Sanjay Poonen: Getting fired was the best thing to happen in my career

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0:47About 20 years ago, I was the VP of Marketing at a company named Informatica. And one fine day, the CEO decided that this was the end of my tenure and he wanted to find somebody else to lead marketing. Effectively, I was fired. That's Sanjay Poonin, who these days is CEO of Silicon Valley tech firm Cohesity. It's an AI and cybersecurity firm founded in 2013 and now valued at around$8 billion. He's telling the story of a formative moment early in his career that drives him to this day, a lesson grounded in failure in being fired. And that moment was a shock to me because I thought I was performing well and doing well.

1:24but you know for whatever reason the CEO has got the prerogative to make their own decision. I initially was disappointed, maybe a little upset, but I was able to rebound from that over six months by you know really searching deep in myself as to what was my true identity. The human spirit is incredibly resilient and sometimes you need those type of events that allow you to bounce back.

1:52I'm Dougal Shaw and this is the Business Leader Podcast, where we look at the stories and strategies behind modern businesses. Today I'm meeting up with Sanjay Poonan, CEO of US tech firm Cohesity, on a visit to London to visit his customers. He's had a pretty fascinating career. He was raised in Bangalore, India, but then moved to the US to study computer science at university. From there, he joined a who's who list of US tech firms, including Microsoft, Apple, Symantec, SAP and VMware. He slowly worked his way to the top, though as we've just heard, he did have the shock of getting fired along the way when he was vice president of marketing at Informatica.

2:32However, the CEO believes major career setbacks can be moments to take stock and recalibrate. In this episode, we'll learn how Poonin learned from the failure of being fired and used the experience as a way to transform his leadership style.

2:53My early life, how far back do you want to go? From when I was born? Yeah, let's start there. I was born in India and lived for the first 18 years of my life, for the most part in Bangalore, which is kind of like the Silicon Valley tech city. It's very different when I grew up in the 70s and 80s. In 87, I was going to go to this tech institute in India called Indian Institute of Technology, IIT, that a lot of engineers kind of go to. In India, most often, at least in that era, you kind of like your life when you're about to go to college, branches into two. You either become a doctor or an engineer.

3:28It's sort of funny. Things have changed a little bit now. But I also got admission to a college in the United States called Dartmouth College, which is a very profoundly good computer science program, and I got a scholarship. So I came in 1987 to the United States as an immigrant, studied computer science for four years there. A big culture shock, you know, to be kind of taken out of a very sheltered existence. If you've seen this movie Animal House, it is about Dartmouth. It's literally about Dartmouth. So think about this boy who is completely shielded from kind of a lot of the things that happen in colleges that, you know, you can talk about being exposed to that.

4:12But four years there, I left and went to the Silicon Valley and worked at Apple in the early 90s. It was an incredible time. And then came back to do my business school degree at Harvard and then came back to the Silicon Valley in 97. And I've been in Silicon Valley since then. So 30 plus years, and I've had a really, really fun time in the tech industry. I was looking at your CV, and it's amazing the range of companies you've worked at. Microsoft, Apple, Symantec, SAP. Did you sort of set out to just accrue as much experience as possible? Was that the idea? My life has not been a straight line.

4:50So nothing is predictable. I think if I were to tell my younger self something, it would be, don't, I mean, you can plan all you want, but you're like the Thames River as you walk in here, right? It curves. And you have to be very comfortable with the curves of life. And, you know, yeah, I mean, listen, I had studied computer science, so I was interested in being an engineer. I didn't think I'd go into business. I really wanted to be a great engineer. But after I went to business school, came back, I was more interested in business. So you take what life offers you. I mean, for me, I think in sort of four or five-year chunks, because that's a little bit more long-term.

5:24I'm not just planning for the four or five months, but be open to where life will take you as long as you're happy, as long as you're fulfilled, as long as you've got some purpose and you're working with a team that's fantastic. Life will throw at you shifts and meanders and that's kind of been the story of my life. When you were a software engineer, kind of a bit further down in the organizations, did you aspire to be a CEO one day? Because it does seem like you're very fired up to get to the top. Not at all. I had no idea. I wanted to be a great software engineer. Like I said, when I was in my 20s, I wanted to really, I had no idea what a CEO was.

5:57I had no idea what it meant to be in marketing or business on the business side of things. I really loved computer science. I loved engineering. I wanted to write good code. I wanted to be around smart people. That's what I really, really enjoy the most. I'm a team player. And I love being around people who are smart that I can learn from. And I think if I had something that sort of has lasted through, you know, 30 plus years, It's been intellectual curiosity about things. And I love, you know, I'm very secure in knowing that people are smarter than me in a particular domain. I want to learn from them.

6:26So I was very fortunate. Apple had some of the best engineers on that project. And, of course, I'd spent a summer internship prior to that at Microsoft. Incredible engineers. But somewhere along the line, I got more interested in product management and the business side. And that's when I went to business school. And after I went to business school and came back, I got a lot more interested in the business side of things. and once I started my business career, yes, then I began to see, okay, hey, you know, maybe there's a possibility which I could run things and I began to see, but even then in my, I'd say, late 20s, early 30s, I was far cry from being ready to be a CEO.

6:58I could have been a CEO, a small company, but I was learning and I was watching people doing this and at some point in time, it became more, I started to have success, some failures too, we'll talk about that, but, you know, I think when you have a intellectual curiosity to constantly be learning and have what I call a growth mindset, you've got to be intellectually curious to learn. You know, sometimes it's a combination of both hard work and a little bit of luck. Opportunity presents itself. And at some point in time, it became clear that I could be a CEO. I think probably in my VMware days, where I was the number two executive there.

7:35But the last two and a half years now, I see you eventually cohesively. I would not have planned that in my 20s at all. Is the discipline of coding, just thinking about it, good for the growth mindset? Because of code, it either works or it doesn't. Does that help the growth mindset? It doesn't. I mean, it's one career. If you're a software engineer, that's the career you pick. But if, let's say, you didn't do software and you were a medical professional, or if you were a marketing person, it doesn't have to be... I mean, software does give you a structure. It's sort of very, you know, if then else, you kind of move in logic.

8:07So I think that logical mindset helps you. But I don't think that the only people who have a growth mindset are software engineers. I mean, you could be of any walk of life. You have to realize that you know less than other people and you want to learn from them. And when you fail, you want to be able to say, that's okay. I'm going to pick myself up and I'm going to grow. And there's a really good book written by a Stanford professor called The Growth Mindset. I mean, I didn't know it at the time, but Carol Dweck. And she wrote the book primarily for kids and for parents educating kids on how you can teach your kids, even through failure, to be a better student or a better athlete.

8:46Because kids go through a lot of failure. They play a game and they lose. So what are you going to tell a kid after they've lost a game? Whatever it is that they play, soccer, football, cricket, tennis. That's okay. Pick yourself back up and have the grit to come back into the classroom, onto the court, and try again. And adults need to learn that too. In fact, I read that book in the context of my own kids, but I found very quickly I could adapt that to my own self. And it wasn't just me. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, read that same book as it relates to his own kids, and he applied that to a lot of the transformation Microsoft was doing.

9:23So I think this whole idea of the growth mindset is a big idea. And whether you're applying that to your children or to yourself or to employees. We use that a lot at Cohesity. How do you build a growth mindset to continuously take yourself to the next level? You mentioned Satya Nadella there. Do you think it helped to fire your CEO ambitions eventually that there are so many CEOs of an Indian background in Silicon Valley? I'm thinking I met recently Chet Kapoor from DataStax, there's many. Yeah, now there is. But when I started my career in the 1980s, there wasn't. uh sorry 1990s um there was maybe one or two we were a lot of engineers who were indian american at that time uh now there's a lot more common satya nadella sunday pichai thomas korean so we're clearly many of us know each other pretty well and we've supported each other and i have various different careers they're all good friends of mine and some of them are mentors to me and the indian american community in the u.s has been i think an entrepreneurial group that has worked hard, many of them in similar stories to mine.

10:25I think we're about 1 % of the country, 3, 4 million. And our hope is that we can be inspirational to other, it doesn't have to be just Indian Americans, any immigrant population who works hard, but also to Americans. I mean, I don't view myself today as just an immigrant story. I think anybody who works hard, hopefully, we want to set up an environment, whether it's at Cohesity or any of the companies that worked in the past where they can be successful. I think hard work actually counts a lot more than just smarts. I see a lot of smart people who aren't as hardworking because they think that their intellect's going to get them through.

11:01I see a lot of hardworking people who are not as smart who do better. So if there's one thing all of us can excel at, it's hard work. Just to go back one sec to the growth mindset idea, you obviously as CEO can shape the workplace culture as you see fit. So what kind of things can you do to encourage that? What you're going to find in every company is at some point in time, it hits a wall of some kind. Like you want to get to a particular stage or level and you're not able to do it. And then you have to ask yourself why. I mean, the most important question any leader can ask is why, why, why, why.

11:32Keep asking why. And somewhere along the line, you've got to help your team and help yourself say, I'm here, but I can get to there with a growth mindset. You know, maybe you want your growth and revenue to go faster. I mean, you want your company to be more efficient in cost. And all of those require some kind of out-of-the-box thinking that you limit yourself often to a place where you are not able to see through, and that's where you need some breakthrough. And hopefully, if you build that into your intellectual curiosity, you can help yourself get there. but sometimes you need an external set of consulting forces or we'll bring trainers in or consultants or outside speakers.

12:17You want those influences in your life that help you get to that next level. And hopefully you also have people within your company who are pushing you to the growth mindset and you're pushing them. So for example, in our executive team at the company, we constantly challenge ourselves to a growth mindset. You just openly do it in meetings and it's encouraged. We talk about it in public forums. like at our big sales kickoff, we talk about a growth mindset. I put a picture from Carol Dweck's book of a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. So a fixed mindset is a know-it-all, okay? A know-it-all. A growth mindset is a learn-it-all.

12:55And we talk about what's the difference between a know-it-all person and a learn-it-all person. And those are very helpful to the way in which we can build a continuity to the company's evolution.

13:13One thing Dweck talks about is the fixed mindset, needing kind of validation through things like exams, or I suppose job interviews and titles. And I wonder, did having a growth mindset, did that help you deal with what you've talked about as a very painful rejection of when you've lost high profile roles or been overlooked? Yeah, I mean, rejection from interviews or jobs, I've had one, we can talk about that. But I've had plenty of, you know, mini setbacks. And if you, I often do this exercise with people on my team. I teach leadership classes at my team at the company and I've done this for 20 years, okay?

13:47I probably put 2 ,000 people through a leadership class I call Leadership Now. And one of the exercises we do is I have teams plot their life, okay, on X and Y axis. The X axis is time. You can go as far back as you're, when you were born. And the Y axis is the highs and lows of their life, okay some people if you ask them to do that story it's one straight line up into the right they're fake there's nobody whose life is one straight line up in the right but most of us are ups and downs like a sine wave and hopefully the direction is upwards but we've had lots of downs and my own life has been a lot more learning from the valleys of my life than the peaks people look at me think oh my gosh you've been so successful you might have a lot of success and you look like one life, but you don't know.

14:32The real story is many valleys. Some of them are personal. I grew up as a kid and I was bullied all the time. Why? Because I had thick glasses. And I learned through that, that it didn't, I mean, it was tough for me because as a kid, you want to be accepted by your friends. And it discouraged me a lot. But the one thing that kept me through those years in my, you know, up to let's say 15 or 17 was I knew that whatever happened at school and I was bullied, my parents loved me at home. So I felt like the home was a fortress. I could get bullied at school, but I was safe at home. And that taught me a lesson very early that we've got to make sure our kids, whatever happens in the school and the playground, I'm going to create an environment where they're extremely safe here.

15:16Later on in my 20s, you know, lots of ups and downs. You don't get the job you want. Maybe you don't get the promotion you want. And then somewhere in my 30s, I was, you know, at a company and I was the VP of marketing of that company. Informatica was the company and the CEO, one fine day, decided he was done and wanted to move on to somebody else. And I thought I was doing pretty well, but clearly the CEO had a different opinion. It didn't matter what I thought. And in effect, I was fired. But I asked myself, which is the first major time in my life where I didn't have a reason for why I was being asked to move on.

16:00But in that failure, or I mean, I'd say rejection, I don't know, maybe it was a failure in his mind. I learned a lot, which was, this isn't my identity isn't working at this company. my identity is going to be long-term, my family, my friends, my faith, things that were more permanent in my life than just that. Six months later, I was at a different company. I was fine. But those six months were very formative months for me and searching deep, doing the things that were important. I needed to get back on an exercise routine. I took some time to figure out what I want to do. A year later, I got married.

16:41I mean, there's just things in my life that just fell in place for a variety of things that may have probably still happened if I was there. But I think that that moment where I was fired for me was a formative moment for me to realize my identity was not going to be in just my work. I know in America, hiring is a lot more brutal than it is in the UK. But I mean, was your position closed? Were you really not given any kind of reason why this happened that would help you kind of process it? I mean, I think if I remember right, it was over 20 years ago. I think the CEO just decided he wanted somebody else.

17:16That's okay. I mean, everyone's got the prerogative to decide you're not the right fit. And there probably was a set of attributes. It almost like now, so long, I don't remember all the rationale, but it almost doesn't matter now. You have to, at that point, really dig deep and say, listen, I'm going to find another job. It's not like you will be permanently unemployed. And you have to not find your identity in that company and feel like that's the only company you can work at. You bounce back up. And the good news about the human spirit is it's resilient. I mean, resilience is a skill you got to learn.

17:54It's all, again, Carol Dweck talks about that, right? In a growth mindset, you want to build resilience and grit into your personality and into your skills so that it's going to be disappointed, you might be depressed, you might be, but you're going to come back, you're going to come back. And then usually you want some influences around your life that can prop you up, right? In my own case, my faith, my family, my friends are more important to me than my work. And I always kind of look that, even today, if the journey at a particular part of your life is over, you go back to the intangibles and the pieces of permanently part of your life, and you bounce back up like a trampoline at some point in time.

18:34It may take some time. It'd take months. Maybe it takes some time. Some people may take years. But, you know, you set yourself that resilience in a situation where you get fired. The other thing it also teaches you is to have tremendous empathy for someone you're going to have to fire one day or let go from the company. And many of the situations where I've had to make tough decisions with employees, unless it's something that's a ethical or a legal or something that was character, where it's hard to then give a reference for that person. I try to be a reference for that person for the next job, because invariably there was something that that person did well, right?

19:13And I want that person to land well in the next company. And I've a number of people I've had to actually part ways with in any of the jobs. I've been a referral for them in the next job. And I try to keep it in a place where the relationship can grow strong because you never know. I mean, that person may come back into your midst, you know, and I don't feel like even for the person who fired me 20 years ago, I have no grudge against that person. You move on with your life. You want to make sure that you have a good attitude towards all the people that you work with. And you want to, I mean, I've lived my life through a very simple principle.

19:46Don't treat people any way different from how you'd want to be treated, right? And, you know, sometimes when you hire people, you might be working for them one day, right? So never hire somebody that you wouldn't actually work for one day. And these are simple principles that you want to live your life by in terms of how you treat people. Like, and here's another principle I share with people. A lot of people lay out a red carpet when people come in, and then they treat them like dirt when they leave. Unacceptable. You want to treat someone, often when someone's been at our company, we will do a going away party.

20:18We want them to be, sometimes when they go to a competitor, we've got to, you know, make a short, abrupt departure. But even then, we wish them well. We just have to make sure they leave right away because they're going to a competitor. But if they're not, we have a going away party. We treat them well because some of those people boomerang their way. I like boomerang employees, right? Boomerang people are people who have left and come back a few years later. So you want to keep a really good relationship with the employees and you want to treat them the way you'd want to be treated. And of course, if you get fired yourself, you want to have a support infrastructure that can help you bounce back up.

20:52One last question on this before we move on to the kind of here and now. Well, it's so interesting. You say that you, as a CEO, you also coach people and you've even devised a coaching program. I think I've only come across that once in the UK, somebody who became a certified coach and he said it made him a much better leader. But can you tell me a bit about the program you've devised for your employees? It's a very good idea. I mean, 20 years were actually at Informatica, the company I was fired at, we had a gentleman named Noel Tishy, who was the professor at, I think, University of Michigan.

21:24And he taught leadership at GE. GE in the 1990s was viewed as the best people factory of CEOs. I mean, Jack Welch, great, great leaders there. And Noel Tishy, and he came and taught a seminal class to us around 2003, 2004, about 20 years ago, where he basically said great leaders have to be teachers and learners. So you're teaching and learning, you're teaching and learning. And you have to have what he called a teachable point of view that you can lead your teams through. So he illustrated to us how they taught leadership at GE and then said the next class you guys are going to teach. And it really had a seminal impact on my life, which is what is my teaching point of view?

22:09Things like, for example, I talk about servant leadership. How do you take the top of the pyramid? Here's an example I talk about in my own point of view of leadership. You could think often of many companies like birds on a tree. The CEO bird is at the top of the tree and every branch has got the next layer, VP birds, director birds, manager birds, and then the employees. Okay, now just think about birds, okay? So work with this analogy with me. What does a bird look up when they see a bird above them? crap falling downhill, right? I'm being nice on your show. And that's how often most companies are.

22:42They look up and they just see crap flowing down, right? And that is a top-down, control-oriented setup of an organization that works in the military. We have to invert that pyramid, and the CEO board's got to be at the bottom of that pyramid, serving the employee and the rep that's in turn serving customers. So when you invert that pyramid, and I talk about this openly in my company meetings, it doesn't mean that the CEO is a pushover. I'm one of the hardest people to negotiate with, and I'm tough on my teams when we're not doing well. But the idea is I'm in the trenches with you to help fix this as opposed to just sending you down principles.

23:23That's an example of my teachable point of view. Now, I want to illustrate to my team, you know, that's how I live now. What are your teachable? What have you learned in your own leadership lesson? What do you want to learn? And we spend a good three hours, four hours or eight hours going through different modules. I learned a lot of that from Noel T. Shee, this person. And over the last 20 years, I've emulated that. And I think that rather than outsourcing leadership training to some coach from the outside, good leaders do that training themselves. and what people start to see from that is my leader or my CEO is approachable.

24:00He or she has a point of view that I can learn from. And then what I tell them is the next class, you're going to teach yourself, okay? Because I want you to teach your team what is your leadership point of view. And many of the things we do in those classes aren't just some lecture from me. We're sharing life experiences. This leadership journey I talked about, the x-axis and the y-axis, I divide people into groups and they go and do this for 15 minutes each. They come back and their whole perspective is different because they haven't talked to this other person in that manner ever. And I tell people, if you're a manager and you have not understood the life story of your employees, what makes them tick?

24:40What got them started from the point they were a young teenager to where they are today, the highs and lows of their life? And it's not a confessional. People don't have to, it's not like Alcoholics Anonymous where you're coming in and talking about all your past grievances or issues of your life. But to the extent that people are comfortable, you get people to open up and in their vulnerability, there is more unison formed in a team. So these are the kinds of things we do. We talk a lot a bit about what does it take to create a business plan. We teach people how to read accounting statements because it's very important that you understand financials.

25:15and over time our goal is at the end of that time the journey that they've spent with us they've become a better leader one thing i talk about leadership is very important for everyone to also note people often think that the greatest leaders are people of big teams they're managers of big teams not true i use this example i said how many people do you think reported to mother theresa nelson mandela or maathma gandhi and especially nelson mandela when he was in jail answer is zero But they were leaders of movements that when they spoke or when they wrote a letter, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people, you know, ate off every word they said.

25:56And I think the best leaders are people who can drive a revolution without managing anybody. They are almost virtual managers. And that's the type of leadership that we all want to drive in, a level five leadership where it's not the size of your organization. You could have zero people reporting to you, but you're a leader of a movement, sort of a pipe piper type of phenomenon of someone who has just so much conviction, passion, persuasion, charisma, whatever it is. If they happen to have a large organization, that's fine. But you'll find sometimes I find some of my largest team managers, they're not good leaders.

26:31And some of our best leaders are people who've got small teams. And so those are the kinds of things we want to create in an organization because ultimately great leaders win.

26:43We've seen this year in the UK, cyber attacks on big retailers like Marks and Spencer's co-op as well. How can your company help with that? And do you think the threat from this is growing? Yeah, this is front and square to what Cohesity does. So we're a data security company that's focused on keeping people's data safe from all kinds of cyber attacks and make them resilient. We have 13 ,000 customers, including 85 % of the Fortune 100. Those are U.S. companies. And then 70 % of the global 500. Those are global companies, including some of the greatest brands in retail, banking, healthcare. And a big part of today's focus, especially with democratic countries, is the bigger the brand you are, the more likely you're going to get attacked.

27:30And we encourage our clients to prepare. The greatest defenses in security are not going to help you unless you're also focused focus on recovery. So these attacks are inevitable to every great brand. Some may have greater defenses, so they prevent it from happening. But the lesson we can all learn is first off, be no more empathetic, because if you think it's not going to happen to you, it's a moment in time before it does. But we have to build better resilience so that when any of us get hit potentially, we can recover the fastest. So our entire focus is on recovery. So that if you get hit, we can get your category zero apps up in an hour, your category one apps in a day, the next category two apps in a week, your category three apps in a month, and maybe the other apps you don't care about.

28:17So the more that we practice and work on resilience, the faster this happens. So why is this happening? Largely, most of these cyber attacks, and now often driven from AI tools are nation state actors and gangs that are just looking for money or looking for fame. They want to take down great brands by getting their stories of their embarrassment in the newspapers and publications, and in many cases, extract Bitcoin for their cause. And in some cases, they're also sponsored by nation states from three or four countries. And, you know, in the cyber industry, you have to be right every single time, a cyber defense, they have read only once, right?

29:00So we learn a lot. We study every one of these attacks. And then we also educate our customers on some very basic principles of cyber hygiene. And that's what we'd encourage every customer now. Listen, let's learn from this and make sure that you've got multi-factor authentication, zero trust principles in, very fast recovery, segmenting your application. We have a handful of cyber hygiene examples. And every one of these, we want to make sure the next attack, we have helped people recover faster. You mentioned AI briefly there, and I know you have an AI product, Gaia. This is such a huge thing for all tech companies, but how are you using AI to help with your product?

29:38Yeah, a couple of ways. One is a lot of the security algorithms we use for data are based on machine learning and AI. Like the founders of our company are Google folks who built that into the product from the get-go. And that's a key part to our competitive advantage in terms of how we built as a modern company with AI and ML. But more recently, generative AI is a major breakthrough. And we, in working closely with NVIDIA, who by the way, now is an investor, they picked one company in our space to invest in, and that was Cohesity. We were able to build a generative AI app that can do what's called retrieval augmented generation directly on the secondary backup data that we collect.

30:16Never been done in industry before. We invented that. We patented the idea. We hope we'll get the patent for it. And that allows you, for example, you know, the power of Gen of AI is you can summarize Leo Tolstoy. You're a writer, so you'll understand this. You know, Gen of AI can summarize Leo Tolstoy on the half page. This is the summary. Read this, then you can save yourself reading the whole book. So apply that same principle of chat, GPT, copilot, whatever have you to what we do. So we back up exabytes and exabytes of data, okay? So imagine you have a 100 million PDF documents in your backup, and they're all vendor contracts.

30:56And they have economic terms of what you've given those vendors in each document. And you'd like to summarize all those economic terms. What was my discount percentages? What was the term my contract? And put it on a nice table. That's what Genitive AI does for you. We've been able to build Gaia as an app that can actually go search, summarize that data, and present to you a summary. It was impossible before. And now with generative AI, you're able to do that. It provides enormous insight. So our goal is to first off, secure the world's data, all of that hundreds of exabytes of data, but then provide AI tools like a flashlight to shine insights into that data so that for most companies, that data is their goal, right?

31:36And allow them to also build AI applications on top of that data. And that's a major breakthrough. We've been working closely with NVIDIA, but also the public clouds, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, and the early results are very promising. And you name-checked before Jim Collins and some of his ideas, the level five leader and things. So he also talks about the hedgehog principle of really focusing just on that thing you do. Are you having to adapt a little bit to capitalize on AI and say, we're not just about data retrieval, we're more about interrogating the data in new possible ways? Yeah, I like the hedgehog principle.

32:10I'm a big fan of Jim Collins and all his research and his books, I would say that we are a security and AI company and data, right? So those two things, we have to do really well, security and AI, security and AI, security and AI. So, I mean, they are related. So if you want to call them sort of 1A, 1B, you could, but to us, that's what we want to do. We want to be the best company that applies security and AI to large amounts of data, right? So at the core, we understand data, we keep it safe. But when you apply AI techniques to either the safety part of it or the insights part of it, you get magic.

32:44And that's what, you know, we're laser focused on. The good news is we have an incredibly sharp team. We have some of the best engineers and now a very large engineering team, given this transaction we've done with Veritas. We're number one in our market and market share. And we have incredible customers. You know, I've been here in the UK visiting customers. When I'm in the US visiting customers there, these customers are the who's who brands of the world. and they're helping our product get better and better.

33:15You've been listening to me, Dougal Shaw, speaking to Sanjay Poonen, CEO of Cohesity for the Business Leader Podcast. Please do rate and subscribe to us wherever you get your podcasts. We do two episodes every week.

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