Serial Entrepreneur Mohit Aron on Founding, Scaling, and Leading Category-Leading Companies
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The founder, eventually the buck stops with the founder, right? Everything that goes wrong, eventually is the founder's problem. And the employees are just doing that one thing that- It may not be your fault, but it is your problem. That is right. You get blamed for everything, right? And that's the first big jump I had to make. That as a founder, whether or not it was because of me, I owned it.

Welcome to Founded and Funded. I'm Madrona Digital Editor Coral Garnick-Duckin, and today we have a special live episode with Madrona Managing Director Karan Mahandru and Moet Aron, the co-founder of Cohesity. This discussion was recorded during our annual CEO Summit, and Moet shared so much tactical advice for founders that we had to share it with you all here. Karan and Moet met over a decade ago, shortly after Moet founded Nutanix in 2009.

He led the company as CTO to become one of the fastest growing storage companies out there before leaving in 2013 to do it all again, co-founding Cohesity. While the firm Karan was at at the time opted not to invest in Nutanix, Karan kept in touch and has such conviction in Moet that he invested in Cohesity while at three different VCs: Trinity, Steadfast, and now Madrona.

Karan remains convicted in Cohesity's vision to become the de facto leader in AI-powered data security and management. And Madrona most recently participated in Cohesity's Series H, which funded the company's acquisition of Veritas in December. While Mohit recently left Cohesity to start another company, more on that to come, his experiences launching and scaling multiple startups provides invaluable insights for other entrepreneurs.

In this conversation, these two cover the key traits of founder success, tactics for scaling a company and hiring effective teams, balancing vision with product development, the importance of pairing a strong vision with what Mohit calls minimum lovable product, and so much more. So with that, let's dive into it. Here's Karan and Mohit's live conversation. Thanks for joining us, Mohit. Sure. So...

I have a lot of questions for you, so I'm going to pull up my notes here to make sure I don't miss anything. If you do it once, you're lucky. If you do it twice, I feel like there's a lot of skill. So the first question I have for you is, did you always know that you were built to be a founder? And what do you think the best founders have as far as capabilities, characteristics, traits? What does it take to be one that scales these companies to multiple tens of billions of dollars versus ones that fizzle out? Where do you begin?

All right, I'll say for the first part, did I always know that I am meant to be a founder? Heck no. All I knew was that I like to put myself into uncomfortable situations. And that's what it takes, number one, to be a founder, right? Because if you're just sitting in a comfortable position, you're not going to be a founder. So trying to be a founder was just one more attempt to put myself in an uncomfortable position. That's how I began.

They have cryogenic chambers for that. You can run like a marathon, but you ended up starting a company. It's the one thing that I thought, let me put myself into yet more ways to make myself uncomfortable. But what it means to me to be a founder is, are you passionate enough to solve a certain problem? I've seen people do companies for the wrong reason.

A lot of people do companies just for the sake of doing a company, right? Well, I just want to be a founder. That's the wrong reason to be doing a company. Another reason why people do companies for is, oh, I want to make a lot of money. It's actually also the wrong reason, right? If you want to shoot for that reason, if you want to do a company just for making a lot of money, you'll probably make some, but you will not make a lot. I promise you that, right? Because doing a great company requires a lot of ups and downs.

The minute you have a down, you're probably going to get cold feet and you're like, okay, let me go do something else, right? Maybe start another company, right? And now you've potentially left a lot of potential on the table. So if you're really passionate about some problem, then and only then you have an opportunity to really build a great company because as part of doing a company, there's going to be lots of ups and downs.

And so what your passion for shooting behind solving that problem means that you're going to persist. And persistence and grit is one of the key things you need to do this because you're going to fall down a lot of times, no matter how many times you've done it before. And so you need that. So to me, that's what it means to be a founder. That's great. One of the things I've repeated multiple times is that the probability you build a $10 billion company is inversely proportional to the number of times you state that as your goal.

And it's very true in your case, having known you for almost a decade and a half now. Okay, so you made three transitions in your career that are really hard to make. You went from a non-founding engineer to a founder. Then you went from a founding CTO to a startup CEO. And then you went from a startup CEO to a scale CEO. And each one of these has its own set of challenges. Walk us through those.

What the challenges were as you made each one of these transitions? What were things you had to leave behind? What were the new traits that you had to pick up? Yeah, so, you know, sometimes people who are employees ask this question, right? How come the founder has such an outsized equity or whatever? And I also used to ask that. And the answer is that the founder, eventually the buck stops with the founder, right? Everything that goes wrong eventually is the founder's problem.

And the employees are just doing that one thing that... It may not be your fault, but it is your problem. That is right. You get blamed for everything. Right. And that's the first big jump I had to make. That as a founder, whether or not it was because of me, I owned it. It's the owner mentality. It's the owner mentality. Right. And that also means that you're doing things that you're not expert at. Right. So that was the first big thing that I had to become comfortable with. The second thing was hiring.

Again, as a non-founder, maybe you just hire people that are in your areas of expertise, but as a founder, you're now hiring people that so are not in your area of expertise. So you have to learn.

And you have to keep them happy, right? Because guess what? If you hire great people, they also have lots of other opportunities. Even if they decide to join you now, if you can't keep them happy, there's plenty of companies and plenty of great companies that VC is found, right? It doesn't take long for them to jump ship.

So, you know, becoming a people person at the same time as you are doing what you do best is very important. That's another transition that you have to make. Companies are, after all, all about people, right? The best people. How do you hire people? How do you learn how to hire people? How do you learn how to hire people outside of your expertise? If you are a technical founder like I was, you have to learn how to hire people, let's say, in sales and marketing and stuff, right? So these are...

um, some of the things that, uh, sometimes I had to learn the hard way. Right. So, and, and then also, um, setting the, if you're a non-founder, somebody else set the vision for the company, somebody else decided what the company is going to do. Um, now it's, it's you to blame. If that doesn't go well, it's, it's, it's your owner. So learning how to set that long-term roadmap on what the company is going to do is, is another thing that I had to learn. Right. So I had a

I had to build a strategy for doing that. That's kind of the strategy behind my companies. Let's talk about hiring because that's a big topic for all of us here. We actually heard a lot of folks here had to let go of people in the last two years and then now we're starting to hire. And you mentioned something that has always stuck with me, which is you're a technical founder. You're a product architect.

yet you were able to hire some amazing go-to-market talent in the Nutanix and Cohesity journey. I remember polling some people that are your lieutenants and saying, okay, use some words to describe Mohit and they used to say, tough but fair, he's a hard boss. And the way I sort of interpreted that is that you have never tolerated much less celebrated mediocrity in the organizations. And so-

What are the things that you look for when you're hiring somebody, for example, a sales CRO in a company where you've never been a CRO before? What are the things you're looking for as you hire somebody in that role? So I'll lay it out as a generalization. So first of all, great companies are built by great people. I'll say that again. If you have an underperformer in a job,

Either you have to do the work for that person, right? Because the buck stops with you, right? And then you cannot scale. By the way, I will talk about repeatability again and again. It's all about repeatability. We'll get to that. But to hire, you know, I literally came up with a hiring strategy. So the way I do it is for every role, I come up with what I call a list of competencies you need in the role, right? So for instance, if you are hiring, let's say a sales leader,

Maybe you need the person to have done it before. Maybe the person should have been a VP of sales at a prior company and maybe for a number of years, and maybe the person should come from an enterprise background. So whatever those competencies are. So I split those competencies into what I call scorecards, three scorecard. The first one is what I call a pre-interview scorecard. This is competencies you can figure out just by looking at the person's resume or just by maybe doing a phone screen.

Because I don't want to waste time. There's a lot of time that goes in interviewing people. I don't want to waste time if the person doesn't even meet the basic competency. So that's a pre-interview scorecard. Then the next one is what I call an interview scorecard. This is what is used. These are the competencies I'm going to test for.

when the person is interviewed. So I don't test all of them. Maybe I'll test three or four of them. And then I'll have other interviewers test the other ones. And collectively we form a very data-driven full picture of the person. And the last one is what I call a reference check scorecard. These are the things that you ask when you do reference checks. Now in the absence of this, here are some of the mistakes people make. The first mistake people make is they will interview someone

They really like the person, the way the person speaks, the way the person moves. Basically, it's a chemistry match. But please understand that chemistry matches only one of the competencies you need in the role. You may need some 10 other competencies, right? 10 other big rocks, if you may. You need to look for those. And unless you have them written down and unless you explicitly test for them, you're going to make mistakes.

Yet another mistake people make when they do reference checks. Everyone knows reference checks are important. But here's the big mistake people do. They'll call up the reference. Hey, is this a great person? The person says, yeah, this is a great person. Hire the person. And that's like the absolute worst reference check you can do. Again, you need to lay out what you need to ask in a bunch of competencies. Maybe the first question is, would you hire this person again on a scale of 1 to 10? Because 6 is a failure. It's a failure mark.

People hesitate giving a negative one. So if you push them to put a number on it, they'll say six or seven. That's really a fail. Unless it's eight or nine, I would not hire the person, right? Similarly, did good performers in your company, did they value this person?

And then maybe if you want to validate some strengths, is the person good today, has a good methodology in a day-to-day execution, something like that, on a scale of one to 10. Everything is on a scale of one to 10. You start getting the real answers. So for instance, if they say eight,

You ask them, so why not a nine? And then they'll say, well, there is this one occasion when they didn't do well. Then you can poke into that, right? But if you just ask, is this a good guy? That's the absolute wrong kind of reference check that you can do. So this is the hiring strategy I use. It has significantly increased my probability of hiring good people. But I would say it's not 100%. No hiring algorithm is 100%.

And even if you hire a good person, they might be good at the time you hired them.

Couple of years down the line, especially if your company is growing at 100% or whatever, right? In three years, it's, you know, 8x, something like that. The person may no longer be good. So it's very important people don't actually, people feel really uncomfortable with this. But you have to performance manage. That's great. And when people, when you hear people saying that I'm tough, it's when that person is not working out. I don't want to make it a higher and higher culture. So there's a period of time when I'm trying to up-level the person. And guess what? The person is in pain. Yeah.

So my goal at that time is to either apply with the person, it's up or out for me, right? Either the person elevates himself or herself or they're going to be out. As simple as that.

and there's a time threshold I have for that. That's it. Otherwise, I will end up doing the work for the person or worse, nobody does the work and the company is not doing it. One of the things I've always appreciated about the way you manage and lead, there's a combination of autonomy and accountability. They're held very tightly. And I think that's worked really well. By the way, there's a survey in all your phones right now on a scale of one to 10. Would you take money from Madrona again? So we're going to follow up on that part later.

Let's switch gears a little bit. Some of the companies here are well past product market fit and at this point are thinking about product market pricing fit after Madhavam's talk. And some of them haven't reached product market fit. I've asked this question to many entrepreneurs. I've thought about it myself. What does it actually take to say that we have product market fit? Is it a feeling? Is it a scientifically calculatable metric? How do you think about product market fit? When did you know you had it at Cohesity?

So I have a very, I'm a B2B person, enterprise building enterprise companies. I have a very crisp definition for a product market fit. Again, it goes back to repeatability, but here's my definition. If an average salesperson, again, average is the key, not an elite salesperson. If an average salesperson can sell to an average customer, again, not an elite customer, an average customer without involving people in headquarters, without involving me, without involving my C-level staff,

then you have a product marketer. Because if you think about it, if it's an average person, you cannot hire all A players as salespeople. An average person needs to be able to sell your product. You cannot all have elite customers who understand your product. The rank and file customers are average. Just the average sales guy can sell to an average customer without involving headquarters because if I'm getting involved in every deal, it's not repeatable. It's not scalable. Once you can do that,

you suddenly have repeatability. It means that now I can hire tons of salespeople and they can sell to tons of customers without putting a load on the headquarters. And now you have a product market. That's great. That's my definition of a product market. So you know that when big deals start coming,

Without any involvement, without me even stepping into the headquarters of the customer, suddenly the gong goes off and some big deal happens. I know there's a product market. That's great. By the way, if anybody has questions, just raise your hand. This doesn't have to wait till the very end. I'm sure folks have questions for Mohit and I'll pause. Just make sure somebody tells me if somebody's hands are risen. All right.

Let's move to one of the things that I observed about you is that one thing that you navigated really well is that when you pitch for money or when you pitch for your idea to employees and other prospects to hire them, there's this constant battle between you have to be focused enough to get the right wedge in the market, but you also have to have a big vision to be able to excite people to really understand this is a 10 billion whatever company.

And it's hard for founders to kind of navigate it because you're constantly getting the feedback it's too niche-y or you're getting the feedback that it's too unfocused. How did you navigate that? Because Cohesity in some ways has replaced like multiple companies as a platform, but you didn't pitch that entire, well, you did, but you didn't raise money and you kind of unraveled those layers of the onion as time went on. So just walk us through how you navigated that challenge. Absolutely. So first of all,

If you want to build a great company, the vision has to be big. Because if you have a small vision, even if you build the best product, that vision can be copied, right? And very soon your product will be a commodity. But at the same time, when you have a big vision, right, you can't wait tons of years to build that vision, right? Anyway, customers don't buy, you know, they don't want to pay for the vision. They want to pay for the actual product.

So it's very important in my mind to have two components. One is a vision, and the second is what I call I hesitate using MVP. I don't like minimum viable product. I think Madhavan was also using minimal, I think, valuable product. I prefer a minimum lovable product.

Right? And so you need to have a very clearly defined minimum lovable product that you can actually sell to customers. And a bigger vision, the bigger vision is useful, A, for hiring great employees because after all they're joining you on a mission. They don't want to do some small thing and then there's nothing more to do. Second, the bigger vision protects you against competitors. By the time they try to copy your minimum lovable product, you are traded on the vision and moved ahead.

And third, it's also important for the customers because they're not just buying the, yeah, they want to solve a problem right now, but they want to solve it in a way so that they can actually keep your product for years and you can add further value.

So having these two components is actually key to building a sustainable business. If you only had plenty of companies that were flash in a pan, did well for a few years and then became a commodity. We can go on and on and on. And they had eventually had to shut down or got bought by someone for a small price. And it's basically the problem of not having a bigger vision.

Or conversely, you can some companies only have a big vision but don't have a very well-defined minimum level product. Maybe you spoke about feature creep when Madhu was here. Some of that stuff is like lots of vision but no lovable product.

By the way, one of my favorite stories of Mohith, and he's too humble to admit to it, but he's one of the best engineers in the Valley period. When I invested in Mohith in the Series B, it was pre-product. And I remember him pitching that he's going to launch the GA. And this GA product was pretty big, but it was still the minimum lovable product of an even bigger vision.

And he said the product is going to be GA'd four months later. It was like October. We were somewhere in June, July. He's like, it's going to be October 14th. And I was like, all right, well, I just add another three months to it because no product goes GA when the founder tells you that it's going to go GA. And I remember calling him a month into it in the afternoon. And I asked, yeah, I want to talk to Moet. He's like, Moet doesn't take calls between 1.30 and 4.30. I'm like, what the hell?

I just invested like 20 million in this company. I was like, no, he doesn't take calls. And it turns out from 1.30 to 4.30, Moit would put on headphones and he would sit there and code. And he wasn't taking any calls from investors or customers or anything. October 14th was the launch day. You launched the GA product on October 15th. And it was, and we sold what, a million bucks in the? Yeah, in the first quarter itself. That day when we GA'd the product, you know, one of the customers with whom we were doing alpha testing,

He surprised me. He stood on the stage and said, I'm going to buy it for $380. So that blew our numbers right there. That's the target right there. And more orders came the very first quarter. And so the very first quarter, we actually surpassed a million dollars. So now you found product market fit. You're an average salesperson selling to an average customer, an average product.

What do you do after? What is the next thing you do as a CEO? You feel it, you see it, you see it, it's happening. How do you change the operational cadence of the company right after you got product market fit? Yeah, so repeatability, product market fit, I mean, the repeatability is a necessary condition for product market fit. I think the company needs to operate very differently when pre-repeatability or pre-product market fit and very differently post-product market fit. So you stopped coding for three hours with your headphone right after that. So pre-product market fit,

Your job is to get to repeatability, right? So your job as a founder and the rest of your C-level suite is to get involved in anything that's important and get it finished. So my job was to finish that code pre-product market fit, right? Get a solid because if there's no repeatability, there's no big business, right? Post-product market fit,

The equation changes. Now, and by the way, pre-product market fit, your job is also to conserve capital. So you're trying to do more with less resources because you want to extend the runway, whatever. But post-product market fit, it's actually a mistake to be conservative because now you have the product market fit. A lot of companies are watching you or a lot of competitors are watching you. They want to copy you, that sort of stuff. You want to press on the gas. Nobody should be able to surpass you or catch up to you.

And that's also where delegation comes. You want to use as much leverage as possible. So you want to hire for the right roles. You want to delegate responsibilities. So pre-product market fit, my job is to finish anything that needs my attention. Post-product market fit,

It's to, A, delegate as much as possible. And look, you're always going to have people who may not be able to do the job that they're assigned. Your job is to be a symphony or kind of like a symphony orchestra player. I'm sorry, a symphony conductor, not an orchestra, but not an orchestra player. You're a symphony conductor. Right. To oversee a lot of things. Right. So you take on a breadth role rather than a depth role.

And your job is to descend and parachute down in areas that may not be doing well with the goal of coming out quickly. So, and what that means is either you replace the person who's not able to do the job or train them, or you bring it to a point where it's kind of operating at 80% efficiency and now the team can take it onwards, right? Not to finish the thing because you've got to watch out for a bunch of other things. It's a very different mindset. You have to change that mindset. Once you attain product market fit, it's

Suddenly, if you don't change that mindset, your company is just... You're going to kill the company. There's a really good quote by Aaron Levy who said, maybe like eight, nine years ago now, he said, the job of a startup CEO is to do as many jobs as possible so the company can survive. And the job of a scale CEO is to do as few jobs so the company can survive. And I think that articulates what you were saying really well. Let's switch... Oh, Matt. All the spokes come to you to solve the problem. It's...

What did you learn in terms of finding ways to

for the spokes to solve the problem so that everything didn't have to go through you, the hub, because that's just not scalable, especially as you get bigger. And am I even thinking about it the right way? Is you kind of up-leveled yourself and tried to work with a very capable executive team and not have to solve every problem. Yeah, that's a great point. Rule number one, when you bring a problem to me, I also want you to bring the solution to me, even if the solution is wrong. I will not give you the solution otherwise. Mm-hmm.

It's too easy for them to just bank on you and you present the solution. And you keep doing that, they become more and more dependent on you. So even if the solution you bring is wrong, that's okay, but you need to bring the solution. If you do that, very soon you realize that they'll start solving problems. That's excellent. We have to use that internally too. Let's switch a little bit to generative AI. We are seeing, I mean, you can't go through any conference, any session, any meeting,

Without talking about it, we're seeing a lot of investments in the infrastructure layer and the model layer. What's your view of where we are in AI today? And what do you think the world believes about AI that you don't think is true? So I have a balanced view on AI. So on one hand, on the positive side, I think it's a mistake for any company to be ignoring AI. If you're doing any company and you don't have AI as a component within it,

it's probably a mistake. Every company needs to view AI seriously and AI is here to not just stay, but also change most businesses in a fundamental way. I think I'm not saying anything that is outlandish there. But on the other side, I do also believe there's a lot of AI washing going on. Companies just attach a .ai in their domains and

project themselves as AI companies when they really don't have any deep AI in them. A lot of people I know who are basically doing nothing more than after the popularity of ChatGPD, they basically have some sort of a chatbot attached to their product and they're calling themselves an AI company. Or they have basically, they have some twist of rag, retrieval augmented generation, and they extract information in some way and they call it an AI product. So there's a lot of that going on. Look, the fundamentals of doing companies has not changed.

You need depth in your product. You need a significant competitive differentiator, right? To be able to build a sustainable business. And even with AI, you need all of that.

So if you don't have these things and you're just slapping on AI in one of the ways I said, it's not a real AI company. And there's a lot of that going on. There's a lot of, I think people know, a lot of companies have come down. They've raised funding at big valuations, calling themselves an AI company, but then they couldn't prove all this and their valuations came crashing down. So that's also happening. I think a lot of the negative returns is happening.

Back in the last two years, a lot of companies got funded at big valuations and then they couldn't live up to the promise. And so that's also happening. So it's a balanced view. It's a huge tool that we have now at our hands to really push technology forward. It's irresponsible to just throw the name AI out there and pretend that you're an AI company when you're not. So the fundamentals of doing business have not changed.

Any more questions? Otherwise, I'll keep going. Somebody there. When you talk about vision and minimal lovable product,

That's something I sometimes struggle with because some visions like Disney is, you know, to make the world a happier place or whatever it is, which is sort of ambiguous enough to pretty much play in any particular field. And then I hear other visions that are almost like the product on steroids. You know what I mean? It's kind of like our vision is to make the best banking software in the world, which doesn't sound that awesome. So I'm curious on, you know,

How do you set the vision at the right altitude to not be maybe so broad and nebulous that no one really believes it, but also not so narrow that it's really just a supersized version of what your product already is? Yeah, great question. I think the answer will come from asking what additional problems you can solve.

right otherwise it's just a big abstract thing or the best thing since sliced bread or whatever it means nothing um so your minimum love of the product is solving some problem for the customer as you build on your vision what additional problems are you solving for the customer what additional things are you enabling for the customer and if that is a growing thing then you have a bigger vision otherwise your vision statement doesn't probably make any sense

So you need to keep on adding incremental value, keep on adding that value to customers, and then you have a bigger and bigger vision. So said another way, you better have a roadmap beyond your minimum lovable product. What's the next thing you want to deliver? And when you talk about that stuff, by the way, with customers, and they see the additional value you're going to bring, that's when they buy your vision. Otherwise, all these buzzy words mean very little for the customer.

You've managed to obviously build great companies, but you've also raised money with tier one investors along the way. You've got Sequoia, Accel, ourselves, Battery, a whole bunch of venture investors that know you, that want to invest in you. As you think about picking investors, as you think about building a board, what are the things that you would advise the founders here as they're going on to raise their follow-on rounds and their first round sometimes? What are the things that they should be optimizing for? Yeah.

So the first thing I would start by saying is be very clear on what you need from your investors slash your board members. Right. So I'll tell you what I look. So number one, I look for investors and board members who will stick with the company in the not just the highs. Everyone sticks through the highs. But what about the lows?

Right. Even in the highs, sometimes when things are riding high, they're like, oh, let's make an exit. This is the time to get the money back. And when it's a low, it's like, oh, my God, let's sell the company before it gets too low. Right. So are they going to they have the stomach to stomach the lows? Right. So that's number one for me.

Number two is also look at, you're hopefully trying to build a company that will become much bigger later on. And this is not the only round of funding you're raising. So will this person be able to stand up to his or her partners in future rounds?

and thump his fist and say, "I believe in this company," because there's always going to be naysayers who try to push back, "Hey, let's not fund this company at this bigger valuation." Nonbelievers. Yeah. So can this person actually stand up and say, "No, I want to fund it again," because that's actually a huge benefit. If you have one of your existing investors

standing up in future rounds and saying that I believe in this company, I will put money again. That's actually a huge incentive for people who are non-investors right now to come write checks for you, that your existing investors believe in you so much, right? In the absence of if a person doesn't have that conviction,

Okay, now I'm left with my existing investors are not standing up to say they want to invest. Why would another one invest, right? So the key to raising big rounds, and I've raised some pretty big rounds, is that your existing investors have the cojones.

to stand behind you, right? I think you had the quality problem of saying no to people more than most people. Trust me, when you raise big rounds, when you raise big rounds, everyone is jittery, right? That's when the rubber meets the road. And I thank Karan. Karan's always been very good at that. He's always fought his partners. I'm going to put money behind him. Took a lot of flack for that in the early days, but I think it worked out for everybody. There was a question there.

This intersection of vision and product market fit, you know, like how you set the vision. You said something that I just wanted to pick on, which is that you solve additional problems, especially as, you know, there's fundamental technology shifts happening always, but nowadays with AI. How do you think about existing workflows and tackling existing workflows versus new workflows as you've built multiple companies? Yeah, great question.

So look, the first thing that you need to do, and this is one of the things I always do when I start companies, is you need to build a hypothesis of what it would take for the company to succeed. Haven't you run into people who are basically running failed companies or failed products, failed companies, or the company has already failed or the product has already failed? And you've said, what were they thinking?

I could have told them that this is not going to succeed. And it's actually amazingly true. So I thought that why not, let's move back to the time when you're conceiving of the company and do that at that point. So literally, I have this framework where I write a hypothesis. It consists of four parts.

The first one, the first section, the first part is elevator pitch. If I literally run into my prospective customer in an elevator in five minutes, how am I going to convince that person? Number one, it needs to be a real problem that the customer cares about. Number two, I need to have a solution that solves the problem in a good way. And number three, the product needs to be differentiated. These are the key components of an elevator pitch. That's section one. Number two is that minimum lovable product. What's the exact, you know, what does it look like?

The fact that the fire phone was at war is because they didn't have a crisp definition of a minimum level product. They kept throwing features, right? So you need to have a very crisp definition of a minimum level product. Number three is why would the company succeed, right? What are the trends that are helping you? And number four is why would it not succeed? What would a near-sales say, right? What technology shifts might happen in the future that would disrupt this? And you are rebuttal against each of them.

And then you write this hypothesis. I literally do it for every one of my companies. I share it because I might be drinking my own Kool-Aid. I share it with people who are objective and knowledgeable. And if they say, okay, this is a solid hypothesis, then I have a company. So what I'm trying to tell you is that up front, I've thought about these shifts, right? I remember Doug Leone from Sequoia. He

Asked me when we did Nutanix, you know, after Nutanix achieved the product market fit, he asked me what has changed since your initial vision. I'm like, zero, nothing. Cohesity, you know, I shared my initial deck that I used to raise my CTA funding with some of my employees. And they were surprised to see that, you know, 10 years later, we are basically building on the vision that I said 10 years earlier. So these things are thought up front.

Now there are some shifts that are going to happen that you can foresee.

And that's where you put your best friends together, right? You collaborate with them and then you align that, okay, this is how the vision needs to shift to accommodate for these technological shifts. And if you do that, so basically what I'm trying to say is that you not only have a hypothesis at the beginning, you also keep building and improving this hypothesis as the company goes along. I think you have a fair chance of building and foreseeing upfront these technological shifts that might come and interrupt what you're doing and then navigate around them.

We're almost out of time. I have one last question for you. So I'm a fan of Patrick Deshaun. I don't know if you listen to his podcast, Invest Like the Best. I know Matt does and I do. He ends all his podcasts with a question that I love. So I'm going to ask you that, which is, what is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

So look, I'm blessed. You don't get here without kind things being done to you. But I think if I may pick a few, the kindest things that people have done to me is when nobody...

believed when I was in a tough spot, the few kind words that were said meant a lot at that time. So I'll, you know, of course it's when the going gets tough and I'm having a hard time raising funding, when there are some backers like Karan who backed me when things were tough, that's very kind. So you don't, look, you're going to have, you make mistakes, you fall down, you get up again, you run again.

But when you fall down, who's there to actually show you kindness is what matters. Thank you for that. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you for your partnership. Thank you for your leadership. But most importantly, thank you for your friendship over 15 years. Thank you for having me.