From $900 in His Pocket to Building a $4.7 Billion Tech Company

Editor’s note: The story of Nutanix’s IPO is part of a series on Inc. 5000 companies making a big exit. The other articles in the series describe the exit strategies of two other companies: New Belgium Brewing and Home Chef.

• Head in the Cloud: Pandey co-founded Nutanix, which manages computing infrastructure for businesses, in San Jose, California, in 2009. It was No. 86 on the 2016 Inc. 5000.
• An Immigrant Entrepreneur: Born and raised in India, Pandey came to the U.S. with $900 in his pocket at the age of 22.
• A Slam Dunk: Nutanix had the largest U.S. tech IPO of 2016; its market value is $4.65 billion.

We definitely waited. The biggest capitalists in the world differentiate themselves by having patience, i.e., long-term greed. I feel like it’s the hallmark of capitalism. My name means “patience,” by the way.

When I got an offer from Oracle in the summer of 1998, I chose instead to go to Trilogy in Austin, a much smaller company. Coming out of Trilogy, I decided to go to an unknown Silicon Valley startup with 20 people instead of Microsoft. So, yes, I am a risk-taker.

People look at IPOs as an exit, but I look at an IPO as a tiny milestone in this journey of building a large-scale business. Think of companies like Adobe and Microsoft and Oracle. When they went public, they were a tiny fraction of what they are now. They had 1,000 times more value to create.

It does create a huge burden of responsibility to balance everything. You have to think about it as a marathon of sprints. There is a sprint every three months, and yet you need to have an ambition for the marathon. Those who forget about the marathon become just another company.