Jeetu Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…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? 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?" 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." 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." 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. 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.…

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