Hello, everybody. My name is Sony G and Dani. I'm a corporate vice president from A MD and a co-founder of a company called Pensando that was acquired a year ago by a MD. Um I'm going to be sharing with you as an audience.What it, I what my experiences and what lessons I have learned as uh I have been a female founder for a number of start-ups over the last decade and a half. And uh the most recent experiences that we have also had as we have taken uh a start up Pensando, which was founded in 2017 from stealth to acquisition uh in 2020 22. Um My, my upbringing was primarily in India and I left uh at a very young age of 15 to become an engineer uh in the course of the journey that I had at a very young age. What I discovered was my passion really lied in working with customers and solving some of the most challenging problems that they were faced with as the internet era was upon us. Uh And that really led was the beginning of my journey. Uh in the technology industry here in Silicon Valley.

Uh The most formative years were from 1993 to 2016 when we became part of Cisco that was evolving uh from being a routing company to a switched in a networking company with the acquisition of their very first entity of a company called Crescendo, which drove a lot of the evolution of CISCO from being a traditional routing company to a switch in a networking company.

From that point on disruption became one of the normal ways that Cisco used to capture market transitions, whether it was building a unified network for voice video and data, subsequently, then expanding it to get into the wired uh wireless environment to complement the wired infrastructure businesses.

And from that point on the adjacency of moving into the data center using the networking expertise to encompass storage later on compute and virtualization coming together and then software defined networking. And there were multiple lessons that were learned as we thought, as you think about the technology transitions.

But in each of the cases, these each uh each one of these entities became multibillion dollar architectures that uh would create lasting value in the industry. And for the customers, when we started Pensando in 2017, it was a collection of experiences and a system and an architectural view that we brought to bear when we created Pensando. And to now a lot of the lessons that have been learned in the evolution that we had in the technology sectors have culminated into where we are today. Now, when you think about creating a successful start up, it's a combination of being an art and a science. But in all cases, it is very important to start with a clean slate approach as opposed to thinking about what has been done before and trying to evolve. That uh the first and foremost thing to look for is what is the disruption occurring in the space that you want to play in. And once you have understood that disruptive opportunity is to then take complex, hard to solve problems and culminate that into a technology base and an architecture base which is more easy for the customers to consume. This is extremely important when you're thinking about a clean slate approach.

Now, when you, when you think about the art of it, timing plays a very big role, you don't want to be too early when you are looking at disruptive opportunities because you are ahead of the time of the market's ability to consume it. Neither do you wanna be too late because somebody else has gotten to solving it and, and, and they have a time to market advantage and a foundational base which is much more difficult to overcome. Now, when you think about the science piece of this, uh it's very important that you consider who are going to be your customers and your early adopters because they become your beacon to try and work through all the kinks in the system because you are approaching it with a lot of disruption in the back of your mind.

And it's going to take these lighthouse accounts to be with you at every step of this journey. So it's not a who are going to be these lighthouse accounts for the first year or two years. Even when you are in a concept phase where it's on the technologies on the drawing board, you need to bring these lighthouse customers that are early adopters to help you build a solution and eventually drive it as a de facto standard. And this requires years of ongoing innovation and no and and an architectural approach as opposed to a point in time solution. And these lighthouse accounts will be with you for almost a decade if not longer to see the gestation and the evolution of those technologies and architectures.

The second key message that I would give is an ecosystem, don't try and solve all the problems alone. Uh And the reason is because whether you are tackling a disruptive technology for the cloud market or whether you're doing it for the enterprise or you're doing it for the telco market, it is very important to have an ecosystem and to build your technology base that with this ecosystem in order to allow you to scale and to get wider adoption of these technologies.

So it's very very important that you keep into consideration, who are your key strategic customers that are going to derive and drive the solution to standardization approach. But also alongside that, who are the ecosystem partners that are going to become part of your standard or part of your blueprint? And who and how will they enable you to take this technology and permeate it at scale? And these two elements are extremely important to have alongside with the b best of breed innovation that you start with. Now, what is at the core of all of this in addition to the elements that we have covered is your team because without a team, you are not going to be in a position to execute. So be very selective. The 1st 5200 employees in your start up are the nucleus of your organization and they are the ones who are going to help you bring in the talent with very diverse backgrounds and thought processes. And so that selection of the 1st 100 people is quintessential to your success.

So make it a priority to make sure that you have at least five of your key leaders in the company to interview every candidate. And if even one person out of the five were to have objections on hiring an individual, do not hire them. It is very, very important that this team and the dynamic of the team is one whereby you're bringing in very, very selectively, the talent pool together and you're creating a culture and an environment to work the system and to work with one another in unison because after all, you have to move at the speed of a start up.

But yet you have to capture market transitions and lighthouse accounts as if you are a big customer, we a a big partner and you have the abi ability to influence an architecture with which will last for another decade to two decades. So it's very, very important that that team, that core team that you select has the ability to scale over time in order to look at uh all of these elements and work in a leadership capacity uh for your company. Now, the team, as I said is at the heart of it. So how do you create a environment, a culture to, to bring in the best talent and how do you teach them? What are the key tenets of the culture that will keep the engine going first and foremost, as I said, find and retain the best talent. Um And because you will operate and your company will operate to the extent that they can execute at scale. So look for experts, but also people that have expertise across at least one if not two areas of technologies, because when market transitions occur, it's not just about being good at one area of the technology, but understanding of other adjacency is equally important. The second key important element which I think has paid huge dividends uh in retaining some of the best team members for us has been open communication, be radically honest with them but always be respectful.

It's very important that we treat our colleagues that that are going to be part of that court team to be treated though no differently than we would like to be treated. And by being radically honest, you are also having bringing them into the tent to understand what are the opportunities, but equally importantly, what are the challenges that lie ahead? So they are able to rise to the occasion to go tackle some of those challenges with you. And one of the key thing here is to keep the customer focus and to have maniacal focus on the customers because they are your best advisors and they are going to be your best champions even more so than yourself or your team members treat them as partners. Don't treat them as I say as either purchase orders or as transactions because when times are tough and how you interact and bring to bear uh the your experience with this customer during those tough times is when those relationships are tested. So have complete focus around the customer.

Whether you are hiding in an engineering position, you're hiding in a customer success position or you're hiding somebody even with a in a financial position, be very open across not only your own team but your community, your customers and your partners. That is extremely important because that is the fabric that is going to keep you together as you are trying to capture the market transition and are at various different phases of this transition. Now, one other thing that I I put a lot of emphasis on in any start up that I have embarked on building is while a lot of energy in any start up in the 1st 2 to 3 years is built around ensuring that the the product is the right product that the market fit is there. And that it is truly differentiable. It has all the architectural elements to capture the transitions that are occurring in that, in that industry. And therefore, it becomes a necessary condition, it is not sufficient. It is very important that even as you have concepts around what you want to innovate on bring your customers in on that journey sooner and not later in every single start up that I have done. I have built customer advisory boards. Uh even when there is a concept of the drawing board because it's extremely important to understand how to hone in on the technology space, particularly around disruption so that you are in a position to help your customers to become part of that journey, make sure that their fingerprints are on the architecture, on the product that you are defining.

Because ultimately, your customers are gonna be able to tell the story and tell the ability of how we solve for their problems better than any one of you can ever tell that story. And therefore as many opportunities as you can get with your customers and partners facetime, that is extremely important to continue to iterate on track your successes, but equally important, track your losses very carefully. So that you are able to adjust as part of the go to market efforts, the things that would be needed in order for you to capture your fair share of the market and continue to iterate on this model. There is nothing static about a go to market model. The more you iterate on it, the better you can hone it at different stages of the transition of your start up as well as the marketplace. So here are some key takeaways, clearly take your time to find the right market disruption that you want to play because the cost to pivot to a different area is going to be very expensive for you as a start up. So it's extremely important to be very convinced that the area that you have picked as the disruption area is the correct one and that it is not too soon and not too late.

Once you have found that disruptive area that you want to create the technology for now, put all your energy on ensuring that that technology can fit into the customer environment without much friction. And as you hone in on the evolution of that product then ensure that you're doing everything in your power to prioritize. How will you continue to make it more simple and more transparent to adopt so that you're removing the friction of that disruptive technology as you attempt to make it more mainstream, build your team, the 1st 100 employees are going to play a huge role on how far you're gonna be able to take that company.

So build your team and keep them, make sure that you can be brutally honest with them and that you can be treating them no differently than you would like to be treated and have the ability to have multiple people and with different dimensions, with more diversity added into that organization because no one person has all the answers.

Your customers and your ecosystem partners are ultimately going to be the ones to take the disruptive technology that you are building and to make it real. And as those customers become more and more sophisticated, stay extremely close to them because the evolution, the ability to champion those those disruptive technologies and the ability to rinse and repeat those use cases. They are the ones who are going to be your true partner in this journey.

Don't go at it alone because your ecosystem is extremely important. Now, having an open architecture allows you to plug in multiple other complementary technologies which we call the ecosystem and that becomes extremely important to retain as part of this journey and to grow that at different phases of the evolution of the architecture. So in closing, I want to thank you for the opportunity and I'll be happy to take any questions that you may have as an audience. I do not see any questions uh as part of the uh uh question and answer uh panel that on my screen. So we'll give it one more minute. Thank you very much. Um I do see um I do see one question from one of the attendees which has to do with talking more about best practices on how to get face time with customers. I think some of the best practices that I have used in the past in getting face time with customers is to go back and tap into my contacts. My rolodex uh that I've had uh particularly customers that have the appetite to work in technology areas which have not only that area that they are responsible for adjacent areas.

Uh And those are the customers that I would typically tap into is based on your rolodex, based on your contacts in the industry, who are some of the early customers that you would categorize as being adopters of some of the new innovations and disruptive innovations. Uh whether they are references or whether they are your own contacts, they would be the ideal people to work with uh to make sure that your ideas are flushed out. That what you're building is indeed a usable piece of technology and what the hindrances are, you are able to identify proactively working with them. So when you're designing the technology and the product, you're architecting it with those elements in mind. Uh when you are at a later point in time looking to get that use case model rinsed and repeated and scale, then identify the verticals that you want to go after. So if it's a cloud vertical is it is uh the mega scale data center customers gonna be honing in on that. You're gonna be honing in on be very, very focused because as a start up, you have to remain focused, you cannot be playing in multiple markets with varying degrees because you'll get pulled in different directions.

So, you know, earlier on handful of accounts who are going to navigate you from concept to reality and then identification of the verticals with more in depth analysis so that you can target your market segments. And that way you're not getting spread across too thin across diverse customer bases, whether those are clouds and enterprises or whether those are service providers and enterprises stay focused and stay true to where you can add the most value in terms of identifying those market segments.

I hope I've answered that question. All right. Well, I uh my time is up. Thank you so much for the opportunity and uh take care. Thank you. Bye bye.