Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
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Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 5 5.00
Q Dheeraj, now I want to go back, like, 20 years back, right, or maybe more, 25 years back, and talk about your whole journey. Can you tell us more about your family, your roots, which city you came from?
A Yeah, and for that, you have to go back almost 40 years, you know, because, um, I'm 46 right now, and I grew up in Patna, and when I was 16, almost 17, I came to come for my undergrad at IIT Kanpur. I pursued my undergrad in computer science at IIT Kanpur, and when I was 21, I mean, almost 22, I came to the U.S., And basically, at an age of 21, I had a fork in the road. I could have joined Unilever here in India. I could have gone and done IT consulting with Deloitte because in 97, this was the first year they had come directly to come and hire out of campuses in India. Or I could have gone and pursued PhD at either UT Austin, Urbana-Champaign, Columbia, you know, Southern California, USC, and so on. And I talked to one of my seniors, it was two years my senior, his name is Gokul Rajaram. And, uh, he's another really accomplished person in the Bay Area. You know, he was very early at Google, was a product manager for AdSense for like seven, eight years and went to Facebook and built their entire business and then was at Square for the longest time and so on. So I spoke to him and he's like, you know what? You need optionality. Don't commit to anything but a PhD. And so I ended up at Austin because I had a fellowship, so I didn't have to go work. UT had It basically said, look, we'll pay for everything, just come and be a PhD student, which is exactly the same opportunity that G…
AI assessment note: “I grew up in Patna, and when I was 16, almost 17”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q a different thing, right? You are not going to enterprises. You're going to startups. If I told a VC five years ago that my target audience is going to be startups, they would laugh at me. And still today, the VCs laugh if I tell them, right, my target audience, I'm building a Why are you then targeting startups? Are startups not more vulnerable? Because any startup couldn't shut down.
A Yeah, I mean, look, there's Darwinism in anything, you know. The important thing is if the cost of sales is minimum, and if they can bake your product, and you can evolve your thinking with these younglings, then the larger segment of the market is more accepting. This is true between mid-market and enterprise. Initially, you never build a company directly for the enterprise. You build up to the mid-market, And then if you have the ambition, you grow to the large enterprise. It just happened with pretty much every company. I mean, you look at AWS is doing probably fifty billion now, but initially when they started, yeah, seventy billion now. And I think when they started, they were just working with companies that were willing to take this path less traveled. And some of them just happened to, you know, really become the black swans of the business. And I think that's always going to be true. You know, you start with enough saplings, you know, I mean, you start with seeds, not every seed becomes a sapling and you nurture some of these saplings and you become plants and plants become trees and enough trees become sequoias. So it definitely is a time-tested strategy. The question is, are you evolving fast enough With these growing businesses. And at the same time, are you bringing enough configurability? Because that's what the enterprise means. Configurability. All the itties th…
AI assessment note: “if the cost of sales is minimum, and if they can bake your product”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 3.70
Q Deiraj, so I would like to start with, you know, in both your journeys at Nudanix and DevRev, how did you achieve What are you thinking in your first journey? Deep back into it. Tell the stage of product market fit. How do you process it? And now in the second journey, how are you doing it? And how both of them are different?
A First, you in many ways had the answer in your question. The word is journey. It's not a destination. So you have to look at product market fit like that. It's like any other relationship between two entities, you know, here there's a product and there's a market. And just like most things, like for example, love, and it happens gradually and then suddenly. So in many ways, PMF is like that as well. I think the act of listening is very important, you know, and what I mean by that is, you know, this tightrope walk between the things that you're going to be stubborn about And the things that you're going to be flexible about. So at DevRev, we are trying to really codify this process of product market fit. And what we've come to really sort of coalesce is like these three pillars of velocity, uh, convergence and delight. So the first one is, are you listening fast enough and responding fast enough? That's velocity. Uh, the second one is convergence where You're negotiating with the market on less is more. Cause you know, you're young, you're early, they would like to have everything and the kitchen sink in your product. And you are trying to find innovators and early adopters. Who are not looking for everything, but they look for the one 10 X. So when you're having that negotiation, you know, you're trying to figure out how less is more candidates are the ones that you actually qu…
AI assessment note: “So at DevRev, we are trying to really codify this process of product market fit.”
Not addressed raw tape
D 1 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 2.70
Q But who pays the salary and then start?
A Well, I mean, first of all, you have to really engineer your cloud where you can have millions of free users. And we're doing that at DevRev right now where we have to miniaturize each tenant. You cannot spin up, you know, big things per tenant because then you want to really give it out to freemium users like the way you do in the world of open source where, you know, people just start to try it out. And especially in the world of developers, they are always skeptical about paying for something upfront because they're engineers, they're developers, they're makers. They're like, look, I'm not going to really believe in you and trust you until I trust you. And when they trust you, they really trust you. Um, so I think you have to engineer a cloud that way, and that's the way B to C was done. I mean, basically each shopping cart was not charged for until you really checked out, you know,
AI assessment note: “you have to really engineer your cloud where you can have millions of free users”
Partly raw tape
D 2 · C 3 · P 3 · Cm 2 2.55
Q What are the risk of failure that you are mitigating right now?
A Um, I think to really, I mean, I said this before, you know, you need to think about a single use case, and you're really focused on how you build software and how you support software. And if we did this right, then we can actually go and help grow business history over time, which is where CRM really comes in. So the idea is to go walk to the developer and the product manager, And then walk with them to where we want them to be. We can't be sitting here and saying, you have DevCRM, DevCRM. They're like, what are you talking about? I don't deal with CRM. That's someone else's job. So we have to walk over to where they are, you know, talk their language, you know, make sure we pass the Maya test. You know, speak the language of software and, you know, engineering software, building products, and dealing with product managers. That alone, if you can just converge product managers and developers in one system so that PMs are not planning in a planning tool, the moment they come out of that offsite of planning, it's still. And then real work is happening in someplace else, whether it's Slack or Jira or someplace else, you know. So I think just converging the product manager and the developer in one place would be great success in coming to the three of them.
AI assessment note: “We can't be sitting here and saying, you have DevCRM, DevCRM.”
Answered raw tape
D 3 · C 2 · P 3 · Cm 2 2.55
Q And what's your aspiration for Devri? Do you want to build a better company or a bigger company than your Linux?
A I think the aspiration is to Go build something that's delightful. So rather than go put an outcome, Or a number or size. I think it's too early. I mean, in fact, who knows, maybe we were wrong in a few things. We'll learn about those things. But if you can bring delight, then I think that's the karma that will pay the bills and that'll, you know, basically the customer love will be there. You know, I mean, we did a really good job of customer love at Nutanix, but our cost of distribution is high. And that's just basically me not taking risks of what distribution meant and something like when Tesla said you can do direct to the customer. It raised a lot of hackles. Like what? You can bypass the dealership? And the public cloud did exactly that. They had a direct connect between the user and them, you know, end user and them. So I want to be able to apply some of those consumer grade lessons to DevRev and Yeah, in fact, there's a really good read, maybe a couple of pages that you might have remembered from book Sapiens. Yuval Harari talks about the discovery of fire. And he basically conjectured as to why homo sapiens really became the more intelligent species. This is obviously a hypothesis, but he says, look, there's two parts of your body that absorb the most amount of energy, the gut and the brain. That's it, you know, more than 80% of the energy actually goes to the gut or …
AI assessment note: “aspiration is to Go build something that's delightful. So rather than go put an outcome”
