Leveraging Your Experience to Build a Start Up Worth $2 Billion

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS

Today’s guest is Dheeraj Pandey, who started from scratch and built a company that is now valued at more than $2 billion.

A 2013 Forbes magazine article about Dheeraj says this, “He brings over 14 years of experience working at high-growth enterprise software companies like Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team from the ground up and at Oracle, where he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases.  He may be a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of computer science (he earned his B.S. in computer science from the Indian Institute of Technology), but he’s earned a wealth of knowledge through his hands on experience in thinking through the challenges of creating a datacenter infrastructure using software rather than hardware.”

Dheeraj Pandey is currently the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Nutanix.

Listen to this interview as Dheeraj also discusses:

• What changes about your pitch when you don’t have a brand
• What motivates him about his business
• Lessons he learned about how not to blow money
• Brainstorm about the why, not the what in starting a company
• How the “green card” strategy played into the founders roles
• Why it took 2 years to go from idea to actually bringing the product to market
• What activities took place in the “building the product” phase
• How they found the right people to form their start up team
• Why the start up phase amounts to tons of hustle
• Crossing the 800/800 phase of growth
• How to deal with conflicting goals and balancing culture
• The importance of being resilience in a start up
• The one thing that causes bad things to happen in a start up
• Why it’s important to instill his value systems in his children

Website:

www.nutanix.com