1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: This is a topic that I’ve been very passionate about – The Renaissance Mind. I have a large body of writings on this. If you follow me on LinkedIn, I have a series called Colors where I publish paintings. I ask people to meditate on just that painting. The whole point is to draw attention to the visual impact of colors and design.

I wrote a series quite a few years ago on the future of Silicon Valley being at the cusp of design and technology, but it hasn’t gone that way. I thought that movement of bringing those two sides together would come faster. Instead, we went deep into data, AI, and machine learning. The design side went by the sidelines. The liberal arts and the humanities side went on the sideline. That still remains to be done.

We talk about social media. Social media is barely scratching the surface. It’s spread out. Real relationships don’t happen in that mode. Real relationships happen when you go deep. The whole social media design structure has been focused on going broad whereas real relationships happen when you go deep.

If you’re talking about groups, it has to be small groups for meaningful conversations. Before COVID, we did a lot of entertaining. The conversations are much richer when you put four to six people on the table than when you have 50 people.

Dheeraj Pandey: In many ways, social media had a role to play at the base of the pyramid of interaction. There’s lots and lots of sand interaction. There are billions of sand particles. You need to figure out that interaction through digitization. It’s better than snail mail what you can do on Facebook. The base of the pyramid has been taken care of by social media.

Now there’s the middle of the pyramid. We’ll see whether AI and VR will help there. At the top of the pyramid are bespoke relationships, which are always going to be human-to-human. We say this about remote work. It’s fashionable to say remote work, but when you’re designing new products and building new things, you got to create these moments of serendipity where people just bump into each other and have a hallway discussion.

We’re scratching the surface of interaction. I think AI and design are two sides of the same coin. There’s a really good article from the Wall Street Journal maybe six months ago. Even humans as users embrace bots that are not very arrogant. The fact that we look at bots that are better designed as being less arrogant is telling. We struggle with notifications all day long. There’s a lot that machines can do on that.

Sramana Mitra: AI is a fantastic tool for designers. The Holy Grail of design is simplicity. If the complexity is managed by AI underneath, the number of options of what to do in the interaction can be minimized, and be more precise, it makes the designer’s job a lot easier.

Dheeraj Pandey: It makes the bots embraceable by people.

Sramana Mitra: Great, thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix
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