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? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

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 the server. They started to put more stuff in their folder. The Intel processor had an immense issue on the server-side.

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 the safe. We were trying to use our skills to try and build a distributed system story around one of the favorite movements at that time – virtualization.

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 want to give you a chance if you are authentic. At the same time, this idea of not overpromising but underpromising and overdelivering. That’s the way we built trust.

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 my pattern over those 10 years, I was just building distributed systems. Reliability, availability, serviceability – all these were etched into my fabric. I was like, “Let’s figure out a way to bring this out through an idea.”

From Hardcore Techie to Unicorn Entrepreneur: Dheeraj Pandey, Founder of Nutanix (Part 1)

Inspiring story of a passionate technical founder who has built one of the iconic fast growth Unicorns in the tech industry.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Besides the guy you brought in from Twitter, who else did you bring in as your key team member? How did you find them?

Manasi Vartak: I recruited through normal channels whether it was through Angel List or emailing people. I also started with a small set of contractors overseas. This was after I had some seed money. That gave us a good start. We still work with them.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of functions?

From MIT PhD Student to Machine Learning Entrepreneur: Verta.ai CEO Manasi Vartak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If you’re an MIT founder, I don’t think gender matters at all.

Manasi Vartak: Based on my experience, I would push back. It’s definitely different. I don’t think it’s terrible. MIT gives you a significant leg up. The other thing that was helping here was that it was an open-source tool that people were using. It wasn’t a question of building, it was more of getting people to pay for it.

Sramana Mitra: You have the product out there as an open-source tool.