1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve touched upon a few different open opportunities. One is you talked about the gap in the visualization space. There are a lot of data solutions but, when it comes to presenting, there’s a lot more to be done.

The second thing that I find interesting is a lot of technologies especially on the data engineering side are very expensive. They are affordable for large enterprises, but when it comes down to small businesses, it’s not accessible. Where is the affordable version of that?

One of our favorite case studies is the Zoho case study taking on Salesforce. They’re offering something that’s pervasive. Definitely product-led growth with high adoption. Doing that to the more complex technologies on the data side that makes heavy-duty data capabilities accessible for the mid-market and the small businesses is wide open.

Dheeraj Pandey: Yes, maybe there’s a meta observation there. You have inexpensive products and you have easy-to-use products. Many times, they’re not the same. You add a little bit more extensibility, that’s where you can’t have two out of the three. Either you have very cheap products that are great for SMBs or there are delightfully well-designed products that are not customizable. If you have something that’s designed well and is highly customizable, it’s too expensive.

Sramana Mitra: If you look back at the skillset of our industry, design is one of the lowest important skillsets. If Steve Jobs hadn’t done what he did at Apple, design wouldn’t even be discussed. We haven’t seen a lot of enterprise products that are focused on design. There’s very little out there that can rely on a skillset of fantastic design to hide complexity.

The New York Times example that you’re giving is from the consumer side and not from the technology side at all. The complex technology side has a blind spot in design.

Dheeraj Pandey: It’s very true, but things are changing. I think what Apple will do for the overall healthcare vertical, it’s going to be massive. I look at design as not just the user interface but also commerce. What Amazon can do to pharmacy, I’m so excited to see. Outsiders coming in is one way to shake this industry up.

In B2B, a lot has changed in the last 10 years. We don’t give credit to Google for design, but one of the biggest things about design is low latency. How do you create low latency products? They had a culture of every search result had to return within less than a hundred milliseconds. That was industry transformation. The idea of giving dopamine to people in such tight loops is as important. Many companies do that well.

I know many of my friends are very good at STEM, but they want to do art. I think that’s the self-actualization of parents as well. You talked about this that everything has been done. I feel like what we’ve done is more like physics has been done, but biology and chemistry haven’t been done. With the idea of integrating different pieces of information and doing them really well and the idea of recommendations, we are still scratching the surface. It’s a modeling problem. If you can’t model, you can’t visualize and recommend.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix
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