 I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon and welcome to a special presentation of Silicon Angle Media's The Cube here at Nutanix headquarters in San Jose, California. Happy to have with me on the program a multi-time guest, Dheeraj Pandey who is the CEO of the newly public Nutanix, NTNX on the NASDAQ. Dheeraj, it's nice to join you. Pleasure. All right so you know tech IPOs they're back so first of all I think the entire tech industry says thank you because we've been waiting for this you know the stock market something we all watched I know you know from when you guys had filed your S1 publicly to now took a little bit of time but at the end it's really exciting I know you know you had your family with you down in New York City had a lot of the you know early employees there everyone from Nutanix celebrating kind of around the world gives a little bit of take as to you know what you were going through. Yeah I think it was extremely poignant moment for the company for myself and all the early people I mean you know we made it more inclusive than most of the companies would do because typically IPOs are more elitist events where like a few execs show up and so on and we worked really hard to say look with the more the merrier and it was exactly that the more the merrier and we were able to fit everybody including board members and advisors and I think if you take a look at this sort of panoramic photograph that fits everybody together there's confetti everywhere I think it just takes you you know kind of into this very different world that says look this company was built on the shoulders of these people and this is the least we can do to thank them actually you know after the two weeks before that was extremely hectic you know there's like you know get into a private jet and you go into like 12 cities and talking to a ton of investors and it was a lot of fun a lot of extremely pugilistic meetings and the questions about where we headed and it was great to actually nancy it you know who the company is and what we do because in a lot of the times you get kind of boxed into one of the other because many companies do what you do today but how you do it why you exist and where you're really headed you know was extremely revealing for a lot of these people yeah it's fascinating to watch because you did interviews with you know some of the some of the big people you know in kind of the media and finance world and a lot of them probably have never heard the term hyperconverged infrastructure you know they asked you questions like oh you know cloud you that means you know are you competing against you know Apple and Google and I think there's other cloud players out there you know cloud seems to be a term that they've kind of heard on anything surprise you as to kind of the whole IPO process you know not much surprise than the fact that you know when people say the two weeks are really grueling to me I think I didn't lose lose my voice which was one of the things that everybody predicted is going to happen and the fact that the team came together you know you know like we had Sudheesh and Ken go to London and they had like six meetings and there was really good you know feedback coming from there we actually even embraced Europe said look we got to do Europe as well because this is one of the things is an international company we need to actually respect you know folks beyond the US too and then myself Howard and Dustin actually were doing the US circuit and I think it was more than the fact of this grueling it was really a lot of fun because you come out of these meetings and you think like you know they didn't get it and when the orders come they're like wow so you know I think the respect that we got from the investors obviously you know there's a whole bell curve of what investors are like today there's enough those are actually sitting at naysayers there's enough as fencers but we got a ton of believers and you know it showed in the results of the IP as well and every year I think we'll convert enough naysayers to fencers enough fencers to believers and that's just the right of passage of being a public company yeah you've talked you know at some of the conferences as well as some of the articles you've written about just the multiple constituencies you've got you know your customers your internal and now you've got kind of the financial constituencies Nutanix is now sitting in a market cap you know somewhere four to five billion dollars at this point most people thought it would be kind of the two to two and a half billion dollars can you give any insight as to kind of that pull between kind of the banks the board you know what you what the thinking is around that well first thing is that there's apples and oranges numbers because of the private company you look at fully diluted shares and in the public company you look at basic shares because it's enough that is not vested or exercised or both actually now so the numbers look different the total number of shares when you multiply that been the share value itself so the valuations in the private market are different than the valuations in the public market and we were quite cognizant of that we said look you know the series e was done with a fully diluted number and what we're going out with was still a great number and compared to what series e was it was actually you know healthily bigger and we said look we want investors to have win-win as well I mean because sometimes you try to squeeze too much and try to act a little cute you miss out a lot of unhappy investors who like look I think we have invested here there's momentum there's the right brain of the investor that also kicks in as opposed to the left brain that's defensive and conservative and you know thinking about spreadsheets and money versus the right one that says look we want this together and I want to be in for the long haul okay so since I've known you you know you've always had kind of a great long view first time I came to Nutanix's headquarters it was across the street and it was a small little place it felt like you know they were putting on certain awards and paint was drying on the wall if I think we first got the first the kind of the the blue in the green and every time I visit here there's a new floor there's a new add-on this time you've got the NTNX all over I didn't see a big stock ticker anywhere though but you know you're done now right you've gone public you know it's the exit you know money I'm sure there's a whole new line of you know Tesla owners in the company so you know you know this isn't the end you know what is where is it in the journey I mean if anything we don't even talk about the ticker or we are telling people look every day I should probably today because it's the paint is still new on the wall look at it once a day and that's a win in a few weeks just look at it once a week and in a couple of months just look at it once a month and then this is the way you slowly wean away from looking at the numbers because after buying a car in a home what will you do with all the money so let it be where it is and focus on really building because we barely begun as a company I mean if you think of companies that have changed their identities from where they were to where they are today I mean from selling books to selling retail e-commerce to selling computing it's a massive journey I mean going from you know what Microsoft was in 92 was an office productivity tools company to operating systems to personal computers to data center to whatever cloud today I think you know this is the journey that we are on and seven years is nothing you know compared to what we believe I mean the great thing about us is that the market is big I mean the it's about computing hyperconverged is is a ephemeral word that will fade away just like smartphone the word smart faded away actually everything is a phone now it's and everything is smart actually you know so the idea of bringing everything together in pure software the idea of doing more automation more machine learning more one-click you know that stuff is what computing is all about that melding different clouds you know I think so in terms of innovation there's so much to be had and not just on the engineering side but on you know product management and marketing and sales and everything that we can innovate more on you know so I think people have really looked at the checkpoint it's a little bit of a validation a pattern the back and I think we'd be remiss if you actually went and started to look at the ticker too much so I think in this in this whole company we want to banish the ticker and focus on things that matter and yet checkpoint whatever I mean because you know when you look at the kind of the ground reality there's enough people who came out of college this was the first job they've been working five six years they've been telling their spouses look this is going to be worth something so the sacrifices you know will need to be sort of a little bit you know responded to as well so they'll go back and say look this was basically one checkpoint but you know we do this we buy a house we pay for the mortgage by you know shiny car but then let's go and do this for the next seven years okay we've got a big show of yours coming up in a couple of weeks the dot next I know we interviewed you and many of your customers thought leaders at the show in Vegas you've been doing road tours all around the world but the big European show is coming towards the beginning of November in Vienna what are you looking forward to at that show what what can people expect that are going well one thing that we've done really well as a company is to when we build a product like you know we built our you know operating system we said let's take it to where the customer is let's meet them where they are that's why you know I personally don't believe the public cloud is it's too rigid an opinion oh everybody should come to us because we built our own and that's what we're doing with this whole idea of taking this opening system you know it's an enterprise cloud operating system and take it to where people are and when we build another product like dot next show we're like look let's go and meet where people are as opposed to having this self-righteous feeling that everybody should come to us whether it's Vegas or you know DC or Miami or what have you so I think it's it's that kind of an aspiration that takes us to 100 cities and it's a lot of work I mean the team here you know does a lot of work to actually take it to where people are and Vienna is special I think it's one of the cities that I'd love to learn more about in terms of history and so on we are doubling down in Germany and northern Europe and we've done a pretty good job outside the US in terms of international business we're already 35 plus percent international which is basically telling you that we've built a business that's not a hack because many companies come out public and they still haven't figured out they have zero muscle memory on international business you know what are the channel look like what does this distribution look like what about Japan and Germany and places like that so we the last four or five years you've ceded a lot of these countries and now it's time to double down and going and trying to understand their business itself like you know what are the safe harbor laws and what are their compliance things that they worry about what are they coming because the cloud is going to be such a nuanced term outside the US that you need to really learn exactly what it means to really consume infrastructure like we want to consume right when it comes to the conference though one of the things I've loved about your events is not only do you bring in speakers that stretch my brain but they're ones that you actually have relationships with so it's always interesting you know I looked you've got speaker series coming through here so kind of Lisa Rice who spoke at the Miami event spoke here Dr. Benocosla you know I think was here today so you've got one of your favorite authors is coming to Vienna I'm looking forward to you know and there's so much to learn I mean a lot of his writings are very profound you have to probably read his books a couple of times but they're deep and even if people get like 5% of it like we were talking about his books today in Vinod's talk as well you know starting from black swan you know like what does mean to get consequential things as opposed to quantum jumps and things in life and how unpredictable they are and how change the world to anti fragility which is yet another really important book that we the company have to embody and imbibe actually you know because you go through highs and lows and the stocks gonna go high and go low and there's gonna be things that we don't even have control on because of which the company's angst the collective angst will actually grow and people really have to understand that look failures like that or you know having a bad press sometimes things like that you just have to take it in its stride and and what comes out of it is stronger company you know in the last seven years you've gone through a lot of lows as well as highs and I think the lows have only made us stronger actually and somebody is telling me recently about Google Maps and Apple Maps and they said Google pushed Apple too hard on the negotiation and what came out with Apple Maps because they said look this is not the way we can be treated you know at the end of the day we would never have gone into maps but the way it was actually done tells us that we need to control our destiny you know HV was like that you probably would not have gotten into the hypervisor business had it not been the way we were treated actually you know and what came out is what's come out what's gonna come out with that is gonna be a thing of beauty actually you know it's very interesting it reminds me of the first conversation I had with you we talked about distributed architectures and really some of the biggest engineering challenge we have of the day and you know think about things like the Chaos Monkey you know going into Netflix and making sure to kill things it's almost some of the same same things we talk about with anti-fragility absolutely absolutely yeah it's one of my favorite topics these days you know there's another one that as a company we're really focusing on a lot it's called authenticity and there's a great speaker his name is Mike Robbins and he's like really embedded into the fabric of the company at every middle manager VP kind of IC level he's conducting these things about what is authenticity and I mean including the way we have to do our press releases and collaterals and things like that and the formula is really simple it says authenticity is actually honesty but you ever take out something and add something and then you scratch your head like what does it mean I thought honesty was good enough and then the way he said it makes it really clear and yet it's very profound it's like luckily you need to take out self-righteousness from honesty and then add vulnerability to make it authentic and then you start to think about it like wow that is powerful you know so we're going deep into vulnerability of the topic like you know I just found a professor she focuses only on vulnerability so she'll be part of her speaker series very soon we'll we try to understand these kind of terms and topics that basically is what about organizational building and company building as opposed to just technology and distributed systems and web skill engineering and things like that well so the Nutanix next conference in Vienna is actually going to be the same week as the US presidential elections I would sure wish that some of that self-righteousness could be pulled out so that we could have a good debate and discussion of proper things moving back to our corners yeah that reminds me looks like we'll have to vote by mail actually yes absolutely I have my absentee ballot you know stuff in order anybody that's attending from the US should definitely take a look all right dear I want to give you the final word coming out from the IPO and any last words you'd like to share with the audience of Newton nation yeah I mean I think the word Newton nation is resonating a lot which means that people are coming together it was a great coming together of people thanking each other it's a whole family and the way you know their family is a sacrifice I think is it's just a culmination of one first phase of this company and there's so much more to do that I can't even tell you that I mean the world doesn't know who we are yet and that's cracking the surface they're boxing us into what hyperconverged is and things like that but eventually what could emerge from this company is way different than what it is today okay well it has been a pleasure to be able to document much of what's been going on please be sure to check out silicon angle dot TV where you can find the exclusive coverage from Nutanix dot next in Vienna on our YouTube channel which is youtube.com slash silicon angle there's an entire playlist of all the interviews we've done with the garage over the years thank you so much for watching be sure to check to check us out of the shows and thank you for watching the cube