SaaS from Scratch: Dheeraj Pandey of Nutanix and DevRev on Building Category-Defining SaaS from India
We congratulate Anirudh, Tanveer and Rahul and the entire Digantara team on this incredible milestone. Since our seed investment in 2021, the team has demonstrated deep commitment to their core mission β making space more accessible and building a comprehensive space situational awareness & surveillance platform.
"We were building brilliantly for yesterday's market."
Dheeraj Pandey built Nutanix from nothing in 2009, the worst year imaginable to start a company, and scaled it to $20 billion. Now he's back at zero with DevRev, by choice.
In this episode of SaaS from Scratch, Vani Kola sits down with Dheeraj to unpack what actually separates founders who build category-defining companies from those who build good ones. The answer isn't product. It's direction.
What the episode covers:
β Why Nutanix could have been a $100B company and what stopped it
β The founder's real job: not vision, not product, but integration across every tribe in the company
β Why capital allocation is the most important skill nobody teaches founders in India
β Peter Drucker's 1967 essay on managers and computers and why it's the most relevant thing a founder can read right now
β Why English is now a programming language, and what that means for India's next generation of builders
β How to think about AI not as a threat but as fire generative and destructive in equal measure
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