from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley Palo Alto California this is a cute conversation hello and welcome to this special cube conversation here in Palo Alto California cube headquarters I'm Jennifer echoes the cube our guest here is Megan Eisenberg CMO of a new hot company called trip actions formerly the CMO at MongoDB before that taki sign we've known each other some advisory boards great to see you yes great to see you as well so exciting new opportunity for you at trip actions just transitioned from MongoDB which by the way had great earnings they did what was the big secret to Mongo DB z earnings tell us well it's fresh and I think they're executing and their growth is amazing they're bringing their costs down I mean they're they've got product market fit their developers love them and so I'm proud and not surprised you're there for four years yeah transformed their go-to market so that fruits coming off the tree yes yeah it's exciting to see the you know process people technology all coming together and seeing them scale and do so well in the markets yes you know being here in 20 years living in California Palo Alto you see the rocket ships the ones that flame out the ones that make it and there's a pattern right when you start to see companies that are attracting talent ones that have pedigree VCS involved yeah raising the kind of rounds in a smart way where there's traction product market fit you kind of take special notice and one of the companies that you're now working for trip actions yes seems to have the parameters so it's off the pad it's going up its orbit or taking off you guys have really growing you got a new round of funding one hundred fifty million dollars yes unique application in a market that is waiting to be disrupted yes travel about company you work for transactions trip actions is a fast growing business travel platform we service customers like we work slack zoom box and we're growing we're adding 200 customers a month and it's amazing just to see these fast-growing companies right when they hit product market fit I think the keys are they've gotten a massive addressable market which we have 800 billion online travel they're solving a pain and they're disrupting a legacy the legacy providers that are out there we're three and a half years old and we are you know really focused on the customer experience giving you the choice that you want when you book making it easy down to six minutes not an hour to book something and we've got 24/7 support which not many can compete with you know it's interesting you know I look at these different ways of innovation especially SAS and mobile apps you know chapter one of this wave great economics yeah and once you get that unit economics visibility say great SAS efficacious happened but now we're kind of in a chapter two I think you guys kind of fit into this chapter to where it's not just SAS cuz you know we've seen travel sites get out there you book travel it's chapter two of SAS is about personalization you see machine learning you got cloud economics new ventures are coming out of the woodwork where you could take a unique idea innovate on it and disrupt a category that seems to be what you guys are doing talk about this new dynamic because this is not just another travel app when you guys are doing gets a unique angle on this applying some tech with the Corpse talked about that this chapter to kind of assess business I think when I think about chapter 2 I think about all the data that's out there I think about the machine learning I think about how we understand the user and personalize everything to them to make it frictionless and these apps that I love on my phone are because they they know what I want before I want it and I just took a trip to Dallas this week and the app knew I needed to check in it was one click told me my flight was delayed gave me options checked me in for my hotel I mean it was just amazing experience that I haven't seen before and it's really if you think about that that business travel trip there's 40 steps you have to do along the way there's got to be a way to make it easier because all we want to do is get to the business meeting and get back we don't want to deal with weather we don't want to deal with Hotel issues or flight changes and our app is specific to when you look at it you've got a chat 24/7 and someone's taking care of you that concierge service and we can do that because the amount of data we're looking at we're learning from it and we make it easier for travel manager half the people go rogue and don't even book through their travel solution it's because it's not tailored to them so this is the thing I want to get it so you guys aren't like a consumer app per se you have a specific unique target audience on this opportunity its travel management I'm I'm gonna date myself but back when I broke into the business they would have comes like Thomas Cook would handle all the travel for youlet Packard when I worked there in the 80s and you had these companies I had these contracts and they would do all the travel for the employees yes today it's hard to find that those solutions out there yes I would say it's hard to find one that you love and trip Actions has designed something that our travelers love and it is it's for business travel it's for your business trips it's taking care of your air your hotel your car your rail whatever you need and making sure that you can focus on the trip focus on getting there and not just the horrible experience we've all had it you travel a lot I traveled certainly back and forth to the East Coast and to take those problems away so I can focus on my business is what it's so just just look at this right so you guys are off to unicorn the funding great valuation growing like crazy got employees so people looking for jobs because they're hiring probably yeah but you're targeting not consumers to download the app it's for businesses that want to have company policies and take all that pressure off yes of the low so as a user can't buy myself can't just use the app or get I know you can Nano that's the the the whole thing is that as a user there's three things we're providing to one inventory and choice so you go and you know all the options you get the flight you want it's very clear and art we have a new storefront where it shows you what's in policy what's not so we've got that its ease of use it's booking quickly nobody wants to waste time dealing with this stuff right you want to go in booked quickly and then when you're on the trip you need 24/7 support because things go wrong airline travel gets cancelled weather happens you need to change something in your trip and so yes the user has the app on their phone can book it can you do it fast and can get support if they need it so stand alone usually can just use it as a consumer app but when you combine with business that's the magic that you guys see is that the opportunity yes I should say as a consumer as a business traveler so you're doing it through your company so I'm getting reimbursed for the companies the company is your customer yes the company's our customer is the traveler yes okay got it so if we want to have a travel desk in our company which we don't have yet yes it would we would sign up as a company and then all your employees would have the ease of use to book travel so what happens what's the sum of the numbers in terms of customers you have said 200 month-over-month yes we're over 1500 customers we're adding 200 a month we've got some significant growth it's amazing to see product market and the cost of the solution tell people $25 a booking and there's no add-on costs after that if you need to make as many changes as you need because of the trip calls on it you do it so basically per transaction yes well Little Feat one of our dollars yes okay so how do you guys see this growing for the company what's the some of the initiatives you guys are doing a new app yes mo what's what's the plan it's a massive market 800 billion right and we've only just started we've got a lot of customers but we've got many more to go after we are international so we have offices around the world we have an Amsterdam office we've got customers travelling all over so we're you know continuing to deliver on that experience and bringing on more customers we just on-boarded we were ten thousand travelers and will continue to onboard more and more so as head of marketing what's the current staff you have openings you mentioned yet some some some open recs yes yes hi are you gonna build out I've got 20 open Rex on the website so I'm hiring in all functions we're growing that fast and what's the marketing strategy what's your plan can you give it a little teaser on yes thinking core positioning go to market what are some of the things you're thinking about building out marketing CloudStack kind of thing what's what's going on all of these things my three top focuses are one marketing sales systems making sure we have that mark tech stack and that partnership with the sales tech stack second thing is marketing sales alignment that closed-loop we're building we're building pipeline making sure when people come in there's a perfect partnership to service what they need and then our our brand and messaging and it's the phase I love in these companies it's really building and it's the people process and technology to do that in the core positioning is what customer service being the most user-friendly what's the core position we're definitely focused on the traveler I would say we're we're balancing customer experience in making sure we get that adoption but also for the travel managers making sure that they can administer the solution and they get the adoption and we align the ascent in the incentives between the traveler and the travel manager and customer profile what small munis I business to large enterprise we have SMB and we're going all the way up to enterprise yes has it been much of a challenge out there in the business travel side I'm just don't know that's why I'm asking is like because we don't have one I can see our r-cube team having travel challenge we always do no centralizing that making that available but it'd have to be easier is it hard to get is there a lot of business travel firms out there is what are some of the challenges that you guys are going after there well I I think what matters is one picking the solution and being able to implement it quickly we have customers implementing in a week right it's understanding how we load your policies get you on board get your cut you're you're really your employees traveling and so it's pretty fast onboarding and we're able to tailor solutions to what people need what are some of the policies that are typical that might be out there that people like yeah so maybe for hotels you may have New York and your your policy is $500 a night what the I would say a normal typical behavior would someone would book it at $4.99 they go all the way up to the limit we've actually aligned our incentives with the travel managers and the employees and that if you save your company money you save and get rewards back so let's say you book it for 400 that $100 savings $30 goes back to the employee and rewards they can get an Amazon card donate to Cherry charity whatever they'd like to kind of act like an owner cuz they get a kickback yes that's the dot so that's how you an interest adoption yes what other adoption concerns you guys building around with the software and or programs to make it easy to use and we're constantly thinking about the experience we want to make sure just I mean I think about what I used to drive somewhere I'd pull out a map and map it out and then I got lucky and you could do MapQuest and now you have ways we are that ways experience when you're traveling we're thinking about everything you need to do that customer when they leave their front door all the way to the trip all the things that can hang them up along the way we're trying to remove that friction that's a very example I mean Waze is a great service yes these Google Maps or even Apple Maps ways everyone goes to backed away yes yeah I don't I mean ways did cause a lot of Street congestion the back streets of Palo Alto we're gonna expedite our travelers well it's a great utility new company what what attracted you to the opportunity when was some of the because you had a kid going over there MongoDB what it was the yeah motivation to come over to the hot startup yeah you know I love disruptive companies I love massive addressable markets good investors and a awesome mission that I can get behind you know I'm a mom of three kids and I did a lot of travel I'm your typical road warrior and I wanted to get rid of the pain of travel and the booking systems that existed before trip actions and so I was drawn to the team the market and the product that's awesome well you've been a great CMO your career has been phenomenal of great success as a CPM mother of three you know the challenges of juggling all this life is short you got to be using these apps to make sure you get on the right plane I mean I know I'm always getting back for my son's lacrosse game or yes event at school this is these are like it's like ways it's not necessary in the travel portfolio but it's a dynamic that the users care about this is the kind of thing that you guys are thinking about is that right yeah definitely I mean I always think about my mom when she worked in having three daughters and I work and have three daughters I feel like I can do so much more I've got door - I've got urban sitter I've got ways I've got Google Calendar I've got trip actions right I've got all these technologies that allow me to do more and not focus on things that are not that productive and I have no value add on it just makes me more efficient and productive how about some of the tech before we get in some of the industry questions I want to talk about some of the advantages on the tech side is there any machine learning involved what's some what's not what's some of the secret sauce and the app yeah definitely we're constantly learning our users preferences so when you go in we start to learn what you what hotels you're gonna select what where do you like to be near the office do you like to be near downtown we're looking at your flights do aisle window nobody wants middle yes but we're we're learning about your behaviors and we can predict pretty closely one if you're gonna book and two what you're gonna book and as we continue learning you that's why we make you more efficient that's why we can do it in six minutes instead of an hour that's awesome so Megan a lot of things going on you've been a progressive marker you love Terry's tech savvy you've done a lot of implementations but we're in a sea change now where you know people that think differently they gonna think okay I need to be on an app for your case with with business travel it's real policies there so you want to also make it good for the user experience again people centric this personalization has been kind of a cutting edge concept now in this chapter to a lot of CMOS are either they're they're not are trying to get there what are you finding in the industry these days that's a best practice to help people cross that bridge as they think they cracked the code on one side then realize wow it's a whole another chapter to go you know I think traditionally a lot of times we think we need we're aligning very much with sales and that matters that go to market marketing sales aligned but when it comes to products and a customer experience it's that alignment with marketing and the product and engineering team and really understanding the customer and what they want and listening and hearing and testing and and making sure we're partnering in those functions in terms of distribution getting the earned concept what's your thoughts on her and media yeah I mean I definitely think it's the direction right there's a ton of noise out there so you've got to be on topic you've got to understand what people care about you've got to hit them in the channel that they care about and very quick right is you don't have time nobody's gonna watch something that's 30 minutes long you get seconds and so part of the earned is making sure you're relevant you what they care about and they can find you and content big part of that for you guys huge part of it yes and understanding the influencers in the market who's talking about travel who's who is out there leading ahead you know leading in these areas that travel managers go and look to you know making sure we're in front of them and they get to see what we're delivering I like how you got the incentives of the employees to get kind of a line with the business I mean having that kind of the perks yes if you align with the company policies the reward could be a Starbucks card or vacation one more time oh whatever they the company want this is kind of the idea right yeah they kind of align the incentives and make the user experience both during travel and post travel successful that's right yes making sure that they are incented to go but they have a great experience okay if you explain the culture of the company to someone watching then maybe interested in using the app or buying you guys as a team what's the trip actions culture like if you had to describe it yeah I would say one we love travel too we are fast growing scaling and we're always raising the bar and so it's learning and it's moving fast but learning from it and continually to improve it's certainly about the user all of the users so not just the travel manager but our travelers themselves we love dogs if you ever come to the Palo Alto office we've got a lot of dogs we love our pups and just you know building something amazing and it's hard to be the employees gonna know that's a rocket ship so it's great get a hold on you got a run hard yes that's the right personality to handle the pace because you're hiring a lot of people and I think that's a part of the learning we need continual learning because we are scaling so fast you have to reinvent what we need to do next and not a lot of people have seen that type of scale and in order to do it you have to learn and help others learn and move fast well great to see you thanks for coming in and sharing the opportunity to give you the final plug for the company share what who you what positions you're hiring for what's your key hires what are you guys trying to do give a quick plug to the company yeah so I mean we've grown 5x and employees so we're hiring across the board from a marketing standpoint I'm hiring in content and product marketing I'm hiring designers I'm hiring technical I you know I love my marketing technology so we're building out our tech stack our website pretty much any function all right you heard it here trip actions so when you get the product visibility those unit economics as they say in the VC world they've got a rocket ship so congratulations keep it up yeah now you're in palo alto you can come visit us here anytime yes love to Meagen Eisenberg CMO trip access here inside the cube I'm John Ferrier thanks for watching you [Music]

(upbeat instrumental music) >> Presenter: Live from New Orleans, Louisiana, it's theCUBE, covering dot .NEXT Conference 2018 brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of Nutanix .NEXT Conference here in New Orleans, Louisiana. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host Keith Townsend. Happy to welcome back to the program, also fresh off the keynote stage, the founder, CEO and Chairman of the publicly traded, Nutanix. Dheeraj Pandey, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you for your time by the way. >> Dheeraj, it's always a pleasure. One of the things we say about theCUBE is we want to take those conversations that we're having at events in the industry and share them out, and we've had the opportunity to have many of them over the years. So to start off with, when you take us back, some of the keynote you say five years ago couldn't really predict what was going to happen now. Yet I talked in our open here, the first interview that we did with you back in 2012, talking about the challenges over time in distributed architectures, it's more real today than it was back in 2012. Cloud has matured and is a little bit more nuanced today. The application space is exploding and changing more than ever. I guess inside a little bit, when you talk about the vision that you had for Nutanix, any major learnings on things that have surprised you along the way? And what things have played out exactly like you thought they would? >> Well, let's start with the easy one, which is the way things have played out, what we wanted them to play out like. I think the idea of commoditization of hardware, the fact that things will become pure software, all these hardware devices should look like apps was one of our sort of big prognosis early on, like six, seven, eight years ago. And largely, everybody is talking about software-defined everything. And that's not to say that hardware doesn't play a role, it's just that it becomes more invisible in the sense that with software running on top, and the fact that you have economies of scale coming with standardization in hardware, a lot of things will move to pure software. That's really worked out well. Disaggregation has worked out well in our favor. The fact that you'd stop buying big things and you start small and pay zero. I think consumerization has really, I mean and this is a word that is a cliche in many senses but what does it mean to have consumer-grade experience of enterprise grade systems, which is a paradox in itself to say that if consumer-grade experience with enterprise grade systems, but I think that has turned out really well for us. And in the staying power of everything eventually is can you build reliable systems? Can you build highly available systems? I mean, because building trust with the enterprise is really hard, and there's lots of startups that has come and gone, that have over-promised and under-delivered, and I think that's one of the things that has really worked in our favor to be really methodical and robust with the way we build our systems, especially the backend systems. And it's showing up in the front end of the world. Surprise, surprise, I think the fact that it's mega distributed now, not just distributed because distributed over LAN is one thing, but distributed over WAN is a very different thing altogether and you need to really think about the basic tenets of computer science, about state and migration and caching. And a lot of this is coherency, consistency, availability, network partitioning, there's a lot of things you need to think about in a very different way than you used to think about on a LAN itself, so... >> Yeah, I want to drill into one of those things. The move to a software model, you and I talked since the early days and Nutanix, at its core, it's software that you do. Changing how people think and consume and boy, getting the financial arm of companies, your channel partners, your salespeople and your customers, that's a challenging piece there. There was one of the customers I've already talked to this week that said one of the things we always had was I buy stuff and you tend to over buy and you could never kind of shrink down. Now, I go to a software model, I have a certain piece of it that I really understand and then I buy, and I can even kind of dial back as needed. Maybe explain some of the nuances and some of those changes. You know, how's the field doing with this? How's the channel adopting to this, and any customer stories? >> Yeah, I think there's, especially for ambitious companies, there's always a Netflix moment, there's always an Adobe Omniture moment. Look at these companies 10 years ago, Adobe was a $3 billion company in 2007. But they said we need to dramatically look at consumption model as the big differentiator going forward actually. Even though they had digitized blockbuster and Hollywood videos and so on, they said it's not enough. We need to digitize even further. I mean, Apple had digitized music with $0.99 songs, but the music player itself needed digitization, and I think that's what happened with iPhone bringing a music player on as an app itself. Photographers digitized, you know because you could now do JPEG files back and forth in emails, but the camera itself made further digitization and the camera became an app. So I think there's multiple layers of digitization that needs to happen. I think as a company, we've digitized a lot of hardware devices. But as a company, we had to digitize ourselves even further. This is our digital transformation. The fact that you can consume Nutanix in ways that are even more invisible, the fact that you can try out Nutanix, kick the tires on Nutanix, run it in your favorite server that you want. And then after you like it, you call us. You know, all of a sudden, the sales funnel is warmer because whenyou look at sales funnel, you don't need people up there to really go do a POC and kick the tires and technology and so on. So software provides access, which is probably at the core of an operating system. If you don't have access, if you don't feel distributable, then you'll always stay at the mercy of the appliance gravity. Because appliance's gravity, it's hardware, you need to ship things as physical objects being shipped, there is logistics, there is capital expenditure, there's a lot things involved that really keeps you sort of anchored to the bottom. And the only way to unleash this is to really bring more digital delivery models, and software is one such thing. Now our sales teams like starting this quarter, are being paid on software only as opposed to on the hardware itself. And we're doing things in the channel that makes it really unique because the customer experience doesn't have to change. In some sense, we're really saying can we have the cake and eat it too? And that's what we're really doing so that the two north, which is customer experience, doesn't take any kind of hit while we can actually look at going and selling the value of software itself. And as you know about Xi, I mean, just doing software alone is just the first step towards digital transformation. And the further digitization is, when nothing is visible on-prem for Nutanix, everything is totally invisible and you can swipe a credit card, you can sign up in a matter of seconds, I think that is where the real epitome of digitalization will be for the company. >> So let's talk about the impact of becoming a software company. I love some of the stories that he says, the ability to download software and kick the tires. I've seen some really geeky stuff, people running prism on bare metal clouds, there's use cases that I didn't really consider. What are some of the more interesting things that your partners and customers are doing that you didn't expect? Like, what's the surprises? >> Well, it starts with the tinkerers. The most important thing about any good software company is tinkerers do things that you never imagined you could do. And it comes down to API, then it comes down to access. Like I have an app on my iPhone, it's called iBeer. Now Apple opened up its oscilloscope, its accelerometer, its compass, and now you can basically fill up beer in your iPhone and you can drink it and it burps for you as well. I don't think the company knew that when it opens up an API. You know, what other possibilities, what kind of apps people will build? I think community addition has been at the core of access for us. People can just download it on an Intel NUC and do things with it. In fact, the NUC is part of a drone now so you can actually have an entire data center in a drone, and the drones can replicate to each other and failover from each other. In fact, we're talking to a lot of very large oil and gas and remote vertical organizations, which are really looking for what does it mean to miniaturize a datacenter? And then at the same time, do very serious stuff in it, back it up, encrypt it, compress it, replicate it, all sorts of things, even put event processing. Like, how do you put a Casca bus on a mini PC-sized server, I think, palm-sized server? These are all the things that we hadn't imagined three, four or five years ago. But the fact that Nutanix can be shrunk wrapped into a palm-sized server, it takes this possibility to the edge, to the next level, actually. >> So the show floor is growing, you hit on API, critical part of building an ecosystem to becoming a true platform player. What are some of the more impressive parts of growth from (mumbles) ecosystem? >> I would bring it back to all the applications. We've done a tremendous job of applications on Nutanix. So if you look at north, south and east, west, I always look at things north, south, east, west, north, south is apps and hardware. So hardware platforms and apps on top of us. I think we've done a really good job with that. East, west, you know, look at data protection, business continuity, security. A lot of those companies are actually part of our overall ecosystem. And we still are not happy. I think we have to do an even better job. But what's the MuleSoft equivalent in infrastructure? Nobody thinks of integration in the operating system world today. It's mostly point-to-point. Okay, I am Nutanix, you're Arista, we'll do point-to-point. I am Nutanix, you are F5, we'll do point-to-point. What if there's a real event bus where you could just publish topics and you become a radio station? There's TiVo and because you can go back in time, look at three days ago what events happened and so on. There's a whole aspect of putting a multicast tree of events that becomes a real groundswell of integration between different kinds of appliances, virtual appliances, physical appliances, hardware below us, software above us. I think that has yet to happen in the industry. And a lot of our developers are now talking about like what's the MuleSoft for Nutanix? So I think there's a lot of innovation that infrastructure has not seen because we always think differently than apps. What if we thought like app companies? We'd do things like app companies. And you'd see us in the next couple of years do something really interesting with, build a system bus which are the pub/sub like model as opposed to a RESTful request/response-like model actually. >> Dheeraj, gives us a little more color on some of those partnerships. I've seen Google and IBM on stage in the past. You're now over a billion dollars in revenue, public company, so I have to imagine some of these companies treat you a little differently. And the ones I kind of initially want to hear of, but you're welcome to run with it is, the server players and the cloud players is, how you see, how much can it just be we do our thing and how much do they need to work with you? >> Yeah, absolutely. Well a billion is still a small number. We're more like VMware of '07. And VMware of '07 was still a test and dev company by the way. They hadn't done anything production at all. People are still tinkering with databases and Microsoft apps and so on in '07. So we are small, we're still not a very big company. I think there's a lot of headroom for us in the coming years. The thing is that we've taken the tougher route by the way. Tougher route being we didn't have to sell ourselves to EMC, which is what VMware did. If you think about it, that asset was worth 60 billion eventually. Was sold for 600 million. It was a 100x smaller price to EMC. Because they actually seeded the ground on go to market. (mumbles) It's really hard, we need EMC to go and really do the distribution in peace. And as a company, we said no, no, I think there is value in building go to market on our own. I mean, look at our cap table. Our cap table is clean, we have dual class, voting structure and things like that. The things that VMware would die for, looking at from a financial investor point of view that we have that they don't, because we took the tougher route to really come to build a business. Now if you talk about hardware companies below us, and when I said below, I don't mean pejoratively, but you know, the stuff that runs underneath us, >> Stu: Southbound. (chuckles) >> I think NX has been a great way to build a market because if you hadn't done supermicro, we wouldn't be here actually. I mean, this architecture would have been a child's play, a science project, foreign tinkerer, most of them what it has become over time because the server vendors took note. They said, oh you can actually come and displace me? I would rather work with you because there's a lot of value we can bring to the table as well. So in that vein I think what we've done with Dell, what we've done with Lenovo, what we are doing with IBM, Fujitsu, and what we're doing with HP's and Cisco's channel partners, there's a lot of regional love that's forming on the ground with HP's and Cisco's channel partners and sales people because sales people are less political than headquarters. And think about strategy tax that headquarter face versus what sales people do. Sales people, I just saw a tweet, I think you talked about an HPE sales guy saying, you've got to bring Nutanix to the table because they really respect market forces. For them, market forces are most powerful actually. And above us and in the cloud, I think definitely a lot of work that we're doing in Google GCP. But I think you know, as bare-metal opens up from these other providers, we probably would be very interested to see exactly how Nutanix Xi works in bare metals of these public cloud providers. >> So you guys disrupt yourself. There was NX, business was doing fine. You guys are starting to build a reputation to being able to support the large enterprise with NX, some of the logistic challenges that you had as a small organization you were starting to overcome, but you decided you know what, you're going to untether yourself, let's zoom out of the industry. If you looked at the industry and say you know what, the advantage that Nutanix has because we're willing to disrupt ourselves, what are the tethers that remain in the industry that you're happy to go before your customers and say you know what, Nutanix doesn't have these tethers and if we did, we'll easily disrupt ourselves again. What's the competitive advantage? >> Hmmm, I think it's a great question. In fact it is the competitive advantage to say that the glass is half-full and it's not a zero-sum game. Because there's two kinds of people in the world. There's the zero-sum mindsets people who actually always think that if somebody is winning, the other must lose. And then there's growth mindset people who actually feel like of course legacy will get disrupted, but the new guys will actually make further progress, future progress. So as a builder, there's a bias in me and many of us out there in Nutanix that you need to have a growth mindset. And then the growth mindset, just giving a software to an OEM partner doesn't mean that it will shrink yours. It's possible that there's going to be more word-of-mouth, and the market forces will actually appreciate that. I mean, eventually, if somebody had a great relationship with Dell, Lenovo or HP or Cisco or IBM, we'd love to do business with them. And we have to relax some constraints because at the end of the day, this is still not our cloud. Now in Xi we can do whatever we want. But when we're walking to the customer, saying we want to build a cloud with you, with you is an important work. It's not for you, it's with you. And with you would mean that we'll have to bend a little bit backwards to relax the constraints away. And that's exactly what we've done. No one else has done this. Same is true for hypervisors. I mean, look at VMware. We go in there and we don't start talking about VMware right away. Like you know what, let's talk about architecture, let's talk about migration, let's talk about security, automation, and some day we'll certainly talk about whether you need to pay for a hypervisor. I think we'll do the same things with data protection and other things we're doing networking and so on. We're not going to just come in and say this is us and nothing else matters. API is everything. I mean, think of consumer companies. They've always competed with their partners and they've done a good job at it. They're like, look, at the end of the day, Spotify, their competitor, Apple music competes with it, but I'm not going to not give them a level playing field. Google Maps, Apple Maps compete. Keynote, Number, Pages competes with Microsoft Office. And I think the best companies are very good at being comfortable. Amazon the retailer, they fulfill more than I would say half their things not from their warehouse but someone else's warehouse, and both parties make money, actually. It's the growth mindset that creates large companies. >> Dheeraj, you're a technical founder, have great success with the company. You know, it's still one of the things I've loved in our journey on theCUBE, is being able to document companies that we knew from the early days and got over 2,500 employees now. >> Dheeraj: Actually, more than 3,500. >> 3,500. Congratulations. As you talk to people in the Valley or your travels around the world, what advice do you give to potential future entrepreneurs, people that are sitting like you did in the early days and have a vision for the future? >> Well, I've gotten a little more philosophical about organizational building. At the core of companies that are building and growing over time, is how do you keep reducing friction? And it's not just friction with customers and partners, also friction within. Because orgs grow and you need to, if you look at organisms, you know we have mitosis where cells divide themselves and become smaller cells and even smaller cells and so on. There's a division of labor, there's specialization, there's all sorts of things that actually happen as organisms themselves. I think an org is like an organism. And over time, there's a lot of accumulated stress that develops. And if you don't really go and address it, you're not a company, you're basically a business that doesn't understand culture. So what I talked about with a lot of entrepreneurs is really fuzzy words like how do you become authentic in what you do? Like, I was in Bloomberg and I talked about the difficulties with Xi. At the end of the day, most people, maybe not the 10, 15, 20% impressionables, but most people appreciate authenticity. And we're like, that is vulnerable, and being vulnerable is the best way to build a relationship actually. So I talk about vulnerability and trust and organizational design and reducing friction and things of that nature because once you are so many people, it's all about reducing friction. >> All right, well Dheeraj, one of the things people I know love about this show is you bring speakers that get us thinking authenticity. Hopefully one of the reasons why you bring theCUBE to the event. So thank you so much for joining us again. Always a pleasure. >> Pleasure. >> All right, Keith Townsend and I, Stu Miniman, will be back with lots more coverage here of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2018 in New Orleans. You're watching theCUBE. (technorock music)