Lessons - He Arrived in America With $900 and Built Nutanix Into a $20B Company | Dheeraj Pandey - Nutanix Co-Founder & DevRev CEO

In this lessons episode, discover why starting with purpose helps leaders focus on what truly matters. Understand how essential thinking cuts through unnecessary work. Explore how AI can free time for higher value human judgment and creativity and uncover why customer trust is built gradually through focused consistent experiences. One leadership principle that you stand behind is start with why. Why is that? 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 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 it. I can see it right next to the startup exit book, actually, up there. Startup exit. Yeah. See it from there. 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 of that, which is do less. and start with why just helps you figure out how do you really get into this essential thinking. In fact, I'm a big fan of essentialism 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 is just being fast and continuous and, you know, iterate, iterate, iterate. 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 really matters. What truly matters. Are we working on the things that truly matter? And, you know, we're really going to open source this thinking about essential thinking, essential methodology. A big part of it for businesses is being customer-centric, 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've 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 this 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 just reducing the noise that's around us these days. So start with why just helps you focus on customers, focus on product, and then focus on the last why. Why am I doing it if the machine can do it? Because then I can have a little bit of work like that. That's a huge question. Yeah. That's a huge, huge question. I love that question. Why am I doing it if the machine can do it? And then you optimize for tasks that you know a machine can't do. Exactly, exactly. And then there's judgment and design thinking and humanism that the machines can do. Because now you're getting better at human-to-human stuff. 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 to me, in the overall crest and trough of, I would say, civilizational building and evolution, we probably are at a point, that's why I'm such an optimist about AI and machines. I mean, you can always argue the dark side of everything, 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 at a dark side. But I think we've got to really balance the two and think about the stuff that AI can really do to restore the work-life balance that we have so missed 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'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 a little bit more balance in our life, especially, I mean, coming from an entrepreneur to an entrepreneur. Like, we work very hard. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, I've actually, I saw this one chart that I find so interesting. It 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 you had the two axes and on one axis you had like the amount of people on the other axis you 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 and you look at the, it's like a reverse J curve. And then fast forward to 2024, it's like one person to make a company worth 1 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 build a company to 2 million, to 3 million, to 5 million, to 10 million, to big, 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 future. If you look at 60 years of inflation, that million is now worth 10 million. And there's something to say about all the printing that we've done of the dollar in the last 30 years or 20 years. But that being said, definitely building products has become easier. But marketing and launching and having the attention span for longer durations has 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 the learning curve has come down and YouTube and social and all this is helping. But I think like what Newtonian law is, for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. Because there's so many products that have been created, consumers are also being bombarded more. Attention spans are hard to actually retain. So I think net-net, nothing has changed. I'm a firm believer of the more things change, the more they remain the same. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction in this case. If it's easier to build the product and we understand what good product is and what good design is, and we understand that once customers are there, good design, regardless of what that definition of design is, will make them stay. As an entrepreneur, how do you capture some of that awareness? Because design, the way you've described it, seems to affect and reduce the churn 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 hard 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-sized thing at a time and that's one of the biggest challenges and opportunities even for us as a product design company to say that, well, we 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, which is the flip side of compounded trust, trust compounds, which is the same as you reveal your 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, graduate and reveal, graduate and reveal, don't blurt out everything. Good news, if anything, should be delivered little at a time. Unlike bad news, which should be delivered all at once. And it's true in negotiation. I mean, one of my biggest mentors is Deepak Malhotra, 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 design thinking is also about gradual review. And 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. Like, yeah, I didn't remember one thing 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 design problem that entrepreneurs are trying to solve now. 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