“GGV China-US Corporate Services 20 Years Interview Notes” series of articles. This conversation took place in January 2020, and Dheeraj has stepped down as CEO of Nutanix in December 2020.


This article is from WeChat official account:GGV Jiyuan Capital (ID: GGVCapital) , author: business services group, oral: Glenn Solomon, Dheeraj Pandey, editor: Rita, Yvonne, the original title: “super fusion originator Nutanix: make cloud computing invisible”, the title figure comes from Visual China

Decisions cannot be made only by emotional blood. Most decisions will have a so-called worst result. As long as you can accept it, why not try? ——Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix

Dheeraj means patience in Hindi. When he was 22 years old, Dheeraj Pandey took 900 US dollars from India to the United States to do his Ph.D. This was the first time he took an airplane.

In 2016, at the age of 40, he led his company, Nutanix, which he founded for 7 years, to go public in the United States, which was the largest technology company IPO in the United States that year.

Nutanix is ​​a global leader in private and hybrid clouds. Traditional companies build their own computer rooms or data centers and need to purchase storage, network, and computing servers separately, and then spend a lot of manpower and material resources to integrate software and hardware resources. The project is huge. Nutanix uses hyper-converged architecture and virtualization technology to integrate storage, network and server resources to provide enterprises with a one-stop solution.

Now Nutanix has more than 5,000 employees worldwide, with annual revenue of more than 1.2 billion U.S. dollars and a market value of more than 5 billion U.S. dollars. How does Dheeraj Pandey continue to restructure his business to stand out from the competition? What have you experienced behind the brilliance?It is for the masses to build, launch and expand the web-scale architecture. We have also learned from the impact of Apple products on our personal lives. How to apply a very profound and professional web-scale architecture to the data center? We must create products that are easy to use, simple in design, and small in size, establish a support model, and actively do non-technical matters, such as delivering equipment to enterprises, rather than just providing software. Because our ultimate goal is to provide consumer-level cloud architecture to the public.

Glenn Solomon: You served as CEO when Nutanix was founded, which is very different from your previous position. How do you judge whether you can be a CEO?

Dheeraj Pandey: In addition to my university computer science courses, I also took psychology, sociology, linguistics, etc. as an elective. I am very optimistic. I like to make friends and communicate with people. I am also good at expressing myself and building real relationships with people. These have shaped me now.

In the course of starting a business, as time progresses, I realized that the three elements of people, process, and products are very important. I am a technician myself, and I also learned a lot about how to build an enterprise-level system: my contact with Apple made me pay more attention to consumer-level products, design, beauty, and simplicity; Oracle taught me a lot about processes Knowledge, such as what the process means, how to deliver software to the enterprise, and so on. In the end, at Nutanix, the CRM, NetSuite and HEMs systems we initially established all worked well and have withstood the test of time. We don’t need to make any changes. This is amazing. I think process is a university question. Respect for process is an important part of leadership.

Glenn Solomon: Back in 2014, when the company was established for 5 years, revenue far exceeded 100 million US dollars, this speed is amazing. What challenges does this ultra-high-speed development bring? How do you respond?

Dheeraj Pandey: There are actually two or three dying struggles behind the glory. In 2011, our philosophy was to make storage completely software-based, running on a virtual layer, and not requiring special equipment to manage data. This idea is very dangerous. In the past few years, we felt that it would definitely not be able to survive, because we were using the VMware platform, and VMware did not have the ability to run high-end workloads. It took us almost 6 months to solve this problem. Coincidentally, VMware revived and released the integrated management suite in January 2012, and we survived.

Glenn Solomon: Nutanix has achieved tremendous growth in the past ten years. What are your expectations for the company in the next ten years?

Dheeraj Pandey: We are still a very small company, and we still have a lot to do. Ten years is a new starting point. We usually call the company’s vision “infrastructure invisible”, which has not changed, thankfully. Invisibility has no boundaries, and there will never be an end. Now we are working hard to make computing power invisible. We have begun to advance this effort in all aspects, exploring the feasibility of edge cloud, core cloud, and public cloud, whether we can make our products ubiquitous, and explore to provide customers with an invisible foundation The facilities are a great experience, this is the direction we have been moving forward.

*Material source:

Nutanix

https://founderrealtalk.ggvc.com/2020/01/09/episode-33-dheeraj-pandey-founder-ceo-of-nutanix-on-refactoring-to -earn-the-trust-of-the-enterprise/

https://www.inc.com/magazine/202009/graham-winfrey/nutanix-dheeraj-pandey-ipo-public-exit.html p>

This article is from WeChat official account:GGV Jiyuan Capital (ID: GGVCapital) , author: business services group