The Enterprise GTM Podcast Lessons from Building Thoughtspot and Nutanix with Ajeet Singh
Ajeet Singh is the founder of not one but two unicorns– Ajeet founded Nutanix in 2009 which went public in 2016 and was the largest tech IPO of that year. It is today a public company making well over 1B in ARR and has more than 23K+ customers worldwide. Nutanix is a leader in the hyper-converged infrastructure space. Ajeet also founded Thoughtspot in 2012 which is valued at over 4B+. Thoughtspot is in the Business Intelligence space, taking on incumbents such as Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, and many others.
Topics we discuss:
* How should founders think about risks in their business? This is a super valuable framework to have!
* Taking care of your mental health (especially in a market like today).
* How to think about AI and how they did that at Thoughtspot as super early adopters (hint: it’s not about the tech).
* What to do when you the wrong customer wants your product.
* His biggest learning and advice for founders. And yes, its about your people!
* How important is “move fast and break things”?
Quotes:
“It’s a great time to start a company – Anytime is a great time to start a company if that is what one wants to do.” — @ajeets [0:04:50]
“When things change, you have to adapt; you have to have a culture that is adaptable.” — @ajeets [0:05:50]
“I find that market risk is not something you can control to any extent, it’s beyond you. Execution risk is something you can control by building a great team, culture, empowering people, being ambitious, [and] being adaptable. So, I like low market risk and high execution risk.” — @ajeets [0:07:37]
“You have to be conscious of [market risk and execution risk]. Whatever type of risk you’re taking, make sure that you then take action to mitigate that and actually thrive on that – value doesn’t get created without taking risks.” — @ajeets [0:09:44]
“2023 is the year in which the whole world is in a big hackathon. It’s a big hackathon, we’re all experimenting, we’re all learning. Nobody really knows exactly how some of these things are going to play out – So, I think it’s a great time to experiment; try; learn; [and] fail.” — @ajeets [0:29:32]
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
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