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Why Your Startup Fails to Scale ($12B+ Founder Explains) | DevRev, Dheeraj Pandey

EO17:05Added Aug 31, 2026

Meet Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO of DevRev. He grew up in one of the poorest towns in India, yet went on to lead the biggest US tech IPO of 2016. Then...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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Transcript format

  1. Intro

  2. 00:00A feature alone is not going to get me
  3. 00:02$100,000 from a customer. One of the
  4. 00:04reasons for our success is
  5. 00:05underpromising and overd delivering.
  6. 00:07This is the core of repeat business. If
  7. 00:09your existing customers are not paying
  8. 00:10you more, then you're basically just
  9. 00:12selling and running, which means hunt,
  10. 00:14hunt, hunt. But the balance between
  11. 00:16hunting and farming, which is new
  12. 00:18customers versus getting more from
  13. 00:20existing customers. Jeff Bezos has
  14. 00:22called it like the flywheel effect of
  15. 00:24companies. You know, you need to add new
  16. 00:26logos, but you need to go make money
  17. 00:28from existing logos. I think that tests
  18. 00:30the real metal of a company. I'm a big
  19. 00:32fan of Will Gdara is a restaurant tour
  20. 00:35who actually had two of the most famous
  21. 00:37restaurants in the world and he talks
  22. 00:39about this concept of unreasonable
  23. 00:41hospitality giving people way more than
  24. 00:44they expect. That is where great
  25. 00:47entrepreneurs differentiate from the
  26. 00:49mediocre ones.
  27. 00:56My name is Dhiraj Pande. I'm the
  28. 00:58co-founder and CEO of a company called
  29. 01:00DevRev. So we are in the business of
  30. 01:02blurring the lines between the public
  31. 01:04wisdom of the internet and natural
  32. 01:07language wisdom with the enterprise
  33. 01:09wisdom. That's basically what Devre is
  34. 01:11all about. Before this I had started a
  35. 01:13company nutanics. We were the fastest to
  36. 01:15a billion dollars in revenue and took it
  37. 01:18public in 7 years record time on NASDAQ
  38. 01:20was the largest tech IPO of 2016. I ran
  39. 01:22it as a public company CEO for almost 5
  40. 01:24years. Then I realized there's a big
  41. 01:26opportunity opening up in AI which is
  42. 01:28how dead started almost 4 years ago. I
  43. 01:30also sit on Adobe's board. I'm on the
  44. 01:32audit committee there. And last but not
  45. 01:34the least a big student of both AI and
  46. 01:37design.

  47. Where a Founder's Journey Begins - From the Poorest State to a Billion-Dollar Path

  48. 01:41I had a fairly dysfunctional childhood.
  49. 01:43I grew up in the poorest state of India.
  50. 01:46The Himalayan rivers the seasonal rivers
  51. 01:48that would flood half the state. Half
  52. 01:50the year was flooded. It was the most
  53. 01:53lawless state but the poorest state.
  54. 01:55That state's GDP per capita is only as
  55. 01:58much as subsaharan Africa. So you can
  56. 02:00imagine the level of poverty that
  57. 02:02actually I saw. That's what catapulted
  58. 02:04me to actually get out of the state and
  59. 02:05do something. Back in the day you could
  60. 02:08only be a good engineer or a good
  61. 02:09doctor. There was no third profession. I
  62. 02:11picked engineering. Luckily when I was
  63. 02:14growing up and I had to pick uh the
  64. 02:16field of engineering the internet had
  65. 02:18just happened. This is 1993 1994.
  66. 02:20computer science was going to be the
  67. 02:22next hot thing just like AI which is the
  68. 02:24new computer science is hot right now I
  69. 02:26built my entire career just being shaped
  70. 02:28around the internet I can't stay in
  71. 02:30India right now but back in the day the
  72. 02:32only option was to leave the country if
  73. 02:35you're an engineer I have to be in this
  74. 02:37bubble to know what working in the
  75. 02:39industry means a big part of this is to

  76. How a Dysfunctional Childhood Shapes a Founder’s Mindset

  77. 02:42have seen dysfunction as a child
  78. 02:45divorced is not bad enough I mean if
  79. 02:47you've seen sad and disappointing days
  80. 02:49as a higher. I think it actually carries
  81. 02:51through with you. But it also means you
  82. 02:53can actually take care of tough
  83. 02:54situations and entrepreneurship is a lot
  84. 02:57of that. It's a lot of highs and lows
  85. 02:59and it's important not to get too sad
  86. 03:01with the lows which also means that you
  87. 03:03can't be too happy with the highs and
  88. 03:05staying on that average line and how you
  89. 03:08modulate your emotion is the way you
  90. 03:11will deal with a lot of failures.

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  119. How the Biggest US Tech IPO Took Him Back to Day One

  120. 04:19only direction when you start a company
  121. 04:22is forward. That's the best you can do.
  122. 04:25I can't thank you enough. I mean, I'm
  123. 04:26I'm not going to
  124. 04:27Nutanics was my first startup. I think
  125. 04:29the core of Nutanix was to really do
  126. 04:32something around data management. We
  127. 04:34said, look, we are good at data inensive
  128. 04:37applications. We reliably manage data at
  129. 04:41fast speeds like no one else. Hey, we
  130. 04:43can ship software to you where your data
  131. 04:46centers will look like Google's and
  132. 04:48Amazons and Facebooks and so on. And we
  133. 04:51were also trying to bring commodity
  134. 04:52hardware which was Taiwanese equipment
  135. 04:54to the enterprise. Before that, people
  136. 04:56were buying hardware from Dell, HP, IBM,
  137. 05:00all these branded hardware companies,
  138. 05:03EMC, NetApp. So, they were all into
  139. 05:06shiny hardware. And he like no, no, no,
  140. 05:08no. You can take the same approach that
  141. 05:10Amazon, Google, Facebook take really
  142. 05:12source hardware from Taiwan, bring it to
  143. 05:15the US and put software on top. So you
  144. 05:18have a commodity hardware and a pure
  145. 05:20software running on top of it. First
  146. 05:22four five years was extremely
  147. 05:24problematic because the hardware was
  148. 05:26flaky and unreliable and the software
  149. 05:28needed to overcompensate for that. So we
  150. 05:31took our time to really make the
  151. 05:32software compensate for a flaky fragile
  152. 05:35hardware. In fact, our company was
  153. 05:36always shut down three times. But at the
  154. 05:39core, the big thing in my head was that
  155. 05:42you are on a tight rope and you're
  156. 05:44walking a tight rope and you have to

  157. Founders Walk a Tightrope - Never Turn Around

  158. 05:46cross this valley. When you're halfway
  159. 05:49through, you can't turn around. You'll
  160. 05:51fall if you turn around. Any new product
  161. 05:53that you launch, any new initiative, you
  162. 05:56have to think about plowing through.
  163. 05:57Now, sometimes moving forward might mean
  164. 06:00shutting it down completely. But to
  165. 06:02actually say I want to go back this
  166. 06:04direction is the worst thing that
  167. 06:05entrepreneurs actually do. So we did
  168. 06:07have a couple of big pivots. The only
  169. 06:09constant in building a company is
  170. 06:12change. So if you can embrace change and
  171. 06:14you can make it seamless and you can be
  172. 06:16a little bit ahead of the market and you
  173. 06:18have to be really good at looking around
  174. 06:19the corner and that means listening
  175. 06:21because when you hear something from the
  176. 06:23market the first time as a stubborn
  177. 06:25entrepreneur you'll say h that's an
  178. 06:27aberration. When you hear it the second
  179. 06:29time, now it's a coincidence. When you
  180. 06:33hear it a third time, it's a pattern.
  181. 06:35You need to understand how to recognize
  182. 06:37patterns and look around the corner. Be
  183. 06:40at least 6 months ahead of what
  184. 06:42eventually will be a hard pivot and see
  185. 06:45if you can make soft pivots into that
  186. 06:47direction. There's no point just making
  187. 06:4990° turns or 180° turns if you can
  188. 06:51actually make softer turns to the same
  189. 06:54degree that he would have otherwise
  190. 06:55achieved.
  191. 06:57I think if you look at the idea of

  192. Don’t Go Where the Puck Is. Go Where It’s Going

  193. 07:00nutanics, it was where the puck was as
  194. 07:03opposed to where the puck was headed
  195. 07:04because it my the first idea my first
  196. 07:06startup. I had started to really take
  197. 07:09technology risk but not a market risk
  198. 07:11cuz the market by 2012 had already seen
  199. 07:14cloud and the fact that consumer cloud
  200. 07:16companies were saying look you don't
  201. 07:18need to own infrastructure if you can
  202. 07:19stream the infrastructure. It's like
  203. 07:21what happened with music eventually was
  204. 07:23like you don't need to own songs. market
  205. 07:25for Spotify was already happening and
  206. 07:27the public cloud was that version for
  207. 07:29infrastructure. So the puck was headed
  208. 07:31to streaming and we were still at iTunes
  209. 07:33and on software was basically headed in
  210. 07:37that challenge market where you would
  211. 07:39constantly have to think about do I need
  212. 07:40to own or can I stream do I need to own
  213. 07:42can I stream so the idea of nutanics was
  214. 07:45where the puck was and it was a
  215. 07:48technology risk and we got paid for it
  216. 07:49for 1020 $20 million that's the
  217. 07:51valuation of nanic but to really build a

  218. To Build a Big Business, Take Market Risk

  219. 07:53hundred billion business you had to take
  220. 07:55a market risk
  221. 08:00This is something that all entrepreneurs
  222. 08:01will actually face being an investor but
  223. 08:03also being an operator and when you do
  224. 08:05your company you're doing both in one at
  225. 08:07some point you might have to decouple
  226. 08:09those where you become an investor in
  227. 08:11your current idea and you become an
  228. 08:13operator of a new idea around 2020 when
  229. 08:16co happened is when you're like okay
  230. 08:17what's the next chemistry we can bring
  231. 08:19together and it really happened to be
  232. 08:21around business software when GPT came
  233. 08:23about by this time we already had our
  234. 08:27own vector database. We had built our
  235. 08:29own vector database to actually do
  236. 08:31search because we knew search was the
  237. 08:34first killer app for anything
  238. 08:36intelligent. Now what GPT has given us
  239. 08:39is the ability to ask it questions and
  240. 08:43bring the natural language wisdom that
  241. 08:45otherwise we would have struggled to
  242. 08:46build. But at the core of it, the
  243. 08:49enterprise data piece of it is the
  244. 08:51biggest challenge cuz I can't do
  245. 08:53anything in the in the business in a in
  246. 08:54an enterprise software environment with
  247. 08:56Wikipedia's knowledge or internet's
  248. 08:58knowledge. I need to bring the knowledge
  249. 09:00of the enterprise in a coherent hole
  250. 09:03which is what a knowledge graph actually
  251. 09:04brings. And to take this knowledge graph
  252. 09:07and mix it up with the wisdom of the
  253. 09:09internet is what we really do. So the
  254. 09:12biggest bang for AI is building a
  255. 09:15perplexity like thing for all enterprise
  256. 09:19assets. And that to me was the light
  257. 09:21bulb moment. In the absence of the
  258. 09:23public cloud, we could have been a
  259. 09:25hundred billion company. But in the
  260. 09:27presence of the public cloud, we'd be
  261. 09:29hovering around the $20 billion range,
  262. 09:31you know, because the market has moved.
  263. 09:34If technology doesn't integrate things,
  264. 09:36bring the chemistry as opposed to just
  265. 09:38new features and new ideas, it has not
  266. 09:41done its job. A big ideas are about
  267. 09:44alchemy. It's about mixing things
  268. 09:45together and making it look like a more
  269. 09:47robust solution. Even like a chemical
  270. 09:49solution is about bringing chemistry
  271. 09:52together. And bringing a lot of these
  272. 09:54things together is where a lot of uh
  273. 09:56value gets created.
  274. 09:58Product market fit is actually a

  275. Product-Market Fit is a journey, not a destination

  276. 10:00journey, not a destination. You'll need
  277. 10:02to struggle with that. At 1 million, at
  278. 10:0410 million, at 50 million, at 100
  279. 10:06million, at a quarter billion, at half a
  280. 10:08billion, a billion, every such
  281. 10:10milestone, you have to keep thinking
  282. 10:12again. You have to think ahead of the
  283. 10:14curve because if you waited too long,
  284. 10:16you might start to sputter at 100
  285. 10:18million. You might have needed a new
  286. 10:19product for going from 100 million to
  287. 10:21250 million. And you might need have
  288. 10:23needed to see the new region of the
  289. 10:25world to do sales and marketing. I think
  290. 10:27this idea of PMF is relative and it's
  291. 10:30not a destination. Every time you think
  292. 10:32you have product market fit, you will
  293. 10:34start to sputter at the next threshold.
  294. 10:35So at 10 million, you're like, "Okay, I
  295. 10:37have PMF." That means that you not
  296. 10:39thought through that at 50 million, you
  297. 10:41will stall because you didn't have a
  298. 10:42pipeline that was large enough for more
  299. 10:45features, more capabilities, bigger
  300. 10:46deals, bigger customers, or you didn't
  301. 10:49think hard enough about the other
  302. 10:50regions of the world, which will now
  303. 10:52create a portfolio effect. Because what
  304. 10:55he keep me to doing is to create a
  305. 10:57portfolio of products of customers of
  306. 11:00regions of the world, geographies around
  307. 11:02the world that will give you that
  308. 11:03balance every quarter because not every
  309. 11:05existing customer will pay you every
  310. 11:07quarter. So you need to find a portfolio
  311. 11:09of large customers so that they can all
  312. 11:11balance each other every quarter. I
  313. 11:13think that to me is a journey more than
  314. 11:15a destination.

  315. The One Thing Behind Every $100B Deal

  316. 11:20We take a step back and think about the
  317. 11:22funnel of idea and the life cycle of an
  318. 11:24idea. There's a lot of ideas up there at
  319. 11:26the top of the funnel and then they
  320. 11:28become concepts. From concepts when it
  321. 11:31becomes a little bit real, it's still a
  322. 11:33feature. You talk about all these
  323. 11:34companies that are basically building
  324. 11:36agents, but at best they're features and
  325. 11:38you can get some early wins by showing a
  326. 11:40feature to your customer, but how do you
  327. 11:42take a feature to a product? A feature
  328. 11:44alone is not going to get me $100,000
  329. 11:46from a customer. How do you organize all
  330. 11:48this into a robust product and a product
  331. 11:51to a company and a company to a
  332. 11:53business? That is the real test of
  333. 11:56entrepreneurship. Going from a company
  334. 11:58to a business is now really building
  335. 12:00relationships with customers, making
  336. 12:01sure that you don't leave customers in
  337. 12:04the lurch when they need the most amount
  338. 12:05of help. One of the reasons for our
  339. 12:07success is underpromising and overd

  340. Underpromise and Overdeliver – The Core of Repeat Business

  341. 12:09delivering, you know, and this is the
  342. 12:10core of repeat business. If your
  343. 12:12existing customers are not paying you
  344. 12:13more, then you're basically just selling
  345. 12:16and running, which means hunt, hunt,
  346. 12:18hunt. But the balance between hunting
  347. 12:19and farming, which is new customers
  348. 12:22versus getting more from existing
  349. 12:24customers, is at the core of building
  350. 12:26large businesses. You know, Jeff Bezos
  351. 12:28has called it like the flywheel effect
  352. 12:29of companies. You know, you need to add

  353. The Flywheel Effect of a Company

  354. 12:31new logos, but you need to go make money
  355. 12:33from existing logos. I think that tests
  356. 12:35the real metal of a company. Do you have
  357. 12:37a product that is authentic? You have
  358. 12:40customer support that's really good and
  359. 12:42finally you have salespeople who really
  360. 12:44know how to underpromise and overd
  361. 12:45deliver. I'm a big fan of Will Gdara is
  362. 12:48a restaurant tour who actually had two
  363. 12:50of the most famous restaurants in the
  364. 12:52world and he talks about this concept of
  365. 12:55unreasonable hospitality giving people

  366. Why Every Founder Should Practice Unreasonable Hospitality

  367. 12:57way more than they expect. That is where
  368. 13:01great entrepreneurs differentiate from
  369. 13:03the mediocre ones. I think a lot of
  370. 13:05people think that entrepreneurship is
  371. 13:06about selling, selling, selling your
  372. 13:08dreams and ideas to prospective
  373. 13:10candidates who become employees of your
  374. 13:12company, but also prospective customers
  375. 13:14and partners. Very few people, I would
  376. 13:16say less than a percent of the people
  377. 13:18are really good at following through.
  378. 13:20They'll sell and they'll move on and
  379. 13:21they'll sell some more and they'll move
  380. 13:22on as opposed to selling and staying. I
  381. 13:25think that idea of unreasonable
  382. 13:27hospitality is what really creates the
  383. 13:29flywheel. When you go to a new
  384. 13:32customers, they hear from existing
  385. 13:34customers and that's how you reduce the
  386. 13:36friction. At the end of the day, there's
  387. 13:37two emotions going on in a new

  388. Fear of Missing Out vs Fear of Messing Up

  389. 13:40relationship. The fear of missing out,
  390. 13:41but also the fear of messing up. FOMO
  391. 13:44and FOMO as we call it. And a lot of
  392. 13:46people think that they just need to
  393. 13:48create for more with prospects. But they
  394. 13:51don't realize that most customers,
  395. 13:53especially in B2B, I'm talking about B2B
  396. 13:54software, when you're really doing
  397. 13:56larger deals like $50, $100, $200,000. A
  398. 13:59lot of it is actually based on faux
  399. 14:01mean, which is fear of messing up. So
  400. 14:04building that critical relationship and
  401. 14:06providing that unreasonable hospitality
  402. 14:08and letting your existing customers
  403. 14:11speak of that unreasonable hospitality
  404. 14:13is the only way to blunt that emotion of
  405. 14:17fear of messing up. To me,
  406. 14:19entrepreneurship is about building that
  407. 14:21authenticity at every level of the way
  408. 14:24because the market is actually smarter
  409. 14:26than you think.

  410. The Future of Enterprise SaaS

  411. 14:30What is disruptive in technology? The
  412. 14:33biggest disruptor to technology is
  413. 14:35miniaturization.
  414. 14:36Big things into small things. Literate
  415. 14:39sits in a pocket. No one on a desk. I
  416. 14:41mean, even the idea of infrastructure
  417. 14:43was like that. Oh, we buying things for
  418. 14:445 years. big metal monolithic purchases
  419. 14:47like just come and use the compute for 2
  420. 14:50hours if that's what it takes for you
  421. 14:52when you make things smaller and lighter
  422. 14:53weight that is the biggest disruptor to
  423. 14:55incumbents SAS has become extremely
  424. 14:58heavyweight extremely
  425. 15:01complex in terms of implementation so
  426. 15:03the disruption that will happen is
  427. 15:06consumption we go from subscription to
  428. 15:08consumption and consumption models is
  429. 15:11what will disrupt subscription models
  430. 15:14remember subscription Subscription
  431. 15:15models disrupted licensing models of the
  432. 15:18last 20 years before that where people
  433. 15:19are buying 5 years enterprise license
  434. 15:22agreements we move to subscription we
  435. 15:24said hey you can pay by the user then
  436. 15:26slack comes in there you don't have to
  437. 15:27pay by the user you can pay by the
  438. 15:29monthly active user making it even more
  439. 15:31lightweight and a little bit more
  440. 15:33towards consumption snowflake coming in
  441. 15:35saying everything consumption based I
  442. 15:38think all SAS will probably become
  443. 15:40consumptionbased and that will disrupt
  444. 15:43legacy SAS

  445. The Worst Decision an Entrepreneur Can Make

  446. 15:47And the worst decision that people
  447. 15:48should not take is sit on things for too
  448. 15:52long. Sit on people who are not a good
  449. 15:54fit for too long. Bad products, unhappy
  450. 15:57customers, unhappy employees, mediocre
  451. 16:00leaders. So to me, sitting on the
  452. 16:03suboptimal thing for too long is the
  453. 16:05worst thing that can happen. It's the
  454. 16:07tyranny of mediocrity. not changing and
  455. 16:10do nothing. Which is exactly what you
  456. 16:13have to go and fight when you go and
  457. 16:15sell your new idea to customers because
  458. 16:17customers most comfortable thing is to
  459. 16:20do nothing. And your biggest competition
  460. 16:21is not that other idea, the other
  461. 16:24competitor. Your biggest competitor is
  462. 16:27inertia. And that is also the biggest
  463. 16:29enemy within a company. Do nothing.
  464. 16:31That's the worst thing uh an
  465. 16:33entrepreneur can do. That's the worst
  466. 16:34thing a company can do.