Nutanix

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

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

“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.”