Sanjay Poonen, Chief Executive Officer and President of data protection and management platform Cohesity has a wealth of leadership experience in the tech space — being a former president and corporate officer of SAP, and former chief operating officer of VMware. Now, he has led Cohesity’s merger with Veritas Technologies’ enterprise data protection business to form a billion-dollar enterprise.
In part one of this exclusive interview series, Sanjay Poonen spoke about Cohesity’s AI strategy. In the second part, he explains key details about the Cohesity-Veritas merger and how he views leadership for the combined entity. He then goes on to clearly delineate the customer roadmap for the merged entity to quell customer anxiety which is natural for a merger of such scale.
What drove you to take up the Cohesity challenge?
I took a year off, and I was on different boards. I was on the board of Philips, a medtech giant in the Netherlands, and on Snyk, a developer security platform, and I was looking at various leadership opportunities. I spoke to Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, who has been a friend and mentor to me. He said that I have already done a number of big company roles, so he thought I should take a smaller company and make it big for a different challenge.
When I joined Cohesity, its revenue was just over US$300 million, and what I saw was the opportunity to try and take it to a multi-billion dollar company. I think the founders and the founding team did a fantastic job getting the company off the starting blocks into a reasonably good-sized company. Then, it was an organic innovation that we did in the next year-and-a-half, which along with this Veritas deal we are now on the cusp of creating a US$2 billion company in just two-and-a-half years.
Interestingly, Nvidia is now an investor in our company, and we think we can do something very special to create an iconic company whose revenue was not just US$2 billion but over US$5 billion in due course. The experiences I had at VMware and SAP have helped me a lot in this regard. The experiences at SAP helped me in laying out the vision and executing it at VMware, and the experiences at VMware have tremendously helped me here. I think those experiences build on each other.
How is the Veritas merger coming along?
We went from Chicago to Berlin, and now to Singapore, hosting our sales and marketing teams and some customers and partners — and the feedback has been amazing from the two teams. The culture of these two teams are remarkably similar. We view the world through the same lens, and our shared mission is to protect and provide insights to the world’s data.
The outcome is resilience. Everyone sees that there is a mission to really take care of the world’s biggest companies. You know, 12,000 plus customers, 85% of the Fortune 100, 70% of the Global 500 — some of those customers have come to these various cities to speak to our teams. It’s been great to hear these stories of customers. We had partners who have also come to meet us including system integrators. I am pretty excited about the future, because for either company, I think it could have taken longer on their own to become this big.
We both come from different spots. Cohesity was number seven in the market. Veritas was number two. I think it would have taken longer for either one to get to the US$2 billion run rate of an attractive growth and profit company. We were about one-third of that revenue, and Veritas was two-thirds of that revenue. Both companies had challenges getting to that next level of being number one in the space.
I think Veritas, on its own, was stuck inside a private equity company and didn’t have the levers that a fast growth venture company has to invest and grow. It was harder inside a private equity company, because there were many assets in a private equity company that had nothing to do with data protection. Those have actually been parceled out to a separate company called Arcterra in this deal. We were able to take out of Veritas the part that’s relevant to data protection and backup, and we combined that with us.
We didn’t actually acquire all of Veritas; we acquired only 70% of that business which was related to data protection. In some sense, even though we got the Veritas name, we weren’t acquiring Veritas, we were acquiring the net backup business, and combining that with our business to create a business that was bigger than the parts. We picked the name Cohesity because when you have had a brand that’s been around a long time, it’s time to refresh it, and we felt Cohesity provided some new cohesiveness and intensity, and in the US, it’s a well-known brand.
How do you describe your tech leadership style?
You have to do everything to empower and engage your employees because when you engage them, great things happen. A significant number of those people are sales reps, marketers, PR folks, partners, and managers. They have got to understand that their role in the company is very important. I want them to lead. Most people think the leaders of the company are the big managers. I use this example: How many people were reporting to Mother Teresa, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela, or even Martin Luther King when he was in jail? Zero.
These people virtually had zero direct reports, but they had an influence over people that was so profound, because when they spoke, people listened, and the influence of what they said and what they did was profound. An individual contributor in the company could be the leader and become more effective than even the CEO of the company, if they inspire others. What I want to see in the company are people who are leaders, not managers. Managers, of course, should hopefully be leaders, but not all managers are leaders. I sometimes find that many managers are bureaucrats.
You have to get those bureaucrats out and shake up the organisation. I want every manager to be a leader, but you’ll never accomplish perfection in this regard. However, if you can get the individual contributors to be leaders, and they realise that they don’t have to be a manager to be a leader, then they can be more effective.
We as leaders, as CEOs, have to go and find those people and just unlock their shackles and let them be effective. We have gone from being a 2,000-person company to a 5,500-strong one with this combination, and it’s very easy for us to become more bureaucratic because we got bigger. However, we have to take the axe to bureaucracy and make sure that we don’t have layers that insulate us from where the action is really happening.
Finally, when it comes to large acquisitions, there’s always some anxiety on the end user side. Do you see the same with the Cohesity-Veritas deal?
It’s natural for customers to be nervous. We have taken a very customer-centric view that we’re going to actually lower the cost of ownership for customers over time. I set out a goal to try and meet the top 1,000 customers of Veritas, even if it was on a video call. I started the day we announced the deal, which was February last year, so I have had a year to meet quite a lot of our customers, and in each city I have been meeting many more customers.
I think in general, we know what their concerns are, and these are primarily around the roadmap. We have now got a very solid roadmap as to how and to where their future is going to evolve. Within six months we’re going to start showing the market what we plan to deliver. We can turbocharge innovation, because I have more engineers to innovate — twice the engineering team compared to our competitors.
If we can turbocharge innovation, these customers will feel that they got something out of this merger. Our customers at Cohesity, the DataProtect base, need to feel like this combination got them features faster than when Cohesity stayed alone. If you are a Veritas customer, you need to believe that this combination has got you more features, benefits, and capabilities. If you know that the customers are happy, then you can provide that incremental innovation without having to gouge them on price. You just need to offer innovation that naturally takes them from where they are now to next generation capabilities and benefits in a very seamless fashion.
