What does it take to go from engineer to founder, from startup CEO to scale CEO? In this special live episode of Founded & Funded, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru sits down with Mohit Aron, founder of Nutanix and Cohesity, to uncover the lessons behind his success. Mohit shares his unique hiring strategy, how to identify product-market fit, and the power of balancing vision with execution. Whether you’re navigating your first company or scaling your third, Mohit’s advice is a masterclass in resilience, grit, and building a legacy.
This transcript was automatically generated and edited for clarity.
Karan: I have a lot of questions for you, so I’m going to pull up my notes here to make sure I don’t miss anything. If you do it once, you’re lucky. If you do it twice, I feel like there’s a lot of skill. So the first question I have for you is, did you always know that you were built to be a founder? And what do you think the best founders have as far as capabilities, characteristics, traits? What does it take to be one that scales these companies to multiple tens of billions of dollars versus ones that fizzle out? Where do you begin?
Mohit Aron: All right. I’ll say for the first part, did I always know that I am meant to be a founder? Heck, no. All I knew was that I liked to put myself into uncomfortable situations. And that’s what it takes, number one, to be a founder because if you’re just sitting in a comfortable position, you’re not going to be a founder. So, trying to be a founder was just one more attempt to put myself in an uncomfortable position. That’s how I began.
Karan: Maybe they have cryogenic chambers for that. You can run a marathon, but you ended up starting a company.
Mohit Aron: It’s the one thing that I thought, “Let me put myself into yet more ways to make myself uncomfortable.” What it means to me to be a founder is, are you passionate enough to solve a certain problem? I’ve seen people build companies for the wrong reason. A lot of people build companies for the sake of building a company, or just to be a founder. That’s the wrong reason to build a company. Another reason why people build companies is, “Oh, I want to make a lot of money.” It’s also the wrong reason. If you want to shoot for that reason, if you want to build a company for making a lot of money, you’ll probably make some but you’ll not a lot. I promise you that. Because building a great company requires a lot of ups and downs. The minute you have a down, you’re probably going to get cold feet and you’re going, “Okay, let me go do something else.” Maybe, start another company, right? And now, you’ve potentially left a lot of potential on the table.
So if you are really passionate about some problem, then, and only then, you have an opportunity to really build a great company. As part of building a company, there’s going to be lots of ups and downs. And so, what your passion for shooting behind solving that problem means that you’re going to persist. Persistence and grit is one of the key things you need to have because you’re going to fall down a lot of times, no matter how many times you’ve done it before. For me, that’s what it means to be a founder.
Karan: That’s great. One of the things that I’ve repeated multiple times is that the probability you build a $10 billion company is inversely proportional to the number of times you state that as your goal. And it’s very true in your case, having known you for almost a decade and a half now.
You made three transitions in your career that are really hard to make. You went from a non-founding engineer to a founder, then you went from a founding CTO to a startup CEO, and then you went from a startup CEO to a scale CEO. Each one of these has its own set of challenges. Walk us through what the challenges were as you made each one of these transitions. What were things you had to leave behind? What were the new traits that you had to pick up?
Mohit Aron: Sometimes people who are employees ask this question, how come the founder has such an outsized equity or whatever? I also used to ask that. The answer is that eventually, the buck stops with the founder. Everything that goes wrong, eventually, is the founder’s problem. The employees are just doing that one thing.
Karan: It may not be your fault, but it is your problem.
Mohit Aron: That is right. You get blamed for everything, and that’s the first big jump I had to make. That as a founder, whether or not it was because of me, I owned it.
Karan: It’s the owner mentality.
Mohit Aron: It’s the owner mentality. That also means that you’re doing things that you’re not expert at. That was the first big thing that I had to become comfortable with. The second thing was hiring. Again, as a non-founder, maybe you hire people that are in your areas of expertise. As a founder, you’re now hiring people that so are not in your area of expertise. You have to learn and you have to keep them happy, because guess what? If you hire great people, they also have lots of other opportunities. Even if they decide to join you right now, if you can’t keep them happy, there’s plenty of companies. Plenty of great companies that VCs found, right? It doesn’t take long for them to jump ship.
So, becoming a people person at the same time as you are doing what you do best is very important. That’s another transition that you have to make. Companies are, after all, all about people. The best people. How do you hire people? How do you learn how to hire people? How do you learn how to hire people outside of your expertise? If you are a technical founder like I was, you have to learn how to hire people, let’s say in sales, and marketing, and stuff.
These are some of the things that sometimes I had to learn the hard way. If you’re a non-founder, somebody else set the vision for the company. Somebody else decided what the company is going to do. Now, it’s you to blame. If that doesn’t go well, it’s your on us. Learning how to set that long-term roadmap on what the company is going to do is another thing that I had to learn. I had to build a strategy for doing that. That’s the strategy behind my companies.
Karan: Let’s talk about hiring because that’s a big topic for all of us here. We actually heard a lot of folks here had to let go of people in the last two years, and then now we’re starting to hire. You mentioned something that has always stuck with me, which is you are a technical founder, you’re a product architect, yet you were able to hire some amazing go-to-market talent in the Nutanix and Cohesity journey. I remember pulling some people that are your lieutenants and saying, “Okay, use some words to describe Mohit.” And they used to say, “Tough but fair. He’s a hard boss.” The way I interpret that is that you have never tolerated much less celebrated mediocrity in your organizations.
What are the things that you look for? When you’re hiring somebody, for example, a sales CRO in a company where you’ve never been a CRO before. What are the things you’re looking for as you hire somebody in that role?
Mohit Aron: I’ll lay it out as a generalization. First of all, great companies are built by great people. I’ll say that again. If you have an underperformer in a job, either you have to do the work for that person because the buck stops with you, and then you cannot scale. By the way, I will talk about repeatability again and again. It’s all about repeatability. We’ll get to that.
To hire, I literally came up with hiring strategy. The way I do it is for every role, I come up with what I call a list of competencies you need in the role. For instance, if you are hiring a, let’s say a sales leader, maybe you need the person to have done it before. Maybe the person should have been a VP of sales at a prior company and maybe for a number of years, and maybe the person should come from enterprise background. Whatever those competencies are. I split those competencies into what I call scorecards. Three scorecards. The first one is what I call a pre-interview scorecard. This is competencies you can figure out by looking at the person’s resume or by maybe doing a phone screen because I don’t want to waste time. There’s a lot of time that goes in interviewing people. I don’t want to waste time if the person doesn’t even meet the basic competencies. So, that’s a pre-interview scorecard.
Then the next one is what I call an interview scorecard. This is what is used. These are the competencies I’m going to test for when the person is interviewed. I don’t test all of them. Maybe, I’ll test three or four of them and then I’ll have other interviewers test the other ones. Collectively, we form a very data-driven full picture of the person.
The last one is what I call a reference check scorecard. These are the things that you ask when you do reference checks. Now in the absence of this, here are some of the mistakes people make. The first mistake people make is they will interview someone. They really like the person, the way the person speaks, the way the person moves. Basically, it’s a chemistry match. But please understand that chemistry match is only one of the competencies you need in a role. You may need some 10 other competencies. Ten other big rocks, if you may. You need to look for those. Unless you have them written down and unless you explicitly test for them, you’re going to make mistakes. Yet, another mistake people make when they do reference checks. Everyone knows reference checks are important, but here’s the big mistake people do. They’ll call up the reference, “Hey, is this a great person?”
The person says, “Yeah, this is a great person. Hire the person.” And that’s the absolute worst reference check you can do. Again, you need to lay out what you need to ask in a bunch of competencies. Maybe the first question is, “Would you hire this person again on a scale of 1 to 10?” Because 6 is a failure. It’s a failure mark. People hesitate giving a negative one. So if you push them to put a number at it, they’ll say 6 or 7. That’s really a fail. Unless it’s a 8 or 9, I would not hire the person. Similarly, did good performers in your company. Did they value this person? Then maybe if you want to validate some strengths, “Does the person have a good methodology in a day-to-day execution?” Something like that on a scale of 1 to 10. Everything is on a scale of 1 to 10. You start getting the real answers. For instance, if they say 8, you ask them, “So, why not a 9?”
Then they’ll say, “Well, there is this one occasion when they didn’t do well.” Then, you can poke into that. But if you just ask, “Is this a good guy?”
“Yeah.” That’s the absolute wrong reference check that you can do. This is the hiring strategy I use. It has significantly increased my probability of hiring good people, but I would say it’s not 100%. No hiring algorithm is 100%. Even if you hire a good person, they might be good at the time you hired them. Couple of years down the line, especially if your company is growing at 100% or whatever in three years, it’s 8X or something like that, the person may no longer be good. People feel really uncomfortable with this, but you have to performance-managent.
Karan: That’s great.
Mohit Aron: When you hear people saying that I’m tough, it’s when that person is not working out. I don’t want to make it a hire and fire culture, so there’s a period of time when I’m trying to uplevel with the person. And guess what? The person is in pain. My goal at that time is to either uplevel the person, it’s up or out for me. Either the person elevates himself or herself, or they’re going to be out. As simple as that. And there’s a time threshold I have for that. That’s it.
Otherwise, I will end up doing the work for the person. Or worse, nobody does the work and the company is not doing well.
Karan: One of the things I’ve always appreciated about the way you manage and lead, there’s a combination of autonomy and accountability that you held very tightly, and I think that’s worked really well. By the way, there’s a survey in all of your phones right now. On a scale of 1 to 10, would you take money from Madrona again? So, we’re going to follow up on that part later.
Let’s switch gears a little bit. Some of the companies here are well past product market fit, and at this point, are thinking about product market pricing fit after Madhavan’s talk. And some of them haven’t reached product market fit. I’ve asked this question to many entrepreneurs, I’ve thought about it myself. What does it actually take to say that we have product market fit? Is it a feeling? Is it a scientifically calculatable metric? How do you think about product market fit? When did you know you had it at Cohesity?
Mohit Aron: I’m a B2B person, building enterprise companies. I have a very crisp definition for a product market fit. Again, it goes back to repeatability, but here’s my definition. If an average salesperson, again, average is the key, not an elite salesperson. If an average salesperson can sell to an average customer, again, not an elite customer, an average customer without involving people in headquarters, without involving me, without involving my C-level staff, then you have a product market fit.
If you think about it, if it’s a average person, you cannot hire all A-players as salespeople, and average person needs to be able to sell your product. You cannot all have elite customers who understand your product. The rank-and-file customers are average. The average sales guy can sell to an average customer without involving headquarters, because If I’m getting involved in every deal, it’s not repeatable, it’s not scalable. Once you can do that, you suddenly have repeatability. It means that now, I can hire tons of salespeople and they can sell to tons of customers without putting a load on the headquarters, and now you have a product market fit.
That’s my definition of a product market fit. When big deals start coming without any involvement, without me even stepping into the headquarters of the customer, suddenly the gong goes off and some big deal happens, I know there’s a product market fit.
Karan: That’s great. By the way, if anybody has questions, just raise your hand. This doesn’t have to wait until the very end. I’m sure folks have questions for Mohit, then I’ll pause. Just make sure somebody tells me if somebody’s hands are risen.
All right, let’s move to one of the things that I observed about you is that one thing that you navigated really well is that when you pitch for money or when you pitch for your idea to employees and other prospects to hire them, there’s this constant battle between you have to be focused enough to get the right wedge in the market, but you also have to have a big vision to be able to excite people to really understand this is a 10 billion whatever company. It’s hard for founders to navigate it because you’re constantly getting the feedback, it’s too niche-y, or you’re getting the feedback that it’s too unfocused.
How did you navigate that? Cohesity, in some ways, has replaced multiple companies as a platform, but you didn’t pitch that, well, you did, but you didn’t raise money and you unraveled those layers of the onion as time went on. Walk us through how you navigated that challenge.
Mohit Aron: Absolutely. First of all, if you want to build a great company, the vision has to be big. If you have a small vision, even if you build the best product, that vision can be copied. Very soon, your product will be a commodity. But at the same time, when you have a big vision, you can’t wait tons of years to build that vision. Customers are not going to pay for the vision, they’re going to pay for the actual product. It’s very important to have in my mind two components.
One is a vision. The second is, what I hesitate using MVP. I don’t like minimum valuable product. I think Madhavan was also using minimal, I think, valuable product. I prefer a minimum lovable product. You need to have a very clearly defined minimum lovable product that you can actually sell to customers.
The bigger vision is useful, A, for hiring great employees because after all, they’re joining you on a mission. They don’t want to do some small thing and then there’s nothing more to do. Second, the bigger vision protects you against competitors. By the time they try to copy your minimum lovable product, you are traded on the vision and moved ahead. And third, it’s also important for the customers. They want to solve a problem right now, but they want to solve it in a way so that they can keep your product for years and you can add further value.
Having these two components is key to building a sustainable business. There’s plenty of companies that were flash in a pan, did well for a few years and then became a commodity. We can go on and on and on. They eventually had to shut down or got bought by someone for a small price. It’s basically the problem of not having that bigger vision. Or conversely, some companies only have a big vision but don’t have a very well-defined minimum level of product. Maybe you spoke about feature creep when Madhavan was here. Some of that stuff is lots of vision but no lovable product.
Karan: By the way, one of my favorite stories of Mohit and he’s too humble to admit to it, but he’s one of the best engineers in the Valley. Period. When I invested in Mohit in the Series B, it was pre-product, and I remember him pitching that he’s going to launch the GA. This GA product was pretty big but it was still that minimum lovable product of an even bigger vision. He said the product is going to be GA’d four months later. It was October. We were somewhere in June, July. He was like, “It’s going to be October 14th.”
I was like, “All right. Well, I’ll just add another three months to it,” because no product goes GA when the founder tells you that it’s going to go GA. And I remember calling him like a month into it, in the afternoon, and I asked his EA, “I want to talk to Mohit.” He’s like, “Oh, no. He doesn’t take calls between 1:30 and 4:30.” and I’m like, “What the hell? I just invested $20 million in this company.” It turns out that from 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., Mohit would put on headphones, and he would sit there and code. He wasn’t taking any calls from investors or customers or anything. October 14th was the launch day, you launched the GA product on October 15th. And we sold, what, a million bucks?
Mohit Aron: Yeah, in the 1st quarter itself. That day when we GA’d the product, one of the customers with whom we were doing alpha testing, he surprised me. He stood on the stage and said, “I’m going to buy it for 300K.” That blew our numbers right there, the target right there. More orders came the very first quarter. So the very 1st quarter, we actually surpassed a million dollars.
Karan: Now, you found product market fit. Your average salesperson is selling to an average customer an average product. What do you do after? What is the next thing you do as a CEO? You feel it, you’ve see it. You see it it’s happening. How do you change the operational cadence of the company right after you got product market fit?
Mohit Aron: Repeatability. I mean, the repeatability is a necessary condition for product market fit. I think the company needs to operate very differently when pre-repeatability or pre-product market fit. And very differently, post-product market fit.
Karan: You stopped coding for three hours with your headphones right after that.
Mohit Aron: So pre-product market fit, your job is to get to repeatability. Your job as a founder and the rest of your C-level suite is to get involved in anything that’s important and get it finished. My job was to finish that code pre-product market fit, get a solid. If there’s no repeatability, there’s no big business. Post-product market fit, the equation changes. By the way, pre-product market fit, your job is also to conserve capital. You’re trying to do more with less resources because you want to extend the runway, whatever.
Post-product market fit is actually a mistake to be conservative because now you have the product market fit, a lot of companies are watching you or a lot of competitors are watching you. They want to copy you, that sort of stuff. You want to press on the gas. Nobody should be able to surpass you or catch up to you. That’s also where delegation comes. Use as much leverage as possible. You hire for the right roles, you want to delegate responsibilities.
Pre-product market fit, my job is to finish anything that needs my attention. Post-product market fit, it’s to, A, delegate as much as possible. Look, you’re always going to have people who may not be able to do the job that they’re assigned. Your job is to be a symphony or kind of like a symphony orchestra player. I’m sorry, a symphony conductor, not an orchestra. But not an orchestra player. You’re a symphony conductor to oversee a lot of things. You take on a breadth roll rather than a depth role, and your job is to descend and parachute down in areas that may not be doing well with the goal of coming out quickly. What that means is either you replace the person who’s not able to do the job or train them. Or you bring it to a point where it’s going to operating at 80% efficiency, and now the team can take it onwards. Not to finish the thing because you’ve got to watch out for a bunch of other things.
It’s a very different mindset. You have to change that mindset. Once you attain product market fit, suddenly if you don’t change that mindset, you’re going to kill the company.
Karan: There’s a really good quote by Aaron Levie who said, maybe like 8, 9 years ago now. He said, “The job of a startup CEO is to do as many jobs as possible so the company can survive, and the job of a scale CEOs to do as few jobs so the company can survive.”
Mohit Aron: Yep, that’s right.
Karan: I think that articulates what you were saying really well.
Audience Question: I love this theme and so I’m curious. A correlator to that is that a lot of times, you’re kind of the hub spokes, and all the spokes come to you to solve the problem. What did you learn in terms of finding ways for the spokes to solve the problem so that everything didn’t have to go through you, the hub? That’s just not scalable, especially as you get bigger. I’m even thinking about it the right way as you upleveled yourself and tried to work with a very capable executive team and not have to solve every problem.
Mohit Aron: That’s a great point. Rule number one, when you bring a problem to me, I also want you to bring the solution to me even if the solution is wrong. I will not give you the solution otherwise. It’s too easy for them to just bank on you. You present the solution and you keep doing that, they become more and more dependent on you.
Even if the solution you bring is wrong, that’s okay, but you need to bring a solution. If you do that, very soon, you’ll realize that they’ll start solving problems themselves.
Karan: That’s excellent. I have to use that. We have to use that internally, too. Let’s switch a little bit to generative AI. You can’t go through any conference, any session, any meeting without talking about it. We’re seeing a lot of investments in the infrastructure layer and the model layer. What’s your view of where we are in AI today? What do you think the world believes about AI that you don’t think is true?
Mohit Aron: I have a balanced view on AI. On the positive side, I think it’s a mistake for any company to be ignoring AI. If you’re doing any company and you don’t have AI as a component within it, it’s probably a mistake. Every company needs to view AI seriously. AI is here to not just stay, but also change most businesses in a fundamental way. I think I’m not saying anything that is outlandish there. But on the other side, I also believe there’s a lot of AI-washing going on. Companies attach .AI in their domains and project themselves as AI companies when they really don’t have any deep AI in them. A lot of people I know who are basically doing nothing more than after the popularity of ChatGPT, they basically have some sort of a chatbot attached to their product, and they’re calling themselves an AI company. Or basically, they have some twist of RAG, retrieval-augmented generation, and they extract information in some way. They call it an AI product. So, there’s a lot of that going on.
Look, the fundamentals of doing companies has not changed. You need depth in your product. You need a significant competitive differentiator to be able to build a sustainable business. And even with AI, you need all of that. If you don’t have these things and you’re just slapping on AI in one of the ways I said, it’s not a real AI company, in my mind. There’s a lot of that going on. I think people know a lot of companies have come down, they raised funding at big valuations, calling themselves an AI company but then they couldn’t prove all of this, and their valuations came crashing down. So, that’s also happening. I think a lot of the negative returns, you see. I think back in the last two years, a lot of companies got funded at big valuations and then they couldn’t live up to the promise. And so, that’s also happening.
So, it’s a balanced view. I think it’s a huge tool that we have now at our hands to really push technology forward. It’s irresponsible to just throw the name AI out there and pretend that you’re an AI company when you’re not. So, the fundamentals of doing business have not changed.
Karan: Any more questions? Otherwise, I’ll keep going. Somebody there.
Audience Question: Thank you. When you talk about vision and minimal lovable product, that’s something I sometimes struggle with because some visions like Disney is to make the world a happier place or whatever it is, which is sort of ambiguous enough to pretty much play in any particular field. Then I hear other visions that are almost like the product on steroids. You know what I mean? It’s kind of like, “Our vision is to make the best banking software in the world,” which that doesn’t sound that awesome.
I’m curious about how you set the vision at the right altitude to not be, maybe, so broad and nebulous that no one really believes it but also not so narrow that it’s really just a supersized version of what your product already is.
Mohit Aron: Yeah, great question. I think the answer will come from asking what additional problems you can solve? Otherwise, it’s a big abstract thing or the best thing since sliced bread or whatever. It means nothing. So, your minimum lovable product is solving some problem for the customer. As you build on your vision, what additional problems are you solving for the customer? What additional things are you enabling for the customer? And if that is a growing thing, then you have a bigger vision, otherwise your vision statement doesn’t probably make any sense. You need to keep on adding incremental value, keep on adding that value to customers, and then you have a bigger and bigger vision.
Said another way — you better have a roadmap beyond your minimum lovable product. What’s the next thing you want to deliver? When you talk about that stuff, by the way, with customers and they see the additional value you’re going to bring, that’s when they buy your vision. Otherwise, all these buzzy words mean very little for the customers.
Karan: Mohit, you’ve managed to, obviously, build great companies, but you’ve also raised money with Tier 1 investors along the way. You’ve got Sequoia, Excel, ourselves, Battery, a whole bunch of venture investors that know you, that want to invest in you. As you think about picking investors, as you think about building a board, what are the things that you would advise the founders here as they’re going on to raise their follow-on rounds? And their first round, sometimes. What are the things that they should be optimizing for?
Mohit Aron: The first thing I would start by saying is be very clear on what you need from your investors and your board members. I’ll tell you what I look for. Number one, I look for investors and board members who will stick with the company in not just the highs. Everyone sticks through the highs. But what about the lows? Even in the highs, sometimes when the things are heading high, they’re like, “Oh, let’s make an exit. This is the time to get the money back.” When it’s a low, it’s like, “Oh my God, let’s sell the company before it gets too low.” So, do they have the stomach to stomach the lows? That’s number one for me.
Number two, you’re hopefully trying to build a company that will become much bigger later on, and this is not the only round of funding you’re raising. So, will this person be able to stand up to his or her partners in future rounds and thump his fist and say, “I believe in this company.” There’s always going to be naysayers who try to push back, “Hey, let’s not fund this company at this bigger valuation.”
Karan: Nonbelievers, yeah.
Mohit Aron: Yeah. So, can this person actually stand up and say, “No, I want to fund it again”? That’s a huge benefit. If you have one of your existing investors standing up in future rounds and saying that, “I believe in this company. I will put money again,” that’s a huge incentive for people who are non-investors right now to come write checks for you. That your existing investors believe in you so much.
In the absence of if a person doesn’t have that conviction, okay, now I’m left with my existing investors who are not standing up to say they want to invest. Why would another one invest, right? The key to raising big rounds, and I’ve raised some pretty big rounds, is that your existing investors have the cojones to stand behind you.
Karan: You had the quality problem of saying no to people more than most people.
Mohit Aron: Now, trust me. When you raise big rounds, everyone is jittery, right? That’s when the river meets the road. I thank Karan. Karan’s always been very good at that. He always fought his partners, “I’m going to put money behind.”
Karan: Took a lot of flack for that in the early days, but I think it worked out for everybody. There was a question there.
Audience Question: This intersection of vision and product market fit, like how you set the vision, you said something that I wanted to pick on, which is that you solve additional problems, especially as there’s fundamental technology shifts happening always but nowadays with AI. How do you think about existing workflows and tackling existing workflows versus new workflows as you’ve built multiple companies?
Mohit Aron: Yeah, great question. The first thing that you need to do, and this is one of the things I always do when I start companies, is you need to build a hypothesis of what it would take for the company to succeed. Haven’t you run into people who are, basically, running failed companies or failed products, failed companies, or the company has already failed or the product has already failed? You’ve said, “What were they thinking?” I could have told them that this is not going to succeed.
It’s actually amazingly true. I thought that why not move back to the time when you’re conceiving of the company and do that at that point. Literally, I have this framework where I write a hypothesis. It consists of four parts. The first one, the first section, the first part is elevator pitch. If I literally run into my prospective customer in an elevator, in five minutes, how am I going to convince that person? Number one, it needs to be a real problem that the customer cares about. Number two, I need to have a solution that solves the problem in a good way. Number three, the product needs to be differentiated. These are the key components of an elevator pitch. That’s section one.
Number two is that minimum lovable product. What does it look like? The fact that the Fire Phone was what it was because they didn’t have a crisp definition of a minimal lovable product is. They kept throwing features. You need to have a very crisp definition of a minimum lovable product. Number three is why would the company succeed? What are the trends that are helping you? Number four is why would it not succeed? What would a naysayers say? What technology shifts might happen in the future that would disrupt this? You are to rebuttal against each of them. And then, you write this hypothesis. I literally do it for every one of my companies. I share it because I might be drinking my own Kool-Aid. I share it with people who are objective and knowledgeable. If they say, “Okay, this is a solid hypothesis,” then I have a company.
What I’m trying to tell you is that upfront, I’ve thought about these shifts. I remember Doug Leone from Sequoia, he asked me when we did Nutanix. After Nutanix achieved the product market fit, he asked me, “What has changed since your initial vision?”
I’m like, “Zero. Nothing.” Cohesity, I shared my initial deck that I used to raise my Series A funding with some of my employees. They were surprised to see that 10 years later, we are basically building on the vision that I said 10 years earlier.
Karan: That’s great, yep.
Mohit Aron: These things are thought upfront. Now, there are some shifts that are going to happen that you can’t foresee, and that’s where you put your best friends together. You collaborate with them and then you align that, “Okay, this is how the vision needs to shift to accommodate for these technological shifts.” And if you do that, basically what I’m going to say is that you not only have a hypothesis at the beginning, you also keep building and improving this hypothesis as the company goes long. I think you have a fair chance of building and foreseeing upfront these technological shifts that might come and interrupt what you’re doing, and then navigate around them.
Karan: We’re almost out of time. I have one last question for you. I’m a fan of Patrick O’Shaughnessy. I don’t know if you’ve listened to his podcast Invest Like the Best. I know Matt does, and I do. He ends all his podcasts with a question that I love, so I’m going to ask you that, which is what is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?
Mohit Aron: Look, I’m blessed. You don’t get here without kind things being done to you. I think if I may pick a few, the kindest things that people have done to me is when nobody believed when I was in a tough spot, the few kind words that were said meant a lot at that time. Of course, when the going gets tough and I’m having a hard time raising funding, when there are some backers like Karen who backed me when things were tough, that’s very kind.
So look, you make mistakes, you fall down, you get up again, you run again. When you fall down, who’s there to actually show you kindness is what matters.
Karan: Thank you for that. Thank you for the kind words. Thank you for your partnership. Thank you for your leadership. Most importantly, thank you for your friendship over 15 years. Thanks for being here today.
Mohit Aron: Thank you for having me here.
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