Empathy Begets Excellence
Jeetu Patel, SVP & GM of Security and Collaboration at Cisco, makes the case for a highly inclusive, empathetic, and iterative approach to building the products and experiences that serve and shape our societies.
Episode Notes
If you ask Jeetu Patel about the nature of success, he’ll tell you that “no one is entirely self-made.” And he’ll be quick to point out all the times that friends and mentors sustained, encouraged, and inspired him as he grew into positions of leadership at venerable companies like Doculabs, EMC, Box, and now, Cisco—where, as SVP and GM of Security and Collaboration, he’s taking on the mission to transform the company around SaaS offerings that break down geographical barriers and improve access to opportunity for people around the world.
But as we often highlight on Breakthrough Builders, opportunity has a strong tendency to gravitate toward grit and curiosity—personal characteristics that are as much a part of Jeetu’s story as his gratitude. In his talk with Jesse, hear how Jeetu pursued a new family legacy in the US after leaving unsafe conditions in his childhood home of Mumbai, India. You’ll hear how he first became a business owner with a loan secured more by passion than collateral, why he left that role after seventeen years for a position where he was expected to learn as much as lead, and how his unique path prepared him to harmonize the often-competing disciplines of privacy and product development at Cisco. Throughout the episode, Jeetu offers a compelling case for why unheard voices need to be amplified, why titles should stay out of the room when product ideas are being debated, and why empathy is now the ultimate driver of business success.
Guest Bio
Jeetu Patel is Cisco’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Security and Collaboration. He leverages a diverse set of capabilities to lead the strategy and development for these businesses while helping to redefine Cisco's SaaS business and strategy around differentiated products that diverge in the way they’re conceived, built, priced, packaged and sold.
Prior to joining Cisco, Jeetu was the Chief Product Officer (CPO) and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) at Box, a role he pioneered. He transformed Box from a single product application to a multi-product platform used by 100K customers representing 69% of the Fortune 500. Before joining Box, Jeetu was General Manager and Chief Executive of EMC’s newly acquired Syncplicity business unit and President of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research.
Helpful Links
Referenced in episode:
Radical Candor by Kim Scott
Management in 10 Words by Terry Leahy
Jeetu on LinkedIn and Twitter
+ Episode Transcript
Jeetu Patel [00:00:00] I think today opportunity's pretty unevenly distributed throughout the planet, but human potential, arguably is not.
Look for hunger and curiosity. You find people that are hungry, that are gonna kind of outwork someone else because they're just going to be relentless.
The thing was product people is, you want to make sure that you push that boundary to give them enough feedback, that they can do the best that they can possibly do, but it don't crush their soul while doing it.
Most customers don't expect perfection. What they expect is someone who's willing to go out and constantly improve. A playbook doesn't really apply. And you just have to make sure that if you're doing the right thing by customers and innovating, well, most things tend to fall in place.
Jesse Purewal [00:01:00] From Qualtrics Studios, this is Breakthrough Builders, a series of conversations with people whose passions, perspectives, instincts, and ideas fuel some of the world's most amazing products, brands, and experiences.
Hello builders, I'm Jesse Purewal. The voice you just heard is that of my guest on the show today, Jeetu Patel. Jeetu is the Senior Vice President and GM of the security and collaboration businesses at Cisco, where he's been since August 2020. His mission there is to build world-class subscription-based products that solve Cisco's customers' biggest challenges. Prior to Cisco, Jeetu was Chief Product Officer and Chief Strategy Officer at Box, where he transformed the company from a single product application to a multiproduct platform used by over a hundred thousand customers and where he helped quadruple revenues to over 700 million.
Prior to joining Box, he was the CEO of EMC's Syncplicity business unit. And before that he was president of Doculabs, a research and advisory firm co-owned by Forrester Research. Jeetu is on the boards of Hacker Rank and JLL. He has a BS from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and he lives with his family in the San Francisco bay area.
But what I think you'll find most notable about Jeetu isn't what he's done, or where he's lived, or the companies he's been with. It's his commitment to his people, to his customers, to his community, and to creating opportunities for one person at a time, as well as for billions of people at a time.
Enjoy Breakthrough Builder, Jeetu Patel.
I am here with Jeetu Patel. Jeetu, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
Jeetu Patel [00:02:46] Thank you for having me, Jesse. It's a pleasure to be here.
Jesse Purewal [00:02:49] Congrats Jeetu on the decision to join Cisco last year. What shared interests did you discover that you had with Chuck, the CEO there and others on the leadership team that made it the right move? Both for Cisco and for you personally.
Jeetu Patel [00:03:01] The big opportunity in my mind was that there's about 3 billion digital workers on the planet. And if I can be part of something where those 3 billion digital workers can fundamentally have access to opportunity, regardless of the geography, regardless of the language preference or their socioeconomic level, or the proficiency with tech, in a way that opportunity gets evenly distributed throughout the world, I think that's kind of a pretty substantial mission to be part of. When you think about Cisco, the one thing that really got to me was, the mission statement at Cisco is to power an inclusive future for all. It's not something that's a DNI initiative on the side. Literally it is their reason for being. And all of the products that are being built are being built with that mission in mind.
So how we think about giving everyone an equal seat at the table. How do we make sure that introverts aren't penalized for being introverts? How do we make sure that, you know, companies and then intellectual property can be safe and secure as people are working? These were, these were pretty high order ambitions that if you can be a small part of it, it's, it's an opportunity of a lifetime.
And then from an economic perspective, Cisco is a $50 billion company and their mission is to get to be a SaaS based subscription company. And that's the thing that I know well, and so there was like, it was one of those things where if you can pull those two together, there's tremendous amount of scale.
With a tremendous amount of opportunity and upside for changing the way that half of humanity operates. That's hard to say no to that.
Jesse Purewal [00:04:36] Yeah. I agree. I, you referenced bringing SaaS and scale together, but more broadly and strategically, how do you see security and collaboration working together for those 3 billion people who are ostensibly audiences of Cisco? And what's cool about leading up both of those in your remit?
Jeetu Patel [00:04:53] The way in which we've actually thought about the entire business as a whole, the value system at Cisco is, privacy is a basic human right. And so the way that they operate everything is around protecting the user or protecting their privacy, protecting the data, protecting the company.
The other thing that was interesting was, as you think about AI taking effect. And as you think about all these different kinds of technologies around collaboration and remote work, you have to make sure that things are extremely easy to use while not compromising on security and privacy as a core value system.
And having both of those under one umbrella was this kind of very unique opportunity that you typically wouldn't find a place like, you wouldn't find people that are running the productivity team and the security team in the same company. And that was a unique opportunity because like, wow, you can, I was fortunate enough to have built security products at Box and build productivity products, and so now two jobs in a row, we had both of those teams kind of very, very tied together.
And I think it just builds for better experiences for the world. Every acquisition we do, every feature we add has a lot to do around privacy. And how do we go out and honor people's privacy. In fact, we just released some features around AI and analytics on how do you manage people's well-being during this very stressful time that people have been working from home, but people feel more stressed.
And one of the things that we did was build this capability on people insights, where you can go out and build insights for individuals. On how they're doing and are they working too hard? Are they, uh, how has their behavior, so for example, Jeetu, you've been late to the past 14 of 17 meetings. That's actually something that you should probably think of changing as your behavior.
That's all great, but I would love to get that data, but I don't want to have my boss get that data because that insight is good for me, but it would actually make me look bad in front of my boss. So the way in which we designed this product was that insight was designed for the individual. And we would not share that data with the company.
And I think those kinds of things just don't happen unless you are thinking about these issues deeply, it just becomes a bolt-on afterthought. Like it's a very, very different kind of mindset. And so I've always believed that if you want to build amazing products, you have to honor privacy. And this was one of those few companies that actually straddled the line between the two really, really well, where one didn't get sacrificed as a function of the other, but it got enhanced as a function of the other.
Jesse Purewal [00:07:16] Well, I love that you laid it out that way with privacy as a fundamental human right. And then saying that even though security might be a separate domain, you're thinking of it in a much more interconnected way. Thank you for laying it out that way. I want to rewind. Now take me back to your early years.
Talk about what and who influenced you as you were growing up? I think there were some specific challenges you had to contend with as a kid growing up in India that helped shape who you are.
Jeetu Patel [00:07:40] Yeah. I grew up in what's now Mumbai, what used to be called Bombay back then in India. And, you know, the first 19 years of my life, I spent over there, moved here in '91.
And the first years of my life were kind of interesting where my dad was, and I, I speak pretty openly about this to people so that they know that adversity is part of everyone's kind of journey and everyone has their own kind of story to tell, so my dad was a high stakes con-man. He used to, you know, swindle people for money.
He was kind of the poor man's Bernie Madoff. And he ended up getting a lot of money from bad people where I was actually physically in danger if I had stayed there, and I didn't want any part to do with that. And so I just kind of extracted myself out of there. He was pretty abusive to my mom. Like I told her, we'd kind of, um, keep her in an undisclosed location and mum, let me go to America and I'll try to see if I could make a life for myself.
And then we'll, uh, we'll bring you over. So I moved here in '91. My uncle put me up for awhile and I waited on tables, did anything that you have to do. And then started, I was grateful enough to actually meet people who were angels in my life that spotted me. I joined a company as an intern, I met someone who then loaned me enough money that I could buy out the company and run it for about 17 years.
And then from there, you know, one thing leads to the other and you have these great kind of people that come your way. But the amazing part of the journey is, that adversity early on in life probably gave me a lot of things. You know, desire and hunger to win. And I actually always believe when you look for people, look for hunger and curiosity.
You find people that are hungry, they want to do things that are gonna kind of outwork someone else, because they're just going to be relentless about trying to go out and learn and they're curious, far greater than someone who is a graduate from a top university or something of that sort, because you'll always be at like, oh, those are things that are really learnable skills, but hunger is something that's hard to teach people.
As I think about this full circle now where I am at Cisco, the reason this mission of leveling the playing field was so important is the only reason that I was able to go out and get to this degree of opportunity at the time was because I ended up immigrating to America. But for all those folks that didn't have that opportunity, geography played a huge disadvantage for them.
And I'd like for that, not to be the case for the next generation.
Jesse Purewal [00:09:55] And Jeetu those angels that came into your life, what do you suspect that one or more of them saw in you that made them want to bring energy toward you and see you as a force multiplier? That would one day think about things like this at such scale.
Jeetu Patel [00:10:11] Firstly, I'm, I always believe that you're more lucky than you are good in most of our jobs, because the availing of the opportunity is 90% of the battle. But I'd say that what people usually see in people is, when there's a degree of tenacity with which you want to pursue something and you just persistently never give up when things get thrown your way, that grit is more important than any fancy kind of pedigree that you might have.
And I think it's pretty important to understand that especially in the, in the tech world as well and startups and all of that. You have to be extremely optimistic about the future, almost delusional to some degree and make sure that you have a level of tenacity that you're never going to give up.
And I think that is something I definitely look for in people. And I'm sure that there's some of that, that the people that helped me out and taught me so much, you know, it's one of those things where these people are few and far between in your life, but you only need a few of them to make your life completely different.
And so anyone who's listening, who is successful already in this podcast, pick a person or two in life that you can make that change for in retail mode. It's one of the most leveraged investments you can make, is make someone a superstar. And then they actually go out and do that for the others and pay it forward.
So I'm not suggesting I'm a superstar, but I'm suggesting that there's, there's a lot of value in making sure that you give people a helping hand. The other thing I say is, there's no person who is completely self-made. We all get support from the community as a result that we progress forward. if I hadn't had my professor in college to say, I'm going to give you a teaching assistantship while you're an undergrad for undergrad, so that you don't have to pay college tuition. So you don't get deported. I wouldn't have been where I am today.
And if I didn't have the first person who made a bet on me to give me a job, even though I didn't have the experience, I wouldn't be where I am today.
Jesse Purewal [00:12:02] Along those lines. Tell us the story of Rick Devenuti and the way that he helped you find your way to some interesting decisions and help frame things for you in a way that moved your career forward.
Jeetu Patel [00:12:14] He's a great man. So he and, so for those that don't know, so Rick Devenuti was at one point in time the CIO of Microsoft, and then went to EMC. And was the reason that I think my career took off in the valley. So him and Mark Lewis were two people that helped me out getting my first job. So Rick was the president of the business unit that I went and joined.
And so he was hiring me at the time and he was looking to buy my company, the transaction didn't go through. And then, you know, he said, well, we'd like to buy you out. Why don't you come here? So we were having dinner in Chicago one night and he said to me, Alright Jeetu, so these are the details of the offer. And I was kind of, you know, cocky and young and dumb, and I'm like, Rick, come on.
What are you talking about? Like I've got 17 years of experience. You've got to go out and give me a better package. This doesn't make any sense. And he looked at me, he was quiet for awhile. And then he said, you don't have 17 years of experience. You've got one year of experience, 17 times over. Come work for me for a year and I'll give you 17 years of experience.
And, um, There was like a mic drop at that time from him. And I'm like, I'm going to go work for this guy. And I did. And during the whole, I learned more from him in the first year than I learned in my 17 years at Doculabs. I mean, it was absolutely unbelievable and he was a great coach. In fact, he was such a good coach, and there were times when I hated working for him, but I didn't truly realize his value until after I went to the next job.
And I would always ask myself, what would Rick ask in this situation? And ironically enough, he's still my coach. As soon as I came to Cisco, I hired him. I'm like, Hey, you need to make sure that you're helping me out.
And I speak to him religiously every week and he will give me guidance. He'll give me coaching. He will calm me down. You'll do the right kind of things, because everyone needs a coach. I mean, Michael Jordan had a coach, Who am I?
Jesse Purewal [00:13:58] Well, it sounds like you have the ability to blend pragmatics with persuasion, and I'd be interested to hear your reflections, particularly as someone who has built things, built products, technologies, ostensibly persuading people to spend their money, their time, their focus, their opportunity cost on them. So you sort of have a human element of this, but you also have a, a technological or a component element of this.
Jeetu Patel [00:14:22] The way I think about this is you have to be brutally honest about seeking them truth. And there's this great book that I keep right by my desk. It's called Management in 10 Words by Terry Leahy. And it's a great book, if people haven't read it, but basically what they talk about is, you know, oftentimes companies will start to lie to themselves. And you have to be brutally honest about seeking the truth and saying, what exactly are the facts on the ground and the front line.
And make sure that you don't ignore them as you're starting to go out and persuade people. So one, you know, have a vision of where you're trying to go. Two, understand the facts on the ground, and three, don't try to skirt around them, but make sure that you're solving the hard problems for customers, because most customers, what I've found, don't expect perfection.
What they expect is someone who is willing to go out and constantly improve and is listening to them. And so, as long as you are listening to a customer and saying, I'm going to build products that your users are going to love, that they're going to talk to each other about, and we're going to make sure we listen to you and we're going to constantly keep improving, and we will never give up on that quest for improving, I think most people will give you more of a shot than you think they will.
Customers find progress far more appealing than the absolute position. If someone's making progress, progress is a far more enticing characteristic than just the absolute leadership position to be in.
A playbook doesn't really apply, and you just have to make sure that if you're doing the right thing by customers and innovating, well, most things tend to fall in place. Literally that rule is applied for me at Syncplicity, at Doculabs, at Box, at Cisco, where you just have to make sure that people see that you're doing really creative stuff and solving important problems.
And you're sweating the details. I think people really appreciate when you sweat the details. If you are careless about the details and build sloppy stuff, then it just shows your lack of regard for a customer. So I think there's something fundamentally unethical about taking a mediocre product and taking it to market because it just means that you don't care about the product enough.
That's an area that I've found insanely kind of instructive in life and just obsessively focused on building a great experience for the customer and start from there and work backwards. And don't think too much about all the other dimensions that people think about that they'll tell you before.
So I very seldom will think about what is the TAM in a business and how do you need to go out. Now, those are all interesting parts, but the thing that you have to do is, is it a substantial problem? Can you go off and solve the problem in an elegant way? That's differentiated, that's going to bring a smile on the user's face.
If you can do that, the rest tends to fall.
Jesse Purewal [00:17:01] Jeetu. I want to ask you about exactly this point. How do you, as, as you begin to scale, how do you develop empathy at scale? How can you not just figuratively keep the customer at the center and your decision making and your innovation agenda, but how do you actually listen at scale, to divine the kinds of things you could go put your energies into, to bring that smile to customers' faces, to create elegance, to create differentiation.
Jeetu Patel [00:17:27] I think if you were able to go out and create an authentic space and a safe space for a dialogue where people can be vulnerable enough, that they can come in and tell you what they're struggling with and you truly want to learn and listen and understand what's happening on that front, and then push them to their boundaries, I think empathy is a natural by-product of that.
By the way, this is not an area that's my natural strength. I'm very intense. And Rick would always tell me this, like Jeetu, people don't shy away from the facts. They get turned off with the tone. So manage your tone and give them the facts.
And I'm still learning. There are times when I'll get really intense because I'm in a debate mode and I'm like, let's make sure that we go off and debate it. And then people feel like, oh, I can't debate it. This person's a higher rank. And so I'm not going to say anything. And so it takes a while for people to understand that you are depending on them debating you for ideas and that 99% of the time they should win the debate because they're closer to the truth than you are, because they're closer to the front lines.
And so the farther down in an organization you are, the closer you are to the truth. And you can actually have a much more, you know, kind of potent debate. And so if you are able to create that safe environment where people can come in and know that the best idea should win, rather than the person with the highest rank winning the debate, and if that becomes part of the culture, then I think something magical happens where people feel safe. They feel like they can rely on each other. The entirety of the culture changes because it's coming from the top and before you know it, you've got this really great environment, but it's hard to do.
And look, I don't think I've perfected it. There are times when I'll, I'll come across two intense in the meeting and then I'm like, man, why did I come across that intense? I needed to be a little bit more nurturing because what you want to do, and Chris Cox had given me this kind of great feedback from Facebook,
He had said to me, one time he said, the thing with product people is you want to give them feedback without killing their confidence. Because the moment you kill their confidence, then the feedback is of no use, you know. But you want to make it, you push that boundary to give them enough feedback that they can do the best that they could possibly do, but it don't crush their soul while doing it.
And so now what I'm trying to do in more and more places, especially in large-scale environments where people don't know you, and so the only time that they observe you is in that one interaction that they've had is, I have to start a lot of meetings by saying, let's keep our titles out of the room. The best ideas should win.
The best idea must win. Expecting a debate. And conflict is a necessary condition of business. And we are all in this together to try to come up with the best idea. And it doesn't really matter whose idea it was. As long as all of us execute on the best idea. So let's brainstorm what the best idea is. And I think that's a very important cultural element that needs to be in these next generation of companies, because I think this whole old school hierarchical top-down commandment kind of mode of management, I just don't think is that productive.
You know, you have to get people engaged in the dialogue and then be able to flip your position when you've got new data.
Jesse Purewal [00:20:33] Yeah. What you're talking about, ties really nicely to what the author Kim Scott refers to as radical candor. So Kim was a, you know, a coach to Dick Costolo at Twitter. She was a leader at Google for a number of years.
She talks about, if you care personally, and if you challenge directly, you end up in radical candor. If, if you kind of navigate around that and you go, well, I care personally, but I don't want to challenge the person - ruinous empathy, right? This awful place. Or if you're doing the opposite where you're challenging somebody maybe with too much tonality, but you don't care about the person and they're kind of aggressive.
I think that's an important takeaway for lots of people. I want to ask you about the debate part of this. Have you seen a culture of debate or a culture of candor around discussing facts to get to a conclusion, either become more prominent or less prominent as we have stepped through the pandemic. And maybe we've spent less time around common whiteboards, but been able to be more globally inclusive, you know, not seeing body language, but be able to invite more voices into the room.
How have you seen the culture of debate evolve or not over the past 12, 14 months inside and outside Cisco?
Jeetu Patel [00:21:47] So I think a lot of this has to do with leadership style to some degree. And a lot of this also has to do with how much is debate encouraged within an organization. But I'll tell you this, at Cisco, I've seen, I've seen a mixed bag. It took a while for them to understand that, Hey, eventually we're all just human beings and we all are in the same boat. We're trying to build the best product for our customers.
And so when we want to go out and evaluate something, we have to make sure that we can talk about this at high bandwidth and, push me on what you think is broken in my thinking. And I'm going to push you in what's broken in what I think you're thinking. That takes a while culturally to get a team adjusted to.
And during that time, there's actually a lot of anxiety that, that starts to happen because people don't know what's happening. Why is he going so hard at this? And what's going on? Intense debate is not something that everyone enjoys and understands. The other thing that I think gets penalized in that style, by the way, is the introverts sometimes, because introverts like sitting back and thinking and processing the information before they come to you.
And if you just go like a bull in a China shop, which I can be sometimes, and say, tell me why, give me three reasons why this isn't quite the case. You can have the introverts get turned off and say, okay, I'm just going to take a step back. And so I think there's much more on the extroverts to adjust their style, to give people the space when you understand those personalities and say that this is the space that you're going to need.
And I would say that the pandemic in that realm has actually been useful, because like, I'll give you an example of a feature that we're going to be launching in WebEx, which is called round table. Round table as a feature is, say you have six people in the room. They just interviewed a candidate. They want to debate whether or not to hire the candidate.
And they all come into the room together. And right now what would happen is the extroverts will take over the room and suck out the oxygen out of the room and actually talk about their perspective on what needs to happen. And if the introvert had a different opinion, and they were outranked by the extrovert on title, sometimes introverts are going to be like, yeah, I'm not going to pick this battle, screw it. I'm just going to stay back.
What we did was we added a feature which was round table, which is everyone gets to speak once before anyone speaks twice. And the rest of the people are on mute. And so literally everyone gets three minutes on the clock or five minutes, or two minutes, or however much of it you decided to do as host of the meeting, and everyone gets to speak their truth.
And then once everyone's talked about them, you've all patiently listened to the other person and now you can debate it out. And so I think the dynamic of meetings has to be a combination of listening actively, and then debating it out once everyone has made the positions clear. And I think that that's an art form that has to get perfected over time, which I believe tech can help, but I think it has a huge amount to do with leadership where calling on the people who are quiet in the room and asking them for their opinion is so important to make sure that you get a cross section of people's experiences.
Because there's no point in diversity if the people that are different aren't allowed to speak. The whole point about diversity is you bring different people in and then have them speak so that you can get their perspective so that, that informs the way in which you, which you service the market. And that the group of people that are building what you want to build are representative of what the market looks like.
You know, which is people are going to be men and women and Black and Latina and white and Indian and all different kinds of folks. And it's very hard to do that if the most dominant personalities dictate a room.
Jesse Purewal [00:25:25] I love that you're addressing this from a feature function standpoint. So thank you. There's also a lot of process that I think needs to get rethought.
And sometimes there's simple things. Bill Carr, who ran digital media at Amazon and stood up prime video and Amazon studios and Amazon music, came on the show and talked a lot about the PR FAQ method where you're writing out the press release and doing an FAQ months, quarters, even years before you're at that launch moment where you're getting to clarity and actually using that document, whether it's in a live forum on Microsoft or Google or some other platform, To do comments, right?
So that you don't have to always occupy the time with voice, which only permits one person to speak at a time. But N people can speak at a time when you're doing it through documentation, and then you bring a better digital record. So I think as we develop new habits around discussion and hearing every voice, even if it's through the pen or the digital pen, as opposed to through our ears and our voices, we can actually magnify the amount of information we're bringing into the debate and probably get to a better decision in the end.
Jeetu Patel [00:26:31] You know, one of the things that we focus a lot on is, what is the story and what is the problem that you're trying to solve? And in my mind, I think the quality of the problem that you pick to solve is 90% of the game. And what I mean by that is the harder the problem, the higher the likelihood of success, which is very counterintuitive because most people are thinking, oh, that's, that's a very hard problem.
Let's not solve that. Let's solve a different problem. And the reason the harder problems have a higher success rate in the outcomes is because you attract the best talent to go off and solve the really hard problems. And so when you have the best talent attracted to a problem, you will just, by definition, humans are so creative and so resourceful.
When you need to go off and solve something that's hard. I mean, who would have thought during the covid pandemic that, if there was a pandemic where if, if I had come to anyone in December of 2019 and said the next 15 months, everyone's going to be working from home, what do you think is going to happen to the economy?
And what do you think is going to have going to happen in the market? People would have thought that this thing's going to be hell in a hand basket. Like you can't just do that. And then literally overnight, everyone started working from home and, I think humans are just resourceful. You know, they figure out a way to go out and survive. We are just survivors.
Jesse Purewal [00:27:48] Jeetu. I want to go back to the comment you made about coaching. How would you counsel somebody to go about looking for the right coach and persuading that person, bringing that person into the fold professionally?
Jeetu Patel [00:28:01] You know, the way I found has really helped with me is, if you really understand what you're good at and what you're really bad at to start with, that's a tremendous advantage that you could have,if you're honest with yourself, because once you know what you're good at and what you're bad at, the second thing you have to know is where do you want to invest your time?
Because not always do you want to invest your time in improving the things you're bad at. In fact, I'd say, I'd argue most of the time you want to invest in doubling down on where you're really good at, as long as the things you're really bad at don't hold you back in such a way that they actually become massive barriers for your success.
Now, once you've decided that you've got a clear inventory of things that you want to get better at, then find people that you really respect in those domains that know you well enough, that invested in you and your success, that will help you out because they care about you. So like having great mentors is extremely important, but I was fortunate enough to have Pat Gelsinger as my mentor at EMC, who is now the CEO of Intel, I was fortunate enough to have Rick Devenuti, like I said, who continues to coach me. Jeremy Burton, who has been fantastic. Kevin Scott, who was the CTO of Microsoft's been fantastic sounding board from time to time and I've needed his help.
You know, Tor Myhren, who is a guy who runs marketing for Apple, is a great friend of mine and a fantastic sounding board when I need to go to him for something. People that work for me usually are some of my best mentors. My EA, Shir, is amazing. To put me straight when I need to be put straight. My VP of Business Ops, who I don't take a job without Jessie Saini, I would never go into job without her because I am infinitely better because of her by my side than not.
So find an ecosystem of people that you can always rely on. That you can go to and say, Hey, how do I get better? And they're going to give you the truth. They're not going to keep giving you what you want to hear, because I think it gets very easy to just love hearing compliments all the time, but it doesn't get you any better, you know?
And I think coaches do that, as they constantly stay dissatisfied with where you are, but they're constantly encouraging of the progress that you're making. So it's a combination of those two that's really important.
Jesse Purewal [00:30:08] Well and I think maybe I would add to that, expect people to want to help. You're naming some very busy people.
And so it isn't like there aren't demands on their time. I think sometimes we allow ourselves to go, well, that person is too busy. And if I approach them, maybe I create this ill perception of them in my mind. I think that could happen. But I, my experience and the experience I've seen around me, people tend to want to honor that kind of request.
They may say no, and they may turn you to somewhere else, but being willing to make the request because people do have a lot to give.
Jeetu Patel [00:30:40] You know, like, I will tell you this, Chuck Robbins, when I took the job with him, I'm like, you know, I've I worked with Aaron and Aaron and I spent a lot of time together.
Right. And we were both kind of in different aspects of life, both coaches for each other. And I came over here and I'm like, I'm not really sure how it's going to work with Chuck because he's a busy guy. Like, I mean, he's almost running like a company the size of a country. And so it's like, what do you, what do you do?
And you just ask him, I talked to Chuck daily, you know, daily there'll be something that he'll call me on. And I just think people are there to help and they see initiative. Now you have to be mindful of how you use their time. So it's your responsibility to only seek input in areas where you actually have a motivation to make a change. Don't seek input in areas where you're just gonna do some lip service and have a conversation because that's not going to be satisfying for them.
But I think people will find a lot of reward when someone else succeeds and they had a small part to play in it.
Jesse Purewal [00:31:32] And Jeetu I want to ask you, because there are precious few people who sit at the Razor's edge of two important technologies that contribute to remote work, collaboration and security. What elements of our society's adaptation to the pandemic do you think are here to stay? And that will shape the way we work for years or even decades to come.
Jeetu Patel [00:31:53] I think the desire for people to want to maintain flexibility in their lives, I think is a pretty core, fundamental human need, you know? And so if you think about that future of work and how it's going to be, I believe it's fundamentally going to be hybrid.
Sometimes people are going to work from home. Sometimes people are going to work in the office, sometimes somewhere in the middle. And I don't think geography will be the limiting barrier in the next decade for opportunity creation. I think today opportunity is pretty unevenly distributed throughout the planet, but human potential, arguably is not.
I think in the future you will see opportunity match human potential in even distribution. If we can open up that aperture so that people from anywhere, with any language, with any socioeconomic level, with any personality type, introvert or an extrovert, any level of proficiency in tech can evenly participate in a global economy.
I think that's a very basic human need that people have that I just don't think we've been able to unlock. And I think technology was a barrier and we have unlocked it quite a bit. Like I remember when I first came to this country, I would ration the amount of dollars I had to be able to speak to my mother on the phone.
Who was in India. I mean, every weekend I would speak to her for like two or three minutes because it was a dollar twenty five a minute. And I used to make, you know, $4 an hour or something. And it was, it used to be a few minutes that I could afford every week. And that has now gotten level as a playing field. We can talk to anyone at any time for free.
And I think there's something remarkable about having that same level of opportunity and not just being constrained to geography. And if the only limiter becomes time zone, boy, we've made a huge amount of progress. And then the second big piece will be that people are intrinsically seeking opportunities to add value.
And if you avail them globally, It's good for individuals, but it's also good for companies who are seeking talent. And so it's, it's actually just a win-win on all parts. And it's actually, if you think about it at a very fundamental level, it's very arbitrary that intersection of longitude and latitude should be where someone has a disproportionate advantage over something else.
Like how absurd is that? And at least on our clock, we should not allow for the next generation to have that same disadvantage.
Jesse Purewal [00:34:11] First thinking hard about this one. When Warren Buffett talked about, you know, the primary reason he got to where he got, you know, and he made these statements going on 15 years ago now, right? It's like, I was born where I was born. And to think about it in those terms really is, is stark. I do have a secret fear. Maybe it's not so secret because I'm saying it on this show. But that there is a world where some may be tempted to run to the extremes of the poles, where you'd say now the Dubai's and the San Francisco's and the London's and the Rio's become even, even more important because in a world where people can live anywhere, they'll want to be in cities together with like-minded people.
And the folks who sort of ran away from urban centers, were doing that for health reasons, not so much because they wanted a bigger lawn. And so I do think that I am so glad someone like you is helping think about this democratization of who gets to bring their thinking to the table and who gets to drive collaboration to go create the next generation of technologies and things we put in the world, because if we don't allow more people to participate, I worry that we will, in some ways, regress to where we were before.
Jeetu Patel [00:35:27] And it's like, it becomes this kind of, you know, this divide where the people that have, will keep compounding and have more and the people that don't have will keep getting put in a disadvantaged position. And I think what you have to measure as a metric is how many people can you pull into the middle-class on an ongoing basis. And remarkable, magical things happen when large populations, large percentages of the populations of a country get pulled into the middle class.
It's kind of like in business, most problems are solved by growth. In countries, most problems are solved when you put more people in the middle class, you know, it just creates an opportunity for people that creates happiness. That creates a level of excitement and there's a confidence and it's just, it's kind of cool.
Like I find when I go back to India now, these days it's a very different 22 year old than when I was 19 or 20 and the low, low confidence I had. Like some of my nieces, they don't really care wherever they live. I don't want to go to America. I want to stay where I am. And like, it's like, I can do whatever I want to do from here.
And it's that confidence in being able to say geography is irrelevant, it's so cool. Because now you're truly a planet that's operating as one species rather than like, you know, being segmented up in these different ways that we humans tend to get ourselves in different buckets.
Jesse Purewal [00:36:48] Well, thank you for sharing your perspective with me today. Jeetu, you're a heck of a human and you're a strong leader and you are a great person to know. I really thank you on behalf of our, our audience for, for being a part of the show. I want to ask you one question before I let you go.
Jeetu Patel [00:37:03] Thank you for having me as well, by the way,
Jesse Purewal [00:37:05] You bet. The builders that are listening here, if they wanted to know what's the most important piece of advice they should take from you given the world as you've helped build it, what would that advice be?
Jeetu Patel [00:37:15] Maybe it's a two-part thing. One is never give up. And two is, your biggest ceiling that you can create for yourself is your own imagination.
It's extremely important to have bold ambition with pragmatic attention to detail, to execution. And that second part requires grit. The first part requires courage and creativity.
Jesse Purewal [00:37:35] Awesome. Thank you much, Jeetu.
Jeetu Patel [00:37:37] Jesse, thanks so much.
Jesse Purewal [00:37:44] Thanks for listening to Breakthrough Builders. You can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be grateful if you could spread the word by leaving a rating and a review, it really does help other people find us. And please tell your friends. Breakthrough Builders is a Qualtric Studios original, presented and produced in collaboration with StudioPod media in San Francisco.
The show is hosted and executive produced by me, Jesse Purewal. Our writer is Todd Bagnull. From StudioPod media, Deanna Morency is our show coordinator. Editing and production by Katie Sunku Wood. Additional editing and music is provided by Nodalab. Our designers are Baron Santiago and Vansuka Chindavijak. Website by Gregory Hedon.
Photography by Christy Hemm Klok. Special thanks to the entire Breakthrough Builders crew at Qualtrics, including Ali Rohani, James Wadsworth, John Johnson, and Kylan Lundeen.