Cloud Wars and Company Wars: Play Nice But Win

Oct 2, 2021

Michael Dell, Founder and CEO of Dell Technologies, discusses his latest book, offering insights from his 37 years of navigating corporate dynamics. He reveals the challenges of innovating in public markets versus private enterprises. The conversation touches on cloud computing's evolution, edge technology, and the complexities of industry consolidation. Dell addresses the crucial role of AI in software development and the importance of adapting business strategies amid market transitions, all while emphasizing the significance of reputation in entrepreneurship.

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INSIGHT

Distributed Infrastructure

Customers are not moving entirely to public clouds, but adopting hybrid and edge computing models.
Infrastructure will continue to be distributed due to data sovereignty, security, cost, and real-time processing needs.

INSIGHT

IT Expansion Cycles

IT infrastructure goes through cycles of collapse and expansion, with each expansion increasing the Total Addressable Market.
The current expansion phase involves data explosion, faster connectivity, and edge computing, indicating a growing TAM.

INSIGHT

Cloud Economics for SaaS

The economics of cloud for SaaS companies are poorly understood, especially regarding margins.
Infrastructure becomes Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) for SaaS, making choice and flexibility crucial.

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There are lots of challenges in being public while trying to innovate, and limits to being a private company as well; but it's rare to see a company go public then private then back to public again. As is the case with Dell Technologies, one of the largest tech companies -- which went private 2012-2013 and then also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare 2015-2016 (and which we wrote about here at the time).

Is there a method to the madness? How does one not just start, but keep, and transform, their company and business? Especially as it adapts to broader, underlying tech platform shifts. Michael Dell shares all this in his upcoming new book, Play Nice to Win: A CEO's Journey from Founder to Leader... he also, tellingly, may be one of the longest-standing founder-CEOs (37 years so far).

Because this is really a story about innovation, who decides, who judges, who does it, and where: In the markets, in public, in private; in the both the big picture and the inner detailed workings of a business beyond "cells in a spreadsheet"; and even in fighting -- or harnessing! -- narratives, whether it's the demise-of-PC or cloud wars 1.0 /2.0... And where trends like the cost paradox of cloud, and "end of cloud" edge computing, among others like AI & ML, also come in. In this special book-launch episode of the a16z Podcast with Marc Andreessen, Martin Casado, and Sonal Chokshi debate the Cloud Wars to the Company Wars (along with some behind-scenes stories and even some star wars) with Michael Dell... and whether you can really play nice to win.

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