Dheeraj Pandey, Founder & CEO of Nutanix, on Refactoring to Earn the Trust of the Enterprise

Dheeraj Pandey is the Founder, CEO & Chairman of Nutanix. He brings a wealth of experience of working at high growth enterprise software companies. Prior to founding Nutanix, Dheeraj was the VP of Engineering at Aster Data (now Teradata), where he helped build the product and its engineering team from the ground up. At Oracle, he managed the storage engine group for Oracle Database/Exadata, and co-authored numerous patents in the area of distributed databases.

Dheeraj is a Ph.D. dropout from University of Texas (Austin), where he was a Graduate Fellow of CS. That didn’t stop him from founding the fastest growing startup in history in 2009. In 2014 (the companies 5th full year), Nutanix eclipsed 100 Million in revenue. In this episode, we learn that behind the rosy story, there were a few near death experiences for the company. Inspired by Apple’s playbook, Dheeraj applied simplicity and elegance to a “very nerdy, geeky thing called web scale architecture for data centers” (his words). Dheeraj engineered significant transitions, turning Nutanix from a device company to a software business to a subscription software business. It doesn’t stop there. In the next 10 years, Dheeraj and his team are committed to making computing invisible anywhere (edge, core, public cloud). Beyond business, Dheeraj emphasizes the importance of building strong ties around you and finding joy at home. His movie recommendations? Darkest Hour and The Post.