From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Going from a techie to an entrepreneur, I presume you did a lot of founder-led selling. What was that transition like?

Dheeraj Pandey: One is just humanism. Business is about people. You have to connect with people. Difficult words like negotiation – if you replace this with building trust, it’s much easier. People want to give you a chance if you are authentic. At the same time, this idea of not overpromising but underpromising and overdelivering. That’s the way we built trust.

I mentioned Apple early on. That was extremely influential in my entrepreneurial journey because I learned design just by using the iPhone and Mac OS. This was there in me, but it was latent.

Sramana Mitra: For a first-time techie raising money, if you tell them that we’re going to ignore the customer feedback and we’ll do this anyway, VCs are going to push back on that. How do you respond to that?

My observation is that I suspect that if this value proposition was presented to smaller companies, they would be more receptive. There are situations where the push back that comes is something that pushes back investors also?

Dheeraj Pandey: Imagine if I knew nobody in the Valley. I would have gotten deeper into design sooner. That’s the way to tell your story. We got to design in Nutanix, but it took three years. I would have gotten to that much sooner. I would also have become more stretchy sooner. Investing in India happened four or five years later.

Just have more staying power. You have to keep knocking on lots of doors. We probably knocked on a hundred doors and three of them opened. We didn’t use the world net dollar base expansion. The flywheel effect was pretty evident. We cannot afford to lose customers once we have them.

Sramana Mitra: You didn’t emphasize design and you were concept-selling to customers. How did you manage to convince them?

Dheeraj Pandey: Of course, we needed to have a killer app. It was a use case. This was a contrarian move, but luck favored us because we were extremely tenacious about it. IOS and Android were coming to the edge and desktop. Most of the world swung the pendulum thinking Windows is dead. We said, “Windows will be alive and kicking because of the business software that exists on it. The only difference will be the form factor.”

That was a very contrarian bet. From 2012 to 2013, Snowden happened. There was a massive leakage of confidential data. US Federal doubled down on confidentiality and privacy. They had to make every Windows desktop virtual. We picked a killer use case which was Windows. We had a large market just on Federal alone.

Sramana Mitra: You had Microsoft behind. Did you talk to Microsoft? Was Microsoft part of your go-to-market?

Dheeraj Pandey: No, we just worked with their API and we made a lot of things automated. 80% of our business in the first couple of years was Federal.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find the customers?

Dheeraj Pandey: We first found the people who were disenfranchised by VMWare. We hired them. Then people-centered salespeople. There’s a huge element of luck with this as well.

Sramana Mitra: In the Federal business, it’s an RFP-driven process, right?

Dheeraj Pandey: It was for very large deals. Our big value proposition was that infrastructure should not be seen on the CAPEX. That was the biggest innovation of the cloud-atomizing consumption. We converted a big chunk of CAPEX into $10,000 at a time. It was extremely innovative for its time.

Sramana Mitra: That movement from CAPEX to OPEX was a big driver for the cloud to take off.

Dheeraj Pandey: Federal loved it because they could fly under the radar.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix
1 2 3 4 5 6