AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco President on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel

Jeetu Patel (00:00:00): Survival of humanity depends on the successful AI. Birth rates are going down. If you have 60% of your population where you don’t have enough people who take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. When I got this new job, there’s zero chance I would have been able to do it if AI wasn’t there, because I didn’t know anything about so many domains that we were in.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:17): A lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world.

Jeetu Patel (00:00:20): You have to know the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. When there’s a megatrend, don’t fight it. AI is a megatrend, one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:30): To turn Cisco from an older, slower, more traditional enterprise to a very AI-forward company, this is very difficult to do.

Jeetu Patel (00:00:37): AI is moving so fast. One of the things I tell my team is, “Fast-forward six months from now, get prepared for that world.”

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:42): You manage 30,000 people.

Jeetu Patel (00:00:44): Every management book that you read will tell you in public criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. What you have to do is, is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:00:59): What’s something that you wish you’d known before taking on this role?

Jeetu Patel (00:01:02): Stamina trumps intellect. It’s very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. You can’t teach hunger.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:01:15): Today, my guest is Jeetu Patel, chief product officer and president at Cisco. Cisco is not a brand that mostly people think about when they think about AI, but not only are they a massive part of the AI infrastructure build-out that is happening right now all over the world. What Jeetu has achieved internally at Cisco in terms of transforming their culture and ways of working to be AI-first is something that most big company leaders only dream about. Jeetu is also an incredible human with so much warmth and wisdom to share. I am very excited to be sharing his story. Don’t forget to check out lennysproductpass.com for an incredible set of deals available exclusively to Lenny’s Newsletter subscribers. Let’s get into it after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.

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(00:04:18): Jeetu, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Jeetu Patel (00:04:22): Lenny, I’m excited. Good to see you.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:04:24): The timing of this conversation is so amazing. You’re just coming off running the most insane assembling of AI thought leaders and tech leaders I’ve ever seen. Let me just read a few of the names that you guys had at the summit that just happened a couple of days ago. You had Jensen, you had Sam Altman, and you had Marc Andreessen, you had Fei-Fei Li, you had the CEO of Intel, AWS, Mike Krieger, Kevin Weil. That’s just like a third of the guests you guys had. I don’t know how you did this, but it feels like you have this fire hose of information coming at you. You interviewed a lot of these people on stage, and so while it’s fresh in your mind, I want to ask you, after doing this summit, after hearing from these folks, what’s something that you’ve changed your mind about, or what’s just like an insight that has been lodged in your head ever since doing the summit?

Jeetu Patel (00:05:13): It was an amazing thing to pull off, because we never thought we’d be able to do it, and we were really worried going into it, thinking, “Well, we’re trying to do fireside chats for 12 hours, and there’s a capacity of human absorption that we’re trying to challenge.” And so, we tried to put a lot of breaks in there and we started at nine a.m and we ended at nine p.m., and we had a couple hour break in the middle, but everyone stayed and everyone was engaged and we could have gone until 11 and it would’ve been fine. And it’s because the quality of the conversations and the caliber of the guests that were there made a world of a difference.

(00:05:53): What was the takeaway from it? I’d say a few things. One is the capabilities overhang is real. I think there’s more functionality, on one end there’s kind of this paradox of progress. On one end we are solving all these amazing problems with science, on the other end you talk to the enterprise, they’re like, “We’re struggling with adoption.” And I feel like there’s help that’s going to be needed within organizations. And the reason we pulled this thing together, the goal was, what is happening in the industry and how can we help customers make sure that they can make the most of it? Because we are in one of the most foundational movements that we have seen in human history, and it’s we got to make sure that we make the most of it. So, that was one is, the capabilities overhang is real.

(00:06:37): The second area is, I’d say that it’s harder when you go beyond some of the more obvious use cases. For example, coding is a very, very good use case that you’re starting to get a lot of success in. I mean, we just had our first product that we think we’ll be in the next two weeks, 100% written with AI. I don’t think that’s as easy when you go into every other function of the business. And that was actually very apparent that hey, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of how every business works.

(00:07:10): And then the third one, which is a really interesting takeaway, and Marc Andreessen talked about this in your podcast a few days ago. In fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast, because it was so interesting, and then we dug into it a little bit more. And then Kevin Scott was also talking about this, but this notion of the fact that birth rates are going down and we have a demographic shift that’s happening in the world and there’s going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than the younger age bracket, and those older people are going to need folks to take care of them.

(00:07:42): And historically in society, that’s actually always been the case, but we might be at a point where that might not be the case. And when that’s not the case, we worry about AI taking our jobs, I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI. Because at some point if you have 60% of your population that’s in a demographic where you don’t have enough people who take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. So, I don’t think people talk about this enough, and that’s something that we have to take a moment and digest, that this is so important for our collective success moving forward.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:08:16): Something I was going to say during my chat with Marc and when he talked about that AI is basically coming just in time to save us, because there aren’t going to be enough people to do the jobs. In my head I was thinking, “This is like another signal that we are in a simulation that things are working out just right for us.” What are the chances?

Jeetu Patel (00:08:34): The older I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation. The first time I heard that concept, I thought it was such an absurd concept. Now I’m like, “This might actually be happening.” You never know.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:08:47): Following this thread, a lot of companies are trying to adjust to this new world. You are doing an incredible job at actually doing this. We got connected through Kevin Weil, who is former CPO at OpenAI, now head of science at OpenAI. And the way he described it is the work that you have done to turn Cisco the way he described it from an older, slower, more traditional enterprise to a very AI-forward company. How many employees do you guys have? You said 45,000.

Jeetu Patel (00:09:15): We have 90,000 employees, 43,000 watch the stream.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:09:18): So, the big question for you is, it feels like it’s really working, and this is very difficult to do at a company of that scale. A lot of leaders are trying to make it work. What are two or three things that you’ve done that you think have been most impactful and effective in helping Cisco lean into AI, not be scared of it, and actually embrace the future?

Jeetu Patel (00:09:40): Innovation in my mind is a choice. I always find it interesting when people say, “Well, you’re a large company, you can innovate. You’re a small company, you can innovate.” It’s like, “No, it’s just a choice. Every day you come into work and you can choose to be thinking about being creative, or you can choose to not be creative.” It’s like a little binary … It’s a binary choice You can make every hour, every minute of every day. And so, we made that choice that says, Cisco is going to be not just an iconic company. And Chuck Robbins, our CEO says this very eloquently. He’s like, “I want Cisco not just to be an iconic company. I want Cisco to also be an iconic and innovative company.” And so, we got to make sure that we are actually innovating with the set of constraints that we are dealt with.

(00:10:30): Every company has their own set of constraints, and we have our own set of constraints, and we have to make sure that given those constraints, we have to actually innovate really well. Now, what are the two or three things that have happened that have really helped us out? One was, being very clear on what is up for debate and what is not up for debate. Because what can end up happening is you can always have a pocket veto in a large company where if you ask enough number of people, people say no. If you’re a large company, you ask enough number of people, someone’s going to say no, right? And so, when you have conviction about something that’s happening, that is going to be a bet that you need to place.

(00:11:10): What most people think in large companies is large companies don’t experiment. That is in fact not true. Large companies experiment a lot. What large companies don’t do is when an experiment works, they don’t go all in and double down. They try to keep hedging. We didn’t hedge on AI. We said we were going to go all in. That was number one.

(00:11:31): What that meant was we had to get people to understand that their personal success and the success of the company are very aligned in us getting dexterous with the use of AI. That means that if they feel like for some reason AI is going to take their job or AI is going to be negative for them, we had to reassure them that that was not the case. But the reverse was guaranteed to be the case, that if you didn’t choose AI, if you weren’t going to be dexterous in whatever job function you’re doing, then your job is probably not going to be that relevant over here in the long run.

(00:12:08): So, that was the first thing that we did, that was a, I’m not a big fan of top-down hierarchy of going out and doing things. In fact, deep down inside I don’t respect hierarchy as much. I feel like it can constrain you at times. But I wanted to make … On this one we were very, very deliberate. The entire company is on the same page, we are an AI-first company. And this happened, we were working towards it even prior to ChatGPT, but ChatGPT became that seminal moment in November of ‘22 that we actually did that. So, that was one.

(00:12:42): Number two was we had to make sure that we defined what success looked like. The way that individual success was defined was everyone wanted to be a GM at Cisco. They wanted to own their own fiefdom, be a general manager. Because they felt like, “In order for me to move up the ranks, I need to be a general manager, which means I need to have my own sales team. I need to have my own marketing team. I need to have my own product team. I need to have my own engineering team. I’m going to make sure I run my own silo.” And if you’re a 40 billion business in product revenues, 45 billion whatever we were at the time, and then all of a sudden your goal is that you’re going to just run a bunch of $40 million businesses and break it up into a series of 40 million businesses, that’s actually not a good thing for the company.

(00:13:30): So, the thing we did was we said, “We have to become not a holding company of 251 acquisitions and thousands of different products, we have to become a platform company.” And the characteristic of the platform is you have to be tightly integrated where the customer feels the same emotion, no matter what product of ours they use. There’s the same set of expectations that can be served, reliability, trust, elegance and design, solving a problem in the most efficient way. Those are the things we want to strive to do. But you don’t have to buy everything all at once, because we also want to be realistic about the fact that not every customer only uses Cisco top to bottom. There’s an ecosystem. So, loosely coupled, but tightly integrated. You don’t have to buy everything all at once, but boy, when you do buy two things together, they work like magic. So, that was the second big thing we did.

(00:14:22): And then the third one we did was we said, “Let’s make sure that we have a mental model shift in the company.” And we did this about five, five and a half years ago when I first joined. This was a very deliberate decision, which was, we cannot operate in a walled garden. We have to make sure that we operate in an open ecosystem, which means we have to be completely comfortable with having a competitor that we’re going to partner with. And that’s okay. We don’t have to think about this in a zero-sum manner. In order for me to win, someone has to lose.

(00:14:58): We can partner, because if a customer has made a choice of going with company A and company B and we happen to be one of those two companies, we owe it to the customer to invest in their success in that other company because if the customer succeeds, that success has a flow through rate to you that’s going to be pretty high. And so, that’s what we did, and I think that’s been those principles of building great products, but making sure that it operates like a platform and having an open ecosystem, I think has been kind of central. And then not being confused about the fact that we’ll be AI-first from the top down.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:15:34): I want to take a tangent and make sure people understand what Cisco even does these days. I think as a lay person, you’ll think about Cisco and you’re like, “Okay, they WebEx, yes. They make maybe some routers.” You guys are key to this massive AI infrastructure build-out that’s happening right now. You’re a major player in this. I don’t think people realize this, people listening to this podcast. Give us just a quick glimpse into how Cisco fits into this massive build-out and just what does Cisco these days?

Jeetu Patel (00:16:03): Cisco is a critical infrastructure company for the AI era. What does that mean? But if you think about where the constraints are right now, if you think that AI is going to be one of the biggest movements, and then you ask yourself the question, “What could hold AI back?” There’s three things where we feel like we can have a direct impact that can hold AI back. Number one is there’s an infrastructure constraint. There’s just not enough power compute and network bandwidth in the world to go out and satiate the needs of AI.

(00:16:31): Number two is, there’s a trust deficit. If people don’t trust these systems, they’re not going to use them. And right now there’s a lot of mistrust in these systems. Hallucination is a feature when you’re writing poetry, but when you’re trying to go out and run predictable systems, hallucination can be a bad thing. And these models are unpredictable, they’re non-deterministic, and so they have to make sure that they have safety and security factored into them.

(00:16:56): And then the third area is a data gap. So far we’ve trained these models with human-generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human-generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models. And every company is going to differentiate based on their own proprietary enterprise data being used to train the models, synthetic data and machine data, which is where the most amount of growth is. And the third category of machine data we can play a massive role in at Cisco. So, what does Cisco do then? If you think about a GPU, which is what everyone now is very clear because of the great job that Jensen has done that here’s what a GPU’s core contribution is to AI. If these GPUs aren’t networked together, you don’t have AI, because it used to be that you could train a model on a single GPU, but then what happened was the model got too big to be put on a single GPU. So then you had a server with eight GPUs that got connected together. So, you could train a model with eight GPUs.

(00:17:58): But then that wasn’t good enough. So, then what happened was you said, “I’m going to have a rack of servers that I’m going to network together.” That at some point wasn’t big enough. And so then they said, “I’m going to have a cluster of racks that are connected together.” And that connected together is the operative word. That’s what we end up doing is NVIDIA makes the GPUs and we connect those GPUs together. AMD makes the GPUs, we connect them together.

(00:18:24): And now what’s happened, Lenny, is you have these data centers that might be hundreds of kilometers apart that need to operate like one coherent cluster, which means that they’re completely in sync. Every GPU is in sync with each other when you’re doing a training run. And that requires a very sophisticated set of technologies that we build to make sure that you could have two data centers, 800 kilometers apart, but boy, they run completely in sync with each other. And that’s what Cisco does. We provide the networking, we provide the optics technology, we provide the safety and security technology, we provide the observability, we provide the data platform, all of those things together for making sure that we provide critical infrastructure for the AI era.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:19:10): So, being on the inside of this massive investment that is happening across the world, what do you think isn’t being priced in into where things are heading into how much life will change, or just the scale of this build out?

Jeetu Patel (00:19:25): Years ago I’d had a chance to meet with Ray Kurzweil. He’s the chief scientist at Google for a while, and I think he still is. And he had talked about, he was writing this book called Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And so I was talking to him, I’m like, “What is the impact to human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously, because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden everything has to change. How does housing work, housing work? How does agriculture work? How does transportation work? How does … Everything changes?” And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer and he said, “Most people can’t think exponentially, because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension.” But what ends up happening in these things is you can sometimes you have to keep in mind that exponentiality happens across multiple dimensions all at once.

(00:20:21): So, if you do have an indefinite span of life, you have to assume that humans are creative enough that they’re going to find a way to have a three-day crop cycle. And they probably will have 5,000 story skyscrapers, and there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that’ll now be solvable.

(00:20:44): So, when you go back to your question and say, what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored in well? I think today AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I’m going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose the data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the answer to the question that you’re looking for that I think is the 0.0001% of the tip of the iceberg.

(00:21:17): The reality is, is we will have original insights generated that don’t exist in the human corpus of knowledge, and we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans. And what we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans, but if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things that you really care to do, and not do things that you don’t care to do. And so our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codex, for example, when we were writing a code with OpenAI’s kind of model and development tool, was the first three months we were screwing around with this. And then there was this light bulb that runoffs. In fact, there was a former deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this, which is, “Hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool. Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team, and your framing will change, and the way in which you actually use the technology will change.”

(00:22:33): And that essentially, if you compound that to how society operates, that’s going to be pretty profound as an implication, while keeping in mind that these safety and security risks are non-trivial and they’re real. And you can’t be completely flippant about them, because how an AI identifies its own success and its own ambition will really matter. And we have to make sure that we actually keep guardrails around that, because it is in service of humans, it is not to go out and build a society by itself. And I do think that those are important kind of checks and balances you have to keep in mind.

(00:23:17): But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society, or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology. I think that’s not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying, “As we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better? How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully?” If that happens, I think there’s goodness that comes out of this.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:23:55): A line that I often think about is, Huang has had this thought that the best case scenario with AI, because he was a very AI doomer for a long time, and I think the reason he got leaned into AI is like, “I need to help steer this in a direction that isn’t going to harm the world.” The way he described it is, “The best case scenario for humanity is we’re the house cat, where AI is just like, ‘Okay, nice. Just keep sitting here with me and I’ll take care of you.’”

Jeetu Patel (00:24:20): But by the way, the things that he is doing right now are nothing short of extraordinary. And for all the critique that one can have, the level of deep thinking that’s going on with his company, it’s just crazy.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:24:36): So, as you’ve been thinking about where things are heading, I’ve been liking to ask this question with people with kids, is there anything you’re kind of shifting in how you raise your daughter, keeping in mind where things are heading? Are there skills you’re trying to instill in her values you’re trying to instill in her that will help her thrive in this future?

Jeetu Patel (00:24:56): We made a choice, and I didn’t know how that choice was going to go. That was actually not even an active choice, it was a passive choice. Frankly, even might have been slightly intellectually lazy in the way that we did it, but it actually worked out pretty well in the sense that we didn’t really deprive her of the use of technology. There’s a school of thought that says, “Keep technology away from the kids for a while.” We didn’t do that. And frankly, I didn’t know how it was going to work out, because there are things about the way that the generation is, and by the way, all of us, not just new generation, but this kind of constantly being glued to your phone all the time and not being able to actually put that down and have a conversation. I think it’s an important skill in humans to have and preserve over time.

(00:25:45): And in fact, as AI does more for us, we should be able to have more of this time. I don’t have to worry about every notification that’s coming on my phone every minute of the day, because maybe I can be more present in the moment that I’m in. She just turned 15 and the night before she was turning 15, what I realized is she is so emotionally mature. We were sitting down one night and she’s like, “Hey dad, just so you know, I feel really good right now about having a very strong value system.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, what does that mean? And say more.” And she’s like, “Well, can you name five things that you feel so convicted about that if the entire world disagreed with you,” this is the day before she’s turning 15, okay? “The entire world disagreed with you. You would still feel like you were right on that and that would waver you.” She’s like, “I have a certain core set of things that I believe in where I am completely confident that if everyone disagreed with me, I’m still good.”

(00:26:56): Now, by the way, I have to kind of coach her on the, “Hey, when you get new data, be open-minded to changing your mind.” But it was actually a very interesting dynamic, which is, if we can have them be exposed to technology but have the right value system, you might actually have the best of both worlds. And the day ain’t over yet. She’s 15. There’s a lot of chances for her getting influenced by external factors and all of that. But what you have to do is make sure that you instill the right values, but then also expose them to the reality of what the world is today and not completely insulate them from that.

(00:27:33): And so, the way that it worked out, it did end up working well, and we were lucky for no credit to us she was able to use technology to get her EQ higher and higher, and we were lucky on that front. And we know it can go sideways the other way too. But I do feel like right now, at least for my one daughter, what we try to do is get her exposed to the technology, but make sure that we focus a lot more on the values that we need to have that govern us on a day-to-day basis. Kindness, not being arrogant, hard work, work ethic, those things matter. And those are timeless in my mind. I don’t think those change, because take risks, be creative, that kind of stuff.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:28:20): Jeetu, these are parenting goals. As I hear this, I have a two and a half year old Ms, it sounds like you’ve done an amazing job raising your daughter.

Jeetu Patel (00:28:28): I would take zero credit for it. I think she deserves a lot of credit for growing up to be who she’s become. And her mother.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:28:37): Got to shout out mom. What’s interesting is that I know Anthropic is really big, this idea of values and just how you operate. Anthropic has this constitution they released of how the values essentially of Claude. And it’s so interesting how much similarity there is to how to raise a great person and to how to steer an AI correctly.

Jeetu Patel (00:28:58): That’s right. And by the way, some of your beliefs and your system around you might change, but values tend to be pretty long lasting. And culture and a company tends to be pretty long lasting. Ben Horowitz talks about this very eloquently. The culture is just a set of norms that accompany action. It’s not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of behaviors that you exude within the company. And it’s actually very, very true, because when things aren’t going right, how do people behave to go solve problems and come together? And that actually forms your cultural norms. And I think those cultural norms, it’s very important to be intentional about it. And as you have more automation in the world, being intentional not just with humans but also with machines and what you want to do to create the guardrails, I think is pretty important.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:29:47): I’m going to take us in a different direction. I talked to Aaron Levie, your former boss at Box.

Jeetu Patel (00:29:54): Dear, dear friend.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:29:56): And friend. I asked him just what should I ask you about with something that he learned from you that has stuck with him ever since working with you? And he share this concept of the right to win, which he says has informed the way he thinks about strategy ever since. Talk about what this is and how folks might use this when they’re thinking about product strategy, company strategy?

Jeetu Patel (00:30:18): One of the things that we would always talk about is in the areas that we are going to participate, do we have permission to play? Every company has to make sure that the way in which they provide points of insertion and logical entry into a market is a lot of times dependent on, do you have the permission to play in that market? Do you have an avenue to have a route to market to be able to take that product? Just by building a product that is amazing in some area, you don’t end up actually getting it to mass scale distribution. And so, one of the things that we would always do is ask ourselves a question. “We’re building this new category or we’re building this new capability. Is it going to be logical for people that Box built it versus another company building it? Is it going to be logical for people that Cisco built it versus another company building it?”

(00:31:18): So, that’s this notion of permission to play, the right to win. Do we have a right to win in that area because we have permission to play? And do we have the route to market to be able to take that product and get it to mass scale distribution? And if you can do those things right, then actually your dollars that you expend on building product actually have an outsized return. If not, then you can actually end up spending a lot of money on product. Where the product people think, “Ah, these sales guys don’t get it. They don’t know how to sell it, especially in enterprise software.” And sales people think, “These product guys don’t get it. They don’t know how to build it.”

(00:31:56): And so, I think in order to stop that, what you have to do is you have to actually use your scale as an advantage and you have to use the areas where you’ve got the ability to have permission to play where people feel like this is very logical for a company like Cisco. When we say we are going to network the GPUs and make sure that we actually have a trusted system in AI, that is not far-fetched for someone to go out and think about, because it’s a very natural thing for us to do, because for the past 40 years we’ve been doing it for the rest of the infrastructure that was not AI. And so, that’s not a far cry to say, “Okay, we’ll now do it for AI.”

(00:32:35): And I think that was an area that Aaron and I spent a fair … And by the way, I’m glad that he took that out of me. There’s so much I’ve learned from him. The biggest area I’ve learned from him is, you never give up. And persistence beats intellect, and stamina beats intellect any day of the week, twice on Sunday. And that guy is as smart as they come, but that’s not the biggest reason he’s successful. The biggest reason he’s successful is he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game. Going back to my daughter’s comment of no matter what everyone else says, his convictions and belief, he will actually stick by them and actually get through the hardest times.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:33:17): I totally believe that. I feel like I’m not the smartest person in the room usually, and I succeed in large part because I just work really hard.

Jeetu Patel (00:33:24): You’re pretty smart though. I’ve been watching your podcast for a while. You’ve done a pretty amazing job.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:33:30): I appreciate it. In this permission to win concept, the reason I think it’s so important is it’s so easy to build stuff now. Everyone’s just building, building, building, launching, launching, launching. It feels like this is an increasingly important lever is why will we win in this space? I’m curious if there’s an example you can share either from Box or Cisco where it’s just like, “Okay, this is like we’re going to do this because we have the permission to play here.”

Jeetu Patel (00:33:57): I agree with you in the sense that if generating code is something that becomes abundant, that doesn’t mean you’re going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code. You still need human judgment, you still need a level of intuition on what problems are the right ones to solve. And yes, AI can help you with all of that, but it’s not something that … That’s where humans have a superpower, they have instinct, and they can actually make sure that they can fulfill out a vision that says, “This is what I think this could be in the fullness of time.” And so, that I think is pretty important. So, the easier it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code, the harder it gets for us to make sure that there’s not AI slop in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things that solve the most important problems moving forward?

(00:35:01): Example of permission to play is, I mean, there’s so many ideas that a company the size of Cisco, we have constantly new ideas that keep coming up. And then in those new ideas that keep coming up, people will always say, “Oh my goodness, this company is doing so well. We should just go into that market, or we should just go into this market.” And 90% of the times, 99% of the times, I find myself saying no. And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories. And that caloric expenditure is where if you expend your calories in a very focused way, the results you’ll get from that focus area tend to be outsized and disproportionate. If you dissipate that caloric burn across multitude of different areas, nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through. And so, why are we not in business-to-consumer tech at Cisco?

(00:36:10): Why are we not going out and building things that are very very B2C? Because I don’t think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA. I don’t think that we’ve got permission to play there. That’s an area where it would be extremely hard for people to growth that Cisco should be the one who’s participating in that. Now can we do it? Of course we can do it. Is that where we want to go or do we want to go where there’s so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with the ability to operate from a position of strength that you’ll just get a much better return for the dollar that you invest.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:36:51): You mentioned Aaron as a CEO that you learned a lot from. I’m curious what other CEOs you’ve learned a lot from and what’s something you learned from them?

Jeetu Patel (00:36:59): Chuck Robbins is one of my favorite humans. And not just because I work for him, I work for him because he’s one of my favorite humans. And what I’ve learned from him, he had this kind of great line. There was this piece of press that our media is very sensationalist by definition. They will try to create a very polarized view about the world where there actually isn’t one. And most things in my life, things are not as extreme as you hear of the headlines of the media. It’s somewhere in the middle. And there was one time that there was this article that ran, and it was about giving me an unnecessary amount of credit, and frankly, not giving Chuck as much credit about something that he has actually done. A lot of the movements that we’ve had internally wouldn’t have happened if he had not hired me and given me agency to go do the things that I needed to get done. And he was very much completely in sync with me on what needed to happen.

(00:38:13): And so, when I saw this article, I had no idea who the report, I reached out, I’m like, “Hey, I just want to let you know, this was not me saying it’s someone.” And she said, “Don’t worry about it, man.” What I’ve learned in life is, if you don’t care about who gets the credit, you just go a lot farther in life.” And it’s so profound in so many ways that he’s just way too confident to let anything. And so, the thing I’ve learned from Chuck is the importance of confidence and the importance of knowing what you’re good at and where you’re not good at. And where you’re not good, you’re going to assemble a team of people around you. He’s just masterful at that, and it happens-

Lenny Rachitsky (00:38:58): And by the way, he’s the CEO of Cisco, in case people-

Jeetu Patel (00:39:03): That’s right. He’s the CEO of Cisco. He is the chair of the business round table. He’s very dear friend of mine. And I feel like there’s a lot to learn from that kind of mental model and mindset. And I’ve been lucky enough, Lenny, that, and this is just dumb luck. The people that I’ve worked with and for are all very, very close to me, and I just don’t let them go from my life. And so, one of the things, for example, is I worked with Aaron and then when I was leaving, it was very emotional, but I wanted to do something different. But we committed to each other that we are going to have dinner every six weeks. And Aaron, and there’s another co-founder, Jeff Kweiser, and I, three of us. Every six weeks in Palo Alto we have dinner. And it’s one of the most special things that I still do, and it’s a tradition now, it’s been going on for six years, and I love it.

(00:40:02): You look at someone like Chuck, I start with my day with talking to him in the morning, we text each other. And then I end the day talking to them in the evening. And we probably touch base at least four or five times a day. They’re not long conversations at all points in time, but we’re constantly in contact with each other. And I feel like that only happens when you’ve established enough trust. My first post when I moved to California is this guy named Rick Devenuti and then another guy named Jeremy Burton. Rick Devenuti is still my coach. I see him every two weeks. Jeremy is someone that’s a very dear friend of mine, and we’re neighbors and be moved and bought a place next to his just so that we could be close to him. And these are special people in your life that have enriched your life in very different ways that I think you just have to make sure that you treasure.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:40:54): Today’s episode is brought to you by Samsara. If you listen to this podcast, you know that we spend a lot of time talking about building things that sit on a screen, onboarding funnels, mobile apps and checkout flows. Samsara is building products for the physical world, first responders racing to emergencies, truck drivers carrying critical supplies, construction workers building our cities and data centers. These are people who put everything on the line every single day, and Samsara’s technology protects them. Samsara is solving complex problems at the intersection of hardware, software, and Edge AI, and their AI doesn’t just detect events, it reasons about the intent and answers questions like, “Did that truck driver break abruptly because they were distracted, or was that a heroic act?”

(00:41:38): If you want to ground LLMs in messy real-world telemetry or solve Edge AI constraints at a planetary scale, Samsara wants to talk to you. If you like playing with enormous datasets, moving fast and working in small teams, come help build the technology that makes the physical world safer and more efficient. Visit samsara.com/lenny to learn more. That’s S-A-M-S-A-R-A.com/Lenny. So, you’re currently CPO at Cisco. I think the team under you, IS it 25,000 people? Is that the right number?

Jeetu Patel (00:42:09): We have about 30,000, but-

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:11): 30,000 people. Okay.

Jeetu Patel (00:42:13): Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:42:14): What’s something that you wish you’d known before taking on this role?

Jeetu Patel (00:42:18): I don’t know if it was … I mean, I instinctively kind of knew it, but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco, because when people say, “Oh, is scale hard?” And my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder than scale. What do I mean by that? If I have a startup with three people and we need to prosecute another idea, and that idea requires five people working on it, I have to go raise money, or I have to pivot my entire business. If you have 30,000 people and you have an idea that requires five people, you just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally and say, “Let’s go prosecute this idea.” So, in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder than the presence of scale. And operating within scale seemed like it was like, yeah, you have more opportunity to do it.

(00:43:23): What I found over the years, not just at Cisco, but even when I … Because I ran a small startup in Chicago for 17 years before I moved over to the Valley, what I found in the large companies is, the communication framework and the lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say, has a profoundly negative effect if you’re not intentional about it and if you’re not careful of it. And there was this board member that we had, there’s a couple board members, our lead director, Michael Capellas is amazing. There’s this other board member, Kevin is amazing, and then there’s this one board member, Wes Bush, who we recently rolled off, but he used to be on our board.

(00:44:09): And when I got this job, he pulled me aside, said, “Jeetu, I’m going to tell you something. I’m going to give you some advice, and take it or leave it, but I think it’s going to be important for you to keep it in mind.” I’m like, “What’s that?” And he goes, “Whatever you do, don’t think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise. Think about it as the most intrinsic foundational exercise of the company. And always be the custodian of the message. Don’t delegate that to someone else to give. Because if you have 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 layers between you and the person who’s actually doing the job in the front line, what you don’t want to do is play the telephone game and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team and then say, ‘Okay, that team will cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team.’ Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned, and then by the time it gets to the end, people won’t know what it is. So always own telling the story.”

(00:45:14): And I’m like, “That seems like it’s a lot because we have a very broad portfolio. We do all of these events. It’s like, I’m going to have to stand on stage for 90 minutes and just talk about it.” He’s like, “Please do that. Make sure you don’t.”

(00:45:27): And initially, the hidden benefit that came out of it that I did not realize is it massively, Lenny, simplified our business. And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it’s impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. There’s just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, how do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers to be able to digest that story? There’s zero chance that would happen.

(00:46:16): And so, that was my big takeaway from this, which is don’t delegate the storytelling. And the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real. And so, make sure that the story is there first, and then that story has evidence and proof based on the products that you’re building.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:46:44): I had a conversation with Matt MacInnis, who’s COO now CPO at Rippling, and hit a similar piece of advice, which I think is also, it’s like adjacent advice, which is “The intensity of an idea or a plan drops at every level that it goes from CO to the next layer and layer. And your job as a leader is to maintain that intensity, not to buffer it from the employees, but to maintain exactly the same intensity."" And it feels like that’s in addition to also just keep the story the same. Like don’t filter it, don’t change it. Although your advice is even different, just like you actually go to the team working on it and tell the story yourself. Don’t even let-

Jeetu Patel (00:47:23): I want to make sure that they hear it from me directly so that there’s no lossiness. We have this concept in networking called packet loss. When you actually send packets over a wire and you have a loss of packet, then actually there’s loss of data. You don’t want to have packet loss in your storytelling from you to the person on the front line because-

Lenny Rachitsky (00:47:43): The direct ethernet Cat 5 connection.

Jeetu Patel (00:47:45): This is just a direct connection and there’s no packet loss of this one. You got to make sure it gets to the intended audience. And I think the reason for that is, as companies get large, they can lose touch with the front lines. Everyone gets really good with the math of the business, but they don’t really always preserve the soul of the business. And there’s a lossiness that happens, because if you have seven, eight layers between you and the front line, even the message that’s coming back to you from them is actually getting lossy.

(00:48:15): And so what you have to do is just preserve … And I think what was said earlier about the intensity is the same way, which is you got to preserve the intensity. You got to preserve the sanctity of the message, and you got to preserve the clarity of the message so that everyone is clear on the direction we’re going down. And if you can stay clear and stay motivated about that direction and make sure that everyone’s on the same page and what needs to be done to execute, you will have success. If not, you’ll actually have guaranteed failure.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:48:45): How do you actually operationalize this without just being overloaded with work and constantly having to meet with every team and remind them of the story?

Jeetu Patel (00:48:53): The first thing I feel is, you have to have very clear thinking because the clarity of thought is what brings clarity of communication. So, you have to spend the time with your team in sweating the details on what it is that you want to do and why you want to do it. The context of why is so lost, and constantly reminding people why it’s important and having the least amount of asymmetry between the topmost layer in the organization and the bottommost layer is super. Now, by the way, I’m a Section 16 officer. There are certain things that, for example, you’re in a quiet period you can’t go talk about to someone else during that time period, but that’s not allowed. However, the most amount of context that you can provide them in the way that you can because you’re allowed to, the better off you are.

(00:49:47): And always treat people like adults. What I’ve found is, oftentimes when you go into corporate environments, like people start becoming very sterile in the facts that they provide. And sometimes it’s okay to just say, “Hey, we screwed up here. This was really bad.” That’s not meant to … One of the things that I found to be very counterintuitive, because every management book that you read will tell you otherwise. What do they say? Praise in public and criticize in private. I fundamentally disagree with that notion. I think what you have to do is establish enough trust among the team so that you are comfortable critiquing and debating in public. But when you’re in private, take that moment to build the trust. Because if you build that trust and you tell them that you’ve got their back and you create a level of safety there in public, you don’t want to be in a mode of posturing.

(00:50:57): You want to be in a mode of problem-solving. When you’re just giving people perfunctory compliments all the time, and everything’s just hunky-dory. Rose-colored glass is great. All your dashboards look green, but you’re growing the business at 1.5%. There’s an asymmetry there, something’s broken. It’s like, what do we need to do over here? And so what I tend to do is use the exact opposite approach. I tend to be very, very direct in public, be respectful, but be direct in public. This is not working. Let me tell you why it’s not working. We got to face the facts. And then be very, very clear with people that you got their back in private. And don’t be stingy with words on that front, because I feel like there are times when people are very stingy with words with people in private. You can’t be stingy with words over there.

(00:51:52): And don’t be stingy with critique in public, because I think people need to make sure that, “We are solving problems together.” And if we don’t know the play that we’re executing, if we don’t know the things that we’re going to need to do, then I am not really certain. If you’re making collective progress, and I think it’s not going to be fulfilling to either you or the recipient at some point, and those compliments will feel hollow because you didn’t mean them. Because you were trying to put it in between. Like Ben Horowitz says, and hard things about hard things that you have a shit sandwich. You say something really nice to someone, then you say something that’s not really nice, and then you put no, just treat people like adults. Tell them the facts, watch your tone. I still have to work on that. There are times when I get very passionate. People think like, but watch your tone and make sure that you debate. Conflict is a necessary condition of business, but the only way that you can have productive conflict is if you’ve established trust.

(00:52:54): And the only way that you can establish trust is by making sure that you spend the time to establish the trust. So spend the time to establish the trust, but then focus on the best idea, winning and actually having the debate.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:07): Is there maybe one more lesson that you’ve learned from this? Or I guess it’s something you wish you’d known before getting into this role? Is there anything else that comes to mind?

Jeetu Patel (00:53:15): I was an apps guy. I operated in the apps layer. I worked at Box. And even when I was at EMC, I was building apps that you built for the end user. Infrastructure is a different game. And the thing that I learned about infrastructure is, you don’t always get the glory, but you always get the blame.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:53:41): Perfect.

Jeetu Patel (00:53:42): And you have to be comfortable with the fact that you are working in a way that other people get the glory. Great infrastructure companies, the application companies get the glory when they’re running on that infrastructure. So, you have to be hardwired in infrastructure to orient on your ecosystem success, not just your own success. And that is probably one of the lessons that I learned at Cisco in a very stark way, which I didn’t fully appreciate it until I got into the details of the infrastructure going, “Wow, if this thing doesn’t work,” we were … Every single time, our infrastructure doesn’t work. This morning I was with a medical institution, I was with a healthcare company this morning, and they were telling me they were very complimentary. They were thanking us on the partnership. I asked them, “Why are you doubling down with us?” And they’re like, “Because when the infrastructure doesn’t work, people die. Someone doesn’t get dialysis, someone doesn’t get a surgery done, and we need to make sure that we’re working with someone with the infrastructure is working.”

(00:55:02): And so, I feel like at that point in time, you can’t be navel-gazing too much about, “Look how cool you are, because you did something.” You have to just make sure that you’re really immediately shifting your focus to, what does the customer do and what does the ecosystem do with your infrastructure so that the outcome is achieved? And you have to get very outcome oriented. And I feel like that was something that I always intellectually knew, but I didn’t fully realize it until I came here on how important of a mindset shift that is. You are not talking about yourself, you’re talking about the system just working. No one will come and tell you, “Hey, Jeetu, thank you so much. My network worked today.” But the moment it doesn’t work, they’re going to call you and say, “You know what? My network’s not working, and my people can’t work and patients are dying in the hospital.” I think you just have to be comfortable with that.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:56:00): It’s so interesting how this lesson connects so directly to the lesson you learned from Chuck, the CEO of Cisco, which is, “Don’t expect the praise and the credit. You need to be comfortable with other people getting credit for your work.”

Jeetu Patel (00:56:14): That’s right. By the way, it’s not surprising given that he spent, I don’t know, 26, 28 years over here, you know why that he’s conditioned with the fact that he’s focused on other people succeeding from it. From your work.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:56:35): It feels like there’s so many metaphors corollaries to networking as a way to think about leadership and living life.

Jeetu Patel (00:56:42): It really is.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:56:44): Oh man, I bet you guys have all kinds of examples.

Jeetu Patel (00:56:49): It’s a good exercise to actually go through and create the corollary of parallelism between life and networks.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:56:57): I’m thinking about just how many friends, like Dunbar’s number, how many notes can you have in a network before it starts to slow down? Maybe 150. Oh, man. Okay. Anyway, I like that your mind’s spinning.

Jeetu Patel (00:57:16): I’m thinking how many can you have? I think more than 150, for sure.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:57:17): I also was thinking about Intel. The whole Intel Inside move was such a clever way to break through that where no one would know Intel and so they’re just like, slap a sticker of Intel Inside.

Jeetu Patel (00:57:27): And by the way, they are. Lipu is a very dear friend. Pat Gelsinger used to be my mentor at EMC. And so both those people that have had such a profound contribution to that industry in general. When you start thinking about them, they’re very, very much on that mode.

Lenny Rachitsky (00:57:46): I could see how you pull together this insane collection of humans, just feels like you’re just friends with everybody.

Jeetu Patel (00:57:51): I feel like it’s, life’s too short not to be, and I’m only friends with people that I feel are good human beings. What I try not to do is I try to minimize my time no matter how successful they are with people whose energy I don’t vibe with, because I think life’s too short. And in my mind, one of the most off-putting things is, look, all of us have a healthy ego. There are times when ego gets manifested with insecurity and you have to make sure that you’re at least self-aware enough to know when your ego is starting to take over your behavior in a way that’s counterproductive. And all of those things are super important. But what I think is extremely important is that you … Life is just fun to live when you love the people you are around.

(00:58:43): Can I digress for a second in this one story that … I’ll tell you the story that was … So my mother was, she passed away two and a half years ago, but she was extremely sick in the hospital for eight weeks before she passed away. And I was very close to my mom. She was my everything and we were only child. I grew up with a rough childhood. My dad was a high-stakes kind of conn man, like Bernie Madoff. I didn’t want to be any part of that. So I had actually left India, come over here, hadn’t seen him. And so he was very abusive to my mom. So there was a bunch of that that had happened.

(00:59:27): And so, we had had a very difficult early childhood life for me, and her and I had bonded during that time at a very deep level. And so when she came to America, she always wanted to have her own place, but she lived very close by and she was very dependent on me emotionally in every way. And so, I had almost become a parent to her.

(01:00:00): And at the last eight weeks things flipped and she became a parent again. And so we were getting to the point where she was ending her journey. And I was sitting one in the morning at the bedside by her in the hospital. I was living in the hospital at the time. And she was sleeping and I was just crying profusely. And she wakes up, and she knows why I’m crying, because she’s going to be gone soon. And she looks at me, Lenny, and she’s like all perplexed and she’s like, “I had no idea that you loved me so much.” Now, by the way, this is the most abnormal thing for me to hear, because I’m like, “What are you talking about mom? Like you’re one of the most important people in my life.” And everything that I did was to make sure that my mom was okay. Why did it feel that way to her? Because she didn’t know how I was thinking.

(01:01:10): And that kind of notion of people don’t know what’s going on in your mind is so important that my biggest lesson from that was, “Don’t be stingy with words.” Because even my mother that knows me inside and out didn’t know how much I loved her, that there’s no chance that people in the business world are going to know how you feel if you’re not explicit with them. And so, I’m actually very clear with people, when I find them and when I find them rewarding, I let them know how much they mean, because I genuinely find a lot of energy coming out of that. And B, the circle of friends just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And I found that to be a super rewarding thing in life. And you’re right, most of the people that were at the AI Summit are dear friends, and isn’t that just a better way to live life?

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:01): I think we’ve uncovered one of the secrets of your success, which is just tell people how you feel and help them see that you appreciate them. Make it clear that you appreciate them, that you value them, which is a lot of people don’t do, they just assume they know that they like you.

Jeetu Patel (01:02:16): And don’t make it fake.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:18): And don’t make it fake.

Jeetu Patel (01:02:19): Don’t make it fake. If you don’t love someone, don’t tell them you love them. That’s the other thing that I have.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:02:27): It’s so interesting. We just did a little interview kind of thing with my mother-in-law meant for our son, just for him to have when he’s older. They just interviewed her about her story and stuff and they asked her at the end of it, “What’s something you want Jude,” which is his name, “to know, a lesson to learn from you?” And it’s to just, if you love someone, tell them you love them as much as you can.

Jeetu Patel (01:02:52): Yeah, that’s so true. You’re so intentional about the way in which you do these things. I wish I’d done a, I should do that now. Now I think about it, do a podcast for my daughter that’s only for her when she gets older.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:03:06): I’ll send you these. This group, they do this. I think they’re in the Bay Area, but it’s incredible. It’s a whole documentary thing where they interview you, film your life for a little bit and then make a whole documentary.

Jeetu Patel (01:03:17): Oh really? Oh, wow. I’d love that actually.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:03:19): Yes. Oh, man. They’re going to get a lot of business right now.

Jeetu Patel (01:03:21): There you go.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:03:24): Let me end with a question around just your journey. So today you lead product at a 90,000 person company. You manage 30,000 people. Like you said, you grew up in India in Bombay very far outside Silicon Valley. A lot of people hearing this today are kind of in a similar boat. They’re way outside of the valley, maybe don’t have a lot of obvious way to break in. They don’t have a lot of opportunity and they see someone like you and that’s their dream. What would your advice be to someone in that place right now?

Jeetu Patel (01:04:00): The platform that you choose and the quality of problems that you pick to solve actually determine a lot of the path of success for you. And typically harder problems have a higher likelihood of success. Because the harder problems are the ones that attract better people to that problem and business as a team sport. And if you attract people to the problems that are hard and important enough to solve, then you get the best team, and you get the best team, your odds are winning just go up exponentially. So most people think I’m going to go out and pick an easy enough problem to solve. And it’s like you don’t get the best-team attracted to you to start up a lemonade stand, very important job. But that might not be the thing that actually gets the best team to come to you. But if you actually pick a hard enough problem to solve, you’ll get the best team to come.

(01:04:54): So that’s one. Number two, I’d say that you can teach and learn a lot of things in life. I don’t think you can learn hunger or you can’t teach hunger. So find what you’re intrinsically hungry about and make sure that you try to pursue that area. And that’s different from passion about something. It’s like in everything that you do in work, you have to just understand the formula that there’s going to be 30% of the stuff that you do at work that you’re just going to hate. And you have to get used to things that you hate that you have to do. But further, but find something that you’re really hungry about that makes you want to come in to work every day, because the mission is worth the expenditure of energy that you’re putting into it.

(01:05:50): And I’ll leave you with a story which was, I hadn’t gone to India in a long time. When I left India, I didn’t go back. I left in ‘91 and I hadn’t gone back in any kind of meaningful way until 2017 because of all the trauma in childhood. For whatever reason, I hadn’t gone back. But I took my daughter and we went to Augra to see the Taj Mahal and we went there and there was this tour guide, his name was Raj. And this tour guide was like he understood so much about the product that he was selling, which was the tour of the Taj Mahal. I don’t know if he was making the shit up or not, but it sounded really good and he seemed like he was kind of early on it.

(01:06:34): But when we were walking back, there’s all these people and he would just start talking to them and he’d bust out in different languages. He’d talk to someone in German, talk to someone in French, someone in Spanish, someone in Hindi, someone in. And at some point in time in Mandarin. And at some point in time I stopped, “Dude, how many languages do you speak?”

(01:06:51): He’s like, “Oh, I speak, I don’t know, 12 or 14 or some ridiculous number. But I try to learn a new language every year.” I’m like, “Oh, why is that?” And he goes, “Well, I just want to honor the people that come here and not be presumptuous that they will speak in the language that I know.” I want to speak in their language. And I’m thinking to myself, I was a box at the time. I’m like, “This guy is smarter than every person on the executive team and probably just as smart as every salesperson we have, but he’s making $10 a day and all of us are enjoying this amazing life, and it’s because we have access to a platform and he doesn’t.” So when people start confusing life thinking that, “Everything that I’ve earned is because of my amazing abilities.” I always question that, because there’s a lot of luck in this thing.

(01:07:45): But when luck does present itself, be extremely prepared to capitalize on it. And make sure that you pick the platform that can actually give you that springboard. Because platforms really matter. And if we, like I had the platform and benefit of America, of education, of being in tech, of having great friends and mentors, all of those things created compounding value. But I intentionally sought out those platforms, seek out the platform, be obsessed about being extremely prepared, and don’t be intellectually lazy. Laziness is not a good trait. So do the preparation that’s needed. And then just make sure that during that time period that you’re doing, if you build a community around you of people that are vested in your success, I think it’s just, life is just a more fun way to live it, rather than being the lone wolf that’s going at it by themselves.

(01:08:54): And that’s why I always feel like making sure that you are expressive and communicative and don’t try to carry the entire world’s burden on your shoulders, but actually share it with people with you, the people that you share it with actually appreciate that you’re sharing it with them.

(01:09:13): And most people in the world love to help. So ask for the help, but make sure that that help is not transactional. And don’t just go to them when you need something. Actually try to add value first for a long enough amount of time, not because at some point you might need something from them, just hard-wire yourself into adding value to others. And then eventually that value starts showing up, and life’s just a better way to live life. And I do feel like right now it’s hard for kids getting into the workforce and all of that. So, don’t lose hope and stay persistent and have stamina, because these things go up and down. But if you kind of stick with it, the people that have the most amount of persistence, it’s very seldom that they don’t end up winning.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:00): Something that comes to me as you share this advice. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s has this book that he put out, and I feel like the title of the book is the best piece of advice, and the simplest way to describe How to be Successful in Life, which is be useful.

Jeetu Patel (01:10:19): That is so good.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:22): Jeetu, this was incredible. Is there anything that we didn’t cover that you wanted to share? Anything you want to leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Jeetu Patel (01:10:29): I think there’s a framework that I use for great companies that might be worth kind of sharing with people.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:29): Yes.

Jeetu Patel (01:10:34): There’s a six part framework that I have, which is in descending order of importance, and on how to build great companies. This is-

Lenny Rachitsky (01:10:47): Amazing.

Jeetu Patel (01:10:48): You get it for free, you get what you pay for it, so take it with a grain of salt. But here’s the way I think about it. The most important thing is timing. The six things you need in a company, if you don’t have all these six, you don’t win. But they’re stack ranked in descending order of importance, but you have to have all six. Number one is timing. It’s the most important. It’s the thing that you control the least. And there’s a lot of companies that have built amazing products, amazing services at the wrong time, in the right market and not won, right? And so timing really matters. You don’t control timing, but if you don’t have timing, you don’t win.

(01:11:27): Number two is the market. You have to be able to go after a large enough market, a chunk at a time. And if you’re not able to go out and prosecute a market a chunk at a time, but make sure that that keeps getting bigger and bigger, it’s very hard to win. So market tends to be the second most important thing in my mind after timing.

(01:11:47): The third one then is team. You have to have the right team. And the team does not mean just people liking each other. Team means that it is actually well-rounded. That means the things that you suck at someone else is really good at, and you have both accepted that of each other. For example, I have a person that I never go to another job without, and she is my partner in crime. And the reason I have her is because she is so good at things that I’m not good at. And so she’s able to, any job I’ve taken since I’ve been working with her, it’s always, it’s a combined deal. If we don’t have two offers, we don’t go. And so team is really important, a well-rounded team where people understand how to complement each other.

(01:12:34): And by the way, in the team, sometimes people say, “Well, isn’t team more important than market?” No, if you have a great market mediocre team, the market pulls you up. If you have a shitty market and a great team, the market drags you down. The market always wins. So no, timing, market, team.

(01:12:50): Number four is product. I think product is the soul of a company. That’s the place where people seek value is, what are you delivering to me? What problem are you solving to me gets manifested through the delivery of a product. So you have to make sure that you build a great product. I actually think it’s unethical to have a mediocre product sold in the market. So timing, market team, product number five is brand. I had a mentor one time that told me, Mark Lewis, he said, “Jeetu, don’t ever go to a company who’s lost their brand mojo, because very hard to resurrect it back.”

(01:13:21): If they have lost their product and you cannot fix the product. But do you think Sybase is coming back? No. Once you lose your brand and once you lose the trust, people don’t come back to you that much. It’s very hard to do. And then number six is distribution. Just because you build it, they will not come. You have to make sure that you figure out a scaled mechanism of getting that offering to many, many people. And so timing trumps market, market trumps team. Team trumps product, product trumps brand, brand trumps distribution. You don’t have all six, you don’t win.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:13:54): What an amazing nugget to have at the end here, just so I understand how you think about this is, do you have a template that you work through when you’re thinking about a new business unit or new product to launch? Is it is timing, right? Is market, what market do we start with? How do you actually operationalize?

Jeetu Patel (01:14:09): It’s actually exactly like that. I will ask myself the question on, “Is this the right time for us to go out and double, triple, quadruple down?” We might still be in experimentation mode, but do I need to double down on this right now because this might not manifest for another seven years and then we’re going to be too early. And by the way, you have to know the difference between a megatrend and a hype cycle. When there’s a megatrend, don’t fight it and don’t succumb to the temptation of trying to go out and do vanity work for a hype cycle. And there’s a big difference between the two. And I think having the judgment, the older you get, the better that judgment gets. It’s just miles. But having that judgment is really important because you see a pattern recognition at some point.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:00): I imagine AI megatrend.

Jeetu Patel (01:15:02): AI is a megatrend in my mind, and there’s a bunch of hype cycles we’ve had where I never particularly subscribe to them. The easiest way for me to tell is, the way it’s described, is it easy to understand what this could do in its ultimate form for most people, or do you need to have a PhD to understand what someone’s saying? When you feel like you need a PhD to understand what someone’s saying, chances are it ain’t going to be a megatrend, because by definition, a megatrend is it’s going to impact a large population of the world. And if the thing is too complicated, chances are it’s not going to have that level of effect, outsize effect.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:15:43): That’s an awesome heuristic. I imagine you’re thinking Web3 as a classic example.

Jeetu Patel (01:15:46): Yes. Web3 was the one that I actually cite all the time. I couldn’t understand what it had been. And all of these people were kind like, “Oh, Web3, Web3.” I’m like, “I couldn’t make a heads of tails out of a use case.” But with AI, it’s like you go to ChatGPT, you ask it a question, you get an answer. I get this. This is easy.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:16:05): So going back to your framework, just to kind of close the loop there, it’s really interesting that timing is the first variable you look at. This could be an amazing idea. You got the right team, amazing product that works really well, but the timing may just not be right. And no matter how awesome it is, it’s not going to work.

Jeetu Patel (01:16:21): Steve Jobs put away the iPad because he thought that the iPhone was a better idea. And timing wise, he actually made exactly the right call. The iPad became successful because of the iPhone success. The reverse order might have not had the same effect, but he had to make sure that he focused on one thing and he actually puts the other, he said, “The timing’s not right, but I’m going to get back to it.” So by the way, when timing is wrong doesn’t mean that you scrapped the idea. It just means that you might put it on ice for a bit.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:16:50): There’s a lot of that happening right now where people try to do a thing and now AI actually makes it possible. And now they’re like, “Oh shit, it was way too early.”

Jeetu Patel (01:16:58): And the other thing you have to keep in mind is you have to also be good enough to know that when something is going to be ready in six months, you can’t think about what it’s doing today. AI is moving so fast right now. One of the things I tell my team is, fast-forward six months from now and anticipate what that’s going to do and get prepared for that world. Don’t get prepared for the world of today thinking that you’re not going to be able to get there because in six months your assumption sets are going to be different. And please don’t actually then bias yourself with the assumption sets you have right now to not move forward. One of the worst things I think companies do sometimes is they put too much emphasis only on solely on experience. And I think experience is good, but experience can actually be meaningfully bad in some areas where you get too biased. And so you almost have to say that I have to have the ability to unlearn.

(01:17:50): And combination of experience with complete inexperience is what creates the magic because the inexperience allows you to ask questions that you might have never had with experience. And the combo of those two gives you the best of the pattern recognition, plus the charting new territory that’s never been walked on before.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:18:10): Yeah, this is a trend I’ve been hearing on this podcast that people worry about young people and people graduating out of college right now and jobs and AI. But they’re the people that are most open-minded about what AI can do for them and how to harness AI and not code in the way people have always coded. It’s just like, okay, this is the way it works now.

Jeetu Patel (01:18:29): Experience, Lenny, can jade us, and I always say when people say, “Oh, entry-level people will never be hired again.” That’s the stupidest thing a company can do, because now what you’ve done is you have completely shut the door to new fresh ideas. I cannot think today the way I thought when I was 19. There is just no way that I can do that. But what I can try to do is I can try to make sure I surround myself with enough amount of my time to get exposed to that thinking and then couple it with what I know and maybe have something better than what either of those two could have had by themselves.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:19:04): Yes. Well, with that, Jeetu, we have reached our very exciting lightning round. I’ve got five questions for you. Are you ready?

Jeetu Patel (01:19:11): All right.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:19:12): First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people?

Jeetu Patel (01:19:17): The Bible and Tech in My Mind, there’s Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution from Clayton Christensen. I think you have to read that book and I’d say I’d recommend to people that read it every few years. And the other one that I love is Ben Horowitz’s book. Hard Thing about Hard Things really talks about how you manage your psychology when things get hard. I think those are the ones, I am not a big believer that you keep reading thousands of books all the time because I think to me, retention really matters. And my brain’s just not that big that I can retain that much. So, I tend to distill the essence of a few things quite a bit more, and at least as the older I’ve gotten, I’ve actually used that pattern more.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:00): Favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?

Jeetu Patel (01:20:03): I don’t remember the name of it, but the Brad Pitt F1 movie that I saw that was pretty cool.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:10): Wait, it was a recent Brad Pitt movie?

Jeetu Patel (01:20:11): Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:16): Was it F1?

Jeetu Patel (01:20:16): It was F1. I think it was called F1, but it was pretty cool.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:18): For Best Fix-

Jeetu Patel (01:20:19): Zach Brown is a good friend of mine and we were big supporters of McLaren, and so it was actually pretty cool to watch that movie.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:20:26): Oh man, I bet. So many stories I haven’t tapped into. Okay. Favorite product you recently discovered that you really love?

Jeetu Patel (01:20:32): I mean, it’s cliche, but I feel like what ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude have done, it’s changed lives. It’s changed my life in the way that I learn in some ridiculous ways. So I actually feel like when I got this new job to run all product for Cisco, there’s zero chance I would’ve been able to do it if AI wasn’t there. Because I didn’t know anything about so many domains that we were in. And I had to get an accelerated training course within a matter of three months. And I mean, I worked around the clock during that time, but I could have worked around the clock without the tooling and I would’ve been nowhere near as effective. So I feel like those three have done an amazing thing. And Grok, even what you’re seeing with Grok tied to Twitter is pretty amazing.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:21:31): Wow, that’s a profound statement. I’ve never heard that before from someone at your level that you feel like you wouldn’t be able to have done this job without AI.

Jeetu Patel (01:21:39): It’s your chance.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:21:40): Especially for someone without the background in networking and hardware, that is so interesting. It’s amazing how just at every level, AI is helping at the most bottom end and also in your level.

Jeetu Patel (01:21:54): Most people don’t realize, I fundamentally believe this is the reason that I’m able to enjoy some of the experiences I have. I was lucky enough that I had made enough money before this job. That was not the thing that was actually holding us back, but the reason I’m able to experience some of the things that this job afforded me to experience have not even been remotely possible without AI, no chance that would have happened.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:22:23): Unreal. Okay, two more questions.

Jeetu Patel (01:22:25): Yeah.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:22:26): Do you have a favorite life motto that you often come back to and work your own life? You already shared a couple, but is there anything else or you want to double down on one you’ve already shared?

Jeetu Patel (01:22:34): Stamina trumps intellect. I feel like it’s very important to have smart people, but you can become smart if you have curiosity and hunger and staying power and persistence. And so I think that trait of learning to learn and constantly being hungry and having the stamina and persistence is far more important than the absolute measure of intellect that you might have, because that is very, very trainable and learnable over time and improvable over time. But hunger is very, it’s not teachable is what I’ve found.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:23:11): I 100% agree with that. Interestingly, when you watch AI work, it’s just like, partly the reason it’s so good is it just keeps trying. It’s just like, “Okay, this didn’t work. Let keep going. What else can we just keep trying? Just give me half an hour, I’ll figure this out. Okay, last question. So when you were younger, you worked at Sizzler Steakhouse making $4 an hour is what I read.

Jeetu Patel (01:23:33): 2.25, not four. It was below minimum wage 2.25, but we got tips. We got tips though, so that was-

Lenny Rachitsky (01:23:43): Okay. I see. Did you have a favorite dish at Sizzler, is my question?

Jeetu Patel (01:23:46): Yes. They used to have this Malibu chicken dish was like magic. And then it was probably, I don’t know if people know this, and I know this is rapid fire, but I used to stutter when I started working at Sizzler and Sizzler is what allowed me to break out of my shell and not stutter. Because something changed in my brain, but I’m like, I have to entertain people and if I don’t, then they’re not going to give me a good tip. And so the stuttering went away at Sizzler, and so I have an immense debt of gratitude and I think everyone should work in hospitality for a while in their younger years. And I’m kind of sad that my daughter has no interest in doing that because I’m like, “I wish she just worked as a waitress somewhere for a bit.” And it’s just so important to just, there’s so many lessons on, I cleaned toilets at the restaurant. I actually washed dishes. I actually waited on tables. And it was the best experience I had. It shaped me for what was to come in the most profound way.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:24:58): Jeetu, you’re just endlessly full of wisdom. Two final questions. Where can folks find you? Where do you want to point people to learn more about you, what you’re up to, and how can listeners be useful to you?

Jeetu Patel (01:25:07): Where you can find me is … I tend to … A lot of people will ask the more success you encounter or the more people want to get mentored by you and learn from the experiences you’ve had, and I have run out of cycles to be able to do that on a one-on-one basis. So what I try to do is do a lot of that on LinkedIn and Twitter, but largely I do a lot of that on LinkedIn. And so find me on LinkedIn. I tend to be very open about not just the work stuff, but the non-work stuff to do that. How can people be useful to me? Was that the question? What was the last question?

Lenny Rachitsky (01:25:48): That is, how can listeners be useful to you?

Jeetu Patel (01:25:51): How can listeners be useful to me? If there is … I would say that if you got something out of this session and if you get something out of whatever you learn from social media, just pay it forward and help the next person out a little bit more. Yesterday I was at a talk and someone pulled me aside and said, “Hey, I saw your LinkedIn post about this.” Don’t be stingy with words, and Jeetu, since then, I’ve been going to see my parents once every two months or so in India, and when I see them, I tell them that I love them all the time. Literally, what could be more rewarding to me than that? It was amazing that they were able to go out and have joy brought to their lives as a result of something they got inspired by something that I learned in my life, that’s paid forward.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:26:51): I’m excited to hear the stories that come out of this conversation. Jeetu, thank you so much for being here.

Jeetu Patel (01:26:57): Thank you for having me. It was great.

Lenny Rachitsky (01:26:58): Bye everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.