Season 1 | Episode 5 

Chitra: Welcome to the fifth episode of The Tech Icon! Hi, my name is Chitra.

 

Aditya: Hello, my name is Aditya and we're going to be your hosts for the show.

 

Chitra: Our guest today is Dheeraj Pandey, a pioneer and a visionary who dares to dream and then relentlessly execute. He's built not one but two unicorns — DevRev and Nutanix. Currently, he is the CEO and co-founder of DevRev, an AI native platform that believes in operationalizing generative AI through a robust knowledge graph. Valued at $1.15 billion, the company recently closed its $100 million Series A.

 

Prior to DevRev, Dheeraj was the CEO and co-founder at Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software that raised a total of 315 million in venture capital, witnessed a 131 percent surge in its stock price on its public debut, recently reported an annual revenue of $2.15 billion, and has a market cap of $17 billion.

 

Dheeraj also sits on the board of Adobe. He did his bachelor's in computer science from IIT Kanpur, and his master's from the University of Texas at Austin. His flight from India to the United States was his first ever — a flight he boarded with the hope for a better tomorrow, and with just $900 in his pocket.

 

We are beyond delighted to have him on the show. Dheeraj, you are a technology icon.

 

Aditya: Welcome. Welcome to episode five of The Tech Icon.

 

Dheeraj: Thank you. Thank you, Chitra. And thank you, Aditya. It's a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to really connect and get to know you folks as well.

 

Aditya: Same here. Okay, let's hear your story of courage, grit, and compassion. To kick things off, I'd like to take you back in time to the day and the moment where you were at airport saying byes to your family. What was running through your mind?

 

Dheeraj: Now, you're taking me back in time, I was not even 22, I was 21. And my parents and a lot of my close family was there to see me off. I think the most important thing was to reach on time because, you know, again, I had never taken a flight, forget about an international flight. And one of the things that I had gone through is I bought a ticket, but they had actually de-boarded me because Air India was full and now I was in United.

 

Like, you know, there was this whole sort of hullabaloo about like de-boarding and re-boarding and all this stuff. And I had to take an extra hop to go via New York and stuff. So all I want to do was to land and then find my student guide. They used to have student guides back then. When I was actually landing, I figured it actually was a smaller city than I had thought America to be. I'm like, wow, this looks like a sleepy town. Even my hometown, which is Patna in India, looked like it was more buzzy than Austin, Texas back in the day. But when I land and I actually meet the friends out there, very quickly, I make some good friends and I realized it's actually a pretty hip and pretty cool town.

 

Aditya: Very cool. And that was the first flight you ever took? How was the experience?

 

Dheeraj: You know, I slept on a bench in London. I had this little handbag, which was pretty clumsy. It was a big handbag and had my transcripts and all the stuff. Like I used to be paranoid about losing stuff, like a passport and all this stuff. I actually used that as a pillow and slept on a bench in London because I was going to London >> New York >> JFK. And from there, it was TWA, an airline that you probably don't even know or remember, but Chitra might remember. There used to be an airline called TWA, and that was my final leg from New York to Austin, Texas. Pretty tiring.

 

It probably took me 40 hours to reach, but I land there and my student guide was there, his name is Ashis Tarafdar. He was also a PhD student. And I had a fellowship from the department. It was called Microelectronics and Computer Development Fellowship, the MCD. The reason why the acronym was important because they had come up with an expletive for that because that expletive would actually say how little we had to work and we would get paid for everything. And basically, we didn't have to pay for tuition or anything else, but we also were getting paid a stipend, which is comfortable $1,500 back in the day in 1997, 1998. That time frame every month was actually a pretty big deal. So UT Austin and the computer science department did a lot for me, which is the reason why we've gone back and done so much giving back as well.

 

Aditya: Nice. A very long and tiring experience. Okay. While we'll focus on your journey for the most part, let's take a moment to learn about your current venture.

 

Chitra: Thanks, Adi. So Dheeraj, what is your vision for DevRev?

 

Dheeraj: You know, it's to really take a step back and say, what's gone on in business software in the last 20, 30 years. What SaaS did 20 years ago was to just move locations from on-prem to the public cloud. It was big. That location change was a big deal. It was a cultural shift. IT was struggling with trying to put hardware and patch security to upgrades and ops, and sandbox and testing and development. All this stuff was too much work. They could never really get to solving the needs of the business.

 

So SaaS companies like Salesforce and others came and said, hey, we can do all that boring stuff for you. So you can focus on business. And one of the key things about that was APIs. You could now use APIs. Now your partners — it could be your system integrators or your Salesforce partner or someone else — could collaborate with you all with a central location. No need to worry about firewalls and coming to office and things like that. You could really do collaboration with cloud as your crucible and the temple where things are happening.

 

In the last 20 years, we created lots and lots of SaaS companies, and there's so many of them but none of them talk to each other. It's the same problem that SaaS 1.0 was really going to solve for. Too many teams, too much hardware, too much patching, too many software pieces didn't come together. I think we have a similar problem right now, and AI actually can really do a lot to bring it all together. The best operating systems of the last 30 years, including the iPhone, the iOS, and even the Android, but also AWS and all these public cloud hyperscalers, what they've done is to integrate a lot. They basically left shifted complexity and said, look, worry about bigger, better things as opposed to worrying about all the boring stuff.

 

I think it's an opportunity for AI now to really bring all this business software pieces together. We talk about a knowledge graph, a knowledge graph of a company that has never existed up until now — which is about the customers, the products, the build, the employees, their work, the users, there are activities and sessions, all the unstructured documents that need to come together at one place. Now, it's easy to search, and search is imminent. You can actually do conversational search. You can now do easy analytics. We'll build all that stuff for you.

 

You don't have to spend millions of dollars and hundreds of people to actually do analytics, like Customer 360 or Product 360. Customer 360 has been a multi-billion-dollar industry in the last five years alone, and it's so bad. This industry is so bad right now that nothing gets answered, let alone things that you can really go and do a call to action on. The last piece is workflow. I think we need to really think about autonomous things in the enterprise, and AI can really help build those agents. In our business, we've built this agent operating system. Our customers can actually build agents. They can sit next to human agents, and we want to make sure that human agents working in customer support and product management, software development, and sales operations can all work together with the AI agents that we want to go and build for the enterprise.

 

Chitra: Awesome. So, enterprise Search, building AI agents, and analytics — Is that a fair summarization? Then I love how you said left-shifting complexity. That was so cool.

 

Dheeraj: Yeah. Basically, the Agent OS is about search, analytics, and workflow. It's like Windows, what Windows was to a lot of people. But there'd be no Windows without Excel, PowerPoint, and Word — the three apps. Excel, PowerPoint, and Word made Windows possible. So in our case, the Agent OS is the thing that you use with search, analytics, and workflows to build agents. But we couldn't have built this operating system without our three apps. The three apps are support app. It's a modern AI native support app. It's a build app that replaces Atlassian Jira. And the other grow app, which actually replaces Salesforce, the sales CRM. And I think all of this is done in a conversational AI interface. So you don't have to come to new apps. You can stay in your existing place and use conversation search, conversational analytics, and conversation workflows.

 

Chitra: Awesome. And congratulations on your recent fundraise. That was quite a series, A, Dheeraj! To be honest, I haven't heard of a lot of $100 million Series A rounds, or for that matter, $50 million seed round. Now, is that the new normal or is that to you?

 

Dheeraj: I think it's obviously the people, it's the combination of everything we had done. I didn't want to value the company until we built a moat. And so we spent the last three years building a great moat of a platform. And now as we go sell, we don't have to worry about changing the wings of a plane at 35,000 feet. It's hard to change the wings of a plane at 35,000 feet.

 

In my previous company, we took a long time to get to enterprise-grade sort of features and capabilities and building the platform. And we also had to change the wings of a plane at 35,000 feet as a business model change, which is what we did at Nutanix after going public. And I wanted to make sure we could, again, left shift all that stuff architecturally. We waited long enough before we thought that we have this, there's a product market fit here. And then it's actually fair to the investors, fair to our employees, fair to everybody else.

 

Now, whether it's me or it's the market, I think it's a combination of everything, as you know. There's not many companies today that can actually say, we will replace your legacy apps as well. Everybody's trying to build these surfaces, which will actually sit on top of legacy. But it's really a lipstick on the pig. At the end of the day, you have to replace the systems of record as well. We are the only company, an AI native company, that's saying, we'll replace your Salesforce, we'll replace your Atlassian, we'll replace your Zendesk, and we'll replace your Intercom. I think that is a pretty bold statement down there.

 

Chitra: That's huge, for sure. How do you think your tech is impacting human lives?

 

Dheeraj: I think if you look at the struggle of the white-collared professional, especially in the last five years, a lot of it has been around distributed workforce, remote peers, 12-hour time zone differences between these peers. Lots of travel as well. Of course, there was a time when everybody could just work from home. So I feel like work has become so pervasive. There are no lines between work and life, and it has taken away your weeknights and weekdays as well. So when people ask and of course, there are a lot of debates, hook up, or discussions about — Is AI utopian or is it dystopian? Because in a dystopian world, you could say it's going to take away everything from humans. In a utopian world, you're like, wow, this is going to be so awesome. That's going to be better than humans.

 

I feel like at the very least, AI has to do one simple thing in our lives which is to give our weeknights and our weekends back. And if it can do that, [it's huge]. Now I feel that it's not easy for AI to do that because machines can look at previous data to go and probably do a few things of our past. But the goalpost also keeps moving. The problems keep getting bigger and bigger. So I'm not sure we'll actually get in a meaningful way our nights and weekends back. But that's the goal of AI. That's the goal that I would love to actually see our software actually go and reach as well.

 

Chitra: Cool. Now for the next section, let's take a walk down the memory lane to celebrate your journey and inspire the world. Adi, over to you.

 

Aditya: Sure. The childhood experiences really shape one into their future self. So let's get to know a bit about your early years. Was there anything unique about your childhood?

 

Dheeraj: You know, I grew up in Bihar. My other friend, Bipul Sinha, is also from the same state. In fact, my co-founder is also from the same state. Now it's a different state because they split the two states. But it was a very dysfunctional state. You know, it was the poorest state. It was the most lawless state, the most corrupt state of India. It actually had a GDP per capita that was like sub-Saharan Africa, so it really needed a lot of work. The only good thing was that there was good education. And my parents sacrificed a lot, especially my mom. She had to sell all her jewelry to make sure that she could pay for our English-medium education and stuff. And we got a lot of help from our maternal side, our paternal side, our uncles, and aunts. They all actually helped us quite a bit through the journey. And yeah, the society actually stepped up to help us to get through the tough times that my father had because of how much corruption was actually evident in that state where he was.

 

Aditya: Wow, with all those factors like the low GDP per capita, did that really affect you?

 

Dheeraj: I mean, look, sometimes they say it's good to have a dysfunctional childhood for you to really go have a little bit of a chip on the shoulders. In fact, sometimes I worry about my children that they have seen very little dysfunction. You know, this whole idea of anti-fragility, the fact that the more pressure you apply, the better the diamond gets. I think there's something about it that I worry about my children. But by and large, I would actually say that everything that happened to me in my childhood was actually for good. Because when you look at the worst and say, if these things are as bad as they are right now, they cannot be as bad as the way things were back then. So the worst is not bad enough.

 

Aditya: Yeah, that's a great mindset. And one last question. You said you grew up in the same city as your co-founder. Is that how you met him?

 

Dheeraj: Same state. No, I met Manoj at IIT Kanpur in my undergrad days. And then obviously, we were very good friends. Then in 2013, he joined Nutanix when we were four years old. And then he was the person I would lean on a lot for all our transformations going from a single appliance company to a software company, to a subscription company, to a cloud company. He helped through a lot in that journey as well. I mean, one of the reasons why Nutanix is what it is, is because of the fact that we kept transforming ourselves and made ourselves pervasive, available on everybody's machines, and to eventually go and have people rent our software — not just own our software, but rent our software through a subscription company.

 

Aditya: Yeah, very cool. What did your parents do?

 

Dheeraj: My father was a doctor in the state government and my mom was a school teacher and then a homemaker.

 

Aditya: And what did you want to become growing up? Did you have a dream?

 

Dheeraj: You know, not that I could remember. I mean, by the time I was 17, I had gotten into computer science, and I'm like, okay, I got to really figure this out. And I probably would have gone and done a PhD in economics. But then I had an intervention for my cousin, who was here in the US. He had just finished his MBA from Stanford. And he's like, why would you even think of economics when computer science is happening, the Internet is happening, you know, HTTP, HTML, browsers, mosaic, Netscape — all this was happening in 1993. And he's like, this is the best time to be in computer science. And that kind of changed my trajectory, and the rest is history.

 

Aditya: The rest is history. Were there certain values that you all believed in as a family, that you still hold dear?

 

Dheeraj: I think from my dad, it is about humility. And my mom, fierce resolve. She's probably one of the most resident people that I know. And I really owe it to both of them, the humility and fierce resolve.

 

Aditya: That is really cool. Next, let's dive into your educational journey and get some advice for students. So which high school did you attend?

 

Dheeraj: The name of my high school, it was a Jesuit school. It was called St. Michael's Higher Secondary School.

 

Aditya: Okay. And then you went to IIT Kanpur for a bachelor's in computer science. In fact, you took the JEE, one of the hardest exams in the country two times to get to the branch of your choice. Was it worth the risk?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah. I mean, look, I had done really well in my high school, but I was kind of a happy-go-lucky guy. I'm like, okay, I can walk into JEE and just take it without much prep. The first time, I got a rank of 1400 odd. And I really wanted to come to Kanpur because it was the best campus, you know. I didn't want to just go to any other campus. I'm like, okay, let's figure out if I can get what we used to call a branch change, a major change from what I joined with, from civil engineering to computer science. And then within two months, I realized that the probability is lower to actually go from here to computer science than if I went out and took the exam again, the probability is actually better.

 

Now you have to be in the top hundred to really get into computer science, at least back in the day, IIT Kanpur would close below 100. But I took my chances, everybody was like, wow, that's the biggest risk that you'd be taking in your life. I was only 17. I said, I think it's worth it, because the worst is not bad enough. I can always walk into any other engineering college. And so I did, and I think I got into top 100 at rank of 84, and got into CS and software.

 

In many ways, that has brought the creative side of me. I mean, I've learned a lot in design. I've learned about empathy, I've learned about being loved, because the market, if you build delightful products, the market loves you. And I don't think anybody would say no to that, just being loved by your creation, your creativity, and not just the product, but the service, the customer support, the humility, the subservience, the servant leadership, the fact that you build a team around you. I mean, creating wealth. In the last company, we created probably more than a thousand millionaires. People bought their homes and bought cars and paid off their mortgage. I think it's all worth it.

 

Aditya: Would you call yourself a good student?

 

Dheeraj: So I probably didn't attend a lot of classes. So I don't know if that way I was a good student, but I was very good at being disciplined about not compromising on grades. I would crush it. I would walk into an exam and people were like [surprised]. I used to have this class called Set Theory and Boolean Algebra, an amazing math and computer science class. And I would walk in and I would just kind of lay it out like that. And people would be like, dude, how did you do that? And there were friends of mine who would spend so much time preparing for it. It felt good that, look, I can visually think, I can reason better than others. So in that way, I was a good student.

 

Aditya: So that discipline and also your cognitive abilities really helped you, huh?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, the discipline of saying I'm not going to compromise on grades. Now, that meant that right before the exams and everything else, I'd actually do all nighters and do all sorts of things to gather notes. I used to be a really good note taker in the first two years. My notes were everywhere in the campus. People would just take, we used to call it photocopies back then, because it was the physical world of writing. I had red pen and blue pen and green pen in which I would take notes. It was important to, just like LLMs today memorize a lot when they're sent repeated facts, I think a lot of that note taking was to build the LLM here.

 

Aditya: Then you transitioned to UT Austin. How was that experience?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, I had a fork in the road. I could have gone to Urbana-Champaign. I had a fellowship from UT Austin. I had a research assistantship from Urbana-Champaign. I had some really good admissions. I had scholarships from USC and Northwest and Columbia, all these places, and I figured I'll actually get to Austin. It's a top 10 school in computer science and fairly good at distributed systems, which is what I was passionate about back then. I was a PhD student, so I didn't have to take any calls. Right after undergrad, they said, look, you can be a fellow and you can be a student of the department and just go and pursue a PhD.

 

And after a couple of years, I went on a leave of absence because the bubble, the.com bubble was big, and I had to at least buy a car and a home for my parents. I'm like, this is the time. They never owned a home. They never owned a car. So there were other things that were also pressing for me, and I figured I would take a leave of absence and go back to finish my PhD and never did. I started working at Trilogy, which was a great company back in the day in Austin, Texas. And within a year, I just literally drove to California and started working here before the bubble had burst.

 

Aditya: Were there any challenges that you had to navigate through? And did you have any learnings from these experiences?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, I mean, the biggest one was the fact that even though everything was paid for and I used to get a pretty healthy stipend, I actually came out with a loan because I used to spend $5,000 plus every month calling my wife-to-be on the other side of the world. Because it was $2.24 a minute to even get in touch with her. I mean, we were long distance dating for three and a half years. And I took loans from friends and everybody else, and it was not enough because it was so expensive to actually do those calls back then. Now, looking back, now everything is free. But one of the lessons is that when you love someone, you go all in. It's all or nothing. And that was actually a really good lesson. She's been my wife for 24 years now. We have three great kids. We've known each other for 27 years now.

 

Aditya: Yeah, that determination really worked out.

 

Dheeraj: Yep, absolutely.

 

Aditya: Okay. And would you call yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

 

Dheeraj: You know, I think I'm an ambivert. Like with my friends, I am witty, I'm humorous, I'm self-deprecating, I'm boisterous, I'm all that. But when it's kind of a networking event, I'm not like just shaking hands and like, excuse me, I've got to step out and excuse me. I don't go and try to collect business cards or phone numbers. So in many ways, I'm actually in the middle.

 

Aditya: Right. So it depends on the situation?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, absolutely.

 

Aditya: Okay. Finally, what is your advice to students and parents struggling with the pressure of school these days?

 

Dheeraj: I would say normalize that, you know, because there is a lot of softness that has actually crept into hardship. And this is what I was saying earlier about adversity. I think we have to take more adversity early on in life. And for a lot of you and a lot of my children's generation, they have not seen real adversity to the extent like, we do not have money to say, okay, can we do any more than potatoes today? Right, that's how hard it was. So you folks have actually seen a lot less in that sense.

 

It takes some hardship because pressure actually creates good character, strong character, and stuff. And we need a lot of that in our society going forward as well, because if anything, you folks will actually face tougher times with let's say climate change and what's really happening with a new Cold War emerging. It like two sides, I mean. In many ways when we were growing up, the Cold War was almost done. By 1989-1990, the Berlin Wall had fallen and East and West Germany had come together. So I think during our growing up years, the world was a lot more namby-pamby as we say, about coming together like it's one world and globalization. You folks will hit into de-globalization and Cold War and climate change and crypto wars and all sorts of things that we never got to see. So get tough.

 

Aditya: Yeah, that's some great advice. As you said, pressure is what creates diamonds. Okay, now I'll pass it over to my co-host to cover the next segment, work and entrepreneurship.

 

Chitra: So get tough, it is. What awesome advice! On to entrepreneurship now. So what was your first job out of college?

 

Dheeraj: Out of my grad school, the first job was with Trilogy software. Now, I did intern at Oracle in 1998, at the height of the bubble. And then I decided not to join Oracle, even though I had a full-time offer from there. I stayed back in Austin, Texas and worked for Trilogy.

 

Chitra: And how did entrepreneurship happen? What did the initial years look like?

 

Dheeraj: I think it was always going to small things. Like even in 2000, I had twice rejected Microsoft, and I had taken up a fork in the road. I'm like, I'm going to go to California, not to Washington, Seattle. Because I wanted small things. The Trilogy was small compared to Oracle, way smaller compared to Oracle. Zambeel, that company that I came and joined, was a Vinod-funded company. In the year 2000, it was a very small startup, a 20 people startup, as opposed to what Microsoft would have been. Then of course, I cooled my heels at Oracle, but I learned a lot about enterprise software development and such. What does it mean to ship big to large enterprises? What about security and compliance and quality and everything else? But the quest for going small was always there.

 

So I went small to another startup which was really in fact, many ways competing against Oracle too. And then from there, there was this quest for I think there's something in the gut. The gut is not wrong. Give it the sunlight, the daylight that it needs. And that's how startups happen. You basically feel like there's a gut and that gut needs to be given its due. So let's go and give that gut its due, which is how Nutanix happened. You know, we said, look, we believe in data. Two of my co-founders and me, we knew each other for a decade or more. I said, look, we have a gut. I know it's the worst time. If anything, the market is gutted right now. No pun intended. In 2009, it was the worst time to start a company. But there's never a good time to start a company. If anything, the best time is when the market is gutted so that you spend two-three years building a product so that when the market opens up and the purse strings are looser, you actually get to start selling, which is exactly what happened at Nutanix.

 

Chitra: Cool. Then you went on to build a pretty iconic company. What were some of the key challenges that you encountered along the way?

 

Dheeraj: Compared to DevRev, the platform was not stable at all. If anything, the underlying commodity hardware, the VMware under us, was not built for such a serious app that we were building on top of it. It's like imagine a music app on iPhone, and if you're trying to stream music, the iOS keeps crashing. That's how it was in the initial three to four years. So the product was hard. I would say that money was harder, simply because it was not as cheap as money became 10 years later or seven years later. But we were very tenacious. We said, we're not going to give up. We just had to say, if you're tenacious, then luck favors you as well. And luck continued to favor us in those first four or five years.

 

I lost my co-founders. They went on to do good things and build great company for themselves. Everybody wanted to spread their wings. And sometimes it happens that three good people, they probably can't all be in one company. They all won't build a good company of their own. So there was enough adversity, which actually helped shape the character of the company.

 

And over time, I think we got better. We got better at selling. We got better at building better, reliable products. And the best part is customer support was such a big part of our thinking. We said, look, we got to really embrace our customers, hug them tight, and think about collaboration with them. You're not just collaborating with your own people, you're collaborating with your customer. What does their operating mode look like? And we kept it that way forever. When we had 20,000 customers in 2020, we're doing almost a couple of billion dollars. Our net promoter score was very, very high.

 

Chitra: Wow. So that tenacity really paid off. And then came the much-anticipated morning of September 30th, 2016, the morning of the IPO. Can you relive that day for us, Dheeraj, and take us through that roller coaster of emotions that you may have experienced?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, I mean, I know it's clichéd to say this, but I didn't feel that different. It was basically a release of something like, okay, this is a pressure release valve because I actually wanted to take longer to go public. We had barely been six years old when we filed our S1, imagine that, a six-year-old company filing an S1. I'm like, there's still so much to be done, because I knew cloud was upon us. Subscription model change was happening, and I'm like, we could do this as a private company.

 

But every employee is like, you're thinking like a founder, that's selfish. What about people buying their homes and cars and all? It needs some liquidity, the need for liquidity. And I finally relented, and I felt good for the fact that we went out there, we made a mark, because the nine months of nothingness in 2016, when nobody had gone public, because of Saudis really getting rid of assets, then SaaS crashed in the second quarter, and then Brexit happened. So there was a big event happening every quarter, so when we went public, it felt good.

 

Then of course, then in my head, I'm like, okay, this journey is barely done, because we're still an appliance company, the world is thinking about buying compute by the minute and storage by the hour, and we're selling five year deals. So how do you really atomize and miniaturize ourselves from selling five year products? Like imagine selling big DVD records and vinyl records when people are trying to buy 99-cent songs, or maybe even saying, why do we need to own songs if I can stream them from Spotify?

 

Chitra: Sure. Congratulations. And what's your take on the much debated founder mode?

 

Dheeraj: I think Silicon Valley is fashionable. This whole industry is quite fashionable. I feel like people who have not built big companies, they become good marketers and podcasters and pundits. But I don't think they actually even understand what that means. Some of them could probably be good investors. They have good taste that way. But many of them have not lived the founder mode.

 

I think for the last 50 years, I mean, who's a better founder than Larry Ellison? Think about it. And he never has to use the word founder mode ever. Right? I mean, he has been a survivor and a thriver of 50 years now. In 1977, he started Oracle when he was 36. And by 1990, he was almost 50. He was written off because there was side letter business, Oracle stock had gone down, they restated the revenue. And that was 1990. 1990. This is almost 34 years ago. And Larry is right now probably one of the top five richest people in the world. Oracle is a $400 plus billion dollar company. He has gone to own more stock now, at least owns more of Oracle than he owned 10, 15, 20 years ago. So I feel like some of these things are just fashion. Like New York has fashion. You know, Hollywood has fashion. This is San Francisco's fashion. I don't think much of it. I think, you know, found the mode has been there forever.

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Chitra: Cool. With that, let's get over to some fun stuff. Adi?

 

Aditya: Are there any books you really hold valuable?

 

Dheeraj: Quite a few, I would say. I mean, one of my favorite, all time favorites is Only the Paranoid Survive. My all-time favorite movie is Darkest Hour.

 

Aditya: My sources tell me that your children make fun of your accent. Is that accurate?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure you actually read in between the lines too, that I'm not a native English speaker. Although my mom and my dad insisted that I go through good English medium schools, which basically helps me get to here. But yeah, they do make fun of me. And the best part is that it doesn't rile me, actually. I feel really good. I make fun of myself right after, because I feel like if I do anything else, they'll do more of a deal.

 

Aditya: Yeah, that's funny. And finally, with Halloween and Diwali falling on the same day this year, which festival do you choose to celebrate as a family?

 

Dheeraj: So I don't want to say this in front of my kids, but Halloween is not a festival. It's a great event for kids. I think Diwali is a festival. I think personally, at least for me, you have to figure out how to really balance their fun, which is what Halloween is, but also just be with friends and really think about lights and firecrackers and just relive some of the nostalgia of the past 40 plus years.

 

Aditya: We're now nearing the end of this episode of The Tech Icon and would love to get some final thoughts in this final segment. Over to you.

 

Chitra: Awesome. Let's conclude on a note of celebration and a note of giving back. So Dheeraj, what would you say to someone who wants to become like you?

 

Dheeraj: Well, they can be way better than me if they just thought about their brain as an LLM as well. See, LLMs are learning every day and a lot of it is repetition and reinforcement and stuff. And I think we can probably be as neuroplastic as a fine-tuned, post-trained LLM that we talked about today. So, your best is probably to come in your 50s and 60s and 70s if you can be like that, nothing like it. I think a lot of people peak early and then they kind of decay.

 

There's a really good word I learned recently. It's called 'adhogami.' Adhogami is a Hindi word that means there's the natural decay that actually a brain, a culture, a society, a company, a person goes through and you have to keep defying it. And it's so good to think about, I mean, I'm going to be 50 next year. I'm like, you know, maybe my best years are ahead of me, the next 20 years. I mean, Warren Buffett, he was in 50 when he was still trying to figure out what's the best way to really build Berkshire Hathaway. So I feel like that's the best way to really keep improving, being a better person, saying sorry and thank yous and being the LLM that keeps growing.

 

Chitra: You have such a strong sense of giving back. You and your wife, Swapna, donated $10 million to UT Austin for the development of personalized medicine. Why is that cause so important to you?

 

Dheeraj: Yeah, I mean, we've given almost $20 million in the last three years to various universities, you know, trying to really blur the lines between computer science and biology, because right now, there's a big gap. You know, biologists struggle with software and AI thinking and AI people struggle with problem-solving. They don't have good problems because they don't understand how it really works in the body. So it's about bringing them together, which by the way has been the cause for me in any company. Well, this company is about bringing business software. The last company was bringing a lot of IT teams and infrastructure together. I think there's a lot of value in actually busting silos and bringing teams together and bringing software together and bringing computing and biology together. So, computational oncology will be a great way for me to also selfishly learn about AI because they also need a ton of AI. And hence all the philanthropy.

 

Chitra: That's amazing. Well, on that note, Dheeraj, thank you very much for joining us in our mission of giving back and really inspiring students and entrepreneurs across the board. We wish you the very best. Thank you.

 

Dheeraj: Thank you. Thank you to both of you.

 

Aditya: Thank you so much.