Dheeraj Pandey

Kindling the datacenter movement.

- Shiv Shanker Sengupta

One morning sitting in a well-lit room of Kanpur IIT Dheeraj Pandey was solving linear algebra, set theory, and Boolean algebra problems. Though a graduate of Computer Science, he was much inclined towards courses not just in system software, but in mathematics as well. A sudden thud on his door and to his delight, he finds his mentor waiting for him at the door. They sit down to discuss the fork in Pandey’s road, a decision that he has to make--one that would decide the future of this young graduate. After much consideration, Pandey decides to join UT, Austin, for a PhD program. The door finally opened; what lay ahead was not a room, but a world full of opportunities. Little did he know that few years from now, he would be taking his tech unicorn company, Nutanix public!

So with $800 in his pocket, and a will to make it big, Pandey travels to Austin, and ever since has never looked back. “I took a chance in the bubble to take a leave of absence from my PhD program and then never returned back to finish my PhD. But I worked at some great companies. There are some failures and some successes, but all in all, it’s been a great experience,” states Dheeraj Pandey, CEO, Nutanix.

In the Beginning

Before founding Nutanix, for which the talks would echo to be the next VMware of Data Center space, Pandey had built disparate systems in pretty much every job that he had after Trilogy. “I worked at Zambeel and Oracle and Aster Data and there was a common theme of building distributed systems. Now one thing I was always passionate about was user experience and design,” explains Pandey. With Nutanix, he had a chance to go and build distributed systems for enterprises trying to meld all the learnings of the last ten or fifteen years before that.