 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE. Covering .NEXT Conference Europe 2018. Brought to you by Nutanix. Welcome back to London, England. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Nutanix .NEXT 2018, Europe, my name's Stu Miniman, my co-host for these two days of coverage has been you, Piscar, and happy to welcome to the program two first time to us. We're going to talk about culture and people. To my right is Rukmani Sivaraman, who's the Vice President of Business Operations and Chief of Staff to the CEO, and sitting next to her is Prabhakrishnan, who's the Senior Vice President of People and Places, both of them with Nutanix. Ladies, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you for having us. All right, so we've been covering Nutanix for a long time. I've been to every one of the shows. I start out, I guess, Dear Raj talked for a long time about the three ages. It was, you know, humble, hungry, and honest. I got those right. And more recently, it was with heart, actually sitting not too far behind us. There's a big booth for heart. So, you know, the culture of the company is something that, you know, is tied with the founders. We've watched that growth. You know, I've watched the company go from, you know, about 35 people to over 3,500 people. So, you know, having those core principles is something that we look at in companies. Why don't we start if you could both just give a quick introduction, what brought you into Nutanix and what your role is there? Sure. So I had been at Nutanix a little over 18 months, and I started out as an engineer, then went to finance and investment banking of all things with that Goldman for almost a decade. And Nutanix is a client of Goldman's back from the IPO. And I had heard great things about the company, of course, it wasn't intending to leave Goldman Sachs. But when I got introduced to Dear Raj, there was so much that was compelling about the company, the disruption, the category defining, category creating kind of position that the company had. And more importantly, I think where we were going, which was just phenomenal, it was ambitious, it was bold. And I think for me, it's always been about the people. We spend a lot of time at work, and it's really important to feel that connection to the people. And that was really important, because I had to pick up and move from New York City to the Bay Area to make this move. And we can talk more about this, but to me, the people were, like I said, ambitious, but they were also grounded. And I see it after being at Nutanix now, it's phenomenal how truly humble the people are, and that's always been struck me as a great combination. You want ambition and challenging problems to solve, but you also want humility in people that you can relate to. So that's really what got me to Nutanix. Please. Yeah, so I've actually been following Nutanix for quite a while. It's a company that addresses a space that's very underserved and has created a suite of products that's nothing short of amazing for our customers, entirely focused on our customer base. But for me, the most interesting thing was, it's a company that is as right-brained as it is left-brained. I've actually spent 19 years of my career in engineering and made a career switch into the people side. And it's one of the few companies where that fit is almost perfect. And once I met our founder and our CEO, Dheeraj, this became even more obvious. So I'm actually very happy to be here. I've been here for about four months now, and it's already very clearly the beginning of a very, very exciting journey. Yeah, interesting. Both of you kind of making those shifts. Talk a little bit about that, Dheeraj. You talk about people from outside of Silicon Valley always, it's like, oh, there's the one where they have the playground and free meals and free drinks. And it's like, yeah, that's because you do the analysis, and if they'll work 18 hours a day, if we can keep them there, maybe even put a cot in the office, that's good. I haven't seen cots in the office when I go to Nutanix. They are really nice offices. And even on the East Coast, we're tartan to change and see some of those things there. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to that culture and Nutanix is much more than just Silicon Valley based now. That's right. So we are truly a global organization, and we decided very early on that we wanted to be a global organization, but we're also thinking local. So we do have multiple offices within the U.S., in Durham, Seattle and other places, but we're also truly global, you know, our Bangalore office, in EMEA we have a big presence. And so for us what that means is, you know, there's people from different perspectives and backgrounds. Ultimately it's our sort of, like you said, the four values, but also our culture principles that we've codified fairly recently that bind us, and that really help us move forward in the same direction and pointing that same direction and growing the same, you know, going the same way. So that has been phenomenal to see, and it's one that I think we've very deliberately codified more recently. It's sort of the how, how do we behave that embodies those four values that you talked about? So Prava, so you're a new hire, right? You haven't been with Nutanix as much. So while we're talking on these subjects, right, so what's your experience, your personal experience coming into Nutanix? You know, is it true what you're talking about? How does it, you know, work in real life, in practice? No, absolutely. So, you know, all companies state a culture, right? All companies, I think are in this day and age, at least and definitely in Silicon Valley, are very clear about having a specific culture. But the key, as far as I'm concerned, and the strength of a company is how they live and breathe their culture every single day, in every decision, in every action, right? In every sort of difficult balance that they need to meet, that's where the culture really shows up. And at Nutanix, it is, how shall I put it? It's really the core of every single thing we do. It's the core of how we interact. It's the core of how we grow. It's the core of how we recruit, how we define our organizations. And frankly, I have to say, I have been in a lot of organizations and a lot of organizations over time, actually, and particularly as they reach our size. You know, we're a bit sort of at an inflection point, if you will, in terms of size, right? Our growth has definitely been very, very quick and continues to accelerate. Having that culture being something that we really live is the most important thing. And it is what will allow us to continue to innovate and continue to succeed all over the globe, as Rukmini just explained, right? So that's, for me, it's really, it's quite extraordinary to see it in action. Yeah, that's really interesting because, you know, one, I mean, our industry has some challenges hiring. You know, it's finding the right skill set there. If you match that with the culture, you know, what challenge are there? You know, what are you looking for? What is the fit from the outside to match what you're looking for? Yeah, I'm happy to address that a little bit. So recruiting for us is everything, right? We want to bring in the best. We want to bring in the brightest. And we want to bring in folks who really value our culture and our values, who really understand them. And again, are willing to live them every single day, right? So we do look for great talent all over the planet because great talent exists all over the planet, right? This is absolutely fundamental to our growth. We are an infrastructure company, right? And we offer actually very interesting work for anyone who is interested in the engineering side, who is interested in the sales side, who's interested in marketing. And for me, the most interesting part in the roles we have, and frankly, the most unusual piece, if you will, is we offer opportunities for people to build things from scratch. So the creative side, the creative mind, is really what we encourage. And it shows up in every single aspect of the way we're structured. So the diversity of thought, the diversity of background, the diversity of whether it's gender or location, philosophies and all of that is really what we want to bring in and what will allow us to continue to create these products that are quite unique. So if I may add to that, we talk internally a lot about the founders mentality. It's a concept, a framework that was developed by Bain and Company. And the gist of it is as follows, right? When you think about great disruptive startups, they're on this rocket ship accelerating growth. And then they get to a certain size and they become a little bigger and they get to enjoy the benefits of scale, or economies of scale, and that's a good thing. But the best companies take that and they enjoy those benefits, but they then also don't lose what got them there in the first place, which is the innovation, the ability to disrupt and look around corners and all of that. So we want the best of both worlds. And in this framework, it's called a scaled insurgent. So you're scaled, but you're still an insurgency. And that is important to us, right? Folks that can sort of balance the two really make sure that we are benefiting from one, but also not losing sight of the other. And it's a paradox in many ways. And we believe in embracing those paradoxes and folks who can sort of balance those two would be really a great fit. And so, you know, if you're growing that fast, I can imagine that keeping the balance between culture and engineering and you're growing, that's difficult. How does Nutanix handle that paradox? I think it goes back to what Prabha was saying. For us, it's like culture and the way we behave is like oxygen, right? So it almost fuels the fire as opposed to the other way around or sort of having to do two things at once. And that's how we've thought about it and the principles, when we thought about them and conceived them, it was the same idea. Which how can this just be the way we conduct ourselves, we treat our customers, we treat each other, we treat our partners. How can it just become the way we do business? And so far, that's worked well for us. So one of my favorite culture principles actually is get comfortable being uncomfortable. And there's a real reason for that because given our scale, given the way we want to grow and given the fact that we want to preserve that innovative seed at every step, right? For us, every single day is about balancing, you know, opposing forces. Do we invest in the short term? Do we invest in the long term? Do we manage locally? Do we manage more globally, right? Do we centralize things? Do we not? Do we distribute, right? Every single day is about balancing those kinds of things and it's that balance that encourages the creativity in every single one of us. So the very fact that we've sort of embodied that in our culture principle, you know, really sort of is a very strong indication of what we look for and what we want to be. All right, with the time we have left, I wonder if you could talk about both at the show and beyond the show. What things Nutanix is doing, I think tech for good. Think about the charitable things. You know, some of the speakers I've seen at these shows, you know, Mick Ebbling is one that stood out from from a previous show talking about tech for good. Dr. Jane Goodall who I know spoke at a women's lunch event and in the keynote here today is, you know, just so inspiring as, you know, someone that loves science and animals. It was very powerful. You've got the dot hard initiatives here. Maybe help for those that don't know here and what else you're doing kind of around the globe and around the year. Did you want to go first? Yeah, so giving back is very important for us. It's very fundamental. I mean, you know, gratitude, understanding, you know, where we all came from, where we are and where we want to go and not losing ourselves, right? That's really the key of, I think, any type of success, frankly. So we have an organization around that. It's a very active organization. We all participate and the company is very much involved in as many different types of charities as possible. It also feeds into the kinds of sourcing that we do when we bring people in. We look for folks who care. We care very much about our people. The amount of attention and the amount of just knowledge and thought that goes into structuring our organization is very much reflective of that sense of giving back and gratitude as well, right? Our employees are everything and the folks around us who are in need are also everything. It sort of goes together, if you will. So that's basically to us, that it's a hugely, hugely important effort and we'll continue investing in those kinds of things as we go forward. I think the one thing I would add is, as you saw at the end of the session, of the closing keynote, I think we announced or shared that thanks to everyone here, really, all the folks here, our customers, partners, all of our participants, we were able to collect over 10,000 pounds for Dot Heart. And that is phenomenal and we're forever grateful to our community to be able to do things like that. We also partner with organizations like Girls in Tech, which is doing great work on making sure that we are bringing all kinds of talent, as Prabha said, to the table. We believe there's great people everywhere and so how do we harness the power of all of those initiatives? Those are some great examples and Prabha, to your point, I think that that individual touch to your employees, that also translates to the customer. Something I hear from Nutanis customers is, despite the fact how large you've grown and how many customers you have, they feel that they've got that individual attention. So thank you so much for sharing all of the updates, wish you both the best of luck in the continued journey. And we want to thank our community, of course, for tuning in to our coverage. It is truly our pleasure to help document what's happening on the industry, hopefully be a surrogate for you to ask the questions that you want to hear and help you along your journeys. My name's Stu Miniman, my co-host, my first European co-host who also did a segment in Dutch, you piss car. Can you say goodbye in Dutch for us, you? I'll have to learn that one sometime, because unfortunately my English and speaking numbers in a couple of different languages is where I'm a little bit limited. But once again, thanks for watching. Turn to thecube.net to catch all of the replays from this show as well as all the shows we will be at, including next year, Nutanix will be at Anaheim in the spring and Copenhagen in the fall. And our team looks forward to bringing you coverage from both of those. 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