categories
HOT TOPICS
- The Accelerator Conundrum
- The Startup Velocity Question
- Platform as a Service
- Man and Superman
- Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS)
- The Future: End of Capitalism
- Capitalism 2.0
entrepreneur journeys
From Hard Core Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Francis Dinha, CEO of OpenVPN (Part 1)
Francis has bootstrapped OpenVPN to $3M ARR with JUST $1M in financing. Wonderful story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born and raised? What kind of background? Francis Dinha: I was born in northern Iraq in a place called Amadiya. I lived there
From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: When you moved out in 2011, you had already transitioned from being a hardcore nerdy developer to someone experienced in sales. You had some understanding of what it takes to close enterprise deals. What happens next? Manish Jethani: I still felt like an engineer who was trying to apply the engineering concepts to
From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 6 )
Sramana Mitra: Did you do shareholder communication? Dheeraj Pandey: All the time. I like it. There was a thesis to be sold as well. After we went public is when we started to transition the business model. It probably was the biggest business model transition the IT world has ever seen – going from hardware,
From Developer to Serial Entrepreneur: Hevo Data CEO Manish Jethani (Part 1)
Manish discusses his various experiences with customer validation in great depth, as well as his journey from being a hard-core developer geek to a successful entrepreneur CEO who has raised multiple rounds of venture capital from top firms including Sequoia Capital. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you
From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 5)
Sramana Mitra: When did you reach some level of cruising altitude? What year would that be? Dheeraj Pandey: We were still the fastest to half-billion in 2015. Along the way, there were jitters. There’s always turbulence. In 2015, there was turbulence when the Intel issue came up. They had a massive number of bugs on
From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 4)
Sramana Mitra: What was the size of your Blumberg Capital round? What milestones were you able to achieve with that? Dheeraj Pandey: It was a million and a half. Word spread out that three Aster Data people had started a company. Lightspeed came within 10 months and we raised a $10 million round and converted
From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 3)
Sramana Mitra: Going from a techie to an entrepreneur, I presume you did a lot of founder-led selling. What was that transition like? Dheeraj Pandey: One is just humanism. Business is about people. You have to connect with people. Difficult words like negotiation – if you replace this with building trust, it’s much easier. People
From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 2)
Sramana Mitra: When you decided to start Nutanix, what was your understanding of the problem that you were going to go after? Did you have a clear vision of the problem you were going to solve? Dheeraj Pandey: We had an idea based on our skillsets and passion for distributed systems. If you look at
