From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you decided to start Nutanix, what was your understanding of the problem that you were going to go after? Did you have a clear vision of the problem you were going to solve?

Dheeraj Pandey: We had an idea based on our skillsets and passion for distributed systems. If you look at my pattern over those 10 years, I was just building distributed systems. Reliability, availability, serviceability – all these were etched into my fabric. I was like, “Let’s figure out a way to bring this out through an idea.”

VMWare was becoming the killer way to do computing back in the day. This was 2009. Apple App Store and the iPhone were growing. I was learning to understand and appreciate design and elegance and what it means to be consumer-grade. Nutanix was about making things way simpler. It was about convergence. How do you take a lot of disparate tools and converge them into something that’s elegant.

Sramana Mitra: What path did you take in terms of getting your first version of this product?

Dheeraj Pandey: This was the golden hand principle. One of our friends was starting his VC journey. Nutanix was his second check out of a relatively small fund. It was a safe note that eventually converted to Series A. It was an idea on a napkin. It was his belief that he wanted to do something big in venture capital. It was our belief that we can make distributed systems usable and likable.

Sramana Mitra: Customer-wise, what validation process did you follow?

Dheeraj Pandey: Early on, people say to not do it. That’s because what we were doing was getting rid of the silos in the enterprise. Most of the people you talk to, by definition, are the larger companies. We had to sift through a lot of this noise to understand what do they really mean. What they meant is different from what they are talking about. We had to parse through a lot of this noise. When you talk to people, they believe in faster horses. But you have this idea of a car.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the enterprise was not the right product-market fit. You needed smaller companies where the silos didn’t exist where people would be able to leverage your technology better.

Dheeraj Pandey: Absolutely. I had to go through this journey to understand who are the innovators and the early adopters. You end up talking to people who inherently work for larger companies. By definition, they’re paid to take less risk.

Sramana Mitra: In the time period that you’re talking about, entrepreneurship hadn’t become as sexy. Today there is a lot more appreciation. People get a lot more credit for taking chances and encouraging innovation. Things have come a long way from that.

Dheeraj Pandey: I think that there’s a right of passage. The world has a role to play in pushing back. They’re trying to test your conviction. If everyone is as welcoming of your new idea, then every sapling will become a tree. You just get tested early on with these.

This segment is part 2 in the series : From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix
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