Raghu Raghuram, former CEO of VMware, discusses go-to-market strategies for incumbents expanding into new software categories.
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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: 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.”
Insight
Raghuram: AI bottlenecks have shifted from models to physical infrastructure
“What we have seen over the last three years is the steady increase of the capabilities of the models. Where the model is no longer the bottleneck. And in fact, using AI, these models are getting better faster and faster and faster. Now the bottleneck is all wh…”
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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. …”