Transforming Customer Support with AI | DevRev’s Co-founder & CEO Dheeraj Pandey

**Dheeraj Pandey** (0:00)
And the way we dealt with, not just making the product very easy to use, but also making customer service so delightful. We said, you got to really make the central opening system, and that's how came DevRev. Obviously, timing is everything. We figured the killer app for AI is customer support, and yet we couldn't be a bolt on top of existing systems. We had to really go and do this fundamentally differently with cloud native and AI native principles.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:30)
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And take the steps you need to improve your organization's developer productivity today. Well, welcome back to Dev Interrupted, everyone. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and today I'm thrilled to be joined by Dheeraj Pandey. Dheeraj is the CEO and co-founder of DevRev, a unicorn, and he's the former CEO of Nutanix, which he led to a $16 billion valuation and a successful IPO. Dheeraj's entrepreneurial journey goes from Nutanix to DevRev, and it's marked by innovation and a deep understanding of how AI has transformed businesses already and how it can transform business operations moving forward. Today, we're going to discuss his approach, the lessons he's learned, and how he's applying a design-led approach to AI at DevRev to build that unicorn company and challenge giants like Salesforce and Jira. Excited to talk about his counter positioning and understand more about that. Dheeraj, welcome to the program. Thank you.

**Dheeraj Pandey** (1:51)
Thank you, Conor. Pleasure to be here.

**Conor Bronsdon** (1:52)
Yeah, I'm really excited to have you on because it's always great to learn from entrepreneurs like yourself who've not only led one successful company, but now are doing it again because there are clearly repeatable lessons and things you've learned along your journey. But before we dive into some of those lessons and your approach, I do want to remind our listeners, I know they hate to hear it from me every week, but if you're enjoying this episode, if you like guests like Dheeraj, if you want to learn more about these kind of topics, please take a moment to rate and review our podcast on your podcasting app of choice, whether that's Stitcher, Spotify, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. These ratings and reviews are how people find the show, and they matter a lot. It's an immense help. We deeply appreciate hearing from you, our listeners. With that said, though, we're going to dive into the content. Dheeraj, you built Nutanix into a $16 billion company, and now you've founded DevRev, and its valuation, that sounds like it's unicorn status. Not to mention, you've also been a board member at Adobe, you're a former VP of engineering and much more. What inspired you to pull away from all these other successes and build DevRev?

**Dheeraj Pandey** (2:55)
Yeah, thank you for the introduction. That $16 billion has been a labor of love for a lot of people. Timing-wise, this just happened to be at the right time and right place. I worked with two other co-founders who also built great companies over time. And just the folks who have actually been doing it ever since I left about three and a half years ago. So, it's taken a village to build that. When I was doing my first company in 2009, then itch was there. I figured that there's a little bit of an intuition, the gut about really going and building products that people like. There's a really good article in The Economist in 2015 when Satya was taking over Microsoft. And they talked a lot about humility and fierce resolve that really made Microsoft, Microsoft, maybe 40 years into its journey. And one of the big things they talked about is how they said, look, we're going to have to build things that people like, as opposed to putting this practical attacks on Windows and Windows Phone and everything has to be built here. We got to really build apps that people might actually like on their operating systems. And to me, that was telling because you just spoke volumes about first of all, what it takes to reinvent yourself, but also how market is king. The market is king. There's nothing more powerful than the market.
It's like the ocean and you don't go and store from the ocean against the tide. You need to actually be with the tide. So in 2009, that journey was about building distributed systems for the masses, because the distributed systems were still confined to consumer cloud and in cloud companies were trying to do this within their own premises. But it said, if you have to really take this and democratize it, what would it take? And that's what Nutanix is all about. If you have to democratize distributed systems, what it meant to have people not buy proprietary, expensive hardware, is there a way to do this? And there was a killer app, that killer app was virtualization. And we didn't know much about virtualization, and we learned everything about virtualization and what it means to take physical machines into the realm of virtual, and built great, delightful experiences on top of it. Now, the first five years of Nutanix, the product was very difficult, like really, really hard, because we were embracing commodity servers, commodity hardware. The things that the public cloud folks were comfortable with, because they didn't have to ship all this stuff to anybody else premises, we had to ship all this stuff to somebody else's premises. And then we had to support this remotely as opposed to the way the public cloud companies or the consumer cloud companies were doing it with tons of people. I think that was the hard part. Of course, VMware is a layer of an operating system underneath us. It was also really hard, because they had never seen as big an app as what we had actually come to build about data management and distributed systems on top of VMware. So the way we had to compensate for that difficulty, the fact that the product was actually fragile, was through customer support, which said, look, we've got to really bring in the human element to this technological breakthrough that we're trying to actually achieve in the market. This hee and yang was great. Product work with customers was this hee and yang, and customer support was about being customer centric. Leading with technology was about being product led. I just realized that we had to do this differently than what was about ticketing. Okay, customer support is not just about ticketing. It's really about end-to-end collaboration between the market, the end users, the buyers, and the support people, but also product managers and developers. So what does it mean to create this real-time highway between the end users and the developers and everybody else in the middle? We used a lot of Slack. In 2014, we were one of the earliest users of thing. Okay, let's do real-time collaboration.