Dheeraj Pandey - Board Member at Adobe, Co-founder at Nutanix | Investing in Innovation

When you say machines, I'm assuming you're meaning like AI is able to look at billions and trillions of data points and then give you the best possible outcome and then leveraging that is probably going to be even more important. I feel like AI has, it's like a Yin and Yang UI and AI will actually be working with each other. I might be jumping the gun, but you know what machines get you to help you because there's only so much as an entrepreneur that you could actually do. As an entrepreneur, to be competitive at an early stage, we don't have the luxury of having a huge team, to be able to do that for us, but now we have the competitive advantage, which is AI to a degree. There's a big sort of civil revolution that happened around what came along with more corruption, more dysfunction, the entitlement that actually arose like, hey, we were the oppressed ones. What's the strategy for an entrepreneur to launch a product that has so many potential applications because you're going very wide now? You know, you might be small, but your biggest relationship is with the end customer. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot is a huge supporter of the show. I'm a huge fan of HubSpot, not just because they support the show because they support entrepreneurs. And if you are an entrepreneur, you have some problems that a lot of entrepreneurs have productivity. And it's not a secret. It's nothing to be ashamed of. You're not the only one that has this problem. And why do we have this problem? Well, all the tools and the tech that we're using, they're massively overcomplicated. We have tons of time consuming tasks. Our teams are not getting the information they need to close the deals, connect with customers, whatever it is, as entrepreneurs and our teams, we all have productivity problems. But HubSpot's customer platform truly helps. It was built to save time and make your job easier. So you can get back to building your business. No more hours wasted on time consuming tasks. No more chasing down prospect info if you're trying to close someone. No more one system for this. Another system for that. HubSpot can help you find leads, reach prospects, deliver the insights you need to convert them to customers all in one place. Plus HubSpot AI can literally do more work for you so you can focus more on scaling your business because HubSpot knows you have massive growth goals and they're here to make your productivity problem go away. Visit HubSpot.com to learn how they can help you grow better. D-Retch, thank you so much for coming on. I'm very excited for our chat today. How I wanted to kick this off because there's so many different topics we can go into based on all the different companies you've built and advised and helped. But when you look at the evolution of software over your career, what would you think is the most notable evolution or difference between when you started building tech companies versus what you have to deal with when you're building companies now? Yeah, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here Scott. You know, the thing that has gone on in a very timeless way, I mean, even going back before I started building companies, how big things have become smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. Just optimizing every experience and not just in terms of space and like all the software is becoming smaller and more lightweight, but also in terms of time, like, you know, people used to buy software for seven years and have support contracts for seven years to now. We're doing not just monthly building, but it's down to the last minute and the last second of usage in some sense. So I feel like it's happened to our personal lives too. I mean, we used to own these big devices and then we moved to, you know, these miniature things and then it went on to even digital things. So I feel like that's the biggest thing and we have to keep sort of working towards just a more optimized experience all our lives. What does that mean for an entrepreneur? You know, the biggest thing is, you know, really thinking about customer delight in a way like every moment in the way you have to really create value because people have been bothered. But stuff that's coming their way that every minute that you're actually spending with your consumer, you have to really delight them. It has to be worth it because you know, they have the opportunity to pull the plug and move on and do something else. And I feel like attention spans and reduce so much that design plays a very important role and I feel like, you know, I might be jumping the gun, but you know what machines can you do help you because there's only so much as an entrepreneur, you could actually do. Maybe you need the help of the machine to really help you not just stay on your toes, but also crush it with this short retention span that we actually have with our consumers. And we can we can jump the gun as much as you want. We're going to we're going to talk about all the incredible things that you've sort of built over your career. But I think that's I think that just to see your perspective through the evolution of of how a product is built and how customer responds. And I mean, I think there's definitely an evolution of UI UX and customer experience. And now we have when you say machines, I'm assuming you're meaning like AI is able to look at, you know, billions and trillions of data points and then give you the best possible outcome. And then leveraging that is probably going to be even more important than ever before because it's not just about creating the nicest thing that keeps people around the longest. Like we don't as an entrepreneur to be competitive at an early stage. We don't have the luxury of having a huge team to be able to do that for us. But now we have the competitive advantage, which is AI to a degree. I don't know if that's where you're going with that, but that sounds like the absolutely absolutely. And in fact, even taking a step back and the consumerization of our experience, you know, we need to be software used to be extremely stodgy. And it was built for a buyer. I mean, IBM sellers would come and, you know, there was no such thing as learning from anybody other than the salesperson. I mean, if you go back to the 80s and the 90s, that's how things were. I mean, the channel was a big part of it because there was no internet before the mid 90s. And I think ever since the health discovery, the sales learning that a buyer goes through now. And I think the evolution of the grassroots. I mean, the fact that the grassroots is so much power now that you can just leave it to the buyer's decision. I thought down something. I mean, socially, we've actually evolved a lot where products are not just bought and sold over, you know, whining and dining of salespeople setting in buyers. It's a lot of it is now proven to me that my grassroots users would actually like it or even approve of it. I think in the last 10, 15 years have come a long way. And the big reason is because I think I society gave it all where you can't re-stock decisions. You know, whether it's software decisions or what have you culture decisions down the throat of the. You know, people who are actually doing the hard work. So there's so much to really connect with the end users that used to happen in the consumer company. I mean, obviously there was nothing to be taken for granted in consumer companies. And a lot of that has really seeped into enterprise experiences as well now, you know, which I think is massive. And, you know, what we can come to expect from designers. I mean, we to be in the last five years is really evolved where design is playing a much central role. Maybe in the last decade, I would say. And we learned a lot of that from Apple as well because we were carrying an experience over the weekend, you know, Saturdays and Sundays were about a consumer experience. And here comes Monday morning and also the whole software experience looks so different because it's. You know, everything is about control and authorization and security and compliance and everything that was so soul crushing about it, you know, as opposed to. You know, I want to come to work and have some fun and have some joy at work as well. So, you know, productivity, which again has been an elusive thing in at work. And happiness, the question is, how do you really print both of them together? It's probably the benching that we come to see. And speaking of machines, I think they'll play a big role. I feel like AI has. It's like a Yin and Yang UI and AI will actually work with each other. I mean, to the extent where where things were 10 years ago, if you think go back to Slack, for example, there was so much dopamine in this real time collaboration and communication. And we were looking at the pulsating dots and say, wow, you know what the other side is typing. So I shouldn't leave my in my laptop or my phone. I think there was so much of dopamine that was coming from real time. I feel like even Slack today looks quite last generation now because it's, it's not sentient, you know, it's not perceptive. It's still based on just all things human. When I think if you look at the help that the assistance cannot provide, I think design will actually go to yet another level for where we saw 10 years ago, Slack and collaboration and real time. And audio and video to where we really want to be in the next 10, 15 years. That's so interesting how you bring that dopamine experience that people are so used to with all these, like you said, personal apps into the workplace, but that's what wins. Because people, I think now I think it's naive to say that people don't realize that even in a B2B environment, you're actually selling to humans and not like robots. But but now people are getting to that point where they understand that they're actually selling to real people. Yes, you're selling to an organization, but there's like real humans with real emotions, making a decision to buy your product or your service or your SaaS or your software. Walk me back because this is great and we will go down this rabbit hole in a second. Maybe just give me a little bit of your origin story because obviously you're very passionate about designing an experience and selling to a human, not just an avatar or an ISP. Right. So you've obviously had some experiences doing this just a few times. So walk me back even where did you come from? What informed your view of the world of building business that come from your parents that come from you were born in India, you came over here. So just give me like the origin story. No, the one thing that India and the Indian upbringing really helped me with was, you know, I got a lot of help socially from my maternal cyber paternal side, you know, my father used to work for the government. And this was the most corrupt government in all of India. So the state governments and this was a little bit more to the north south of Nepal, a state called Bihar. And there was a big sort of civil revolution that happened around, you know, the caste system was dissolved and people really said, look, we need to really attain a lot of the luxury in the power that these upper caste actually had for after since independence. And that turmoil really created a lot of dysfunction in governments to, you know, my state went through that big people in the good thing into the bloodless civil war, so there was no bloodlet. But what came along with this more corruption, more dysfunction, the entitlement that actually rose like, hey, we were the oppressed ones and we need to actually get a lot of. So I think, you know, they were the dark side to it, my father didn't get paid for like six, nine months at a time, because the government was dysfunctional, they didn't have the budget, they were running in deficit for. And they would be at the mercy of the federal government to give them loans and such, you know. So my maternal side, my paternal side, my uncle's, my aunt's actually helped me a lot. And, you know, we went through a good education, great education, you know, there was great, you know, schools, even in that corrupt state, I think it was. And it was just a luxury to actually go through great schools, my parents sacrificed everything, said, look, education matters, even got to go through the best education possible, even though things are actually, you know, it's hard to actually make end meet. And with that, I think the word entity actually just got ingrained, you know, I mean, I just felt like look, if I've been helped, I need to help and I need to really get in the shoes of others because they got into my parents shoes to really help me as well. I think I didn't have to learn the word empathy because this idea of what are they going through something they just came naturally and, you know, gratitude and, you know, even being a little more service minded, you know, in the world of design. And a lot of it is about being service minded, I think has been ingrained in me. So when I was 17, I actually, you know, took some big risks, you know, I went to undergrad school for the first time when I was 16 plus. And then I quit after three months because, you know, in India, you have to be in this all in their rank, you know, if you're not in the top 100 of 200,000 students back then, you can get to computer science. I'm like, you know, I really need to get a computer science and this was 1992 when the internet was just about on the horizon. So I came back, it took a risk, I retook the exam, I got into the top 100, you know, got into computer science in 93. And in many ways, it was perfectly fine because the internet grew, the browser grew, I mean, there was so much that I learned about what was going on in the world as well. By 97, and I was still 21, I left India, came to the US for a PhD program in Texas, Austin, mostly Texas. And even there, I got a lot, I mean, the university paid for everything was a fellow, the department, I mean, even to fly from India to the US, I mean, I didn't have the money, the university was not going to pay for that air tickets. And there were two really good comrades out of India, you know, Tata's and Mahindra's who actually paid for those things. So I have a lot of gratitude for, you know, people around me and corporations and companies around me, you know, and I feel like that has come to reflect in the way I think about consumers and users. And, you know, the fact that they don't owe me anything, but I owe them a lot actually. And it's really helped me think through divine and customer support and service and all this stuff deeply. I love that. When you started, and by the way, that's a beautiful lens to look at business through. I don't think that everybody just intuitively looks at business that way, but I think that's actually what probably leads to success. When you do adopt a very empathetic, servant mindset towards your customers, I would actually ask you because, you know, you have more experience than me. Do you find that you find that it's even possible to build a business if you don't adopt that view? I mean, people try because they feel like they're accessed, you know, to the big waves and the haunches and, you know, the powers that be and it doesn't last. You know, unless you really connect with the people who are using on a day to day basis. And if anything, other mentioned in going from perpetual licenses to subscription to now consumption, you have to be in your toes and really prove every day that you're worth it. It's a servant mindset, you know, being subservient to the end user, if anything, is just coming to the floor like never before. And it's not just for the consumer. I mean, I look at the employees that you hire and you need to have a servant mindset towards them as well. I mean, the best leaders right now people ask me this question, like, how come there's so many Indian CEOs? I'm like, you know what? There are a lot. I feel like it's maybe this thing about you don't have to pump your chest for everything. You don't have to really go and, you know, pump the table to get everything done. There's this, you know, thing about level five leadership and how can we extremely humble and still be fiercely resolute at the same time, which is very paradoxical. But this humble side of it is a servant leadership in how can you be a servant to your employees and a servant to your partners and a servant to your customers. I think it's great business, you know, people in this day and age, they actually be through in authentic stuff. And given there's so much fake stuff around us that, you know, being authentic is a great differentiator. And most people in the world, they can see through stuff, you know, and then you want this is something you want to do business with. This is the person I want to do business with. This is, you know, kind of the disposition that I want with my vendor, my partner and so on and so forth. So fast forward, like, I mean, you've been building companies for over 20 years now, but now, you know, hindsight is 2020 that all makes sense and that all sounds good. And these are the people you want to align with. But I'm sure that over the course of your career, it didn't always work out perfectly. So like, when you built a new mix, that was several years ago. In 2009, in 2009, it's been 15 years and it's a 15 years of learnings. And even before that, honestly, you know, when I got married to my wife in 2000, I was barely 25 and, you know, we were going through the highs of the bubble, the dot com bubble and everything looks so hunky Dory and all sudden within a year of the bubble burst. Of course, 9-11 was painful. But between the two, there were two big, like, it was the double damning, you know, for a young career coming out, I had dropped out of the PhD program and I'm like, I'm going to work in the industry. And here I was like really looking down the barrel and like, and I was in the Bay Area Silicon Valley was going through gloom and doom everywhere. So I was going to hunker down and say, well, keep learning, keep learning. The inputs are good. The outcomes will come someday and I think I learned to build software and, you know, have some great camera. I was working with people. If anything, that company that I was working for over those three years, it didn't go anywhere, but they were like, you know, six, eight of us were just. We were engineers. We actually created about $30 billion worth of enterprise value by going building companies ever since I think being in a great company of, you know, people who just wanted to learn and be foundationally strong actually helped a lot. What does mean to ship great software and what does quality mean? It's like the way quality was taught by the Germans and the Japanese and, you know, many, I think about customer service at Nordstrom and Amazon's customers at all about quality. If you learned about quality early on in your life. And then I was fortunate enough to have great manager in my, so after my startup stint in 2002 and three. I went and cooled my heels at Oracle for like four and a half years and I learned a lot about, you know, shipping big software, the big companies and still figuring out how to change the wings of a plane at 35,000 feet and make a lot of change to Oracle's core kernel code. But then I think I had the fortunate sort of thing of having great manager, you know, just who in many ways taught me excellence, you know, because, you know, young, you have to be shaped by somebody who was just really good at defining excellence. What good looks like as Bernie Brown talks about what good looks like, how do you define what good, you know, she even has an acronym WGLL, you know, so I got that WGLL from my manager and my manager manager, I mean, Oracle, the database team was just phenomenal. And I was only two or three layers between me and Larry Allison and that was pretty flat organization and some great minds who it just taught me what good looks like and then for a couple of years of going to a startup and in 2009 and this whole thing starts. And along the way, I think just knowing how to grasp authentic people actually because I was going to be my question, by the way, it was it was like, how do you align with those people because the manager, the investor, the employee, the business partner, the co founder, it can be a hit or a miss. So the lesson is there, align with authentic people, but how do you actually find these people, because that will accelerate your career. Yeah, I mean, look, like most things in life, Scott, you can predict everything. The question is, how do you react to it? Once you know that your bet was wrong. And that's the biggest thing that I've learned in life that I'm a big fan of Nicholas Talib and this and he talks about anti-frigility, like what does it mean to really go through a shock and emerge better than before the shock, you know, I mean, not to be resilient, but be anti fragile. So I had to make tough calls in my entrepreneurial journey to actually say, look, I don't want to work with this person. So either I move on or they move on it. And because life is short, I mean, you're doing this not just for customer love and, you know, delight in the market and, you know, winning, winning is a big part of entrepreneurship as well, because it just gives you so much of endorphins and dopamine and so on. It's also because you want to come home and, you know, be authentic with your kids and your spouse and and all that stuff. So you can't leave a second life outside when you're dealing with flying balls all day long, you know, and you have to really think hard about how do you deal with them and so on. So in many ways, I, I actually figured out a way to part ways with such people, because as I said in life is short. And you are defined by the company of people around you and if you start to go down the slippery slope and it is about again lowering the bar on what good looks like and what truth is and what being authentic is. Eventually, every day you're making it worse and worse and going back to the world quality, I think the quality of what you think awesome people are, you start to just keep lowering the bar diluting it, you'll become one of those people over time. That's really powerful too, because it's very scary to be an entrepreneur because you grasp you grasp on to anything and everything you grasp onto the wrong investors you grasp on to the wrong employee and out of all of the technical lessons that you could most definitely teach. I think that the ability to walk away from the wrong people is probably one of the most impactful, because I can yeah, that transcends any part of your and I feel yeah, I mean, I feel there's two big values. By the way, you will already talk about these two values and sapiens to even if you have sapiens in a library somewhere here, but I'm a big fan of sapiens, the book. And it talks about two big qualities that I mean drives human kind of large, but liberty and equality and you know, you know, this idea of fairness and this idea of autonomy drives me like, like there's no tomorrow, you know, and when he's seen in authentic people and you look at unfairness and inequitable sort of things that they do. You know, just I feel like it's the worst thing I can do to my life and to teach what my children should learn and how I should really, you know, conduct myself. When you look at of I mean, there's millions and less millions of lessons that you've learned over your career, let's let's like try and pull out just one major learning from newton X that was probably the most impactful it could have been. The scariest moment, the shit hit the fan moment, the I screwed up and lost X amount of hundreds of thousands or millions because I did this thing that you'd want to like impart on an entrepreneur from the period of that company. It goes back to how you have to weave through being of the youngest kid on the block, you know, because there's a lot of incumbents large companies, you know, and many of them initially will entertain you because like, hey, what can they do to you? You sometimes you become partners with them, you probably run on top of them. So there's a in the layering of the cake, you probably might be partners and then eventually they obviously want to get into your business and that's what happened in Nutanix, you know, where we were, you know, basically partners with the software in which we ran on top of, you know, which was basically infrastructure, the substrate of VMware, you know, when you were running this entire data center infrastructure is pure software and top of VMware, so their partners and now all of a sudden, you know, their revenue curve had actually flattened and then they're like, okay, we need to get into new markets and they never decided to get into our market. And then they got acquired by the company that we were disrupting force, which was these hardware players with giant machines, giant boxes, EMC and NetApp. So EMC acquired them, they'll become a part of the system, the pretty complicated my asthma, like relationships and, you know, co-operations. Yeah, it's just got messy, you know, and I think there's two big lessons. One is, you know, you don't blink because if you blink, the crushing, you know, you might be small, but your biggest relationship is with the end customer. And if you get that right, and if you think that the power is the end user and the market is all powerful, then no amount of power of these incumbents can really bring you down, you know, and that is what we kept, you know, you know, just true. I mean, and again, it goes back to how do you still authentic with here in the market, you know, because we went up the market, we had a competitive product to, you know, they incumbent, we ran on top of them. And we could have gone and tried to eat the entire cake and they said, how just replace everything and the customer select hold on, can you do one thing at a time first. And therefore, we had to run on top of our enemies and, you know, survive next to them because the customer said, I've had a 10 year relationship with these guys. So how can you go and try to replace everything. And what that meant was that I had to lead lead a very schizophrenic life that look, I can replace the whole thing. You can get the whole thing from me, but at the same time I have to insert this enemies learn the middle because you have a 10 year old relationship. So authentically, I have to say my software has to run the best on both of these stacks, my stack and my enemy stack. And I cannot be biased towards my stack, you know, I have to be biased to the market's way of thinking about it. And if I did that right, they will be my best protector, you know, and they protected us to the core with a said, if you just cared for me and no one else, I'll take care of you. And, you know, this is brilliant, this is beautiful. This is the best thing about the Western economies is the way companies abilities. If you take care of the market, the market protection. And, you know, it really happened with us. The reason why we are an independent company and our biggest incumbent is now a private company part of Broadcom is because we had an eye for the market and the never blink. And we did the best servant leadership with these guys look will be the best customer support company will give you the best network or score. When you call us will never say it's not our problem about that, you know, never ever say it's not our problem. So, because, you know, we were in this lead cake, the things that ran on top of us, the other things that ran on top of them. And sometimes they just call us saying, look, the end to end latencies are bad. Now, one could say it's not my problem, you know, what are you doing above that? But they always said, we'll put the best people on this from customer support point of view. And they learn your applications, which are really not my software, it shouldn't be my problem, but they learn your applications, they learn how they're tuned and configured and all this stuff. And I will tell you the best way to solve that problem. So, you know, net net. The biggest lesson in all of this was you could be small, but if you cared for the market, the market is the biggest caretaker of such company. How do you measure if you are catering to the market? Like, how, as an entrepreneur, I feel like my products are good. What's the KPI? What's the one, what's the one North Star KPI that you look for as to whether or not you are, because maybe you maybe you are growing. Maybe your CACTLTV is great, maybe, maybe the numbers make sense, but is caring for the market and catering to the market. Is there something that you should look for, something that you should establish so that if things don't go right, at least the market will protect you. Like, what you just described, I'm trying to think of somebody who hasn't built a software product in the same context as what you've built. How do you look for that in whatever industry they're in? You know, the obviously the big sort of wall street we are thinking about is repeat business. Are you getting enough repeat business and repeat business is a smarter business because you've already had the trust with the customer. They bought X amount of quantity from you and now they're going to make it two X or four X or five X. And by the way, they might be buying a new product from you, so both op cell and cross cell are great for the metrics of what trust means that I trust you more and I trust you more and so on. But there's also the, I would say the emotional side effect, like in your conferences. How many of them show up? Because they're all busy people and they're, you know, really not just a grassroots practitioner, but even the folks will see X. They're biggest on the rarest commodity they have is time. So if they're able to give two, three days of their lives to your conference, I think it goes a long way to say, you know what, now you're quantified customer love. Because money is the easier thing is anything they're not even managing their own money. It's the company's money that they work for and so on. And eventually it's procurement and gotten their magic quadrant and all that stuff. But the fact that they're able to give you time. A couple of days of their time, because they don't go to 50 conferences, they probably go to five conferences. And the fact that they happen to be new doors and they spoke up and. But you know, they were able to proliferate the power of social proof because even the power of social proof is, is the stuff that sometimes you don't even want to go out publicly and talk about in a press release. But when you're sitting next to someone and you're able to tell how much you've evolved and transformed and all the stuff, I think that is an immeasurable thing. But I think conferences go a long way in really defining what the market sort of love is for you. I just want to take a second and thank the HubSpot podcast never for supporting success story or part of the network. If you love podcasts, the HubSpot podcast network has other incredible podcasts like entrepreneurs on fire hosted by John Lee Doomass. Entrepreneurs on fire is one of the OG entrepreneur podcast. It really stokes inspiration, share strategies to fire up your entrepreneurial journey to create the life you've always dreamed of. It has unlimited energy value and consistency. The podcast is truly for anyone who wants to learn more about entrepreneurship. If you like fast paced, packed with value stories as shows for you, John brings on great guests. He speaks about failures, aha moments, what's working for them currently. If you love podcasts, go listen to entrepreneurs on fire wherever you get your podcasts. I love that. That's a very good metric. I've never thought about it that way, but I think that's actually a perfect because time is so, so valuable. It's a perfect way to measure it. Let's fast forward a little bit to dev rev and what you're trying to accomplish there. And then I want to go into some more sort of philosophies that you hold about business, about data, about design, about democratizing data. We've spoken a lot about authenticity as a core concepts. I'm sure that's going to also permeate what you've done with dev rev and how you've built this business. But I do want to understand what problem you're trying to solve because even before we jumped on to this call, you said some pretty prolific things about how dev rev is going to do something similar to what a very well known company has already done to us. So if I may explain exactly what you're trying to accomplish and we'll go from there. You know, from believer of this kind of just talking we are thinking about that the whole is better and bigger than the sum of the parts. Yes. And the biggest companies, the most successful companies the last 15, 20 years and I can go back even the hundred years. You know, they all have left shifted a lot of the complexity that said look, we'll reduce the number of things you have to deal with. And this extremely reductive way of thinking about things is what has created simplicity in our lives, you know, and it just in the last 15 years, I mean, we have reduced the number of devices we have to deal with. And by the way, these devices are not talked to each other and so on, you know, and that was iOS. It was an extremely reductive way of thinking about our personal lives. And that's what Amazon did with AWS saying, hey, just, you know, we have 10 teams to really get up an app, now you can do this with this one abstraction called public cloud. And even there a developer who is a have not, you know, they never get to make procurement decisions. I will have them make decisions how empowering is that. So that's what Nutanix was about it with empowering the have not which is the application folks were the mercy of stitching 16s together and making budget decisions and who gets to do what plan like big things and upfront and so on. You don't have to plan at all, you can start small, you can keep adding, but we reduced the number of teams, the number of components will integrate all this for you will left shift all this complexity, you know. You know, so all that was happening in a personal infrastructure and I team infrastructure, data center infrastructure. I felt when I was running Nutanix that we had the same problem business infrastructure and there's tons of CRM's and every department and the work management tool, you know, it's called software work management from Atlastian and it's incident management and service management with service now and then there is ticket management and support stuff with Salesforce and then there was sales management with Salesforce and hot pot and all this stuff. Everybody has a work manager. But the problem is nobody knows why the company takes you know and clicks with their customers and it's come down to think it's product and the customer do does everybody know everything about customers within the company and does everybody know everything about products, you know, if he did both of these things well. Then maybe we get to unify and then work is a job ideally we should not have to do as much work because hopefully machines do more work going forward, but why do we actually make work primal when it should really be product in the customer. So now, you know, this idea of building a knowledge graph really became the big thing for me, I'm like we need to reduce friction, we need to reduce conflicts, we need to, you know, really bring the why of any company or in the why of a company's customers and product, you know, you know, how is there, you know, sausage making and the what is the KPIs and the work and everything that comes out of it. So we built a knowledge graph around product and customers, then we said, look, what do we got to do with this, it has to be evidently searchable semantically searchable, which is the whole idea of AI. And then it has to be highly analyzable, which is, you know, the last five, seven years of data warehousing in the cloud and stuff like that. But finally, we said, look, we can't stop there, we can't just be a bolt-on from top of existing storage business software, we have to rebuild the apps. Because, you know, what we need to rebuild the apps with AI being the foundation, not AI being a lipstick on the page, but AI being the foundation, how do you go, rebuild apps. And that's what we did with it, we're going to focus on customer support because it's not passion about customer support. And it starts with chatbots, but chatbots are not the end all and be all of all things AI and customer support because that's just one channel, you know, you have so many other channels of communication beyond the chatbot itself. And people and call centers and service staff and support agents and support engineers, they're here to stay, you know, I mean, let's not fool ourselves in thinking that the car gets fully autonomous overnight and we don't need drivers at all, you know, we still need drivers, you know, it's still be assisted driving as opposed to fully autonomous driving. So we took that problem and he said we're going to redefine it, we're going to try to disrupt the support industry. But along the way, we also had to think hard about software development because software development without support ideas and what's happening on the customer support side is meaningless. So we really focused on these two things, you know, customer support and software development using all things AI foundation is AI. And it is supposed to be delightful and opposed to, you know, worrying about tickets, tickets and being better than tickets, the way things have been in the last 30 or 90. When you think about building a product that touches so many business units, I mean, that to me is very stressful because you say like riches are in the niches and that's what people usually would push you towards if you're trying to build a new company. So if somebody wants to sell something where the buyers potentially could be a couple different people involved, what's the strategy for an entrepreneur to launch a product that has so many potential applications because you're going very wide now. On the platform and I really want to talk about the two things about running or building a new business is you've got to think about the platform. Tempted from the use case. So you explore. I mean iOS was the platform. Yeah. Music player was the app and camera was the app. You know, email was the app. So you got to have this iOS versus the app thinking the platform was the app thinking. Yeah. And to us, a customer support is a use case on top of the platform and the platform is not negotiable. It has to be something that really looks at all facets of the business, the product, the customer, the people, the work, the end users, the activities. And honestly, this is a great timing because AI does not care about department. Right. Departments were created to organize human beings. But they only from machines to actually be having better judgment and reasoning and you know synthesis power. I mean, all the stuff only happens if you give them all the information about product customers. People work, users activity, everything. All business. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because the linkages are there. There's a connecting the dots, which is what we as humans when we walk the hallways, we listen to all that we connect the dots. The only way for AI to be not hallucinating is if you actually give them the entire of what I call the knowledge graph, you know. Therefore, the platform is extensible and it's actually omniscient is knows everything. But now when you go to the use case, you know, you go and build a customer support app. You have to make sure you don't violate what designers call the Maya principle and the Maya principle is an acronym. It says most advanced yet acceptable, you know, it's the most advanced platform thinking. But for a persona who only deals with customer support or product management software development, they want a lot of the old world stuff in there as well. So they had to be really careful about platform works is app, you know, you think horizontally, you think extensively, you think about. You know, the entire knowledge graph because the, you know, the chain of thought reasoning and the synthesis power and the judgment ability of AI is very, very important, you know, you can't compromise on all that. But at the same time, you know, humans are still used to the creatures of habit. You've got to give them something that looks and feels and walks like an old customer support software, the workflows, the security and the, you know, notifications and the mobile app thinking all that stuff. So you want to think about what's right for the humans and what's right for the machines. Machines want to know everything. And then humans want things the way they were done in the past. And we have done that really well. We built a platform that is AI native. Yeah. But at the same time, they built the app like a customer support app or the product management, we call it products here and we talked to development app. They just very much so have not violated the Maya principle, which is most advanced yet acceptable. And then when you, as you grow the company, now you have all these other opportunities that you could eventually go into if you like. You're right, you're right. I mean, first is the ability to sell the platform because you do want to go tell people that AI is meaningless without a knowledge graph that's extensible. Yes. But then you start with one use case and hopefully get to the second and third and the fourth. I mean, look, the iPhone was not like all million apps used on day one. You know, you started with calling people. Very true. Yes. Putting your iPod in there is like, okay, my music player is here like, hey, I like the camera a little bit now. Hey, you know what? The GPS thing. Actually, I can remove my laptop or garment and move to this. And then, hey, I don't need my blackberry anymore. I'm an email. I've actually here now secure as well. Every year, you took a step towards a new use case with the iPhone. And that's what we have to follow. I mean, start with a chatbot, get to customer support. You know, do product management then software development. And hopefully, all the time we get to sales management and other such things too. Obviously data is wildly important in what you're building. When you look at, there's sort of two data concepts that are attributed to this, to this business. And also just business in general in 2024 and beyond. So the two are the democratization of data. And then data visualization is storytelling. These are both interesting concepts. So you've touched on, maybe you can start, maybe we can talk about the democratization of data, because you just sort of touched on that briefly. Maybe explain why that's so important from a business leader's perspective, why they want. And so, I think you're going to have to share that permeation of data across the organization. I'm assuming it helps with, you know, organizational cohesiveness and shared knowledge. But maybe give me some ideas on that. And then I want to talk about data visualization, because I know nothing about that. So, yeah. Well, I mean, look. And society, especially democratic societies that we've all in this way, where you're just giving more power to the grassroots. You know, we had a pretty hostile work environment in many ways. I mean, the madman culture and, you know, even the back slapping culture, all this stuff was pretty awful. And then we just kept evolving to the better human beings. And a big part of that is basically democratize decision making and let people know more. Let people know more is the only way to reduce politics. And the information asymmetry is a big part of conflicts and organizations. But data is too expensive up until now, you know, where it can only be in the hands of a chosen few. Do we feel that to change cultures really, you know, bring all this out the fountain of youth and younger people to actually feel like there's a sense of meaning to the jobs. I want to say that there was this recent Wall Street Journal survey that they'd like two weeks ago. But basically, the Americans don't care about their jobs anymore. And that is telling just the fact that there's no sense of purpose in workplace right now. Maybe since COVID actually talked about since COVID days, people are lighting their multiple jobs. And the reason is because, you know, they don't feel like they're part of the decision making. And data is the core of decision making, you know, you have to assume that anybody coming fresh out of college has immensely good analytical skills. And if you give them the data, they probably won't need to be shouted upon. You don't need to actually throw your badge and, you know, talk about your seniority of how much you know and how much more experience you have. I think at the human level data is important, but even at the pace at which, you know, company is getting disrupted, you need to actually give more data to everyone at their fingertips. Now today, you know, you know, and to each one of us, you know, obviously, you know, modulo authorization compliance, all those things being considered as well. So if you've done a lot of work around democratizing data, making sure it's the hands of everybody. And if you think of the biggest thing about let's say customer support, they feel like they're all they're dealing with is like an emergency room that just triaging. Emergency cases, you know, when they are saying, look, I want to be actually in charge of healthcare, like I want to be preventative, not just reactive, not just go and apply a bandaid and then move them to some other world or something like that, you know, and that means that they want to be. This round table on this round table with product managers and software developers and, you know, cloud operators, you know, as opposed to being on a desk, just dealing with, you know, a swarm of emergency cases and so that's an example of how do you democratize information about the road map of products and what's being cooked and where is it in the oven. Because that's what customers keep asking for is it done and when will it get done. You know, and these are the things that you know support people are disenfranchised on, you know, so I think it's really important to reduce the information symmetry for an organization to feel like it can leverage AI to the health. And honestly, that's the only way you can let AI even be relevant and useful and a little bit more sentient and making decisions on your behalf, as opposed to just doing a tragedy next token for generating a summary of something. When you talk about to this will sort of segue into using data in different ways, so we talk about data visualization as a storytelling tool storytelling to who to everyone to investors to customers to employ these appears, where do we use data properly what's a really good example of using data to tell a story to achieve a result. And I'm a big fan of the New York Times, like not because of my political views or anything, but just the way they've looked at data. And you know, that company just like most of the newspaper companies could have died, but they didn't reason why they they have flourished in the last 10, 15 years is because of design and visualization. Like they tell stories in such a visual way that people are willing to pay through subscription, like hey, I'm willing to pay 30 bucks a month because of not just the stories because stories of commodity now, but the way you tell it, you know, so I think that's one like and I really look at New York Times as a true North star for visual storytelling. I mean, even their games like I'm so hooked to their spelling bee and their world and all this stuff that I feel like there's something about foreign building that starts with visualization and design that they're nailed and not just now, but even from the last 100 years they've been working on this. There's a big reason for it because New York was all in an ad industry creatives with their lots of really good designers actually, you know, came out of New York because of the ad industry. And I think that they've just leveraged the creatives in New York to really not just the vibe and the on-sort on sort of Google and all the digital ad world that actually changed everybody's lives would be on that as well. And to now take that and apply it to a B2B realm is probably the most exciting thing that I think of. I mean, in the world of AI everybody thinks visualization is dead, but I feel like. What do they think it's that? What do they think it's that? You know, it's because machines can make decisions. Why do we need to show anything to humans? Because obviously anything visual is actually more for humans. I mean, machines can interpret spreadsheet data or database data records, which don't have to be visual at all. But if anything, I feel like humanism is here to thrive. I mean, you know what Warren Buffett says about making money with the mob things that it's all AI. You have to go in the other direction. You know, it's fear and greed when the mob is fearful you get greedy when you know they are greedy, you get fearful. I think it's the same thing here, you know, I mean, like we overdid fully autonomous vehicles like in the last seven years, 10 years. It's going to be completely autonomous driverless is the way to go. And look at who is having the last laugh. It's the hybrid guys. They're like, well, look, you did this well. It's not all EV. It's going to be hybrid. And by the way, it's assisted driving. It's not fully autonomous. And I think that's equally true for machines and humans. I think AI is here to assist. You know, people ask me, so why are you doing this company? And I'm like, you know, there's probably a hundred million professionals out there, but developers support people, product managers. And we don't have to take anybody's job away. We, if you can just give them work like balance. Or just give their week nights back, given how much of cross country, cross continent, zoom calling that's going on in the nights and early mornings that if you can just give them the week nights back with design and AI coming together. I think they've done at least made a little thing in the universe. You speak about design is like the sort of the second, the second component that's required for good companies. And you've mentioned it quite a bit. You speak about consumer grade design. I think we sort of touched on that briefly. We can talk about a little bit more, but also. Like there's some examples. I've listened to some podcasts and I looked at some of your work. So you're looking at examples of mediocre designs. So my space, Craigslist, kayak, Windows phone, then you look at good design. So Airbnb, Instagram, Amazon, Reddit. It's so interesting that in your opinion, maybe make like an argument as to why you feel like design is the reason why those companies didn't succeed. You're probably right, but I'm very curious as to you. I've never heard that argue maybe before because I would have never thought designs important, but I would have never thought of that as the Achilles heel of some of these companies. Maybe Craigslist. And look, and they are argued for function. They're like, look, it's function. But the thing is, function is just a left brain. There's a right grade coming back to a site as well, because there's an element of serendipity. Like, what is it going to tell me now? What's going to show me now and so on and I think that is the cockiness that Craigslist went through like, hey, we don't need to do any of that stuff. And part of the design thinking is, are you keeping with the tastes of the changing market? Because the younger demographics and the younger demographics are different tastes. So you have to really transcend this generational shift that actually happens with the market. And they were not. They were very arrogant about their opinion, like, look, we know a function and function is good at come. You can do a search here. And when Google search came about, it basically just obliterated them. And there was so much more. I mean, just a simple search box to one search box was so much more powerful. So, I mean, a big, big student design. I feel like whatever we are doing right now, I mean, I spoke of Maya. I mean, our biggest friend is design and our biggest enemy is not thinking through what's most advanced yet acceptable. I mean, you talked about all these different kinds of use cases. How do you really bring it all together? Like imagine 50 devices being shoved physically into one physical space that couldn't have happened. So it had to be done with this idea that hey, I can bring them together a camera and a phone and a music player. And yet, I want to make sure that when people on the music player, they feel like this is the best music player, the best camera and so on as well. So there was there was a lot of design thinking in what really led to these everlasting companies. I mean, look at Amazon versus even sealers, for example, you know, and I don't mean to say visual thinking all about design. No questions asked your thing gets returned Costco is good design really good design, you know, it might have an ugly warehouse, but it's a great design. No questions asked six months later, I want to return something that is customer service design. So big, big, big fan of, you know, what it means to reduce friction. Making things frictionless is probably the core design. And sometimes it's about the best customer service with no questions asked because the moment you ask questions, people start to think twice about buying something again, like, hey, but what if I need to return it? Not strong, you they don't ask you questions about returning something, you know, that's why with this onslaught of Amazon.com, it still survives and tries actually, you know, so I feel like reducing friction is the core of entrepreneurship of doing business and therefore a design means a lot, you know, in pretty much not just short building, but customer service building, go to market building messaging, positioning everything. When you look at just one last stock, I love now you've expanded the definition of design, which that makes a ton of sense now, when you look at evolving design needs and reducing friction constantly, so keeping in touch with the market, what's your strategy so that you don't become outdated. Of course, a big part of it is respecting designers and bringing the best, I mean, celebrating design and designers, and by that, I don't just being product designers, but many a time it could also be process designers, you know, like customer services, a process design thing, you know. And sometimes even organizational design Scott, you know, like the way you think about an organizational line in a post-COVID, you know, I see the world is flat, you book up here, but Thomas Freeman up here in the summer, the world is indeed flat, the world is flat. So you've got to think about organizational design, you've got to think about hiring as a design thing, because if you want to get young people, how do you design your culture, all this matter, because it's going to mix the most experienced people with the youngest people, you're going to get good stuff if you really thought about, you know, being empathetic to the have nots. And sometimes they have not is the young people, sometimes they have not in the experience people, you know, and being able to get the best of both worlds to me is immensely beautiful organization, you know, getting the best people like the way we've done it between here in Austin and Buenos Aires and Slovenia and Bangalore and Chennai, you know. So when people say it's culture, it's all design, like what do you want to get Chennai to produce versus Bangalore to feel good about versus Argentina to feel great about versus Slovenia and making it extremely diverse, and at the same time, equitable. One leadership principle that you you stand behind is is start with why why is that it's such a because now I'm starting to see the threads between all the different things that you incorporate into your businesses. So why is start with why is such an important principle because I'm assuming start with why is like them is like the precursor for all the thought that we just spoke about. I've become a big proponent of Greg McKeon's essentially been thinking. I can see right next to the start up exit book actually, you know, up there, you know, start up exit. Same for me. You know, there's so much to do and in the world has just talked so much about more, more, more of everything that the only way to make money and to make sense and to have meaning is to do the opposite, which is do less. And start with why just helps you figured out how do you really get into this essential thinking in fact, I'm a big fan of essentially them and essential. So in fact, we're proposing essential methodology like, hey, at the end of the day, you know, last 20 years software celebrated agile agile, it just being fast and continuous and you know, iterated, iterated, which is like celebrating a lot of working forward. You know, and of course, you might want to bring in the customer every once in a while, but I think essential is probably the opposite of that. You're like, hey, let's pause and think about what truly matters what truly matters. Are we working on the thing that truly matter and you know, we, you know, really going to open source this thinking about essential thinking, essential methodology. A big part of it for businesses is being customer centric and which is more than just a cliche actually, it's really defined what customer centric means and without access to data and information and sales and customers, you can be customer centric. So you have to democratize all that customer data. You know, the second one is being product led, you got to know what you build, you know, if you're not passionate about what you build, how can you sell it, how can you market it, how can you position it, how can you talk about customer success, all the stuff without being product led. And then lastly, how do you be an AI native, like, you know, can the machines do more so we can do less, you know, to me is a big part of, you know, just reducing the noise that's around us these days, you know, start with why it just helps you focus on customers, focus on product, and then focus on the last why, why am I doing it, the machine can do it, you know, because then I can have a big question. Huge question, yeah, that's a huge huge, I love that question, why am I doing it, the machine can do it, and then you optimize for tasks that you know a machine can't do exactly, exactly. And then the judgment and design thinking and humanism, the machines can do, because now you're getting better at human human stuff, I mean, and not just in business, but also in life with your spouse and your partner and your children. I think machines have the power to give us time back so that we can really, really, really have more meaningful experiences, I think that lead in the overall crest and trough of. I would say simulation building and evolution, we probably are at a point that's why I'm such an optimist about AI and machine, I mean, you can always argue the dark side of everything in a dark side of internet, dark side of social media, dark side of mobile dark side of nuclear energy and. Fire and water and everything else that are dark side of them, but I think we've got a really balanced to and think about the stuff that AI can really do to restore the work like balance that we have so messed in the last 30 years. Yeah, I don't think that, you know, I also don't believe that AI will remove humans, I think that it will, it'll make humans better and I think it'll give people balance and make. We work hard in the US very, very hard, so we need to, we need a little bit of a little bit more balance in our life, especially I mean coming from an entrepreneur, I don't know what you're saying. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I've actually, I saw this one chart that I find so interesting and showed the amount of people required to build the company that runs at a million dollars per year and it was like a graph right so. Yeah, the two axes and on one axis, you had like the amount of people and the other actually had like the date and it was like in 1950 i'm going to make up numbers, it was maybe like 50 people to build a company to a million but then you fast forward you look at the it will it's like a reverse J curve and then fast forward to 2024 it's like one person to make a company worth one million. And I feel like that's I feel like now obviously you can't get less than one person, but you could have one person built a company to two million to three million to five million to 10 million to think I don't know where the end is with the right tools with the right AI. I mean, I will say it's a little misleading graph, though, because I've tested this and the thing is that people don't consider inflation in the factory. If you look at 60 years of inflation that million is now worth 10 million and there's something we said about all the printing that we've done of the dollar in the last 30 years ago 20 years ago, but that being said, definitely building products has become easier but marketing and launching and having the attention span for longer durations become much tougher. So like most things in life, I think there's a Yin and Yang to wow, we can launch products faster because of the cost of engineering and and and the learning curve has come down and YouTube and social all this is helping, but I think like what Newtonian law is like for every action, they're going to go and operate reaction. Because there's so many products that have been created, consumers also being bombarded more attention span the hard to actually retain. So I think net net nothing has changed, you know, the phone believer of the more things change, the more they remain the same for every action that an equal monopoly reaction in this case. If it's easier to build the product and we understand what good product is and a good design is and we understand that once customers are there are there good design. Regardless of what that definition definition of design is will make them stay. As an entrepreneur, how do you how do you capture some of that awareness because design the way you've described it seems to affect and reduce the turn of the customer and creates a great experience and creates great repeat business. But then how do you become noisy in a super crowded marketplace where on the front end, maybe it's harder to see the optimized design and the reduced friction behind the scenes. Well, I mean trust compounds and there's no shortcut to building that trust, you know, the bite size thing at a time and that's the one of the biggest challenges and opportunity even for us as a product design company to say that. Well, you can do all this stuff, but how do you start with just winning the trust of just one department customer support, nothing else, I don't want to go to product management or software development or what have you. I think we have to. And I use the word gradual reveal, you know, which is the flip side of compounded trust, you know, trust compounds, which is the same as you reveal your. You know, stuff gradually even though you do a lot of things, how do you start with one separate time and I think all of us are learning i'm still struggling i'm like okay, every day I tell our employees gradual reveal, gradual reveal don't blow out everything you know good news if anything should be delivered little at a time you know i'm like bad news, which should be delivered all at once. And it is true in negotiation, I mean, one of my biggest mentors is Deepak Malhotra was a professor of negotiation at Harvard Business School and he talks about this that in a negotiation when you really deliver good news, you don't deliver all of it at once. You deliver you know bite sized good news while negative news bad news should be delivered all at once, so in this case, I think a design thinking is also about gradual reveal and the the smaller you are initially the more bite sized you are the fact that you got two minutes of their attention span probably is a good win. And then how do you create the recall and send them the notification, the update the reminder, all this stuff, leaving a little bit of a subliminal sort of thing in their heads as well, I can remember one thing that in those two minutes as well so that I can come back the next day for three minutes and five minutes and so on to me that's the most timeless sort of design problem that I'm trying to solve now. Love it alright let's just wrap up with I would say a last I always like to ask because you've had an incredible career. I always like to ask if you would you know look back at your career and you'd have to tell your 20 year old self one thing based on all the lessons you've learned what would that thing be. You know and I've always part about this and I've always come to the same observation learning languages you know in the midst of all the GPT and everything else because it's still one thing and because the religion and language there's food there's music that all the stuff that you can relate to other people with. I wish I had learned Japanese and German and Mandarin food or in my life out of dance so much more business with the people around you know just by relating to speaking in their mother tongue I think there's something about the door fence and the oxytocents and the serotonin instead actually said I mean you just build great relationships so more than food more than music. Which is more subtle things you know more than their movies and art and all the stuff I think it's language out of love to learn Mandarin, Japanese, German early on to actually be a better entrepreneur. I love that it's a great lesson I think that's like an underrated lesson I don't know ones ever said that on the show ever but I think it's a massively underrated lesson because then you. Show so much empathy meeting people where they are as opposed to forcing them to communicate the way that you want to I love that. All right where if you have any other lessons you feel free Laura's yours but I'll leave it with I'll leave it with any website or social that you want to send people to where should they go. How do you want to connect with them what's your I mean obviously you probably have linked in for sure do you wait do you use anything else let me see I have to find you. Well you know I have sort of again in this reductive world and I've said okay less Twitter more LinkedIn. Yes you know my email is a D.P. at Devredor AI so people can send me an invite and I'll connect with them a D.P. and Devredor AI. And but yeah LinkedIn has become my one stop shop to just talk to anybody and everybody perfect okay I appreciate you so much that was a lot of fun I appreciate what you're building and thank you for thank you for. I think it's opening people's eyes up to how to be an empathetic and human centric entrepreneur and it's a beautiful thing that's why you're success. It's a journey and it's it's a timeless journey and I love every every day I learn more things about. Religion to employees are partners and customers and end users you know that's the fun of building a company.