From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When did you reach some level of cruising altitude? What year would that be?

Dheeraj Pandey: We were still the fastest to half-billion in 2015. Along the way, there were jitters. There’s always turbulence. In 2015, there was turbulence when the Intel issue came up. They had a massive number of bugs on the server. They started to put more stuff in their folder. The Intel processor had an immense issue on the server-side.

We had to really stick with Intel and make them a better company. There were very few companies who were willing to test it out. We always continued to gain altitude, but there was turbulence along the way.

Sramana Mitra: This very fast growth trajectory that you were achieving was all direct selling?

Dheeraj Pandey: It was partner-fulfilled. No one else builds a brand not because they don’t want to, but because they don’t have the time. Only you have the time to build your own brand. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a distribution partner or two. Even there, the brand is still built by you.

Sramana Mitra: What else do you want to cover in the Nutanix story?

Dheeraj Pandey: I think this constant evolution of any organization. We learned so much about developers. How we constantly underestimate developers. We think they’re all back office people and they’re shy. If anything, the more we put developers in front of customers, the more customers love them and the more developers understand what is important.

The other lesson was that customer love makes or breaks companies. The third one is around distribution. There’s a great lesson in distribution about how the cloud changed everything.

My next gig had to take all of these three ideas. DevRev’s thesis was, we need to bring developers closer to the customers. They love the Slack interactions with the customers. They were willing to be involved in operations. They wanted to automate the heck out of everything. We needed to take this and make this into an operating system.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start working on DevRev?

Dheeraj Pandey: This idea was there for a couple of years. October 2020 was when we needed it. January 2021 was when we got a critical mass of 10 to 15 people. We kept designing till April. It’s almost a year since we picked up the pen.

Sramana Mitra: How long did you run Nutanix as a public company?

Dheeraj Pandey: Five years.

Sramana Mitra: What was that like for you? Your passion is in products. Then you joined the Board of Adobe. Why did you join these governance things?

Dheeraj Pandey: The world of public and private is really in the eyes of the beholder. The moment you say public, you stop thinking about customers and growing. I never looked at the public stint as anything different. There is this new customer which is the shareholder. The more you make it like that, the better it is. I feel like shareholders are very much like your employees. There’s a Main Street/Wall Street paradox. At Adobe, you constantly balance the two. The moment you stop thinking about Main Street, you’re done as a company.

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