Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

Raghuram: Selling to new enterprise user personas requires fenced-off teams

Raghu Raghuram · From the Dot-Com Crash to the AI Era: How Builders Survive Waves of Disruption · Aug 6, 2025 · at 9:55

Raghu Raghuram, former CEO of VMware, discusses go-to-market strategies for incumbents expanding into new software categories.

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“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. Right? Because it's going exactly at the same user. But if you're, for example, going at a different user, like we were doing with the Nesera and networking. Then you need to fence it off, and that's, you know, the experience there.”

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