I first met Steve in 2011, when we were still less than a two year old company, Nutanix. I was young, but he was even younger, probably 10 years younger — a fountain of youth for me as we both grew together, learning from each other, making mistakes along the way. We were hustling for early customers, creating nascent benchmarks, jostling with naysayers on Twitter, defining an MQ with Gartner, losing debates with the skeptics, and of course, winning hearts and minds of innovators and early adopters.
Company building is hard. Finding people who believe in building is even harder — because you have to learn to reset the clock, assume once again that you haven’t achieved anything, and don’t know much. Then you start learning again, having made yourself vulnerable in the new arena, with a new problem statement, new competitors, new peers, and new technologies.
Steve has done exactly that: reset the clock with DevRev after having spent a decade at Nutanix converging IT infrastructure, making machines invisible. He’s back to converging again, this time business infrastructure that is hopelessly fragmented, dispersed, and extremely complex to stitch together.
A 5-people startup is elegantly simple. It has a couple of founders, a few early developers and designers, and a handful of early adopters. Everyone knows the product, and everyone communicates with the customer. They don’t just communicate, they collaborate with the end user, and mostly in real-time as technologies improved this past decade. Everything is real-time and continuous — integration, deployment, nudges, onboarding, feedback… and collaboration.
As companies grow, clouds begin to emerge: an engineering cloud, a production cloud, a support cloud, a marketing cloud, a sales cloud, a customer success cloud, an analytics cloud, and of course, a collaboration cloud separate from all business systems. Everyone is working hard — jostling for growth, trying to contain customer churn — being on the Zoom treadmill early mornings and late evenings, updating Slack channels, responding to emails, being in unnecessary meetings for fear of missing out, and hopelessly searching for answers to do what matters most. The customer and the product are forever lost. The energy vampire of busy work, especially with remote peers, has raised its ugly head.
Simplifying something this fragmented takes immense energy. Manoj and I are so grateful for the early DevRevelers to have put so much effort to define this new paradigm of business software that makes the back office customer-centric, and the front office product-centric — helping businesses support users (not tickets), build products (not projects), and grow customers (not departments). Defining the object and resiliency model, the event model, the security model, the SQL and analytics model, the large language and AI model, and the migration pathways has been hard, really really hard. But it has been fun in a close-knit family that fights together, designs together, and travels together.
Writing is a rare skill. Writing something as it is being created is rarer. Manoj and I are thankful that we founded DevRev with Steve early. The Book of DevRev is a testament that friends can work together for decades, disrupt markets, and be constant students of life and technology. I look forward to seeing The Book evolve along the way, helping you appreciate the effort that goes behind the Effortless…
—Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO, DevRev, Prior Chairman and CEO, Nutanix