Dheeraj Pandey, founder of Nutanix and DevRev. The conversation spans a variety of topics and has some brilliant insights into the gaps in the tech industry.
Sramana Mitra: We’re going to continue the conversation we’ve had where we talked about his background as a founder of a successful high-growth company. We’re going to talk about investment today. Let’s start by however you want to introduce yourself and your companies.
Dheeraj Pandey: I came here to the US exactly 25 years ago in 1997 when I was not even 22. Monica was talking about her Black Swan event in her life. I definitely believe in serendipity and everything that has happened is about chasing serendipity in some sense. I tried to work for small companies.
When I came here, I was a Ph.D. student in Austin, Texas. A lot has changed in Austin since then. It was the height of the internet bubble. A lot was happening in 1998 when I came here to Redwood Shores for my internship at Oracle. I decided to take a leave of absence and decided to join the industry and worked for Trilogy in Austin, Texas for a year. I really refused large company offers like Oracle and Microsoft several times to work for small companies.
I saw the boom and the bust. Along the way, I got married. Then I went back to Oracle for four years. Since 2009, I have been an entrepreneur. In the last five years, I’ve turned into an investor. When they ask me for something, the reason I like to call it a win-win is because it’s a great reminder for me as well of how I need to run my own business and operations because many of these things people ask is not something unique to them but also applicable to what I do on a day-to-day basis as well.
Since 2009, I grew Nutanix to a great number of friends. We made many millionaires along the way. I took it public in 2016. In 2020, I figured I wanted to do something in the space of cloud service. DevRev has been that opportunity to think hard about makers. How do you get makers or creators closer to users? That’s where failures start to happen – when the handoffs are not good. Listening from users to creators is noisy. There are too many departments and there are too many tools.
Creating that customer love is an art and a science. The question is can you make it engineering? That’s that opportunity at DevRev for me. Then we are juggling a couple of other balls in my family with my Chief Investment Officer and the team that he has. We have a Family Office. We go into even things like nuclear fusion.
Sramana Mitra: Is your funding of startups from the family office or have you created a vehicle?
Dheeraj Pandey: The family office is a real fund with a bunch of Series in there. We have different classes. We have employees and research analysts. It’s a single-family office. We don’t have other families or other LPs in there. We look at anything from early-stage to growth. We’ve written very large checks as well.
