Sanjay Poonen on Innovation and Leadership at Cohesity

I'm here in our Santa Clara office. I live in Los Altos, been in California since '91. But came here after four years in college in the east coast and I grew up in India. Came as an immigrant to college on a scholarship in the late '80s and then came out of Silicon Valley and somehow haven't left this area.

I grew up in India in a, I would say, middle class or lower middle class. So poor by all American standards, but middle or lower middle class in India. My dad was a naval officer who left the Navy to plant churches. So he's sort of a preacher-teacher of a church. And my mom's a doctor who also kind of left her medical profession to serve in leprosy mission hospitals. So I come from a family that's very service-oriented in terms of all they've done to try and help humanity. And I'm the oldest of four boys. You know, I was fairly good at engineering, sort of math and engineering-related things. And in India in the '60s, '70s and '80s you kind of became a doctor or an engineer. I joke about it. Typically those are the paths out of poverty. You got a good education, you became a doctor and engineer. So I had sort of that math gene in my body much more so than my biology side from my mom. And I wanted to be an engineer and my path was likely to go—I'd applied for this engineering program in India. There's the equivalent of MIT in India, it's called IIT, Indian Institute of Technology, a prestigious engineering school. And I'd gotten in there. But at the same time, my uncle who lived in the United States at the time said there were a few colleges who were offering scholarships to international students. And I decided to apply to MIT. I didn't get into MIT but I got into this college called Dartmouth that has a very good computer science program in New Hampshire. I'd never been to New Hampshire. Really never knew what the United States was like. But when I got a scholarship and it was computer science which I really wanted to study and Dartmouth had a pretty famous computer science program because there's a gentleman there named John Kemeny who invented True BASIC, the BASIC language. He was a very, very well-known name in computing. I took the leap and came here in '87. And it was a culture shock, complete culture shock. Imagine an 18-year-old who had been sheltered in Bangalore, India, coming to a country that was very different. The culture is different, the people were different. But Dartmouth itself, if you've seen the movie Animal House, that movie is about Dartmouth.

It's just like an absolute culture shock on all fronts. Now fortunately because the British have set up a lot of schools in India that were based in English, I spoke the language. I spoke English, spoke English reasonably well. And I was reasonably well prepared academically for the American college system. But it was a very tough first year. I was homesick. I was fish out of water. It was extremely cold. I mean, New Hampshire gets very, very cold compared to Bangalore. So on all fronts it was a rude awakening. But I adjusted. By the end of my four years, I'd wanted to work at some tech company and I was very fortunate and blessed to get an offer to work at Apple. I'd always considered the Macintosh like one of my favorite computers and I was enamored by Steve Jobs. Now, unfortunately, Steve Jobs had been fired from Apple in the early '90s. So, when I joined Apple, he wasn't there. But I always joke for the four years I was at Apple, his ghost could have been there because everything about Apple was Steve Jobs did this, Steve Jobs did that. This is how Steve would say things. And I never met the man but I was just so enamored by everything about design and all the beautiful things. But those were the wilderness years of Apple because they were really kind of wandering around without—sort of trying to chase Microsoft. It wasn't happening and he wasn't there. In '95 or later, I think '96 he came back but by '95 I'd gotten pretty disillusioned with the four years I'd been working at Apple. Apple was trying to build an operating system that competed with NT. I was working on that effort. It was a joint venture with IBM and it was going nowhere. So I decided I was probably—I think about 26 at the time—to go back to school and get an MBA. So I went back to the east coast to get an MBA at Harvard and that's where I think my eyes opened a little bit more to not just the science of engineering but product management, marketing, other things around tech, and general management principles. How do you run companies? What makes successful companies? And all of a sudden, I think I was starting to think about businesses not just as an engineer writing code, but as a possible business unit leader or how would you build a business. Now, I had no aspirations to be a CEO. I just wanted to learn more about business and apply the technical knowledge to products and to business concepts. So I came back and did a number of things at two or three companies but probably the most formative one was Informatica which recently got bought by Salesforce. After my first job out of business school, my second job was at Informatica and a tremendous amount of learning experience. It was probably my first break that I got in Informatica to a more senior position in the company. I first ran marketing for the company and then later on ran a business unit and learned a ton there. The company grew I think from about 60-70 million to about 250 million when I was there. And then I left and that really launched me into a place where I was now ready to take on more responsibility. And the next 20 years was spent mostly between two companies, SAP and VMware. We can talk about any of that as you want. And I basically was very fortunate to build some very important businesses—the analytics business and the database businesses and several of the infrastructure businesses at SAP where I was there for eight years. Ended that time as president of the company. And at VMware, built the security businesses, the end user computing businesses, and ended my time there COO of the company. Both were fantastic learning experiences. We took the company from 10 to 20 billion at SAP and then from about 6 to 12 billion at VMware. Those 16 years between those two companies taught me a lot—about a global business, how do you build a great brand that's international at SAP, how do you take a company and scale it. Taught a lot about leadership. We can cover any of that that you want. I left VMware in 2021.

Yeah, it was a great—it is still a great—

Yeah, it wasn't just me. Pat, Raghu, myself, many others. We really loved that company. There's a lot of sort of fanaticism about the company. And then many of those people have now joined me here like Michael and others. So anyway, I took a year off. I joined two boards. One is this medtech giant Philips in Netherlands. I really enjoy healthcare because my mom's a doctor and I respect that industry. And then the other is Snyk, a developer security company. And then Cohesity came calling me, I think it was around March or April of 2022. The founder—I'd heard a lot about him—he's an incredibly smart man who had built the world's first zero-trust hyper-converged security platform for data. And they tried to take the company public but then the market collapsed in early '22 so they pulled the IPO, decided to wait. I liked the company, I liked the vision, I really respected the founder a lot. And I joined in August 2022 and next week's my three-year anniversary.