The 8 EE finalists and I were in an insightful free-wheeling conversation on Week 3 of Lightspeed’s EE program with Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO of Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX) – that has reached 4500 employees and a market cap of $7B+ in under a decade. Here are the highlights:
- The “WHY” of the business is the 10x. The “how” and the “what” are just incremental
- Keep visibility of the Rock (3Y out mkt position), Pebble (1Y out budget) and Sand (1 Qtr. out sprints, sales pipeline)
- You are the DREAM MERCHANT. Can’t delegate product vision and hiring in early days
- Being a leader is tough – it’s okay to be not liked by all
- Find good advisors – those who give you courage when you need it the most!
The WHY of business is the source of 10X
“Think of the WHY of your business from day 1. You can’t delegate it to someone you’ve hired.” The WHAT of business will be incremental in nature – checklist of what you need to do every day. It is the WHY of the business that will be your fundamental differentiator, the 10X for your business – “WHY is it so important that you took on the mantle and started solving the problem yourself.” Why does someone want this. It is similar to having a “WHY” for yourself, the one superpower aspect about you that is 10X better than any other founder.
You are the dream merchant
In Dheeraj’s words, “You are the dream merchant. You are the primary product visionary. It is extremely hard to get the right product manager in early days, who shares your vision and can take the product from version 0 to 0.9 (if they were disruptors themselves, they would have been founders already!)”
Great judgement is why you get paid
Having good judgement is key – about the people and new hires in particular. Dheeraj takes interviewing as an opportunity to learn, not just focusing on the WHATs or his own areas of expertise. He likes to go into the WHYs and HOWs of people’s achievements, even if they are not directly linked to the role. He added “You don’t need the people with greatest experience… most people are afraid to take such risks but Nutanix took some early calls. We even hired sales leaders who had never done sales before!”
Judge what is a fundamental vs peripheral decision. Get the fundamental choices right because they can’t be changed later – the ability to distinguish between these two is core to scaling. For example, at Nutanix, the team got their choices around architecture and design right early on.
Be Anti-Fragile – emerge stronger from shocks. Not just survive them.
How a leader adapts to change is key. Recalling his early days at Nutanix, Dheeraj shared that the company nearly died 2-3 times. “There were a lot of naysayers” he said. Founders need to learn to be anti-fragile i.e. not just survive, but become better with shocks. It is necessary to learn from tough times, course correct and keep the velocity going.
As a leader, learn to get comfortable with not being liked by all
As human beings we get very attached to individuals but what the system is expecting of a leader is detachment. Lots of people deviate from the mission in an effort to please everyone. Being respected is different from being liked. A leader needs to like not being liked and is expected to make tough calls which will help a company grow.
Find good advisors
Dheeraj had a spiritual take on this. “My advisors have been a mix of both managers (experienced) and makers (young)”. The common characteristic is that all my advisors had courage. They had seen highs and lows. Being a founder is like playing a marathon of test matches – listening to such people helps in normalizing failures and successes and stay put on the field.”
Maintain right visibility on your business – Rocks, Pebbles, Sand
Dheeraj’s says founders need to have the visibility of rocks, pebbles and sand at all times:
- Rocks- where I want to be in the market in 3 years
- Pebbles – where is my budget in next 1 year
- Sand- where are my sprints (sales pipeline, engineering, product.) in next 1 qtr.
Delight current customers, before scaling
Integrity is super important: the idea that I will deliver whatever I promised to my customer. Focus on getting customers hooked and double down on extracting more value from the current base. You don’t want to acquire a customer only to see them go after sometime and spend the acquisition cost again.
Journey form founder to the CEO – somewhat like motherhood
Recalling his early days at Nutanix, Dheeraj shared that he worked like a developer during first 12-15 months, then transitioned to a PM, then to VP engineering and finally became the CEO only 3-4 years later. To one of the questions on the right time to make the transition between these roles, Dheeraj compared this journey to that of a mother. “The transition of a mother from a nurturer, to a teacher, to a disciplinarian is natural. You will just know! The child might take longer to walk or speak, the mother adapts to the needs of the child naturally. She eventually learns when is the time to let go the child, which is the most difficult part of the journey.”