Jeetu Patel: Cisco’s AI-powered cybersecurity future

Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.

I am Ross Haleduk.

And I am Mahendra Ramasinghani. We have spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.

On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the network where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors Building the future of cyber.

We will talk about the hard parts of the founder journey, launching companies, getting to product market fit, raising capital, and scaling to an exit.

And yes, we will also be talking about epic failures.

But Mahendra, we're here to make the founder journey easier.

That is correct, Sid, but we cannot make it too much easier because startups are hard. And of course, you already knew that.

All right, you two, enough. Let's get started with this video.

Episode.

Our guest today is Jeetu Patel, Cisco's Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer. At Cisco, he leads innovation and execution across the company's security and collaboration businesses. Under Jeetu's leadership, these divisions have become major growth engines driven by a focus on innovation and an increasing emphasis on user experience as well as AI-driven transformations. Prior to joining Cisco, Jeetu was a Chief Product Officer and Strategy Officer at Box, where he scaled the platform to 100,000 customers and over $700 million in revenues. His career also includes leadership roles as Chief Strategy Officer at EMC and President of DocuLabs. Today, Jeetu will share with us why he chose to join Cisco and lead its transformation in embracing AI and growing cybersecurity. For context, Cisco is a 40-year-old networking giant with a $250 billion market cap. It generates over $50 billion in annual revenues, and its security business alone brings in over $10 billion each year. Serving 300,000 customers. Its cybersecurity business grew 32% last year, driven by the $28 billion acquisition of Splunk. Ranked number 74 on the Fortune 100 list, Cisco is now in its next act, evolving into a different kind of a startup. For our audience today, Jeetu will share Cisco's vision and strategy in security, including areas Cisco is doubling down on, and most importantly, how it plans to compete with incumbents like Palo Alto Networks, Zscaler, as well as new disruptors like Wiz and Cato Networks. Without further ado, let us dive in. Welcome to Inside the Network, Jeetu.

Thank you for having me, Mandur. It's great to be here.

Sid, Ross, and I are excited about this episode where we can talk about the journey that you're on. And it's a fascinating journey. You started at Cisco 4 years ago, and rumor has it that you're infusing this very large enterprise, almost 100,000 people, to move at the speed of a startup. We'd love to hear how you're doing that. But before we go in that direction, 4 years ago when you joined Cisco, you were assigned to resurrect Webex. And it would have seemed like a career suicide to do that. Why did he even consider taking that on?

It's great to be here with all of you. And I think these are, you know, I, from what I understand, your audience is entrepreneurs. And I think it's, uh, I love speaking to people that are starting companies because that's the lifeblood of this country. And, um, we just need more and more startups that are actually getting created because, um, they do a very important job in society. So Thank you for having me to talk to them. Going back to your question on why did I even consider doing it? I was, in fact, I had accepted a job at a FAANG company when Chuck called me and I was going to start there in like 9 days. And it was a great company and it was a great job. I'm a product guy at heart. And so I love building products that people love that they can talk to their friends and family about because I feel like in a tech company, the heart and soul of a company is the people and the product, right? So if you don't have great people building great products, then everything else is almost like academic in nature. And in Webex, I always had this kind of, you know, passion for productivity. And we were in COVID when I actually started at Cisco. And so it was a very kind of relevant technology at the time. But when I logged in to have the meeting with Chuck the first time, like it didn't even work. And so, uh, it was like there was some glitch that was there and I It was like 15,000 ideas coming saying, oh my goodness, you can do so much with this product. And, and so I, um, glutton for punishment. I decided that I'm going to kind of dive in and there were two big problems to solve. One was Webex and one was cybersecurity and, and both those franchises were pretty damaged and neglected at Cisco for a long time. So what I needed was commitment from the CEO saying, hey, I'm going to give you air cover. And we're going to go out and make sure that we double down on this and the product investment and innovation is important. And he was very good about doing that very early in the conversation. And what I can tell you up until right now, I still— Chuck is my first guy that I talk to every morning and he's the last person I talk to when I go to bed at night. And he is completely engaged. But what, what was interesting about it was there was so much potential and there was Uh, if we did it right as Cisco, we have such massive distribution and such a huge global brand that you could really shape the way that the world operates. And so I decided to do it, but here was the thing that was interesting. The exact same team that was there that I was thinking like, what are these people doing? Why are they not fixing the basic problems? It was that very team that got our NPS score from 22 to 68. It was that very team that actually added 1,800 features within a matter of, you know, like about 9 months. And it was that team that refactored the entire platform. So what you see as Webex today is a completely rebuilt platform from the ground up compared to what was Webex 4 years ago. But what they did that was really interesting was during COVID we were already in that we were starting to build this new platform. But we had all these features in the old platform, right? But what we had done was we had said, let's stop the old platform. Let's start building the new platform. But unfortunately COVID happened and everyone said, now I need all these things that I need to have in my new platform because we're all working from home. And so what the team did was they actually in parallel built 1,800 features twice and then they merged it. And now we are on the new platform and. No one even knew that that change happened. And it was the same exact team that I'd inherited, not one executive change. They built it, the entire new platform. And I think it was because they were so hungry and they were so, it was a personal thing for them. They're like, you know, we cannot on our clock, let this franchise that we care about so much die. We have to make sure that we actually get it to be one of the world's best products. And the mission was what actually drove them. And the beauty was all I did was created a clear strategy and put the right people in the jobs and then got out of the way. And then what we did was we were very, very obsessed about experience of the user, which was not quite the DNA of Cisco at the time. You know, we wouldn't do design reviews at Cisco. We wouldn't do demos. And that cultural shift really energized the team because they were like, oh, why is, uh, an EVP doing a design review with an IC in a, you know, a 6,000-team org, which is how big Webex was. And yeah, that's a big, pretty big product because we've got calling, messaging, meetings, polling, Q&A, events, whiteboarding, async video, all of those things. And they just, man, the tempo with which they built that stuff is probably one of the proudest projects that I've been a part of in my life is Webex, just because of the level of kind of progress they made within a very compressed amount of time without complaining, while all being remote in COVID. I mean, there were times when the shortage of servers was so high during COVID that they were begging for servers and bringing those servers back in and staying up all night just so that they could actually keep the site up and running. And look at it now, like we've got hundreds of millions of users and the system is working marvelously well. And it's, it's actually very, very gratifying to see. Long-winded answer, Mahendra, but it's one that deserves a lot of accolades for the team.

Jeetu, maybe unpacking that a little bit more and advice maybe for founders, what was the cultural shift? It seems like this was the same team that had had a difficult spot before and they went into full gear to fix things. Many founders and many founding teams go through that, right? The first version of the product doesn't work. You have to go and flip things and try to rework everything on the second version. How do you kind of change that team's viewpoint to saying, look, we're at day zero?

I think you had to give them clarity, a sense of urgency, and sweat the details. You know, and so the clarity was in the strategy. We had to be very clear on what strategy we were going to kind of pursue. We had to sweat the details. So we would sit down and debate every pixel on the screen on how it needed to be laid out. Which would have the least amount of friction for the user. And we really had to galvanize the team to say, you know, you know, just really sweat the details. And, and I think that's an important dimension that sometimes gets missed where you have to operate in founder mode.

Right.

And so, like, you know, when you like, I haven't run my own business now for 15 years, but for the first 20 years of my career, I ran my own business. And I'm just hardwired to think in founder mode. I'm just hardwired to think this is my company. And so I just don't think in terms of like, I'm in a large company and I have to do all of these different things. Like, no, this is my business. And how am I going to run my business the way that it would be if I were owning it 100% of it? And I think that really helps. And the people that we had, we had to make sure that we switched their perspective to, if we do this right, we can change the way that the world operates. And only Cisco can do a certain set of things that no one else actually will. Like, one of the things that was really valuable was if Cisco didn't do this, some of the things that we were imagining would not happen in the world. And that got them very galvanized. And, um, you know, there was a leader named Javed who actually had run this thing for a long time. There was a guy named Anurag who actually did an amazing job. There was a guy named Abhay. Who is another leader who had done a fantastic job. And these people were just amazing leaders that, that drove the team. There was a lady named Larissa who was amazing. And they just drove the team to this very, very good outcome. And, um, I feel like if I were a founder thinking about what this would be is any task when it seems completely impossible, when you break it down into small elements is very, very achievable. If you just stay with it and persistence really matters. And this is a lesson I learned from Aaron Levy. You just never give up. You know, you just keep going. And the days which are hard where someone's coming at you because it's not the right, you know, you feel like you're being attacked either internally or externally, you just keep fighting it, keep fighting and keep moving forward. And I think that's what this team did.

In your recent Mad Money interview with Jim Cramer, you mentioned that there will only be two types of companies. Those that use AI and those that are held back. Can you elaborate on this topic?

I was even stronger than that. I think those that are going to be really good with AI and those that are going to be really struggling for relevance. And, and I actually truly believe that. Like, here's the thing I've learned is when there is a massive megatrend and a tectonic shift that's occurring in the market, you can't fight it. You have to use it as a tailwind. Now, the difference is you have to know the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. And that's where the judgment comes in, right? Because you think about some of the things that were hype cycles that were there on, you know, Web2 and all that, leaving aside the crypto piece, but like a lot of the other key, you know, kind of pieces. I think it was, it was hard to kind of put your arms around what they meant because it was very hard to say, what is the use case actually? What is the life of an individual? How is it going to be different? It was all very theoretical kind of aspects that were talked about, whereas when you think about AI, we've been investing it now for about my entire time there. We've actually just proposed my first investment I made before my first day that I started. I actually had not even started and I was on a call negotiating with the CEO was a company in AI for sound acoustics engineering called Babbel Labs that we had acquired a team from Stanford. There was like 40 PhDs on sound and acoustics engineering to really remove noise from the background and amplify human speech. And it was one of the most successful acquisitions we've made to date because it, it just got embedded in the fabric within the first 30 days of the acquisition. But I think what you have to keep in mind is when you have these mega trends, you have to go all in because the shift that'll be there will be so profound that if you don't commit to it, there's no other way besides you'll be left behind, you know, and AI is one of those where I think in the short term, people might overestimate its impact, but boy, in the long term, every one of our lives is going to change so profoundly. And I mean, just look at what's happening right now. It's crazy. What seemed like magic 2 years ago is now something that we have gotten so used to. And then every single day there's new magic coming out. You know, like I had heard a great example. Someone said, if you've taken a Waymo in San Francisco, the first time you sit in a Waymo, It's like, oh my God, this is amazing. The second time you sit, you're like, wow, super convenient. I'm going to do my email. The third time around, you're complaining about the seats. You know, you've gotten used to it. Like you've, you've just, it becomes baseline. And so I think humans have a remarkable capability to actually get magic to become baseline. And I think we have to keep creating new magic. And I think what AI is going to do is just extend our ability to create new magic over and over and over again. And I think we're just getting started. We're probably in the first innings, if you take any kind of sports analogy, and there's, there's so much to be had, but companies that fight it, I just don't think they'll be relevant. You know, it'll be very hard for them to actually participate in the economy meaningfully. And like Cisco is all in, we are AI first. If there's anything that anyone is confused with is if anyone thinks AI is not something that's worth doing, they should not be at Cisco. They should leave Cisco because they'll be disappointed, you know, and, um, that I think is a very important thing to digest. And in my mind, if you do that right over and over again, you become a great company. If you do that wrong, even a couple of times, you might not be a company at all.

For founders who are just starting to explore AI, how do you tell the difference? What is your framework for telling the difference between a hype cycle and a mega trend that is going to redefine everything?

You know, it's a really good question, Ross, because the way I think about it is the easiest way to do it is, are there extremely easy use cases that the technology solves in such a way that the people that are the benefactors of those use cases, the users, cannot help but tell their friends about that product? Like, how many of us, after we use ChatGPT the first time, wanted to just tell someone about it, right? Like, I— my goodness, did you just check this out? This is crazy. Like, have you seen what they've done? Like, every one of us, I guarantee you, said that to someone in our, in our close circle, right? That was— that in my mind is a megatrend, when there's a wave that's happening. By the way, I think Operator is one of those other waves. I don't know if you folks have used Operator yet from OpenAI, but It is unbelievable what it can do. And it's, you know, it's early days, right? Because there's a lot of fit and finish that has to get done, but it is unbelievable on how it is going to solve problems that we had not even thought about that could be solvable. And in my mind, if your explanation of something gets to be overly complicated, and if people still don't understand it after 30 minutes, and then when you see when they see your product, they still are scratching their head on it. Chances are you're not hitting a megatrend. Chances are you're not going out and doing something. You might be drinking your Kool-Aid way too much, but you're not listening to the customer enough. And I think when the customer sees something, they should feel magic happen. And you know, it doesn't— there is no concrete way to know whether you have product market fit, but you know when you don't have it because that's when you have to keep fighting for press. That's when you have to keep fighting for, you know, explaining to people what it is and people still don't get it. Whereas when something is magical, a few sentences and people are like, I want that. Where can I go buy that? Sign me up.

You know, Jeetu, I want to dive in a little bit deeper on the cybersecurity business at Cisco, which, you know, kind of was relatively, when you look at the grand arc of all the other things Cisco does, it used to be relatively small. It was about 10% of the total business. And Obviously, you've made this very large acquisition with Splunk, and that has helped to change the game. We've had Doug Merritt on the show, and he talked a little bit about kind of the early days of scaling Splunk post-IPO and what was learned through that, what worked, what didn't work, the insights that were gleaned. I'm curious, now that you have Splunk as part of the core business in security, how do you see the next phase of growth of the cyber business at Cisco?

Well, you know what most people don't realize when you think about Splunk, you take Splunk and our core business, we are one of the largest security companies in the world, roughly about $8.5 billion of account services. And it's growing, you know, close to double digits. In fact, Splunk is growing at double digits and our security business is growing close to it. But if you think about what we want to do over here, I think I would start back from the core foundational principle. We are at our core a networking company. You can't be a great networking company if you're not a great security company, because otherwise you're just selling dumb pipes. You can't be a great security company if you're not a great AI company. And you can't be a great AI company if you're not a great data company. And I think Splunk brings us that dimension of data in a pretty big way so that we can, we can correlate data in an effective manner to be able to detect breaches faster, to be able to compress the time to investigation. And to be able to accelerate the response and remediation to a threat. And so from that perspective, I'd say that we, um, it is so much part of the core. And the way I think about Cisco is we are the world's only AI-first secure networking company. No one else can say that. You go to Arista, they have to partner with Palo Alto. You go to Palo Alto, they have to partner with Arista. You go to, uh, you know, like none of them have networking and security combined with AI as a core obsession. That's what we do. Now, why is that important? Why is that combination important? Because, you know, if you assume that the attacker is already in your environment, assume that the attacker has already infiltrated your environment, the name of the game is preventing lateral movement, right? Where does lateral movement happen? On the network. Who knows most about the network? In the world, Cisco, because we've got the most amount of telemetry on the network. And I think if you think about security being a data game, the correlation of that telemetry so that you can better detect, compress investigation, and better remediate is all gonna be a core part and parcel of it. And in my mind, the more the data sets that you have that you can more effectively correlate together, the better a security company you're gonna be. And so I think there's a, compounding effect to scale that we can bring to the table. And the structural advantage that we have of networking and security is very hard to replicate because someone has to get into an entirely different business, whereas we are already in both those businesses and we can tie those together. And so what we want to do is take security and bake it into the fabric of the network and make security hyper-distributed so that no matter where in the network, You want to enforce security, you should be able to do it, whether it be on a top-of-rack switch, whether it be on a server, whether it be next to, next to the kernel in the user space using an eBPF agent. We should be able to make sure that we actually embed security in the fabric of the network. And that is a foundationally new architecture than the way that security has been, which is very perimeter-focused.

In fact, Jeetu, you did at one of your RSA talks touch upon some of these seismic shifts as well as architectural changes that Cisco is building in the product lines. And we'll go a little deeper into that in the later part of the program. I want to start with the big picture view. Cisco has what, almost 300,000 customers worldwide?

Cisco has about close to a million. Security has close to 300,000.

Well, that's even better. A million customers, of which 300,000 are feeding into your security business. You have a great perch, a great vantage point where you can sit, look at the forest, you can talk to some of the largest customers in the world. Help us, help our audience understand what are some of the pain points you consistently hear in the market from CISOs, from your customers? What do they talk about when it comes to talent shortage in cybersecurity or budget constraints or even integrating 50 different products? You know, there are some numbers out there that Average CISO is struggling with integrating a large number of security products. So give us some color on what is the pulse of the customer out there in this day and age.

Yeah, I think, you know, this, it's a very good question and you hit the nail on the head. The way that security innovation has happened over the past 3 decades is it's innovation by patchwork. And what do I mean? A new threat emerges. Ross, you know this really well. There's a new company that comes to go out and solve that threat. Consequently, we've got 3,500 security vendors in the market, right? Not a single one of them owns more than 10% of share. And on average, most companies have about 50 to 70 companies and products within their cybersecurity stack. That is 50 to 70 different policy engines. That's 50 to 70 different management interfaces. That's 50 to 70 different vendor management things that they have to worry about.

It—

the complexity is untenable. So, and ransomware, despite us spending more in security today than ever before in the history of humanity, ransomware is at the highest point that it's ever been. So clearly something is not working, right? And so in my mind, there is this kind of move towards more integrated platforms rather than just a bunch of point solutions. Now that doesn't mean that the point solutions go away. That means that the platforms will be able to go out and integrate other point solutions as well so that organizations have an easy way to manage the estate. And at Cisco, we have one of the broadest portfolios in the market. And so we are able to go out and make sure that this integrated platform— now we used to be like a holding company. We had bought a bunch of companies and every single company was a different brand, different logo, different design language, different— so it was madness. Like you couldn't make any heads or tails out of it. And The thing that was sad about that is we were not getting the advantage of being a startup nor of a big company because we were too big for being a startup and we were too disorganized because everything was being run individually to benefit from the scale of a large company. So it was the worst of both worlds. What we've done is we flipped that equation completely. Right now, what you have is a completely integrated platform. We're not a holding company. We are an integrated platform that is loosely coupled, tightly integrated, which means that Customers don't have to buy the full stack from us, but boy, when they do buy a few components from us, they work like magic together. And that's actually a very important kind of dimension. So what customers are saying is decomplexify things for me, simplify it, increase the efficacy, right? And make sure that you can actually create a level of responsiveness for the things that are happening in my environment so I can move fast. Towards addressing the breaches that are happening in my organization and do that in a way that is an open ecosystem rather than a closed wall garden. So I actually think that's a pretty important dimension, which is we don't want to just be completely tied to a closed wall garden where, you know, only things that Cisco works with is Cisco. No, I will work with my competitors. I will integrate with Palo Alto. I will integrate with CrowdStrike. I will integrate with SentinelOne. I will integrate with Zscaler. That's Great, because a true enemy is not the competitor, it's the adversary. And so we got to make sure that we all come together and share data in real time. Because if we share data in real time, what'll end up happening is we have a chance of beating the adversary. Because right now, the adversary is— we've made it very easy for the adversary to infiltrate our environment, and we've made it very difficult for the defender to be able to defend the environment. It should be the other way around, right? We should have it difficult for the adversary to penetrate, and we should make it easy for the defender to go out and protect. And if there is a breach that has happened, you should be able to do detection and response and remediation as fast as possible. So I feel like both on the protection side as well as the detection response side of the house, I feel like there's an opportunity for the market to just get a better, faster, cheaper kind of approach, highly performant, fully integrated platform, high efficacy, responsiveness in real time or near real time. If we could do that with a high amount of data that gets correlated, so you're, you know, in the age of AI, you cannot have human-scale defenses for machine-scale attacks. You have to have machine-scale defenses. And so that's the way at least that we think about it at Cisco. And, and by the way, it's working because now what you're starting to see is tremendous amount of uptake. No, we built like 7 products from the ground up at this point, from the ground up, right? This is not like, it's like a startup. There's a startup within a company like Cisco. And our goal is in 4 years, we should get them to anywhere between 3 quarters of a billion to a billion dollars in top line. And in year 1, we try to see if many of them that are monetizable products get to $100 million in top line. If you can get to that momentum, then you can start to see some really meaningful things happen. You know, and by the way, you have to know that we are, we relate to the industry in a lot of these things, right? Like if you think about SASE and SSE and, you know, Zscaler was the first one, but the beauty about this is sometimes when you're late, it actually helps because they're a 13-year-old stack and we built a modern stack and now we are starting to replace these companies. In customers. And when you replace these companies and customers, like we recently had a company, a competitor be replaced in a customer, which was a very well-known competitor, 78,000 seats that were deployed in like about 79 days or something, you know, 78, 79 days, something like that. And it was 100% deployed within 79 days. It would have taken our competitors 6 to 9 months to go out and deploy it. So not only are we operating at scale, but we're also operating with agility, which is the whole point of this operating as the world's largest startup. You have to operate, you know, at speed with scale.

Jitu, the last year's RSA conference, you talked about how securing applications is becoming harder and harder and how security needs to be reimagined with AI at the kernel level. How do you see various product lines and their adoption in the market? What What is moving the fastest? What kind of solutions? What kinds of categories?

So we launched a product called HyperShield, right? And it's in, it's, you know, this is the first year that it's been there. We just had it available, you know, not too long ago. And we've got the way that we're doing it is we're getting the first batch of customers up and running in it because it's a product that is going to have a tremendous amount of long-term impact on the architecture of security because it's not the next version of something. That already exists. It's the first version of something completely new. And so what we've done with HyperShield basically is think about taking a security stack, breaking it up into thousands of piece parts, hundreds of thousands of piece parts, millions of piece parts. And in front of every microservice, in front of every Kubernetes container, in front of every virtual machine, in front of every Kubernetes cluster, you will have a mini security stack, right? And that mini security stack will be able to know exactly in this end-to-end encrypted world what traffic is originating from where and where does it terminate. And you, you get full visibility of that front. But then you solve some big problems. We solve the problem of segmentation is hard. So we actually do autonomous segmentation. Patching is hard. So we actually provide instantaneous compensating controls when there's something that needs to get patched because it Usually takes about 45 to 49 days to patch a vulnerability from the time it's announced. And Ross, you know this better than I do, right? But it takes only about 3 days, and soon will be hours, from the time that you announce a vulnerability to when it gets exploited. So you've got this window where the market is very exposed, and what we needed to do was make sure that you actually solved that problem so we can immediately, within a matter of minutes, have a compensating control put in front of something that's a vulnerability. And once you actually apply a patch, the vulnerability spot, uh, the compensating control is smart enough to be taken off automatically. But if you don't apply that, then it'll just keep stacking the compensating controls on top of each other. So that's the second thing. And the third thing is we never have to do an update again. Because right now, if you think about what happens with firewalls, updates happen twice a year, once on the 4th of July, once during the holidays. Right? And why is that? Because you have to bring the whole system down. Well, you never have to do an upgrade because what we have done is we've created a mechanism to do dynamic dual pathing. So version 1 and version 2 can run in parallel. You see that version 2 is working exactly the way that you want it to work. Nothing is breaking. And then you make the version 2, which is in the shadow path, become the primary and make the primary the shadow path. And before you know it, what you've done is created something completely magical. Where the infrastructure is constantly updated and you don't have to do anything about it. The infrastructure is constantly patched and the infrastructure is autonomously segmented. And if you can do this, it solves massive challenges because what we've done is gone from a monolithic architecture to a hyper-distributed architecture where we baked security into the fabric of the network. And this is what, you know, like the, I mean, we're an infrastructure company. Look, what we do is we do the plumbing so well so the customers don't have to think about it. And that's what we've done here.

I want to talk about the broader competitive landscape in cyber and maybe, you know, let me, let me highlight at least how I think of the landscape and you feel free to correct me or debate with me. I think there's one group, which are the more kind of multi-subsector enterprise software companies. And there you would put Microsoft or Google or Cisco who are doing a whole bunch of things. Security is one of them. Then you kind of have the incumbent public— exactly, pure-play public cybersecurity companies, the Palo Alto Networks, the Zscalers of the world. Then you have kind of the high-growth private cybersecurity companies. Here I would put Wiz or Cato Networks in that bucket. And then the last is obviously the pure-play cybersecurity startups, the very early-stage folks who are kind of breaking out of the mold. When you look at that broader market, I'm curious, Jeetu, How do you think of those different players? Even if we zoom out of just Cisco, what do you think each of these groups is the best at doing in their sub-segments?

Yeah, I think, so, like, I think, by the way, all these companies that you talked about, we've got some very, very big brains working on security. Like, I personally, you know, a lot of these people are friends of mine who are CEOs of these companies, and they're very, very smart people, you know, and so I have a lot of respect for Nikesh. I have a lot of respect for George Kurtz. I have a lot of respect for Tomer. I have a lot of respect for, you know, of course, Satya, who doesn't, uh, with what he's done with Microsoft. Like, all these people have done a phenomenal job of building amazing franchises. And I think what's happening is there's going to be a few companies, a handful of companies that'll be platform companies in security. I think Microsoft will be one of them. I think Cisco will be one of them. I think Palo Alto will be one of them. Each one of us will have a very different vantage point and a unique proposition that we can bring to the table. And then there's going to be some things where all of us kind of say the same thing, but the proof's in the pudding and who does a better job. So I think everyone will say we're really good at AI. I think you have to kind of take a look at what we're doing, each one of us are doing in there and make the decision yourself. And that doesn't mean that it's a zero-sum game either. I feel like what's going to happen is most organizations want to have a multi-vendor strategy because they don't want to have just one vendor in security, but they'll at least have a couple. But you need to make sure that you have a platform play. I think gone are the days where you're going to have 50 to 70 vendors. I think that just simply does not work. And then what you have is the startups that I believe are going to work very closely with the platform players and integrate with the platform players over time. So what I would assume if we execute what we say we're going to do over time, our platform, our management plane, our data plane, which are the two big elements of the platform, will be ones that third parties will be able to integrate into, right? And so if you're building a cybersecurity startup, maybe you don't need to build a management plane. Maybe you can actually just plug into Cisco's management plane. That would be great. Maybe you don't need to build a data plane. We could actually make sure that we provide you with a mechanism to go use Splunk and you can actually use that, that data plane as effectively as you need. And so those are the kinds of things that I think will evolve in the market. But I personally don't see any of these companies that you highlighted, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cisco, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, none of these are going to go away. They're all going to do well. But I think the composition of the kind of role they'll play will change where there's going to be a handful of platforms. I know for a fact Cisco will be one of those, and then there'll be a couple others, but it's not going to be a dozen. It's not going to be 50. It just is not tenable to have that many.

Jeetu, switching gears a little bit towards how founders can benefit from some of your insights. You have a very interesting rubric of 6 different parameters that you have talked about, timing, market, and so on. Now, the most fascinating part that I got out of that rubric when I first heard it was how you help prioritize those 6 in a certain order. Because look, everybody's talked about those pieces, but the way you set it up and prioritize them is a very unique way. Can you share with our audience first the priority of those? And then the second question is, how did you even come up with that logic?

Way too much time on my hands sometimes in the evenings. So, but no, it's, I've actually studied this one and it originated from a post that Mark Andreessen had written a while ago. And, but I didn't feel like it was fully complete. And so then I kept iterating on it because I wanted to make sure that my team understood this as we were going through it. So let me give you the 6 things that I think are important. So I think that these are 6 things that a company must do to be a great company. They're in descending order of importance. But if you don't have all 6, you don't win, right? And so the first one is, like you said, my ender, it's timing. And a lot of great products were built at the wrong time, never saw light of the day, right? Apple was not the first company that built the tablet, but they're the ones that actually hit the timing right. The technology was right. That's why they were able to be successful. So timing is number 1. You don't control timing. Number 2. Is market. And what I mean by market is you have to be able to address, you have to be able to have a very large market available to you that you can actually bite off one bite at a time. You don't have to go attack the full market all at once, right? So number 2 is market. Number 3 is team. Oftentimes people will debate me saying a team is more important than market, Jitu. I say absolutely not because you have a great market with a mediocre team. The market pulls you up. You have a shitty market with a great team. The market drags you down. Market always wins, you know? So I think team is number 3. And what I mean by team is you have to have a team that can complement each other. Everyone being a Michael Jordan in a basketball team would not create a great team. You need to have a rounded team so that they can complement each other. Number 4 then is product, which I always think is the soul of the company. Is product, right? Number 5 is brand. One of my mentors that told me one time, G2, don't ever go to a company where you've— they've lost the brand mojo because it's very hard to resurrect back. You know, it's— do you think Sybase is ever coming back? Zero chance, right? But, but it's okay if the product is broken because you can go fix that. But don't go to a company where the brand is, is completely dead. And number 6 is distribution. Just because you build it doesn't mean they come. You have to build it and get it through your distribution channel to the right buyers if you're selling into the enterprise, because that distro is really important. So timing trumps market, market trumps team, team trumps product, product trumps brand, brand trumps distribution. You don't have all 6, you don't win. And it's a good way for a company to keep themselves in check. How many of these are we good at? How many of these are we great at? And how many of these are we exceptional at? And what would it take for us to be exceptional at all 6? Because that's when greatness starts to happen. And by the way, it's not easy.

So talking about distribution, it's well known in the industry that Cisco's true superpower is precisely its distribution channel. And obviously every founder wants to get access to this advantage. What do founders need to do to win your attention?

So I actually don't think, I mean, Cisco has a great distribution, but I think our true superpower is we actually take very deep, hard infrastructure problems and we're able to solve them very elegantly. And that is the true superpower. You know, for a while there, we had lost and forgotten that that was our true superpower. And I think we are kind of, we are right back where we need to be on that front. But I think building technologies that are really hard. With true kind of technology differentiation is one of the things that we do well. But what we do is very well as well is distribution. You know, we've got a lot of great salespeople that can go out and take a product to the market in a very rapid, and they're competitive and they're great. And they're, they're very thoughtful. And, and in my mind, how you have to think about this, if you're a founder, right? Let's say that you're a founder who's doing a single product company. In a single product company, what you have to worry about is, did you get to product market fit before you ran out of money? Phase 1. Phase 2, did you get to go-to-market fit where you could now in a repeatable way sell the same product over and over again to the same title? And have you created a repeatable opportunity creation motion? It's very important to create a repeatable opportunity creation motion. What I mean by that is I want to be able to create an opportunity after opportunity after opportunity in Salesforce that I'm logging in over and over again with the same titles, because what that does is shows repeatability. And the name of the game in sales is repeatability. You want to be creative on the product front. You don't want to be creative in sales. It's repeatability. Just keep getting the engine cranking over and over again. Can you go to the same person, the same value prop? And get the same level of seductiveness for a very large group of people, you win, right? So that's phase number 2. Phase number 3 is only after you've had phase 1 and 2, you invest in scale. If you prematurely invest in scale, you're just throwing money down a drain. There's no point doing it. A lot of times founders will think they have product market fit when they don't. And product market fit basically tells you that, is the user coming back to my product over and over again?, and when they come back, are they getting their problem solved over and over again? And do they love the product every single time they use it? That's product market fit, right? It becomes a habit over time. Then you get to go to market fit where are we able to sell to the same titles over and over again and create opportunity. And then 3, now once you've got the first 2, you invest in scale. So that's the first, let's say that I'm a, I'm a startup. I built the first product. Those are the 3 phases I go through. Great. Everything worked out well in those 3 phases. I got to $100 million in ARR. Awesome. What do I do next? The board says, hey, you know what? You need to become a multi-product company. You can't be a single product company anymore. You know, Lightspeed Ventures will come in and say, I need to make sure that we're doing some, some more multi-product kind of work. So what do you do next? You start building a second product. What's the biggest mistake people make when they build a second product? They don't keep in mind the route to market that they had available that they have perfected with the first product. So if I've got a route to market to selling to a certain persona in a certain band of a company for a certain economic buyer, and then I build a second product, which has nothing to do with the first product, that's completely different because I've read too many TechCrunch articles. And all of a sudden I'm finding that, you know what, this is the big trend, so I'm going to go over here. And you don't pay attention to your distribution available. You don't pay attention to your route to market. You will build a product which requires an entirely different sales force. Which means it should have been a startup by itself. It should have not been part of the company being a second product because there's only so many routes to market that any company can actually go out and capitalize and be really, really good at. You cannot be good at 15 different routes to market. You would fail, right? And so the second product and the third product and the fourth product, why is Workday so successful? Because every single one of their products takes advantage of their existing route to market. That they have. You know, they don't just go out after the shiny toy because they heard about something that was great. That's, you know, growing really fast. It's okay to go after markets that are growing fast as long as you have permission to play in that market. And I think the thing that gets most ignored by startup founders is they forget where they have permission to play and where they don't have permission to play. The other thing that actually gets forgotten sometimes is a startup founder will— this is where startups are better than large companies. Large companies suck at this. The startups are much better at it. A startup, I was having dinner with Jyoti Bansal last night. He's a great friend of mine. He runs Harness. He actually founded Apti. He has multiple different teams building products, right? And that's great. But you know, the beauty about this is the startups that are really good is when something works, you double down on that. What large companies are good at is not placing the bets and taking risk. What they're not good at is when something works, they don't double down on it. They keep hedging. Hedging is not always good. And so in my mind, what you have to think about when you're building a company for durability is you have to first make sure that your product is saturating all markets, all segments in the right way. And you built the right market, right product for the right market, right segment that you, and you are very clear about where you're going to be good and where you're not going to be good. Right. And when you get your second product and third product and fourth product, like what we had done at Box. We have to be very clear about which route to market do I have available? And am I selling my products into that route to market? And am I leveraging the platform that my company has rather than me going out and building a bunch of independently standing products for different markets in different areas? Because then you would rather be a startup rather than being part of that company. And that is something that founders have to really internalize. As they go through it.

Jeetu, you know, I've been investing and building startups on the security and IT side for the last 12 years, and every single time there's a conversation about acquisition, Cisco guaranteed will either be the first company that's mentioned or the second company, just guaranteed, whether that's by a founder, a board member, an operator, an advisor. So I think probably the question that most of our listeners will be most interested in hearing is this one, which is just how does this acquisition machine work? Are you proactive? Are you reactive? What are the criteria you're thinking about? How should founders even be engaging with Cisco's acquisition teams? What's the inner workings? Give us some insight there.

It's actually not as complicated as people might think. We used to be in the mental model where all we would think about when we went into a new market was buying something. I hope I have actually played a part in killing that notion. We are builders, not buyers. Okay. So I want to build great products. However, we have a great balance sheet. Every once in a while, if we find someone else who can accelerate where we want to get to, and it's a great team with a great culture fit, with a great either product or tech talent, with a strategic fit in the company and our strategy, and it is something that is reasonable price-wise, where we can actually feel like it's a reasonable price for us to pay for that asset, then we will actually not be shy in going out and deploying our balance sheet. But our strategy is not to go out and buy companies. Our strategy is to build a very deliberate set of capabilities and products and platforms. And if that can be accelerated by someone else, then we do it. For example, we just launched a product in AI. Safety and security called AI Defense. Hopefully many of you saw the event that we, we had hosted. AI Defense is a product, was something that we were underway on about a year ago. The team had come over to my home. We sat down and stayed up until like late at night. And we decided that this is what we're going to do. That night they went home by 1 AM. I think they left my place at like 9, 9:30. By 1 AM, they actually had a presentation for me that said, this is what we talked about. Here's what we're going to build. By 6 AM, I ratified that presentation. And then we built the thing in 9 months. In between there though, we acquired a company called Robust Intelligence. Robust Intelligence gave us things that we would have actually taken much longer to build. And it gave us an accelerant so that we could get that thing built. And we were completely okay with going out and buying it. And the co-founder, Yaron, is great. In fact, the guy that's running AI Defense was a guy named DJ Sampath who actually was another company that we acquired from a company called Armor Blocks. And these CEOs, what we, what I look for is, are the CEOs good culture fits? And is the team a good culture fit for Cisco? Because I don't want them to just sell the company and move on. I want them to actually be part of the Cisco mission. And I don't want them to feel like I need to protect my thing that I sold to you. I want them to take on a larger mission to make Cisco a very meaningful entity in the future. So DJ's mission is not to go out and make Armor Blocks great at Cisco. DJ's mission is to make Cisco great at AI, right? And, and that's what he does. And he then advocated for acquiring Robust Intelligence and Jeroen, who's the CEO over there, his mission is to help DJ making sure that we make Cisco the best AI company that there is in cybersecurity. And that in my mind is the way that it works is the secret sauce is, is there a culture fit? Do you have grit? And by the way, it's very hard to fake this thing, right? Like when you come in, don't fake it. It's not good for you. It's not good for us because we are sophisticated enough to go out and give you a package where you're not going to be able to just leave. You won't make money if you don't stay for a while because we are buying people. We are not buying bits and bytes. Software is a bunch of people, right? We're buying people. So what we want to do is make sure that when people come in, that they actually have a commitment to stay for a while. And when they stay for a while, their— what they want out of this is to become a very seasoned executive. So the next time they become a CEO, they could be a CEO of a larger, bigger, badder company. And that's what I think I can offer them. Right. And I have done about 15 acquisitions so far. Majority of the CEOs, I had one that I actually had a really sour taste in my mouth that I will never hire again. And I will never invest in again. But other than that, most of them, class act people, right? And they worked with us for a while. Some of them retired over here. Our CTO right now was an acquisition. When he sold the company, he thought he was going to stay for a year. 22 years later, he's still here. Right. And so those are the kinds of things that we want to do is we want to bring people in and then make sure that they can flourish at Cisco so that ideally they could do their life's best work over here. Now, by the way, it's not all a bed of roses. Cisco does a lot of stupid shit and we sometimes can suck the energy out of someone because of some of the things that we do. And we have to make sure that the way in which we structure that deal is that we, we insulate the founders from that, because if you take 90% of the time that the founder has to deal with that, they will leave. Right? So we have to insulate the founders from that madness. But we have to make sure that the founder also knows that 10 to 20% of the time, you're going to have to deal with some of that stuff because it's a large company. There'll be some of that tax that you have to pay. And so it's just a different mental model and a mindset. The thing that you have to think about is one of my good friends had told me one time, working at a startup is like working in a, in a treadmill. You're moving really, really, really fast, but there might be a lot of motion, but there might not be as much, you know, kind of distance that you cover with that motion. In a large company, it feels like you're moving a little slower, but man, when something moves, the entire world starts noticing and everything changes. But you have to be patient. So it's a different muscle you have to exercise. Now, what I'm trying to do is we're trying to make sure that we operate at speed with scale. So don't make it feel like it's going so slow, move faster. But make sure that you also keep in mind the scale dimension of it. Because there is an impact of scale. Like if you have a team of 7 people, you just huddle all of them together. If you have a team of 30,000 people, you can't just huddle them together. You know, it takes a little bit more production. It takes a little bit more thinking on how you're going to convey something to them. But that's a good skill to learn on how to operate at scale. And what I would tell founders is if there's a match between Cisco and you, and you come here, come here wanting to learn that because you will become a better leader. You will become a better executive when you go leave Cisco and go someplace else. The people that have come to Cisco having sold a company, work here for a while and then have left, have built very, very successful businesses that they would have not been able to build had they not had the Cisco experience.

We're coming towards the end of our conversation. So we're going to close it out with a few closing questions. And maybe the first one is, you mentioned a whole bunch of folks that you've interacted with, that you've worked for, that you worked with, folks like Chuck Robbins, the CEO of Cisco, and Aaron Levy, the CEO and co-founder of Box, Jyoti Bansal, who you had dinner with yesterday. There's this Wall Street Journal article that describes your personal board of directors. Could you talk a little bit about what is a personal board and why should people create one? Is it important for founders to have something like this?

So this idea of a personal board is a very important idea. What ends up happening as you get more and more what the world deems as success is you get a lot of people around you that start telling you what you want to hear. And that's the beginning of the end if you start believing that stuff, you know? And so what you need to do is you need to surround yourself with people that know you well enough, that really care about your success. But that will never bullshit you. And I have a person in my life, Jesse, who is my SVP of operations. I literally never take a job without her. Don't take a job. It's a rule because I would be not even half as successful if she wasn't by my side. She is so good at what she does and it is so different from what I'm good at that the combination of the two of us makes for A very, very good outcome, right? And the beauty about it is even though she works for me, I think of her as one of my mentors. And so she will coach me on things. She will tell me, Jeetu, you sucked over here. This was not your best work. You needed to do better here. You need to make sure that this is an area that you never make this mistake again. That is not acceptable. You did a really good job over here, so don't be too hard on yourself. So she'll tell you that. You know, Aaron is another one that I actually talked about in the Wall Street Journal article. I left Box 4 and a half years ago. We have dinner every 6 weeks. Aaron, there's this another guy, Jeff Kreiser, who was a co-founder of Box, and me, every 6 weeks at Nobu, we sit down, we have dinner, right? And we, you know what we talk about? Just what's happening in the market. We'll catch up for 10 minutes on family, personal life for everyone, and then remainder of the time is what is happening in the market. And it just energizes me. Like he, he is one of those guys that's such a positive influence in my life because I laugh with him. I think with him, I have such a great time with him. Tor is the head of marketing at Apple. He's one of my very dear friends. Anytime I have something that needs radical simplification, he will just do it. He's not a tech guy. He's the only guy I know in tech that doesn't have a LinkedIn account. It's wild. And I, first time I told him, like, you have a LinkedIn account? He's like, what's that? He's head of marketing at Apple, right? But he is, he is so good at what he does. All the commercials you see at Apple and all the corporate marketing you see, that comes from his team. And he is very, very good at simplifying things and distilling it down. Jeremy Burton was one of my former bosses. You know, Rick Devenuti, who was one of my prior coaches. Chuck, who I actually look to for advice all the time. And he's got so much wisdom in so many areas. I think all of these are kind of good people to surround yourself with, and it's up to you to not keep seeking compliments. It's up to you to say, what am I not doing well? And what would you like me to see up my game in? And when you ask the question that way, they will tell you what that is. And when they tell you what that is, you have to take that seriously and you have to make sure that you actually, you know, do a much better job at that. There were a few things in my first couple years that I had made some mistakes with that at Cisco and Chuck had just told me one or two sentences. You know, he's a man of few words. Like, I think this one you could have done a little bit better. I took that. I completely changed my approach because he was right. That was not an area that I did as well. And so I think you have to surround yourself. And especially if you're a CEO or someone in a senior level rank, it gets lonely at the top. You got to have a group of people that are just constantly rooting for you. But I'm not going to just give you false flattery, which is one of the most dangerous things that you can actually start— you can get. And the more successful you get, the more of those people there will be around you. They might not even consciously know they're doing it. They're just enamored with you in the wrong way. And you cannot take that seriously because they might have seen your public persona. They might have not seen your private persona. Like, I'm a human being like everyone else. You know, I get I get happy. I get anxious. I get, I mean, you know, if something happens to my daughter, I'm a nervous wreck and they know that about you. And then they can make sure that they could. So I think it's important to make sure that people around you keep you human and remind you that you're human, but you can do superhuman things. That's the personal board of directors. You know, you should have at least a half a dozen of those in your life for different things that you can reach out to whose only vested interest is seeing you succeed. And they don't have any jealousy streak with you. They don't want to compete with you. They just want to see you win. By the way, it's hard to find that many people that actually genuinely want to see you win, right? And so find those people and cherish them and nurture them.

Jeetu, with my roots in Europe, I'm curious about how Cisco is navigating the geopolitical situations. We live in an interesting times and business is under pressure, be it with Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, Israel, Gaza, or here at home. How do you think the world events could impact technology companies both this year and going into the future?

Look, I think the political and geostrategic landscape is no longer something that is divorced from business. It is actually something that you have to factor in into the business decisions you make all the time. And I do feel like, you know, having a very strong public-private partnership is extremely important. You're not going to always agree with every policy of every government, but I think it's important to actually initiate the dialogue because if you don't, because you say, I disagree with this, therefore I'm not going to initiate the dialogue, there is no chance that's going to get better. If you believe that's not good, particularly in the areas that you don't agree with, if you don't engage in a dialogue, there's no good coming out of it. You know, and, um, in my mind, like our business is so global at this point, we do business in so many countries. That we have to engage with government leaders across in all these countries, whether it be India, the Middle East, or Europe, or the US, or South America, anywhere. And I think the way that I at least approach it is it is a, a deep curiosity to learn their perspective and a deep desire to expose to them your perspective. In an even exchange so that you can both walk out of that, that dialogue smarter than what you had walked in. And then there are going to be certain things that you just, you know, kind of, um, you have to, you know, make a choice on at some point because you're trying— I mean, we are working eventually for our shareholders and we want to make sure that we can actually have a— we need to build great products that get to massive adoption that obtain commercial relevance. That's the goal, right? And I feel like it's not as complicated as I thought it would be looking from the outside, because you know why? Every person you talk to is eventually a human being. And the moment you, you respect their culture and you respect the way that they're operating, but understand that they're human beings and they will have incentives and you will have incentives. And sometimes those incentives are different, but if you can actually figure out a way to converge the incentives, and find common ground and start from where the common ground is, you will be better off. I think that's just a good way to live life. That works in a personal life. That also works really well in, uh, you know, kind of engaging with people on, uh, in the public sector. And I actually find that the importance of public-private partnership today is more important than ever before. Regardless of whether you think that more regulation is good or less regulation is good, there should be more collaboration between public-private. Enterprises. Like, you should not have less of that. You should have more, regardless of what your perspective is.

On behalf of our audience, we want to sincerely thank you, Jeetu, for taking the time to share the inside the network view at Cisco. You joined this company amidst COVID and have infected it with a startup-like entrepreneurial energy. Rebuilding Webex with over 1,500 features in 9 months is a non-trivial example that shows how you can in record time galvanize the troops at this 40-year-old giant. Our audience will have a much better understanding of partnering with Cisco. Then, as you reminded them, founders shouldn't sell to Cisco to rest while staring at their golden handcuffs, but rather come and build new global-scale businesses that can serve a million customers worldwide. Thank you, Jeetu. On behalf of our Founders community, we wish you the very best for the road ahead.

Thank you for having me on the show. And, you know, I think the Founders are doing a very important job. So engage with me on LinkedIn and Twitter. And if there's any way that I can help, I want to see a vibrant startup ecosystem. That's good for our country. It's good for the world.

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