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The Neon Show
Hi, I am your host Siddhartha! I have been an entrepreneur from 2012-2017 building two products AddoDoc and Babygogo. After selling my company to SHEROES, I and my partner Nansi decided to start up again. But we felt unequipped in our skillset in 2018 to build a large company. We had known 0-1 journey from our startups but lacked the experience of building 1-10 journeys.
Hence was born the Neon Show (Earlier 100x Entrepreneur) to learn from founders and investors, the mindset to scale yourself and your company. This quest still keeps us excited even after 5 years and doing 200+ episodes.
We welcome you to our journey to understand what goes behind building a super successful company. Every episode is done with a very selfish motive, that I and Nansi should come out as a better entrepreneur and professional after absorbing the learnings.
The Neon Show
The Internet Is Getting a Billion New Users. None Are Human | Sudheesh Nair, Thoughtspot, Nutanix & Tinyfish
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
From employee #16 to $1B ARR at Nutanix, then scaling ThoughtSpot to $150M ARR and a $4B+ valuation now building for a world where agents will drive the internet.
Sudheesh Nair joins the Neon Show.
The internet as we see it today was optimized around human strengths and weaknesses, using algorithms to monetize our greed and fear. But as agents take up more of the internet, that playbook starts to break. We are moving from a web of discovery to an outcome-driven internet, where agents care only about the destination, not the journey.
As an operator who has scaled companies, Sudheesh believes sales is a noble profession where there is no middle ground. You are either a hero or a zero. Sales is not a function at the edge of the company, it is the primary job of every employee in a company. When that happens, teams stop acting like mercenaries chasing targets and start behaving like missionaries focused on customer outcomes.
Beyond agents, we also discuss building companies and whether there are right or wrong reasons to start. Sudheesh’s view is simple. There are no right or wrong reasons, but you have to be brutally honest with yourself about why you are doing it.
This episode is one hour of clear thinking on agents, sales, and the realities of company building.
00:00 – Trailer
01:49 – What % of the internet is agents today?
10:25 – How far are we from trillions of agents?
12:47 – Why isn’t the internet ready for agents?
18:31 – Consumer is a tough game
19:49 – Selling to enterprises = high value / low risk
22:14 – A noble profession with only heroes or zeroes
24:41 – Only 3 reasons why people buy anything
26:14 – How we got Fortune 500 customers in just 18 months
27:28 – The wrong reasons to start a company
31:05 – Cursor vs Claude vs Codex
34:30 – Do investors prefer failed founders over first-time founders?
35:06 – 3 reasons why an enterprise will sign your startup
39:52 – PMF has to be proven every day
41:21 – What’s the play b/w OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic?
45:12 – Drivers vs passengers in companies
47:17 – The muscles you build as an operator
50:45 – Hire one person when you actually need four
51:41 – Why is marketing the most in-demand skill?
53:50 – Nutanix: from 0 to $1B ARR in 26 quarters
54:55 – The hardest choice Nutanix made
59:25 – Talent is universal. Opportunities are not
01:04:08 – Selling is everyone’s job
01:05:58 – Passion comes from value creation
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This mission goes beyond startups. It’s about shifting the center of gravity in global tech to include the brilliance rising from India.
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We invest in seed and early-stage founders from India and the diaspora building world-class Enterprise AI companies. We bring capital, conviction, and a community that’s done it before.
Subscribe for real founder stories, investor perspectives, economist breakdowns, and a behind-the-scenes look at how we’re doing it all at Neon.
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Website: https://neon.fund/
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Connect with Siddhartha on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siddharthaahluwalia/
Twitter: https://x.com/siddharthaa7
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This video is for informational purposes only. The views expressed are those of the individuals quoted and do not constitute professional advice.
Sales is like a mercenary profession. If your software code didn't release and slipped by a week, nobody gets fired. Because it is considered to be an artistic profession. Whereas sales, March 31st comes, the quarter ends, and you're a hero or a zero.
SPEAKER_01Legend in the India US called our core pillar of the team that built Nutanix along with Diraj Manoj. And then with Ajeer who rebuilt Thought Spot.
SPEAKER_00We heard the news that VMware is going to compete with us directly. Diraj made the decision that we're going to compete with VMware.
SPEAKER_01Within one and a half year of starting TinyFish, we have some of the largest companies in Fortune 500 as customers.
SPEAKER_00In the new world, everything should be a product problem. Because product problems have high leverage. If I fix it, I can get that hundred thousand people immediately affected. So you gotta wire all of them in the product so that the product is learning from the interactions and getting better. Everybody believes that sales is what they are doing. The job that you're hired to do is the second job. So your first job is sales. Nothing of value is ever created until it is sold.
SPEAKER_01Hi, this is Sadhat Aluwaliya, your host at Neon Show and managing partner at Neon Fund, a fund that has invested in pre-seed stages in the best of enterprise AI companies between US India Corridor like Atomic Work, CloudSec, and Spot Draft. Today has someone who has lived enterprise in his career. Sudhish, founder of TinyFish, welcome on the Neon Show.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Siddhartha. Thanks for having me here.
SPEAKER_01Sudish, you are a legend in the India-US corridor because you were the core pillar of the team that built Nutanix along with Dhiraj, right? Manoj. And then, you know, you were the one with Ajeet who rebuilt ThoughtSpot. Right. So coming on to the current change, right? In the ecosystem that we are seeing. 90% of the web has completely transformed. Now the web is being built for agents. How let's say today shopping is done by Amazon for humans. I think it will be built entirely for agents.
SPEAKER_00Web is itself is not being transformed. And that is the beauty of it. So there is only going to be one web. And the power, the innate power of internet or the web is that it is going to be always one. In the sense that if there is a new paper that is published by IIT in Delhi, it should be immediately readable and researchable and augmentable in MIT.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And a kid in uh in Nicaragua or Nigeria should be able to pick up and work on it, right? That is the reason why internet is powerful, because it removed silos of knowledge. Right. So it should never buy for Kate. Now the problem is that today internet is mostly built for human commerce, human understanding. And I'll be very honest with you, if you think of bot detection and cloudflare and all of these things that they talk about, like they sometimes go on soapbox and saying we are guarding the internet, we are keeping the bots away. It's all bullshit. Because what they're actually doing is preventing uh value creation for humans and focusing on dark patterns for merchants. Let me explain what I mean by that. Imagine you go to Amazon and try to buy something, you work there, I'm pretty sure you studied this. Amazon will, if you search for anything today, I guarantee you the first uh 30 to 40 seconds of your time is trying to figure out how to not fall into a trap. Because you search for a soap, and then you're trying to avoid which one is a sponsored product, how do I not click on it? Yes. And then you see something that looks organic, but then you read the reviews and like, oh, dang, there's a lot of reviews. This might be AI. And then you are trying to figure out what is an organically good product for me here that showed up really nicely. Why? Because Amazon has completely optimized this thing for ads and value creation and whichever merchant is providing the most margin, right? Not about the user at all. And why is that? It is because we as a species are kind of weak. We have fear, we have greed, we have all these emotions, and we have scientifically figured out how to exploit it. See, every time people say, I bought this, uh, would you like insurance? You're going for travel. You just came to US. I'm pretty sure somebody, the ticket people probably would sell, would you like travel insurance? Would you like health insurance? And you're like, the chances of me falling sick is pretty low, but my God, US is crazy. I bet by that. And then if you buy a rental car, get a rental car, in the rental counter, they'll say, Siddhartha, are you sure you don't want fuel options? Because what if you forget? And you're like, oh dang, you're right. Because if I forget or I don't have time because I didn't plan well, I will be paying a lot more for gas. Let me prepay. People who bought this also bought that. These are all dark patterns. Now imagine AI agents or robots interacting with the web. They don't care about the journey, they only care about their destination. And that's a fundamentally different way of operating the web, right? But they have to get to the same web. So now imagine this web as a uniform, a singular entity. There are two different kinds of users coming in, humans, which let's say four 4.4 billion users out of eight. The potential for between robots, devices, and agents, it is going to be trillions. An order of magnitude, more users are going to come to the internet. They're fundamentally different. This group is emotional. They have greed and fear that Web has figured out how to exploit. These are like that Terminator movie. You know, they watch this internet like extreme efficiency. They see ads, they see JavaScript, they see DOMP that are mutating. And it will ignore everything that is noise and go to the signal. If it is trying to buy that soap, it knows exactly what which soap to buy and it'll execute that task with extreme efficiency. You can't treat them like humans. For example, if you're renting the car and say a robot is renting the car, and if it says, Would you like fuel option? The robot is like, why would I ever need that? Because I'll never forget. I'll know exactly what the mileage is, how much efficiency my car has, exactly how much time, what time the flight is leaving. I will figure out exactly when to do that. It's part of my plan. I will fill the gas and deliver it to you. Unemotional, perfectly built, right? This is where the challenge is. And what we are doing at HinyFish is we think there has to be an abstraction layer built for the same web. But this is only has one persona to think of, which is how do agents, robots, and devices will interact with? How do they need an operational internet that is outcome-driven? They won't watch cat videos because they are bored. They won't pre-buy or extra buy soap because they feel like they're going to Costco, Metas will buy a large bundle. They are going to be extremely efficient. So it's all starting, by the way. There is no idea how this is all play out. But one thing is for sure the web will be used by trillions of users like these, and they will not want the same abstraction layer. It has to be something new, and we are trying to figure it out.
SPEAKER_01And let's say you are talking about the web being built for agents. So for today, customers don't have their own agents, right? So who are you building it for?
SPEAKER_00You know, customers don't have agents is true, but it is also not true. Let me explain what I mean by that. Um we are focused on two kinds of users, okay? The enterprise business users. Uh, so uh an insurance company, uh claims management specialist, potentially, or a supply chain in a specialist in a manufacturing company. Two years ago, an enterprise buyer like that, if they want something, you know what happened? They will call Accenture or McKinsey and they will do a consulting session. And then you today, what has changed is that this buyer either will tell their data science people or a machine learning team or their BI team, hey, we have this unique problem. We need fresh data, and can you help us? And they don't pick up the phone and call a BI company or a large consultant company. What they usually do now is open up uh a cloud code or some other tool like that and say, let me see if I can do something here. And they will say, I want to have an extremely complex workflow automated. Like I want to know my competitors' pricing at checkout.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I want to know that on all 50 states at different zip codes. So I want to run 300 sessions in parallel on my competitors' website. I want to buy from Kansas this box and uh from Florida the same box. And I want you to pick all color options and then tell me when pink color is not showing up as available in Florida because I have a bunch of pink stuff. If it is out of stock for me, them, then I want to push and get a promo before the replenish. That cloud code now will say, let me find out how to do that. And one of the things that'll do is actually spin off a bunch of agents. And they are gonna say, I want to know how to run this in parallel. So I need serverless computing browser infrastructure. And then it'll say, I need human-like navigational skill because my competitor will never open up an API and give me the data. Yeah, I need to navigate and find it. Then it'll say, Oh, it's gonna have infrastructure problems like bot detection and proxying and stuff like that. And what we have done, a tiny fish, is we turned all of that into an API. Okay. So even though the user themselves may not know that they're actually creating agents, through chat interface, they are actually spinning off hundreds, if not tens of thousands of agents. And these agents are coming to your website. So, yes, they're not directly running agents, but agents are approximately 28. By some counts, approximately 43% of the internet traffic right now are agents.
SPEAKER_01Wow. So I didn't realize that 43% of the internet traffic is already agents.
SPEAKER_0028 to 43. It's a range depending on how you like depending on which data source you're looking for, but it is happening so much of it. And we're all getting spun up by these models.
SPEAKER_01And you mentioned there will be a world, there will be trillions of agents. How far are we?
SPEAKER_00I so this is the thing, like you are here, San Francisco. I'm sure you took a Waymo, right? Yeah. I'm pretty sure you took a Waymo a few uh years ago as well. Two years ago, Waymo would have been science fiction. Yeah. And today, first time I'm sure of this. When you got into the Waymo, you probably had an iPhone.
SPEAKER_01You're probably scared, right?
SPEAKER_00You you can't relax because you're excited and you probably have your phone out, and you probably looked at took a video of the steering wheel automatically turning and the gear pair. But after second or third, I'm pretty sure. You're you're used to it. Yeah. You took your iPad and then, okay, what am I gonna let me do some research? That is something to remember. Things are happening faster than we think. And this industry, this space, it's moving so fast. I hate to make predictions, but I do not think we are talking about multiple years, probably two years, but in the next 12 to 24 months, there will be significant movements in autonomous robots. Uh, I mean, the amount of work that is being done here, and one of the first use cases that'll go uh viral is domestic chores. And we already know. Uh, I mean, these are some fascinating stories. Some of the global 2000 companies we are talking to, uh, we they did some research. And you know what is the number one thing people want to automate? It's not cooking. Okay, it's laundry. So people still like cooking, some people. No one likes cooking. No one likes laundry. So I do think from autonomous car, which is nothing but an agent that will be making calls to the web, every time it says I need to go find a coffee shop versus order something, these are all going to be agentic transactions to home robots, to everybody using and building apps. I mean, software, it's not going to be something that we think of today. Today, software is built and hosted in cloud, Salesforce, ServiceNow. And then we all go to it. Software will be something like American Constitutional built by a few, you know, for a few, for a few times. You will build a software app that you and your wife and your family might use three times, and that's it, you'll never use again, because the cost of building software will be so close to zero, which means that the process of building software also will be done by agents. Yeah. Now multiply that with uh a billion Chat GPT users. You can already see we will pretty much reach the kind of scale that I'm talking about within months, uh, if not a couple of years.
SPEAKER_01And uh you earlier mentioned that the web is not ready for it.
SPEAKER_00Uh why do you think it's web is not ready, not because of infrastructure. Of course, there are infrastructure problems, and we will uh you know talk about it. I think the primary reason is because commerce is broken then. Because you remember I just talked about the detergent equation. Uh, if you take uh one of the largest uh in in the US, the largest, uh one of the largest is Procter Gamble, and they make amazingly beautiful smelling, beautiful color, uh detergent, you know, tide and others. And they spend a lot of money on that brand, and they spend even more money on digital shelf. So it shows up in the right place with the right color, with the right vanilla fragrance and all of that. And it is all built for humans because we like the color. If it is not in the right eye level, when you walk into Walmart, you will not see it. So they fight to make sure that it's properly placed. Again, coming from Amazon, you know all that game. Now imagine that robot that did the laundry is making that decision. It will say Siddharth and uh Nancy like organic detergent. They like vanilla fragrance, but it should not have any toxins because Kabir is small. And it takes that and breaks that detergent into molecular level, and it'll understand exactly the components required and then say, okay, this is what I need to buy. I zero care about, like I don't care at all about the color or the you know, the branding or all of that stuff. I'm gonna be unemotional about finding that exact composition across a thousand websites, and I will never get tired, I will never get bored, and it doesn't matter if it's on the 50th page or 100th page, I'm gonna click on all of them and then I'll only buy when I know exactly it'll be over. I won't buy, pre-buy, and keep it next to me like stupid humans do. And by the way, when I buy it, it'll be the best deal for my family. That now think about the implications on commerce, branding, web companies where brand itself is the entire business, all of that vanishes. So when I say the web isn't ready, it is not because of technology. Companies like TinyFish now we can actually solve some of these problems, but the the commerce behind that is going to be the thing. And by the way, these things will happen so fast and it is going to disrupt a whole series of business models.
SPEAKER_01But do you think today, um are we there where uh agents are shopping on behalf of uh Sadhart?
SPEAKER_00Not as much as you think. And I'll tell you there is a reason. So, for example, uh automation, when we do automation, the primary reason people automate is because it it's more efficient and frees me up and it does faster than I can, right? Uh if if car is slower than walking, you'll never take a car, essentially, right? If you look at when you think of web specifically, you think of like OpenA Atlas or Perplexity Comet and all of that. It's sort of like that Waymo example the first time, because first time watching this mouse move is kind of fun. But when you are trying to book a hotel and it is hovering over the you know calendar for three minutes and thinking and uh it's not clicking properly, you will just cancel and say, I'm gonna do it myself. That's the problem. The reason why consumer-based agents are not ready to go is because it still assumes humans are watching and humans will correct. For example, book me the next hotel in Palo Alto and it booked four seasons.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Maybe you don't want four seasons, right? So you're afraid of that. That is right, but what it has changed is on industrial size for enterprise. So, for example, one of our clients is uh a very large insurance company. Yeah. And this insurance company wants to make sure that every uh there is something called pre-authorization. You know, in the US, health insurance is so kind of complicated. Where if your primary care doctor said, Siddhartha, you've got to go see a specialist, the insurance company now has a clock running because before Siddhartha gets pissed off, I need to make sure that the doctor, the specialist that your primary care asks to see, uh, he or she, are they in the network? Yeah, are they available? Are they the right kind of frame? Do we have do we have a new contract? Have the accreditation is proper and all of that stuff. This is a lot of paperwork involved in the back. It's all in the internet, but it requires a lot of work and it can't have failure. And there are hundreds and thousands of these things happening in parallel. And usually what happens is it takes a few days. And you are, let's say somebody wants a scan done, and after getting that scan only, I will have peace of mind because it could be really bad or not bad at all. And the patient is like on like angst written, and backend is holding everything back. These are the kind of places where agents are already making a difference because imagine taking 10,000 of this parallel transaction and the entire workflow around pre-authorization is deterministically executed. And that is important because it can't have errors. Yeah, it has to be reliable, it has to be deterministic, and it has to be done with the kind of scale and cost that it delivers as opposed to the you know slow moving. So agentic transactions built for this kind of use case is working. That is why we have focused only on that. We don't want to book your hotel.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But if uh the tour company, the Xpedia or Booking.com, wants to compare 10,000 hotels at the same time, we are there for them.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And now that's why you were trying to solve it from an enterprise point of view to make enterprise ready and enterprise preparedness ready from an agent point of view.
SPEAKER_00That, but look, consumer is a freaking hard game, Siddhartha. I mean, I like there was a period where I was thinking, what should I do? And I thought, maybe consumer sounds good. In fact, a friend of mine and I, we try to even do something in the world of sports. But I quickly hit uh reality that when you think of companies like MyFitnessPal and uh all of this, you know, you know, the Duolingo and others, the way they do demand and then constantly keep feeding the top of the funnel is unbelievable science. Like growth business that they do will put all enterprise into shame. It is a very different type of skill and science. I don't have the skill for that. Because you know, one of the things with consumer businesses, they keep dropping. People sign up and drop, sign up and drop, sign up and drop, which means that the bucket has a lot of holes. Yeah, which means you better have a huge demand gen pipeline. What these people do is so data-driven, so unbelievably good, and so scale, and every message, every pixel is perfectly built. I have a lot of respect for them. So, partly, like I said, it's CC, but otherwise, like this is not something I can do. I mean, quickly realize that.
SPEAKER_01So, I believe, you know, and you have shared in your learnings on the internet that uh sales you treated as a very noble profession throughout your life, and you are not afraid to, you know, run a marathon for your customer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so look, I think sales is always had this bad rap. Yeah, uh, and it is true, it deserves bad rap because sales is like a mercenary profession. Yeah, it's one of those jobs where you hire people and fire them every 90 days if they don't produce, and there is no place to hide. Yeah, like if your software code didn't release on February 1st and slipped by a week, nobody gets fired. Yeah, you know, because it is considered to be an artistic profession. Uh, whereas uh sales, March 31st comes, the quarter ends, and you're a hero or a zero. There is no place to hide. If you say like the product failed or support wasn't good, nobody cares. So, first of all, it starts with a different types of mentality. And uh I say that in the trenches there are no board seats. Like let's say you're in World War I and there is trench building and the bullets are flying. There are no boardrooms or discussion going on. The only word is to survive. Often, enterprise sales, sales sales teams feel like they are in the trenches and they don't have a lot of appeal. I mean, they could finish a quarter, come back into a QBR and say, hey, the product sucked. But that is an excuse post facto. What makes it noble in my mind is are those companies where they feel like the sales team feels like they're not alone in the trenches. When the bullets are flying, the competition is trying to kill them, uh, the product team is with them, the engineering is with them, the support, the marketing, the CEO, they're all in the trenches. They are learning from wins, learning from losers, losing uh opportunities. But at the end of it, the accountability is squarely with the sales organization. And if you can properly do that, what happens is that this sales team will be so directly focused on customer outcomes as opposed to figuring out how to report back up to the management so they won't get fired. So organizations where the sales teams feel like they have transitioned from being mercenaries to missionaries. Sales is a noble profession. And you can clearly see the difference. Customers will see that, sense that. And that's the kind of sales organizations that I like to engage with, I like to build, and I guarantee your customers like to interact with.
SPEAKER_01And today, uh enterprises, are they actively engaging in conversations on what agents can do for them, or are they still like clacking behind and well, look, I'll tell you, Europe is pretty slow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But US, absolutely. And but here is the thing though. If you're an AI company, there's a good chance that pretty much every, if you're a decent AI company with a good team and good funding, chances are pretty much every large enterprise will uh do a free POC or maybe even do a pilot, uh paid pilot. But do not think that that means you're landed. I mean, we talk about ARR and all of that very loosey-goosey right now. You absolutely will get the attention and you might even actually get a few dollars for pilots. But unless you are able to really deliver value, not just deliver value, but deliver value at very low risk. So the numerator, the value has to be so high and the denominator has to be so low that you deliver the value without saying, you know, we're going to be here for 10 years. Because remember, this industry is so crazy. No one knows what two years from now looks like. So if you do that, enterprises are definitely converting into production. And that's one of the reasons TinyFish, we have decided to focus only on internet today. Because of course, we can actuate any browser, which means we can easily go into intranet, we can use uh CRM systems, ITSM systems, because they're all browser-based applications and we can do anything, payment processing, uh, you know, working capital, any of that. But the moment you go inside, then you have to deal with data quality, security, audit governance, and all that. What we have done is we just focus on internet, but within internet, imagine focus on freshness of data. If freshness is value, we can quickly deliver. So morning, we have the meeting, and usually in our first call itself, we show something that they should see. And then if they like something by afternoon, we have finished the pilot or the POC part of it. And then we go into a paid pilot. And from there, we can move. So this ability to move means you have to show high value. And then the low risk part is let's say TinyFish stops existing tomorrow, they ask us that question, we'll say, you will just go back to the way things were.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And it'll be slower and probably not the highest quality data, but you didn't break anything. So if you apply that kind of sort of extremely scientific way of thinking on behalf of customers, uh, you can absolutely crack into enterprise.
SPEAKER_01How did you build this muscle of which one? Thinking on behalf of the customer, starting a conversation morning by afternoon, do a POC by evening sign up.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_01Contract.
SPEAKER_00We've got to take a step back then, because sales, if you think of it, I said it's a noble profession, right? If you really boil everything down to why people buy it, buy three things. They buy time, they type, they buy uh uh money, yeah, and they buy promotions. It's that simple. Let me, I don't need to explain, but I'll tell you again. Uh, you will buy a product if it gives you more time to spend with Kabir.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You are not in an organization, so you don't care about promotions and all of that, but uh in large organizations, that matters. Yeah. People want to get promoted. You know, there used to be a saying, you know, you don't get fired for buying IBM. The simplest thing is you also don't get promoted for buying IBM.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And this is the same thing applied to Salesforce and all of these companies now. They're all like safe choices. Sometimes you have to step out, and and if you do it right, you'll get, and that's the second. And the money is the third one, which is I mean, there is a social angle to AI, which I'm not qualified to speak about, but there is going to be significant transformation in the workforce and labor. There is going to be a lot of disruption to white-collar jobs. But as organizations go through that, there will be dark days. So they have to make sure that cash flow and operational efficiency of the business is increasing.
SPEAKER_01But um in fact, within one and a half year of uh building or starting TinyFish, you have some of the largest companies in Fortune 500 as customers. So you have a track record, right? Uh, Nutanix, ThoughtSpot. But leaving that aside, right, uh, what help you get these customers on daily though when they ask you like you're only a one-year-old startup?
SPEAKER_00I wish I could say that um it's the quality of the tech and it stands itself. But the reality of our industry is that experience and network really does matter. And I've been fortunate enough to work with uh, so I have two co-founders. They're more exceptional people. One is Shuhao Zhang and the other one is Kizai. Uh, they both came from different uh life uh experiences. Uh so between three of us, we have non-overlapping network. Uh we also jokingly say between India and China and US, now we're connected like uh more than half of the world. Uh but uh seriously, though, it is uh, you know, this is one of the things I think Siddhartha, you know this when when I and others reached out, uh, I was hesitating. Yeah. But then you reached out to Vijay. Yeah. And Vijay is a dear friend. Yeah. And when Vijay says, Sudish, you should do this, I'm like doing it. Yeah. And that is the example of everything that is so what are the lessons? Number one, uh, this might sound philosophy, which I try not to do, but you know, you have to ask why you are starting a company. And sometimes people say, Oh, start for the right reason, don't start for the wrong reason. I actually have a contrarian view there. If you want to start a company, do it. Whether it is the right reason or wrong reason, I don't care. What, like, quote unquote, what is the right and wrong reason? The right reason could be I want to make the world better. I see a problem, I feel like nobody's solving, I have to solve it. These are all the things that we tell others. Yeah. But the wrong reason, which are truly sometimes the reason, is because I think I can raise money. Yeah. Somebody's giving me money. I know Siddhartha, I'm sure they will fund me the pre-seeds, so I might as well start something. Or worst case, sometimes it's like I went to a Diwali party, or my friends started, I better start. Yeah. And or you come home and your spouse is telling you, hey, you went to IIT. I see the other person started all of them, right? Right. Or they're thinking, oh God, everybody's making money. I don't want to work for somebody. Or you had a bad day, your boss yelled at them, like, screw this, I'm going to start my own company. My advice is like, we are living in such a beautiful uh age for us in this bubble. If you want to start a company, no matter what the reason, give it a shot. However, you take some time to think honestly, like the why. Just be truly, brutally honest with yourself about that reason and say, this is why I'm doing it. I want to never work for anybody else. Uh I want to make a shit ton of money so that I don't have ever worry about your money. Uh, I just want to quickly do uh something so that when I go to my next college reunion, I don't look like a loser. Yeah, it doesn't matter. And then, and you don't have to show anyone, put that and say, this is why I'm doing it. But then realize and say, for us to be a company, this is not enough. So I need the missing pieces. One of them could be like a good company can never build, never be built by one person who is so intensely focused on what they want. Yeah, there has to be a better equation. And no one is overnight, is going to become enlightened about all of this stuff, which means that I say, I do need somebody who really is like maniacally focused on solving this problem for the right reasons. And I'm going to bring that person. And then I need one more person who genuinely think like they can easily raise money. Now, what happens is you have a team. This is an honest approach. It is such a fascinating time to start companies because uh it actually offers opportunity. But here is the thing, though: 92% of AI companies are failing. So when you open up LinkedIn and Twitter, you will see Cursor is here, Eleven Lab is there, and you're like, dang it, investors are coming and saying, why are not 100 million in the first year? It is important to know that you are watching the shows that others have put out. Like I'm sitting here and putting out a show, and you're probably on the other end watching it. You will never get to see the backstage of my company, which is mess, right? But I go and feel the best every day. And then what happens is this contrast that building, I get one backstage pass and a bunch of front row seats. And all the front row seats are showing amazing performances. And then I'm comparing that with my backstage. If you do these few things, what happens is you're built and calibrated in a way that actually makes you feel like I know what I want, I know why I'm doing it, and I'm willing to grit through it because I guarantee you, no matter how good the story is, like cursor, one of the biggest success stories. My company used to have around 83% of the company engineers for cursor. Today it is like less than single digit. I'm not saying that it means cursor is doomed or any of that stuff, but the reality is nobody's safe.
SPEAKER_01The cloud took away everything that cursor built.
SPEAKER_00And Codex is now trying to get better at that. What is your view on that uh cursor versus cod and codex and developers and all of that?
SPEAKER_01Well, I think uh if you understand the customer psyche, the customer developer is an individual customer, they are really fickle. Wherever they get the maximum value for the buck, whichever helps them write the most accurate amount of code for the least amount of cost, they'll go for that tool.
SPEAKER_00100%. I always say developers are the most disloyal users there are, yeah. And they're also constantly trying to see if if any product tried to keep them without portability, they will also not use that. Yeah, it's uh so yeah, this is the thing. So every company will have dark days. Uh the question is, you know, in the old ways, days it used to be like you'll have I'm on the top of the world, and like, holy shit, nothing is working was probably every three months. And today it's happening three times a day.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's it.
SPEAKER_01And I think then the news are also too high and too low, right? Uh, like 50% to 80% of the SaaS stocks are down because clouds aren't one upgrade, right?
SPEAKER_00Those are like, look, I think Siddharth, we have been through a couple of uh cycles. Um what I like is, you know, uh, I think Salesforce, which is one of those stocks that is currently taking a hit, uh, it went public, I'm not quite sure, but it's close to 100 million in revenue. 100 million, okay? They have been through ups and downs. And every time they get punched in the face, they get up.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if you think you can be a company that doesn't take a punch and somehow succeed, you're dreaming. Yeah. Like you've been, you start a couple of you get punches daily, right? So exactly. And and this this is another startup for you, you know, showing the VC fund. And I can't imagine like the pace and the relentless speed with you're creating content. Yeah. There are days where it's like, what am I doing? Yeah. So if you go through enough of this and then you sort of take a step back and say, I'm not going to zoom too much into the stock, so to speak, like metaphorically speaking, the ups and downs. You want to take a step back. Now it's very easy to say, okay. This is where I think having a good partner at home and co-founders at work will help. And when I say co-founders, it doesn't have to be co-founders, a good team around.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And if you have, like I said, if you did that initial jigsaw pistol really well, then hopefully all of you are not having the same amount of downtime all the time. You know? And so somebody's down, somebody lifts you up. And when someone is the other person is down, you are able to lift them up. It's a long game. Uh, you look 10 years from now, how many of these companies will be around? 92% are failing right now. And it is only going to get worse because more companies are getting founded, uh, rate of change is increasing, and frontier models are coming and just swallowing, and SaaS companies are going to lie down and take it, which means that there will be the delta is only going to increase. So uh a lot of us are going to fail. And what does that mean? Like, what is failure? Uh, you know, in our world, startup, we are so lucky because there is no real failure because we are absolutely burning somebody else's money. Like people like you go get LP dollars and invest in us. And even if we sort of quote unquote fail, you would invest in a failed founder much easy than a fresh founder sometimes, right?
SPEAKER_01Because the hunger is much more and they know.
SPEAKER_00So, what is failure? So we sometimes over rotate on failure, and the real cost of failure is to our ego.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like, oh my God, I failed. And that's a one thing Bay Area does very well. I hope that the rest of the world catches up. Here, failure has no stigma. Failure is like, I failed two companies, started two companies, both failed. Give me more money. And PCs are like, here it is.
SPEAKER_01So again, you know, coming back to a one critical question, I think our audience would love to understand. In within one year, the customer started caring about you. Yeah. Right? So, what are the things you did, right? Obviously, you mentioned one thing, you didn't went into internal systems, you just touched the internet for them. So, because you're not risking anything. Yeah, that is one thing. But what are what are the other things that customer cared about you? Like, because today the AI noise is so much that every enterprise that any company goes to, Microsoft is trying to shove their AI to it. Salesforce is trying to do shove their AI through the C Exo. So the top-down motion has become very heavy, right? Because every C Exo is getting bombarded with demos, pilots, even from the largest of largest enterprises.
SPEAKER_00I'll give you three things. The first is I already mentioned this, which is it is our job to figure out the equation that is really heavy on the side of numerator. So value to risk ratio should be like over the top. If uh it was four in the, let's say four years ago for a startup, it is probably 40 now. You really have to think. That is, when the customer asks you, um, how do I know you're going to be around two years from now? Don't try to fight it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I would rather say, like someone asked me, like, the reality of AI space is if let's say you are very successful, there's a really good chance somebody could buy you and kill you. If you're not, you'll run out of money. So instead of trying to prove that, no, no, no, I'm going to be around 10 years from now, you'll say, okay, let's think about that. If we fail, what happens to this project? So it is our job to explain instead of fighting. Yeah. Right. So that's the high value, low risk. The second is quick realization of value, but it is not just value delivery, but value realization and then continuous value delivery. Value realization is if the cost of acquiring a customer is reduced because of my product and it turned into something better in terms of value. Let's say their stock is actually impacted as an extreme case, that is realization, right? Even that's not enough. Now you got to think about continuous value realization. What does that mean? It means that you have wired that into the business logic in such a way that it is not starting to produce results for others. So it is self-sustaining. This is sort of sounds like, oh my God, it is very difficult. I guarantee you, if you're in an enterprise, if you think you are not have to do all of that, that is because you're not doing it. Somebody else is doing it. The problem, the risk on today's world is if the customer is doing it on behalf of you, another vendor could go and do that and take your business away, right? So that is the second part of you. You have to think through this inside-out framework and then apply that methodology. And the third thing is that the cycle of disruption is you have to assume it is significantly short, which means that you have to run this life cycle that I just talked about in probably months, maybe like a month or two months. That is, you know, procurement cycle itself for enterprises sometimes three to six months. You can't live with that. So you have to say, if a procurement person comes in and says, uh, your legal contract and uh you know HIPAA governance and the PII thing is going to take you six months, you should not lie down and take it.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You got to figure out how to take it and go back to the case and say, six months, are you like seriously? Like go to the business champion and say, Do you know what the world is going to look like six months from your competitor might be in production and taken all your customers? So your engineering team, your data team have really modernized, but your procurement team is Neanderthal. They're holding you back, and this is going to fail. So the answer is not to say, ignore, we are a global 2000 company. No, the answer is let's go through that and we will take your paper. But I want you to remove the boilerplate stuff that doesn't apply to us. And here are the things that apply, and here is how we can remedy that so that we can compress it. So compressing the entire sales cycle is important because without that, you won't get to continuous value realization. So that's the third thing. What we have done, and we can do a better job, but what we have done well is we've been intentional about all of this. And the last thing I'll say is that in the old world, everything I just said is on people. It's on the salespeople and the delivery of customer success people. I do not accept that. In the new world, everything should be a product problem. You show me a problem in a company, I will tell you how it is a product problem. Your customer side is wrong, product problem. If your marketing branding is wrong, it's a product problem. Everything is a product problem. Why do I think like that? Because product problems have high leverage. If I fix it, I can get that 100,000 people immediately affected. But if I train a salesperson and they're good, I cannot ever hire 100,000 good salespeople or customer support people. So you got to wire all of them in the product so that the product is learning from the interactions and getting better.
SPEAKER_01The other thing in today's world is your product market fit has to be proven daily. For example, like ChatGPT was so hidden in the race. Gemini caught up, uh, right? And Gemini is part of your Google Suit today, right? And similarly, the what Claude built, right? So what I I am listening from enterprises is now they're reconsidering the agreements that they signed with OpenAI kind of thing. So the world is changing so fast, yeah, even at that scale. Uh that you know what product market fit you had today, yesterday is not valid today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. This is such a good point, by the way. So I, you know, inside the company Shuha and I, we talk about product market fit doesn't fall from the sky. Product market fit is something you have to earn every day. So what I like to think of it is as um we uh are building a company that hopefully lasts many decades, but the problem that we are solving is a moving target. So when I think of product market fit, I think of as I've earned the right to live six months.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So six months is a decent time frame because even in today's world, if you don't think six months, uh it's a really difficult thing. So I think of it like do I have I earned the right for the next six months with this customer? And if the answer is yes, in that six months, can I go earn the right for another six months? Yeah. Now there are two different sort of sort of fabric in the point that you made about OpenAI and others. One is the foundation models are getting commoditized. There is no question, like in our product, for example, one of the reasons we took web is because web is dynamic and uh it is not something where you can just throw LLMs at it. Yeah. Because if you ask LLM the same question three times and prompt it differently, it'll give you different answers. Yeah. And web is constantly changing dynamic. That is why you can't apply web LLM directly. What we have done is we used LLM and abstracted out and codified and executes in a deterministic fashion. So that's our IP. But from a product market fit point of view, what we have done is we look at this and say one day it is Grok that delivers better. Uh, and then we have built our own benchmark, and we might say, you know what, Gemini 2.5 is flash is better. And then when three came out, we actually did benchmark for our use case. We found that even though three is supposed to be better for our use cases, 2.5 previous September was the better use. So we just use that. Why? Because all of these are commoditized. But within that, you can now start seeing that there are channels being built. For example, coding, uh, Anthropic has gotten the best model. Now, OpenAI is trying to catch up. But when it comes to reasoning, uh, definitely uh OpenAIA models and uh Google models are better. Uh imaging like Anthropic sucks. Grok is actually getting better, and Nano Banana and others are actually getting better. So developers are going to think just like CPUs used to be like so Intel inside and now nobody cares.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I think models will become that. This is where Google and Anthropic, I think, have taken a different track, which I think is going to be good because Google definitely have the enterprise bandwidth and mind share. So they have built ecosystem around it, uh, which means that they get wired into G apps. Anthropic from the beginning understood coding is going to be the infiltration point and they've done it very well. And now they are applying vertical AI inside the enterprise. Open AI, though, you'll never write them off because they missed all of this. However, the model that there's a framework that they built called Frontier. That frontier framework is to me one of the most exciting frameworks for the intranet because it actually talks about context and semantic layer in a way that if you get it right. It will wipe out a whole suite of products out there, because it is the best architecture to understand the semantic model of an organization. And this is something that I struggle with in BI because you know there are BI companies trying to do semantic model for a long time. And the reason why it doesn't work is every company's semantic is different. How you recognize revenue is different from how he recognizes revenue, right? If you are wired in with this level of intelligence inside the organization, it'll fundamentally change. What will happen is these are all smart companies with amazingly gritty leaders. They will evolve. And the way they will evolve is they will become more uh what's the right word? More proprietary about their models and they'll keep holding back. Post-training and RAG is going even, pre-training will become more important. And then they will stand up verticalized apps. And then what happens is there will be a fight for data, proprietary data within the enterprise. All three are massively capable. And in that context, I would say OpenAI and Google are more capable.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then if they have the verticalized apps and access to data with this kind of a frontier kind of an architecture, that will become sticky. And because the apps are sticky, the models will become sticky. Otherwise, it'll all change.
SPEAKER_01So for founders, quite a lot to process in to survive.
SPEAKER_00Oh my God, it's just like every day go to school. I love it, but it's pretty scary.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's it's pretty scary. Uh so for example, what you built 10 years ago, let's say for uh the process, the systems, the architecture would not sustain today.
SPEAKER_00From a technology to even sales and all of that, but there are things to learn, of course. I mean, there are things that doesn't change. For example, uh a flat organization, an organization with the drivers, no passengers. Yeah, it's a really difficult thing to do. So, for example, in Nutanix, we did a decent job. And I left, we were over like 5,000 or so people, but it was we didn't have a lot of passengers in the sense that we all rolled up the sleeves and do whatever it takes. Obviously, we had a lot more people, we don't need as many people, but that structure of learning and figuring out how to respect every leaf node, every root node in the company, that matters. Um, and with the smaller company, there will be a lot more ego, a lot more uh shoulder punching happening. How to resolve conflicts? And it's really easy to resolve conflict when everything is going well. But when things start going uh not so well, the first reaction would be to point fingers. And when the companies are small and people start pointing fingers, there is no place to hide. There is no redundancy, there is no contingency plan. How do you manage through all that? Like people equation is always going to be challenging. And then last is customers. Like I said, how do you react to customers? How do you treat customers? How do you build with respect? Those things are also fundamental. They haven't changed. And how do you build a company and calibrate them for the long arc? You know, not get carried away by, oh, first year should be 100 million or you're doomed kind of thing. How do you change that? So experience definitely matters, but you should also assume that the experience is not blinding you. You know, they are not blinders, they're like guardrails. If you go away, you're gonna fall. But don't assume that things didn't work in the past, will not work now.
SPEAKER_01So, in your journey, you know, uh, you would have seen a lot of ups and downs. Like, for example, in Nutanix, first of all, you were the challenge, yeah, challenger. Uh right, yeah. And then uh as as you grow over a period of time, then stock took multiple hits during the course. Uh similarly, a thought spot when you joined, right? First you had to fire people multiple times, which is much more difficult, you know, as a leader because you don't expect as soon as you join, you are given the responsibility to cut cut the organization by 25% or or 50%, right? Uh so during this dynamic uh landscape that you know you saw over 15 years, you know, sales is obviously the muscle that you build, leading sales sales. What are the other muscles that you build now that you are using at Tiny Fish?
SPEAKER_00I think first is I've become better at um communicating directly, uh in the sense that I've realized that if I give off um 10% vagueness in my communication, by the time it actually gets to action, that is probably augmented itself to 50% lack of clarity. So I become very intentional in what I say. Of course, I have problems when it comes to writing, I keep writing long stuff and speaking, as you can tell, I go all over the place. But I intentionally, when it matters, I break it down so there is no lack of clarity in what I'm saying. That is, if I say no, I will explain clearly it is no, and we will not do that. And that is something it took me a while to learn because there is this inside all of us, people might say, Oh, they are not like that, but all of us want to be liked. And there's nothing wrong with that. You know, you have to be like a sociopath if you feel like you don't want to be liked. I mean, there are some people who just act like the opposite of it. Like, my job is to act like, you know, I'm the boss, so nobody should fear me. That's BS. In our industry, knowledge industry, people work because they want to work, not because they have to. So, one thing I learned is like you have to have the clarity of communication that is not burdened by the need for liking, being liked. If you can get that right balance, it'll really help. So, and it's not just uh for every communication. You need to know where I'm saying something and we get caught up in the moment. A Slack message shows up, uh, you know, WhatsApp comes up, and you're just responding. And that is how it should be. I'm really fast at responding. But when it comes to something that you know it requires your attention, you should take a pause and say, Am I going to send this message with extreme clarity? And will that help or hurt? And is that being shaped because of my ego or vanity or my need to be liked? And if the answer is all good, then send it out. So that's something that I've gotten good at. Second is I've become a lot more passionate about product building, uh, in the sense that growing up in sales, uh, you know, early days of sales, it was always like product people don't know what they're doing. It sucks. Like I can't close the deal because it's in ship. If they ship, it is poor quality. If it is poor quality, then the support is bad, you know, like flame throwing everywhere. Why? Because you don't you understand we have to close the deal. And that's a pretty bad place to be in because um the building software out of nothing, uh, building things that doesn't exist, maintaining things, it's a hard job. So I've learned a lot. I've actually built a lot more empathy for engineering and products and resource management and even back office. I mean, resource management, like going through multiple rounds of layoff, for example, really sort of inculcates you that you don't want to do this. And if you don't want to do this, the first thing to do is to not hire. Yeah. Like don't hire unless you feel like you are in a place where you need to have four people and just going to hire one person, and this person is the best person, and he or she is going to be a needle mover. In smaller companies, you can do that. In larger companies, sometimes you know, you end up hiring four uh masses. So that is important, the back office. So I thought of like every function in my mind deserves so much respect, and I've actually come to empathize with that. Third, and probably the final thing I'll say is that I have fundamentally internalized that marketing has changed. I genuinely believe that marketing is the hardest thing to do in today's world, and uh it is probably going to be one of the highest uh uh in-demand skills. And there will be a lot of marketers. Um the entire social media world has completely perverted the incentive structure, you know, from Twitter to YouTube, they all are algorithmic optimization for uh clicks and views. Nobody pays attention to anything, nobody reads books. I'm even surprised that uh we are doing this because I don't know how many people will watch this, and if they watch it, it will be like 7x speed, uh, or they will summarize it. So it's a very weird world, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00If people, I mean, you know, one of the books that I was reading uh in Jacob Rowling, she has a uh pen name called Robert Galbraith, and he writes, she writes a lot of books in it. And there's this pattern that always stuck with me. She's the world's biggest problem right now is there are more writers than readers, there are more publishers than uh listeners, there are people like you and me sitting, making more content than actually people sitting and watching the whole thing. And the problem is that, sir, the signal to noise is very difficult to find. And marketing is not about adding to the noise anymore. Marketing is to identify how to get the right signal in the noise to stand out through the right channels. And you can see clearly paid influencers and non-user-generated content, it is a challenge. So that is probably the last thing that I'm learning. And the last part, it's a work in progress. I have really no idea. Like part of the reason I'm here, like I said, is VJI, but the other part is I'm experimenting with this because I didn't do a lot of these. Now I'm trying to figure out does this work? Because uh if you don't put yourself out there, if you don't figure this out, yeah, I could have the best product, but no one will know.
SPEAKER_01So Dish, can you share uh how did you take, you know, I know it's it's too uh short a conversation to get the summary. How did you take from Nutanix from zero to one billion in revenue while you were there?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I have no idea. And that is the honest answer. What I can tell you is that I lived um 26 quarters, and I loved thinking that way. So I'll give you an example. So we did our IPO in September 2016, and we were in New York, uh, you know, Nasdaq, and we finished the IPO, and I still remember Diraj and I, we had this, you know, emotional thing like, oh, we are going to feel amazing. I did not feel amazing. I was like, oh, now we are a public company, and if we drop a quarter, that'll be a problem. So from New York, I flew to Tokyo directly because I wanted to make sure that the deal happens. I was intensely focused on uh every quarter. So, and you know, some people say that, you know, people who live in history will never realize they are actually doing it. I don't try to uh you know aggrandesize the whole thing, but my point is, you know, there used to be a guy that I used to work with called Bob Wallace. He had this saying where you remember, he said, so these are the good old days. And uh I didn't understand what he meant, but after I left, I realized because you were thinking about um what's not working. And one of the best things about um uh highly accomplished people is that they're always really good at looking at why things are not working, but they never think too much about why things are working. If I were to tell you, Siddhartha, you're a very high accomplished guy, I say that Siddhartha, here are the 10 things that you do well, but this one thing you're not doing well, I guarantee you there's a good chance you'll forget those 10 things and you will never forget the last thing I told you, right? That is why you are good. However, that also can be a bad thing. So when you build companies like that, we are very myopic in our actions. But if you don't think about that, uh you will never improve. However, but if you only think about myopic things, you forget that these are the good old days. So, going back to your question about Nutanix, one is we never thought about uh uh a quarter after, but it is very critical to know that we were never myopic in our vision and ambition. For example, uh, when we built a company uh very beginning, it was all on VMware. The product was built on VMware, the sales motion was completely on VMware, the use case was VDI, which was on VMware, our demand gen was VMware, our conference was VMware. And then I still remember standing on all hands when um we heard the news that VMware is going to compete with us directly. Of course, we were freaked out, but after the initial freak out, you know, Diraj made the decision that, okay, here is what we're gonna do. We're gonna compete with VMware. And first instantly, like, what do you mean? Like, we're gonna compete against them on the vSAN and uh the hypervisor. No, we're gonna compete them on a hypervisor because our product was sitting on their core product. If they're gonna compete with us on the app, we can't be on their infrastructure. Imagining thinking that we're gonna build our own hypervisor would be like saying, I'm gonna build my own frontier model today. Yeah. That sounds really ridiculous. But you know what? That's what Elon Musk did. Now, of course, Elon Musk has advantages that most mere mortals don't have, but what he did do is stand up an entire data center and you know work with uh NVIDIA and get all the chipsets necessary to go stand up something in eight months, which Mark Zuckerberg himself said that he thought it'll take three years. People are doing unbelievably impossible things every day. You may not feel like it is doable, but you have to be able to do that. So in our case, we always had ambition that is unencumbered by realities. So we always think like we want to build a large company from a culture, from a vision, from an aspiration, from an ambition point of view, we'll never shortchange. However, from an execution point of view, we will be very realistic. And Deerj has this way of looking around the corner, seeing around the curve, like no other human being that I have come across. However, what do you mean by that? So he can see the dots before I could see it, in the sense that he could connect 10 dots out. He's like a chess master who plays his chess in his own mind. The problem sometimes is that he'll checkmate himself.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I have none of that problem because I'm not as intelligent as him, but so I'm clearly seeing. So he has this extreme charisma and vision, and I have this intensity and execution focus. That is a good combo.
SPEAKER_01Can you give an example? For example, to close a large deal or a hundred million dollars.
SPEAKER_00This example that I just told you about competing them on hypervisor, that was an amazingly gutsy call. We said we are going to build today. Nutanix will be nothing if he did not make that decision early on, that we will build our entire product on the hypervisor. And the guy who, by the way, built took that chance, Deeraj had this idea which sounded crazy. And you know, the guy who made that is Manoj.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Now they're building a company together. And Manoj said, it sounds crazy, but I think I know Diraj well. If you think he can do it, I'm gonna, and he did it. I don't think Diraj could do what Manoj does, but Manoj could never do what Diraj does. So that's why they're a good combo at DevRel. So that's a good way of thinking. So my way is like I am like really paranoid and passionate about uh sales and delivering numbers. And uh, you know, I didn't have as much respect and understanding on the product side, which I developed later. So this kind of combination worked very well there. Um, the third thing I'll say is that we never, I personally will say that I never believed that talent is um centered in US or in Bay Area. I always believed that talent is universal, opportunities are not, which means that we got to be everywhere all the time. And this turned out to be one of the best things we did at Nutanix.
SPEAKER_01What do you mean by that? Everywhere all the time?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So I remember, so we released our product the first quarter. The product didn't work. It only had support for like some ice cusse or something, which didn't work really well at all for locking and all, and the it was down more than up. It had hardware lock and we were running on supermicro and all of that mess. Uh, but I get this email from a guy from Sydney saying, hey, your idea is pretty good, and if it ever works, uh, and if you're ever coming the next few years to Australia, uh, we would love to do it. And I'm like, oh my God, you're are you serious? And the guy says yes. Within a matter of seconds, he says yes. I said, Okay, I'll come. Like when? Like, now. Yeah, now. So I flew to Sydney, and I and first of all, this guy is like, what the hell? Right. I mean, I'm not sure that I'm ready to buy from a company with no product and no personnel here. And he's like, I'm like, no, no, I'm serious. We do it. Long story short, not only we sold, he actually joined the company. His name is Cam Stockwell, and he ended up being one of our best employees. He moved here and then he moved back there. We sold, but we turned him into a reference. A lot of a large portion of a business came from RCN, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia. Why? Because we hired a really good leader, PKN team around them. There's a guy called Matt Young. He knew how to run Asia. Europe, there are quarters where Europe outperformed us better than everyone else. Uh, South America, Mexico, all of these places, right? And the advantage is smart people want the same technology that US or Bay Area or Bangalore using anywhere in the world. It is just that we do not think of them until we exhaust everything else. And the problem is here, it's such a red ocean. Everybody's selling. Uh uh, Thailand, pound for pound, happened to be one of the most profitable regions for us. Why? Because cost of living and cost of doing business is low and people are willing to spend. There are amazingly large banks and so, you know, stock markets and other institutions out there, and they want the same tech. Cloud has fundamentally sort of at that time, you know, evened out the playing ground. Now AI has done that the same thing. So if you are thinking that you will never make a company unless you come to the US, you're making a mistake. Middle East was a booming market for us. We found amazingly good teams around them. We hired ownership mindset, people with the agency. Uh, and one of the things that we made very well was we did a really good distribution system. We had resellers, and the resellers were just part of the company. They will criticize, they will file bug, they will come to our kickoffs, internal meetings, they will tell us what's working, they will absolutely tell us when our product is failing them and their customers. So it takes a lot of back-office effort, but instead of waiting, we just went everywhere. Like federal. Federal is not something that most startups think that they should go there. Nutanix, we were there in the first year, international. Our first quarter, second, first or second quarter, our business came from UK, Federal, Australia. It was nuts. And once you see it, we just expand. And people are grateful, they're very smart and they'd pay. And Japan was a massive market for us. So these three things that I just described, if you apply that playbook, they all apply even today. You know, I'm going to be in Japan next week. Actually, no, tomorrow I'm leaving for Japan. And the reason is because AI is hard. Japanese society is aging and they always believe AI and robotics to be answers. They have a very high bar for quality, they have a very high bar for uh user delight. Uh, but that's not a bad problem to solve for, right? So I apply the same playbook when it comes to respect for the entire universe, be anywhere. Talk to people, show up. Uh, make sure that you're absolutely ambitious and unafraid to imagine the impossible, but at the same time, balance it with realities of not delivering a quarter means it is actually bad, and then rally the entire company. I never thought of Nutanix as a any function as not my function. Uh everybody believed that sales is what they're doing. I told them that, you know, the job that you're hired to do is the second job. Your first job is sales. And that sort of like really inculcated in the company a sense of pride in winning and losing.
SPEAKER_01Are you applying the same principles that you are global from day zero?
SPEAKER_00Trying to. So uh it's one of those things where I remember saying this once in an all hands somewhere that no, nothing of value is ever created until it is sold. I mean, it's it's such an important thing. You could be a profit or non-profit company, I don't care. You are selling. And any engineer who thinks selling is beneath them, any marketer who thinks my job is top of the funnel and demand journey is completely delusional. The point is, selling is everyone's job. If you are designing something, you need to make sure is it going to help me sell? And if it is helping sell, it does it expand. Does it expand, does it cross-sell? If it's a cross-sell, does it upsell? A product manager who doesn't think that way is useless in today's world. Engineers who are fixing something without thinking about is that going to make it easier for sellers to sell, is not. And a salesperson who doesn't think like I'm selling this, but will the product itself expand is not doing a service to the product. So if you create the vibrance inside the company that we are going to measure ourselves against sales matters. Now, it is important to sort of sort of uh guardrail that with the idea that we are a failure if we don't make the number. That's not the point because sales is going to be painful. There will be good quarters, bad quarters. We are going to be a good company, whether a quarter is good or bad. We will learn what we made mistakes from, but we'll improve on that. But entire companies should care. And trust me on this Siddhartha, it is really difficult because a lot of people want to celebrate good quarters, but they want to run away and blame sales for bad quarters. Sales want to deliver blame the engineering for bad quarters. So blame no parents. Successful quarters. Quarters, a lot of patterns. So you have to surgically remove that fear and then make everyone come together, good quarters or bad quarters.
SPEAKER_01Are you still following the same aggressiveness in sales today?
SPEAKER_00100%. Yeah. Aggressive, in fact, probably worse now. The point is intensity that I have sometimes can be a problem. But people, once they get to know me, they realize that it is I'm very passionate about value creating. Uh, in the sense that uh there are three constituents that I think about as a company uh responsible for running a company. One is employees, the other are customers, the third are investors. You have to think about all three equally. Uh, you know, the the the VC money that we raise is not coming from fat cats, it is pension funds, it is university, uh, it is teachers' union. These are 401ks. You know, so it is our responsible delivery. This is not like money that we just burn and then, you know, no, no, no blame. So that is important. But if you overrotate on that, you might not deliver. People who invest in early stage, they want 100x return, 10x returns, not like 2x, 3x. They can do that from safer uh investment vehicles. So employees, what do they want? The reality is most employees want to never have to work for money.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's what they want. They want to create generational wealth in that one job.
SPEAKER_00100%, 100%. And then, oh my God, I just want to work because I don't have to work.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And then customers, what do they want? Like I said, they want to make time, money, or get promoted. So when you put this thing together, life becomes very simple. What I'm doing right now, am I passionate about all of them? Everything I'm doing, is it moving the needles on all of them? And when you go through an exit like uh uh, you know, Nutanix in terms of IPO or hopefully thought spot soon like that as well, something of that magnitude, hopefully. The most profoundly moving thing that happens is like somebody who just joined the company uh fresh out of school will send you a note out of will say, like this house we paid for. Yeah, Nutanix paid for that. It is just massively gratifying. Unless you are like a sociopath or a psychopath, this is why you do it. And um, you know, I if you are not passionate about it, there are a lot of other jobs to do. But uh startup is like a freaking hard thing to do. Uh, don't ever get into it thinking this is going to be easy. Uh, and don't ever get into it thinking like, oh, others have done it and that's very easy. Even if you do everything right, there are two things that's out of your control: luck and timing. Every successful company had luck and timing on their side. And you could do everything right, and one of them could completely come and shaft you in the back. And if that happens, you will be nothing. So it's not for everybody. And the important thing to realize is whether starting or joining a startup, really think hard. Are you signed up for this? Is your family aware of what it is going to take to do that? And if the answer is no, think hard.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Sadish. It's been an amazing conversation with you.
SPEAKER_00I truly enjoyed it. I mean, you're such an easy person to talk to. I can see that. I'll say one more last thing, which is that you know, professionals, the difference between professionals and amateurs, they make it look easy. You make it look so easy. So I genuinely enjoy it.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. I'm grateful to you for you know for having this conversation with you in person. It's it's like, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I've never had such a long conversation ever. So I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01Truly means a lot, and you know, would love to do someday part two of it because uh I had so many, many more questions, there were so many more curiosities, but I think I have more answers though. I think I said everything. But but I think we we brainstormed a lot of things together. Yeah. I I learned from you a lot, right? And and my uh I was constantly thinking what you were saying about and you know what my past experience could relate to.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate. Thank you.