 Hi, and this is theCUBE on Cloud. I'm Stu Miniman, and really excited to welcome to a special fireside chat. CUBE alumni has been on the program so many times. We always love talking to founders. We like talking to deep thinkers, and that's why he was one of the early ones that I reached out to when we were putting on this event. When we first started Conversations, we were looking at how hyperscalers really were taking adoption of brand new technologies, things like Flash, things like software defined networking, and how that would invade the enterprise. That, of course, has had a huge impact, helped create a category called Hyperconverged Infrastructure, and I'm talking about Dheeraj Pandey. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Nutanix, taking HCI from Hyperconverged Infrastructure to Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure. So, Dheeraj, welcome to the fireside chat. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, and thank you for the last 10 years, and we've grown together, both theCUBE and Nutanix, and myself as a leader in the last 10 years. So, bringing HCI from Hyperconverged to Hybrid Cloud just reminds me of how the more things change, the more they remain the same. So, looking forward to a great discussion here. So, talk about that early discussion, what the hyperscalers were doing, how can the enterprise take advantage of that? Over time, enterprises matured and looked a little bit more like the hyperscalers, hybrid cloud, of course, is on everyone's lip, as well as we've seen the hyperscalers themselves look more and more like the enterprise. So, hybrid and multi-cloud is where we are today. We think it'll be in the future, but give us a little bit as to how you've seen that progression today, and where are we going down the road here? Yeah, I think I talked about this during my .next keynote. And the whole idea of, you know, we in every recession, we make things smaller. You know, in 91, we said we're going to go away from mainframes into UNIX servers, and we made the unit of compute smaller. Then in the year 2000, when there was the next bubble burst and the recession afterwards, we moved from UNIX servers to Wintel, you know, Windows and Intel, X86 and eventually Linux as well. Again, we made things smaller, going from million dollar servers to $5,000 servers, shorter lived servers. And that's what we did in 2008, 2009. I said, look, we don't even need to buy servers. We can do things with virtual machines, which are servers that are an incarnation in the digital world. There's nothing in the physical world that actually even lives, but we made it even smaller. And now with cloud in the last three, four years and what will happen in the coming decade, we're going to make it even smaller, not just in space, which is size, with functions and containers and virtual machines, but also in time, so space and time. We're talking about hourly billing and monthly billing and one-year terms as opposed to really going and committing to five or seven years of hardware and capex. So I think as we make things smaller, I mean, and this is true for us as consumers, we have shorter attention spans, things are going fast. The cycle of creative destruction of virtual machines is shrinking as well. So I think in many cases, we've gone and created this autonomy, massive sprawl, like we created a massive sprawl of Intel servers back to 95 in 2005. Then we had to use virtualization to go and consolidate all of it, created beautiful data centers of Intel servers with VMware software. And then we created a massive sprawl of data centers and we consolidated data centers with one click private cloud in the last five years and hopefully in the next five too. But I think we're also now creating a proliferation of clouds, there's a sprawl, massive sprawl of cost centers and such. So we need yet another layer of software for governance to reign in on that chaos, hence the need for a new HCI hybrid cloud infrastructure. Yeah, it's fascinating to kind of watch that progression and over time, there was a phenomenal Atlantic article, I think it was from like the 1940s or 1950s where somebody took what was happening post World War II and projected things out. And we're talking really pre the internet, but just the miniaturization and the acceleration, kind of the Moore's law discussion, if you take things out, where it would go. When I talked to Amazon, they said, the one thing that we know for sure, I'm talking amazon.com is that people will want it faster and cheaper in the future. I don't know which robot or drone are things that they have, but absolutely there are those certain characteristics. So from a leadership standpoint, Deerage, you talk about these changes, we had the wave of virtualization, the wave of containerization, you talked about functions and serverless, those are tools, but at the end of the day, it's about the outcomes and how do we take advantage of things? So how is a leader, do you make sure that you know where to take the company as these technology waves and changes impact what you're doing? Yeah, so it's a great point. I mean, we celebrate things in IT a lot, but we don't talk about what does it take, what's the underlying fabric to really use these things successfully and better than others and not just use buzzwords because new buzzwords will come in the next three years. For example, AI and ML has been a great buzzword for the last three, four years, but there's very few companies, probably less than even half a percent who know how to leverage machine learning, even understand the difference between machine learning and AI and a lot of it comes down to a few principles. There's some culture principles, not the least of which is how you celebrate failure because now you're doing shorter, smaller things, you've got to be more agile, you'll have more velocity, gone at the days of waterfall, where you're doing yearly planning and three year releases and such. So as we get into this new world, not everything will be perfect and you've got to really learn to pick yourself up and recover quickly, heal quickly and such. So that is the fundamental tenet of Silicon Valley and we've got to really go and use this more outside the valley as well in every company out there, whether it's East Coast company, the Midwest company, they're outside the US. I think this idea that you will be vulnerable, more vulnerable as you go and learn to do things faster and shorter. I think product management is a term that we don't fully understand. And this is about the why before the how and the what to be quickly jumped to the what, containers and functions and databases of service and AI and ML, they're the what. But how do you really start with the why? You know my fascination for one of my distant mentors in assignment Sineq and how he thinks about, most companies just focus on the what while very few actually start with why. Then the how, then the what itself and product management has to play a key role in this, which also subsumes design, thinking about simplification and elegance and reducing friction. I think again, very few companies, probably no more than 1% of the companies really understand what it means to start with design and APIs, user experience, APIs for developers before you even get to writing any single line of code. So I think to me that's leadership, when you can stay away from instant gratification of the end result would start with the why, then the how, then the what. Yeah, as we know in the technology space, oftentimes the technology is the easy part. It's helping to drive that change. I think back to the early days when we were talking, it was hyperconverged, it was a threat to storage. We're going to put you out of a job and we'd always go and say, look, no, no, no, we're not putting you out of a job. We're going to free you up to do the things that you want to do. That security project that's been sitting on the shelf for six months, you can go do that, helping build new parts of the business. There's things that you can do. It's that shifting a mindset can be so difficult. And dearest, I mean, you look at 2020, everyone has had to shift their mindset for everything. I was spending half my time on the road. I don't miss the hotels. I do miss seeing lots of people in person. So what's your advice for people is how they can stay malleable, be open to some change? What are you seeing out there? What advice do you give there? Yeah, I think as you said, inertia is at the core of most things in our lives, including what we saw in healthcare for the last 20, 30 years. I mean, there was so much regulation. The doctors community had to move forward, nurses had to move forward. I mean, not just providers, but insurance companies. And finally, all of a sudden, we are talking about telehealth because of the pandemic. We are talking about online learning. I mean, the things that higher ed refused to do. I mean, if you think about the last 20 years of what has happened with the cost of higher ed, I mean, it's 200% growth in when the cost of television has gone down by probably 100, 200% with more features, healthcare, higher ed, education in general, all of a sudden has come in for this deep shock because of the pandemic. And I think it's these kinds of black swan moments that really change the world. And I know it's a cliche to say this, but I feel like we are gonna be in a new normal, and we have been forced to this new change of digital. I mean, you and I are sitting and talking over the internet. It's a little awkward right now because it's a little bit of a delay in the way I'm looking at things, but I know it's gonna directionally be right. I mean, we will go in a way where this becomes seamless over time. So change is the only constant. And I believe that I think what we've seen in the pandemic is just the beginning of what digital will mean going forward. And I think the more people embrace it, the faster we do it, the speed is gonna be the name of the game when it comes to survival and thriving in this new age. Dear, it's interesting. We do hope, I'm a technologist. I know you're an optimist when it comes to things. So we always look at those silver linings. Like I hope healthcare and education will be able to move forward fast, higher education costs, inequity out there for access to medicine. It would be wonderful if we could help solve some of that despite this global pandemic. One of the other results, dear, we talked about some very shifts in the marketplace. The large tech players really have emerged in winners so far in 2020. I can't help but watch the stock market. And Apple is bigger than ever. Amazon, Google all ended up in front of Congress to talk about how that if they've gotten too big, that you've partnered with Amazon, Microsoft and Google. They are potentially a threat, but also a partner. From your standpoint, have they gotten too much power? Do we have an inequity in the tech world that they are creating the universes that they will just kind of block off and limit innovation? What's your take on Big Tech? Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's always been big something. I mean, if you go back to the 90s, Amazon or not Amazon, IBM was big and Microsoft was big and AT&T was big. I mean, there's always been big companies because of the consumer effect that they've had as well. I mean, and I think what we're seeing right now is no different. I mean, at the end of the day, the good thing about, the great thing about this country is that there's always disruption happening. And sometimes small is way better and way more competitive than big. Now, at the same time, I do look up to the way some of them have organized themselves. Like the way Amazon has organized itself is really unique and creative with general managers and very independent, highly autonomous groups. So some of these organizations will definitely survive and thrive in scale. And yet for others, I think decision-making and staying competitive and staying scrappy will come a lot harder. So to me, when I look at these big names and what Congress is talking about and such, I feel like there's no different than 20, 30, 40 years ago. We've always talked. I mean, we talked about Rockefeller and the oil giants back from 100 years ago. And so in many ways, I mean, the more things change, the more they remain the same. What we have to do is we have to walk over to where the customer is. And that's what we've done with our partnerships, like in Amazon and Azure. We are saying, look, we can even use your commits and credits. I mean, that is a very elegant way to go to where the customer is. Doesn't force them to where we are. And the public cloud is facing this too. They've come to realize in the last two years that they cannot force all of enterprise computing to come to hyperscalers data centers. They'll have to take in these bite-sized, smaller clouds where the customer is, the customer's machines are where the customer's people are, where the customer's data is. That's where we also take to disperse the cloud itself. So I think there's going to be a yin yang where we'll try to walk with the customer to where we want them to be, whether it's a hyperscaler data center or the notion of hybrid cloud infrastructure. But many a time we've got to walk over to where they are. I mean, and outside the U.S. I mean, the cloud is such a nuanced word. I mean, we're talking about sovereignty. We're talking about data gravity. We're talking about economics of owning versus renting. This trifecta, the laws of the land, the laws of physics and the laws of economics will dictate many of these things as well. So I think the big folks are also humble and vulnerable to realize that there's nothing more powerful than market forces. And I think the rest will take care of itself. Yeah, my quick commentary on that, Deirdre, I think most of us look back at AT&T and felt that government got it wrong. The way they broke it up and ended up consolidating back together, it didn't necessarily help consumers. Microsoft, on the other hand, might have had a little bit too much power and was leveraging that against competition and really squashing innovation. So in general, it's good to see that the politics are looking at back and it sure felt the last time I watched things, they were a little bit more educated than some previous times there, where it was almost embarrassing to watch our representatives fumbling around with technology. So it's always good to question authority, question what they have. And one of the things you've brought up many times is you're open to listening and you're bringing in new ideas. I remember one conversation I had with you is there's that direction that you hold on to but you will assess and do new datas. You've made adjustments in the product portfolio and direction based on your customers, based on the ecosystem. And you've mentioned some of the bring thoughts that you've brought into the company and you share. So you mentioned Black Swan, Naseem Taleb, you brought to one of the European.next shows. It was great to be able to see that author and read through. Advisors like Condoleezza Rice who you've had at the conferences a couple of times. Where are you getting some of your latest inspirations from any new authors or podcasts that you'd be recommending for the audience? Yeah, I mean, I look at JCNC's obviously Simon has been great in a he was at a .next, talked about the infinite game and we'll talk about the infinite game with Nutanix too with respect to also my decision. But Brené Brown who has been very close to Nutanix, I was just looking at her latest podcast. She was sitting with the author of Stretch, Scott Son and Shine. And it's a fascinating read and a great listen by the way, I think for what's an hour talking about scrappiness and talking about resourcefulness. What does it mean to really be resourceful? And we need that even more so as we go through this recession as we are sheltered in place. I think it's an adjacency to everything that Brené does. And I was just blown away by just listening to it. So I'd love for others to even have a listen and learn to understand what we can do within our families with our budgets, with our companies, with our startups. I mean, with Qube, I mean, what does it mean to be scrappy and celebrate scrappiness and resourcefulness? More so than, yeah, I always need more. I think it's a, I just found it fascinating in the last week itself listening through it. Yeah, well, John Furrier said, talk many times that founder startup that being able to pull themselves up, be able to drive forward overcome obstacles. So, dearest, you did tee it up. It sounds like is the next step for you that there's a transition under discussion. Bain has made an investment. There's a search for new CEO. Are you saying there's a book club in your future to be able to get things ready? Why don't you explain a little bit? 11 years took the company public, over 6,500 employees, public company. So tell us a little bit about that decision-making process and what you expect to see in the future. Yeah, it's probably, one of the hardest things as an entrepreneur is to let go. Because it's a creation that you followed from scratch, from nothing. And it was a process for me to really think about what's next for the company and then what's next for me. And me and the company were so tightly coupled that I was like, wow, at some point this has to be a little bit more like the way Bill Gates did it with Microsoft. And there's going to be a baton zone and you'll then start to realize that your identity is different from the company's identity. And maybe the company's built for bigger, better things and maybe you built for bigger, better things. And how do you really start to first do this decoupling of the identity? And it's really hard. I mean, I'm sure that parents go through this. I mean, our children are still very young, our eldest is nine going on 10 and our twin girls are six. I know at some point in the next 10 years, eight to 10 years, we'll have to figure out what it means to let go. And I'm already doing this with my son. I tell him, you're born free. I mean, the word born free, which drives my wife crazy sometimes. I say this to them, it's about independence. And I think that the company is also born free to really think about a life outside of me as well outside of founder. And that was a very important process for me as I was talking to the board for the last six, seven, eight months. And when the Bain deal came in, I thought it was a great time. We ended the fiscal value well, all things considered. We had a good quarter. The transition has been a journey of a lifetime. The business model transition I speak of really three years. I mean, I have aged probably 10 years in these last three years, but I think I would not replace this for anything. Just the experience of learning what it means to change as a public company when you have short-term goals and long-term goals, when you need the conviction and knowing what's right. Because otherwise we would not have survived this cloud movement at all, this idea of actually becoming a subscription company, changing the core of the business in the on-prem world itself. It's akin to changing the wings of a plane at 40,000 feet where none of the passengers blink. It's been phenomenal last 11 years, but it's also been nonstop, monomaniacal. I mean, I use the word marathon for this. And I figured it's a good time to say, figure out a way to let go of this and think of what's bigger, better for Nutanix and going from zero to a billion six in annual billings and looking at billion six to three billion to four to five. I think it'd be great to look at this from afar. And at the same time, I think there's vulnerability. I mean, I've made the company vulnerable. I've made myself vulnerable. We don't know who the next leader will be. And I think the next three to six months is one of the most important baton zones that I have ever experienced or been a part of. So looking forward to make sure the baton doesn't fall, we define what good to great looks like both for the company and for myself. And at the same time, go read more. I mean, I've been passionate about developers in the last 10 years, 11 years. I was a developer myself. This company Nutanix was really built by developers for IT. And I'm learning more about the developer as a consumer. How do you think about their experience? Not just the things that we throw at them from open source point of view and from cloud and technologies and AI and ML point of view, but really their lives, having them think about revenue and business and really blurring the lines between architects and product managers and developers. I think it's just an unfathomable problem we've created in IT that I'd love to go and read and write more about. Yeah, so many important things you said there. I absolutely think there's certain things everybody, of course, will think of you for a long time with Nutanix, but there is that separation between the role in the company and the person itself. And it really appreciated how much you've always shared along those lines. So last question I have you and you heated up a little bit when you talked about developers. What do you take off your Nutanix hat for a second here? What do we need to do to make sure that the next decade is successful in this space, cloud as a general guideline? Because we know we have skill gap. We know we need more people. We need more diversity, but there's so much that we need and there's so much opportunity. But what do you see and any advice or areas that you think are critical for success in the future? Yeah, I mean, you hit upon something that I have had a passion for. Probably more latent as well, more so than conspicuous. And you hit upon it right now, diversity and inclusion. It's an unresolved problem in the developer community, the black developer, the woman developer. You know, the idea of, I mean, we have two girls, I'd love for them to embrace computer science and even probably do a PhD. I mean, I was a dropout. I'd love for them to do better than I did, get embrace things that are adjacent to biology and computer science, go solve really hard problems and we've not done those things. I mean, we've not looked at the community of developers and said, they are the maker and they work with managers and the maker manager world is two different worlds. How do you make this less friction? And how do you make this more delightful? And how do you think of developers as business, as if they are the folks who run the business? I think there's a lot that's missing there. And again, we throw a lot of jargons at them and we talk a lot about automation and tools and such, but those are just things. I think the last 10, 11 years of me really just thinking about product and product portfolio and design and the fact that we have so many developers at Nutanix, I think it's been a mind boggling experience thinking about the why and the how and the what of the day in the life off, the month in the life off. You're thinking about simple things like OKRs. I mean, we are throwing these jargons of OKRs to them, productivity, offshoring, remote work over the Zoom design sessions. It's just full of conflict and friction. So I think there is an amazing opportunity for Nutanix. There's an amazing opportunity for the industry to elevate this where the woman developer can speak up in this world that's full of so many men. The black developer can speak up and all of us can really think of this as something that's more structured, more productive, more revenue-driven, more customer-in rather than developer-out. That's really been some of the things that I've been in my head, things that are still unresolved at Nutanix that I'm pretty sure are many of the places out there. That's what thinking and reading and writing about. Well, dearage, first of all, thank you so much again for participating here. It's been great having you in the CUBE community almost since the inception of us doing it back in 2010. Wish you the best of luck in the current transition and absolutely look forward to talking more in the future. Thank you. And again, a big fan of the triumvirate of John, Dave and you always learned so much from you folks looking forward to be a constant student. Thank you. Thank you for joining us at the CUBE on Cloud. Lots more coverage here. Be sure to look throughout the site, engage in the chats and give us your feedback. We're here to help you with the virtual events. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching.