Nutanix

“Yeah, it was about, ah, you know, twenty-five million of revenue. Independently, yes. Ah, when we got acquired, we're about twenty-five million of revenue.”

“Four and a half years from beginning to acquisition.”

“Today, Nutanix will be nothing if we did not make that decision early on, that we will build our entire product on the Hypervisor.”

“Thailand pound for pound happened to be one of the most profitable regions for us. Why? Because Cost of living and cost of doing business is low, and people are willing to spend.”

“And after Snowden, basically, There was a big push towards virtualizing desktops. Like, okay, no machine leaves the premises. Everything is actually on the inside, and it became a great use case for us to say, let's virtualize the windows, desktops, in an envi…”

“We had a great net promoter score of 90 for the longest time, yet we had not used Salesforce Service Cloud as a way to really front end our customers with someone else's support software. We said we're going to build our own, so we built our own portal and our…”

“I think at Nutanix, we really took upon things that we never understood, like hardware, when we were software guys, pure software guys. And two times at least out in this first five years, we felt like we have a near-death experience. And even VMware didn't wo…”

“Most of the India's new millionaires among the youth, they have come from tier two towns. So again, coming back to the example of Sachin Bansal, Bini Bansal, Mukesh Bansal, these folks are all from tier two towns of India. If you consider folks from Bihar, the…”

“In 2020, when both Dheeras and I, we left the company, it was at 1.6 billion dollar in software revenue.”

“Nutanix itself, like, 1.6 billion dollar that we were bringing revenue. We were spending close to four hundred million dollars just in R&D product side. Hundred million dollar in customer support, close to a billion dollar in sales and marketing, let's say.”

“So, so we crossed three mil. We crossed three mil... Before acquisition.”

“I genuinely, I believe as founders, ah, you know, when you have this acquisition opportunities, if you tell your team very early, ah, if the deal doesn't happen, ah, it will create like so much of negative energy because people will think maybe we are not wort…”

“So I learned, you know, in the process, I learned, you know, you never put the, Number on the table because you know there are like a lot of stories of founders saying, you know, how, and how much under value, you know, they do for their own company, right?”

“And but we could get from whatever that initial X value to two X value. Yeah. You know, in that short one week of negotiation.”

“Me and Anand could have made like a couple of more millions each if he had optimized, but Anand was also very clear that, you know, look, we should be because when nobody trusted us, these people really trusted us.”

“So the stat when we used to look at it in 2019 and 20 20 was around just 45 companies ever crossed a billion dollar ARR. From that 45, I think less than, you know, around less than 20 companies ever crossed a three billion dollar ARR.”

“We were always, you know, very, very high velocity with our customers, and I think it created this dopamine effect with them as well, because they're like, oh, they're coming back, and even though they're not perfect, you know, they're really, Agile.”

“And the first 10 customers, I think some of it was, you know, a lot of begging and a lot of ruffling and relationships and network. And the early on stuff is about friends, you know, can you find friends who are willing to make a bet on you? And I think finall…”

“Even if you're solving a very large problem, find a use case that is easy to get dopamine on, and that is what becomes viral. Because once you build that little trust, because remember, trust is only built a bite-sized at a time, and you cannot build, you know…”

“Actually, you know, I tell you what, to be honest, Nutanix was all SLG. You know, we were spending a billion dollars a year to go get a 1,000,000,006 and so on.”

“If you treat the founders and that team as a customer, Just the acquisition itself, which is like an event of sales, is not good enough. You know, once the thing settles down on the other side of the hourglass, that's customer success. You know, you have to re…”

“Our first thesis was that this product will work on top of VMware, and it was a wrong assumption because they were not ready for something as sort of demanding as our software running on top of it. Nobody had run what we were running on top of VMware.”

“So our first million came in our first quarter of selling, actually.”

“Then we get, got rid of the hardware. So we almost gave up 30, 35% of our revenue.”

“And it's super important because now investors and the market are asking for capital efficiency with SAS businesses. 18 months ago, that didn't really matter. But if you look at things like Okta, you know, you look at companies like Nutanix, et cetera, these I…”

“I left Aster in 2009, and I actually founded the infrastructure company Nutanix in 2009, September 2009, and I was there with Nutanix for a little more than three years, and I was the brains behind the concept of hyperconvergence, which has kind of taken over …”

“Well, the public number that they published out was 8.8%. you know, it's out there in storage review and a bunch of other articles. So that's what I own.”

“Yeah, we were, I think we were doing approximately ten million a quarter by then.”