Raghu Raghuram (former VMware CEO and a16z partner) explains the thesis behind a16z's Machine Age Fund, focusing on physical infrastructure constraints in AI.
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Raghuram: No Major Tech Company Was Built From Docker or Kubernetes
“Now, the interesting thing is the industry, nobody made money on either Docker or Kubernetes. I mean, there were some startups, right? But really, there was no big company that was created out of that.”
Insight
Raghuram: Selling to new enterprise user personas requires fenced-off teams
“There are some classes of innovation where you can get by what I would say is close adjacencies, where the If you're building a product that's closely adjacent to your original product. You can take it from zero to one through the existing Salesforce. Yeah. Ri…”
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Raghuram: Non-Founder CEOs Get Less Time to Transform Companies Than Founders
“Founders will get much more time. The market gives them more time. The board gives them more time. The employees give them more time. Non-founders for various reasons, and I don't know if you agree, you don't get the same amount of time.”
Disclosure
Raghuram: VMware Did Not Know How to Market to Software Developers
“The cloud, I mean, initially Amazon AWS did not change The abstraction of a virtual machine but everything else, the business model changed, and the most important change that AWS brought about was it made infrastructure available to developers without IT. Tha…”
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Raghuram: VMware vSAN failed with storage buyers until sold to compute buyers
“In fact, we had two iterations on vSAN, right? Initially, we said, hey, let's go after the storage buyer. That did not work as well. And then we said, look, we're going to go expand the compute buyer's purview. Right? Then it started working. So the go-to-mark…”
Insight
Raghuram: Enterprise companies should target ideal practitioner profiles, not target corporate logos
“I think the term ideal customer profile, sometimes, especially in larger companies, misleads people into thinking about, oh, my customer is JP Morgan, my customer is Home Depot, I can't. The ideal practitioner profile. Exactly. The ideal practitioner profile. …”