From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You talked to me about doing a startup in the beauty space. What do you know about the beauty space? You don’t have a particular domain expertise. When you go into a field where you don’t have real domain knowledge, it doesn’t create for the kind of passion that drives a startup to go big. There are exceptions of course. A good formula is you want to go after something that you have a passion for.

Manish Jethani: More than the domain expertise, one thing that has the shortest lifespan is the borrowed conviction. You cannot build something on a borrowed conviction.

From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 1)

Francis has bootstrapped OpenVPN to $3M ARR with JUST $1M in financing. Wonderful story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background?

Francis Dinha: I was born in northern Iraq in a place called Amadiya. I lived there until I was six years old. Due to the Baghdad-Iraqi war, we had to escape. There was a lot of bombing. I remember the bombing of our village. It reminds me of the current situation in Ukraine. We had to escape to Baghdad.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When you moved out in 2011, you had already transitioned from being a hardcore nerdy developer to someone experienced in sales. You had some understanding of what it takes to close enterprise deals. What happens next?

Manish Jethani: I still felt like an engineer who was trying to apply the engineering concepts to sales. The engineer in me has never left. Nothing gives me more joy than creating something. Building a product is still very thrilling.

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6 )

Sramana Mitra: Did you do shareholder communication?

Dheeraj Pandey: All the time. I like it. There was a thesis to be sold as well. After we went public is when we started to transition the business model. It probably was the biggest business model transition the IT world has ever seen – going from hardware, to software, to subscription in three years. Communication is not something you can shy away from in these things.

From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)

Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

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.

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was the size of your Blumberg Capital round? What milestones were you able to achieve with that?

Dheeraj Pandey: It was a million and a half. Word spread out that three Aster Data people had started a company. Lightspeed came within 10 months and we raised a $10 million round and converted the safe. We were trying to use our skills to try and build a distributed system story around one of the favorite movements at that time – virtualization.

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.