scaling.

Midokura offers virtual, distributed forms of network functions such as routing or load balancing, spreading the intelligence around to x86 servers. The company has kept itself closely aligned with OpenStack during the past three years, and its MidoNet controller and network virtualization are available as API calls in OpenStack Neutron. (See also "SDN Startups You Will Hear About in 2013" — which, in Midokura's case, turned out to be true.)

Midokura raised a $17.3 million Series A in April led by Innovation Network Corporation of Japan (INCJ), a Japanese public-private partnership. NTT and NEC are also investors.