#232 CEO NetApp, George Kurian: New Chapters

0:00When you get really successful at one thing, many, many people tend to believe that we're better than we really are. that, hey, there was timing, there was compelling need. And yes, we were really good at what we created, but maybe timing and compelling need are no longer as pervasive or there are other alternatives. And so you got to stay humble. You got to stay hungry to keep moving the business forward.

0:39Hi, I'm Jubin, partner at Kleiner Perkins, and this is GRIT, a candid exploration of how hard it is to create, build, and scale world-class organizations. The goal of this is not to talk about how successful my guests are, rather a real conversation about the personal and professional challenges they have faced. If you're a fan of the show, please follow us in the podcast app, Find us on any of the socials, YouTube, etc. Or just tell a friend. Thank you.

1:09Did you ever go up to the city? We lived in the city for 10 years. Who? My family. Yeah. We lived in Pacific Heights. Until when? 2019. Until COVID. Yeah. Right before COVID. Really? Yeah. Did you like it? We loved it. It was crazy, the commute for me, because I would go from the city to Sunnyvale. I was just thinking that. From Pack Heights to Sunnyvale is, on a good day, an hour or 10? Yeah. Like no traffic? Is that right? It used to take me three hours a day. Would you stagger your commute? I'm a super early bird, so I would get up at 6 and be in the office by 6.45. And then would you leave before?

1:51I'd leave at 334 and try to beat the traffic. And then I'd do conference calls in the car or have a car service take me home. Yeah, even today, I'm almost neurotic about if I don't have calls while I'm driving up and down the 280, I'm just like, what am I doing? This is a complete waste of time. You want to hear a funny story? Yeah. Speaking of commuting to Sunnyvale, my first ever job was a startup that was in not the same space as NetApp and EMC, but a similar space. It was basically building a hypervisor that was at the very early days of the public cloud. That was basically an abstraction layer between all of the different cloud service providers.

2:36Because the bet at the time was people are going to want to go to different clouds and shift workloads. kind of like what you hear today with these LLMs. Everyone just says, oh yeah, we'll port OpenAI in and we'll pull in DeepSeek. Anyway, we thought that in the early days and it turns out people usually just pick a cloud provider and run with it. And then maybe if they end up acquiring a company, they'll have a little GCP sprinkled in or something, but that's about it. Anyway, it was wrong. The bet was wrong, but it was my first job out of school and it was in Sunnyvale And I used to live in the Mission, and I didn't have a car because I couldn't afford one after I crashed my previous one.

3:18And so I would bike over Potrero Hill, get on the Caltrain, and there is no, I'm sure you know this, at the time there was no bullet train to Sunnyvale. Correct, correct. Is that still the case? there are bullets that go down to Mountain View, and then you can catch the little VTA train. But like, what a nightmare. It was painful. That's like what people do for the Niners games too, right? It's a horrible experience. So anyway, I used to do that, put my bike on the Caltrain, and then crank cold calls and emails up and down. I don't miss that. I don't miss that. It's called progress. You're making your way in the world, Juvan.

4:02You have shitty jobs like that? I did a lot of shitty jobs in my life. Have you? Makes me appreciate the job I have. What's the worst job you've had? I've worked my way through college. So I work for like 30 to 40 hours a week while I went to Princeton. And I've done cafeteria crews. I've done construction. I've done parking cars. Just lots of different jobs. I worked at Subway. And I thought that was bad. And then I went and got my next summer job when I was in high school at Vons, which is like Safeway. It's a grocery store. And that was actually soul sucking, like just bagging groceries all day.

4:40And right then and there, I made a pretty clear decision in my mind, like, just don't do this. Just like, I got to work hard to get away from this. When you were in India, you grew up in Bangalore. Correct. Did you work? Like, how old were you before you moved out here? I was 18. And you and your brother worked out here? Correct. We came out to college together, yeah. And were you working before then? Is there a culture of working at a younger age in Bangalore? In India, there is a culture, unfortunately, of the really poor where they have child labor. The middle class that I was a part of, we didn't do work in the sense of paid jobs.

5:24Yeah. Do you go back? Often. I used to go back many times a year for professional and personal reasons. Now I go back about once a year for both professional and I have a brother still in India. And you opened an office, a NetApp office there, right, at some point? We've had an office there since I think 2004, so a long time. Wow. And so you go visit that office? Yeah, I was responsible for the site when I led the engineering group. and then we've now got a multifunction site. So it's the largest campus for NetApp in the world. And are your mom or dad there? They were. My mom passed three years ago.

6:06My dad passed almost 10 years ago. Okay. And was mom or dad played a bigger role in your life? Both of them did for different parts. But I think for the big influence who shaped me into the person I am is my mom, of course. What would she say now? Your brother is the CEO of Google Cloud. You're the CEO of NetApp. It wouldn't matter an ounce to my mom. At all? She would talk, nope, not a bit. She would talk about the fact whether we were good people, whether we were good parents, whether we had good values and treated the people around us well. But in Indian culture, is it similar to Persian culture, which is what I am, where achievement matters a lot?

6:53Like, you know, in my family, if you're not a doctor, dentist, or lawyer type thing, do you not, is that not a thing in your culture? It is in Indian culture. But I think that my mom would say, if you weren't these other things, like a good human and you took care of your kids well and you treated the people around you well, then it doesn't matter what you do achievement-wise. You would not be the child that she would want you to. She had made so many sacrifices for. So when you would call your mom to tell her, I got promoted, I got the CEO job, I got into Princeton, I got into Stanford for my MBA, what would she say?

7:35She would say, well done. And then she would say, well, have you called your daughter and made sure you're going to her play tomorrow that you committed to doing? Or she would say, hey, when you go to Princeton, you need to remember where you came from and the roots that you have and the humble origins you have. And remember to treat the people around you well, regardless of whether they're wealthy or not, regardless of whether they're accomplished or not. Does that kid ever show itself today? Meaning, like, does the younger version of you ever rear its head in ways that you maybe don't want? I listened to an interview by Brian Cox, the Scottish actor, a few days ago.

8:21And he says that, you know, you want to protect the little child and make that as part of the authentic you. And I think that it does show up. I think it shows up in the priority calls I make about where I spend my time. It shows up in the way I try to keep my office accessible to people of every rank in the company. and it shows up in the way that we try to keep the culture of the place flat so that there isn't titles don't really matter. But everybody has titles, right? Sure. So how do they not matter? You try to encourage in the meetings that you have, you try to make sure everybody's point of view is heard.

9:03You might have to make a decision at some point in one direction, but you try to make sure that people's points are heard. Before you make people decisions and policy decisions, you go and walk a mile in the person's shoes before you make decisions about, you know, kind of, hey, how do you organize sales or how would a policy drive sales behavior? You go talk to the frontline employees and say, hey, you're a salesperson. How would this thing affect you? I had this guy named OJ on. I guess now he leads international for OpenAI. And he moved to Singapore. And the reason he leads international for them is because he felt almost claustrophobic raising his kids in the Silicon Valley culture.

9:51And I think his daughter or son's friends would pick them up in Ferraris and Lamborghinis and, you know, the whole nine yards, you know. And so he moved to Singapore and raised his kids there because he didn't want them to think that this is real life. how old are your kids? My son's about to be 21 and my daughter's about to be 18. Did you worry about that? Absolutely, still do. Do you really? Absolutely. Especially because you're rich now, right? Like they grew up with a lot of privilege relative to certainly what you did. That's exactly right. I think that, you know, you need to make sure that people have a perspective on what are the real needs of people in the world as opposed to the imagined ones.

10:40You know, I think humans, regardless of where you grow up, always create a sense of need and a feeling of entitlement. And you got to be real about that. And we try to keep it real in the family by exposing them to their cousins in different parts of the world, by traveling to different places. And when we lived in San Francisco, the Quaker school there was particularly really good about taking the kids out in the mission and having them see some of the unfortunate people there. Can you artificially create constraints with your kids? For example, if you and your wife are taking the kids on a trip to Europe and you fly first, are they flying first or would you put them in coach?

11:26Are they getting on a private plane with you can you do that we fly economy whenever we can that is not just my kids it's my wife and i and and them why it's a way to just say hey you know coach is good enough you know yes for certain long distance trips you might fly them all business but uh for many trips you try to fly what everybody flies because it's good enough for everybody it's good enough for us i don't use a private jet. I don't think that that's appropriate use of my personal or professional resources when there are so many commercial options. What would your mom say if she saw that?

12:08About the private jet, you mean? She would ask me, could you not fly a commercial jet or drive? Is Thomas the same way, your brother? Yeah, I think so. The most extreme example of this that I've ever seen is Jay Chaudry, the Zscaler CEO. Commercial all the time, no handlers, walks around. I mean, he started five companies. He's, I think, the richest Indian in America and only stays at four-star hotels all the way. Correct. I'm quite similar. You are. Did you make money at some point? If you grew up without money, usually, especially if it's not in America, I would imagine that you think about going to America, making it, being successful, getting money, and then living your dream life.

13:00Was that not how you thought about it? I didn't think money was a major consideration in the ways that when I grew up. I think that the reason we came to the United States were, you know, one was the Indian professional system was still very family run and family led. And so if your parents were not owners of a business, it was really hard to get to the top. And then in the late 80s and 1990, the Indian economic environment was really difficult. I think the turnaround of India into where it is today started in the fall of 1990 and 1991, really, when Manmohan Singh got to be the finance minister.

13:54So it was a tough time economically, and there were less professional opportunities. I think if you ask me, you know, what was my sort of dream scenario, it was to make sure I had enough money to take care of my parents when they got older. I never needed all the things that I have. And, you know, you never needed to be super wealthy to be happy. Do you ever feel guilty? you do feel that when you have access to opportunities and you grew up in a place where there were many kids who were not blessed with the parents that I had who created the opportunities for me you know that you are not where you are because you're entitled to be there it's because both people made sacrifices for you and you got lucky.

14:48And so the way that I treat that is to do the best I can with the opportunities I'm given. You know, some people say they're earned, maybe they are earned, but you still feel like you got to do the best you can. Yeah. There's many reasons I was very excited to talk to you. One is because I know you are this way. And I think that's a rare type of leader in this part of town. But also, I think not only do you have a deep sense of humility, but your track record is also quite amazing. And I mentioned this to you earlier, but the company NetApp in the early 2000s and late 90s, throughout the 90s, I imagine, was the darling of tech companies, the darling.

15:36In the late 90s and early 2000s, the stock peaked at$120 a share. And it was one of the it companies. Over the next 15 years, that stock bounced around from anywhere close to$20 to$40 a share. And you joined in 2011, about 10 years after the peak, when it was still bouncing around basically at the bottom as an SVP of product and then you did more product and then ultimately became the CEO in 2015. When you became the CEO, the stock was roughly about$30 a share in 2015. And today it's back to 120 at its peaks. that's like in 10 years less than 10 years in many ways like this is one of the great turnaround stories it is amazing and in some ways it's almost still under the radar because I think so much of people's association with a company like a net app or an emc or any of these legacy tech providers right is that it's a has-been you think that same thing about oracle and you look at oracle stock which is where he spent a bunch of time.

16:58It's in the same boat. Isn't that amazing? It's a great story. I think the story of NetApp is one where a company that succeeded in one era of technology then kind of lost its way for a period of time and now has got onto both the next technology curve as well as has rebuilt the operating foundations of the company to be a third generation company, right? I think that's what the story is really about. And I think we in the tech industry, we love to talk about the first generation hot company. And then when they either hit a wall or they lose their way or whatever transition happens, you never hear of them again.

17:47What wave in the 90s was NetApp really riding? You know, data storage and management was historically tied closely to the computer, right? And so every computing provider had their own storage technology. And so if you bought a computer for IBM, you would buy the storage from IBM. If you bought a computer from Sun, you would buy the storage from Sun. Then what happened was you had, with the advent of technical computing, the need to have the data be shared across workstations or computers. That's like silicon semiconductor design, you know, kind of the advent of workstations, right? Where you had really powerful applications that were running on the workstation.

18:38and it was essentially collaborative work where one workstation user was not the only one on the team that was contributing to the project. You had multiple people working together. And so you needed to keep the data shared across systems and the advent of networking that allowed you to connect these data repositories with fast enough networks to computers. That was what drove the creation of NetApp. And we essentially became the platform for what we call files-based storage or unstructured data storage. And then we added on to that storage for databases called block storage and a variety of what you call data management capabilities for security and multi-tenancy and other things over time.

19:33And why did that come crashing down? I think the growth in data centers slowed over a period of time. I think there was a period when the internet first and then virtualization technologies drove kind of a transformation of the data center. And then subsequent to that, essentially the growth of on-premises data centers slowed quite dramatically. And then the cloud wave started up, right? So Amazon, Microsoft, and Google started to build data centers on behalf of end customers and build full stacks of not only infrastructure, but applications. And so more and more clients for whom technology was not their core competency said, hey, I would just rather rent infrastructure and apps from the cloud.

20:23Yeah. Can you contextualize how insane the growth at NetApp was before you joined? Meaning, can you give a feel for people that might not remember this company back then, how crazy it was? Yeah, like NetApp never hit$5 billion. We went from$4 to$6 billion in a year, right? Of ARR. Of revenue, right? So there never has been a$5 billion year. at NetApp. And so I think it was like a startup that had grown to multi-billion dollar company. And I think that was also one of the - Four to six billion in a year? Correct. You know, we had some unique technological innovations that allowed us to dominate virtualization.

21:13I think it also went like zero to a hundred or one to a hundred in like a year. Correct. So we had both a market need for what we were building as well as a technological advantage in the way we built it that allowed us to scale really quickly. I think it also became a hindrance when you didn't have that growth anymore. If the culture was different, do you think the market still would have gotten away from NetApp? I think that there are two sides to that, right? I think that you need to have the ability to be humble enough to know when the chapter of the book that you have written, the masterpiece that you have written, the page needs to be turned, right?

22:04And you need to write the next chapter. And so teams that have succeeded in one era have a hard time believing that their era is no longer the prevailing era, but there's a new one. It's not like it's ended, but it's no longer the most important chapter of the book. There's a new one to write. And I think that was part of the challenge with NetApp. We were unable to see for a period of time that these new things were happening and we needed to capture them. Do you think it's a byproduct of being a victim of their own success? I think when you are really successful, and you see this in many, many, many technology companies, when you are really successful in one era, it's really hard to say you got to write the next chapter.

22:51because writing a next chapter, you need to have both the risk-taking appetite, but also the humility of being a startup all over again. That all the laurels and all the victories and all the championships you've won in your period of dominance, they are not a sofa to sit on, but a springboard to push you forward. Don't you think part of the problem is that when you get to a certain size and scale, you've brought in so many people that changing that culture becomes so difficult absolutely for example we just had a company in our portfolio called glean they're on all the graphs now of how long it took to get from one to a hundred you know you know that's right you know that's right that all the vcs like to publish and of course it took them two and a half years or something amazing and this is true enterprise sales this isn't plg or anything like that i was giving a talk to their team, I probably told them six months ago that you're about to be on all these fancy graphs.

23:54And the byproduct of that is that all the people that have been here building this company over the last three or four years were all the missionaries that were not really in it for the money because they could go make money in other places. They weren't really in it for the glitz or the glamour because they could go get a better gold-plated resume somewhere else. They were going to have to do something above and beyond themselves. And there's this weird almost disease that begins to, in my experience, incept these high growth companies. That is, you know, the people that come in because now you're on all the charts.

24:30You are the next high flying company. and over time that success attracts a certain type of person that over time kind of infects the entire organization with some feeling that this is entitled to us because they didn't see the work that it took to get to this point. Maybe that happened to NetApp. I don't know, but there is a disease that needs to be stamped out by the previous generation of people. Take your sports analogy. Kobe would stamp out that disease. That's right. He would stamp it out. Steph does the same thing. I think there are multiple reasons why organizations often don't catch the next wave or don't build the capabilities you need timely enough, right?

25:22I think there's multiple reasons for it. The big companies, the very large ones that have been successful over multiple eras, face this as well. I think that their path to the next chapter is easier. They have so many resources they can buy their way in. But for a smaller company like ours, that's not tens of billions of dollars, you have to reinvent yourself, right? You can't just buy your way into the next thing. I think the reasons you outlined are some of it. Clearly that you lose the energy and the risk-taking appetite of a startup, that the really hard work that you need to build a second business, right?

26:05I think that's certainly part of it. I also think that when you get really successful at one thing, many, many people tend to believe that we're better than we really are, that, hey, there was timing, there was compelling need. And yes, we were really good at what we created, but maybe timing and compelling need are no longer as pervasive or there are other alternatives. And so you got to stay humble. You got to stay hungry to keep moving the business forward. And when you joined in 2011, you'd already had a great career at that point. Five years at Oracle, four years at McKinsey, a few years at Akamai leading product.

26:51These are great companies. Then you go to Cisco and you spend 10 years there. Again, at the time, was an amazing company. It feels to me like you could have had your pick at a lot of different companies at that point. And maybe I'm curious about your decision making to go to a company like NetApp, which at the time was, like I said, kind of bouncing around the bottom. You know, first of all, I'm fortunate to have worked in a lot of places that have shaped me to be the person I am today. You know, I think there's a collection of experiences from, and friends, from each of those parts of my career that are still with me today, right?

27:36And my wife, for example, I met her when I was at Akamai. And so I have a lot of great opportunities that were given to me on each of those career steps. I think when I left Cisco, I was interested in, you know, working at a place that had good values. You know, NetApp was always seen as a place that treated our customers well, that treated the employees fairly, and had a culture of respect for every stakeholder. I think that it wasn't as important to me to be on the hottest company or the fastest technology curve because I'd seen many of them. And I knew that I think what's more enduring about an institution is the people that are part of it rather than just the tech trend that it's on because those tech trends come and go.

28:37And how would you assess the state of the business at the time that you joined? I think we had done extremely well the couple of years prior to my joining. We had caught the virtualization wave. On the other hand, there were several things that we had been slow to do. I think we had been slow, very slow to build out our scale-out technology. and my predecessor as CEO wisely told us to go build that even at the cost of slowing down the business. It was kind of like the next big thing to get done. I think we had not changed the team at the top to be the people who had seen scale. So we had a business that had reached$6 billion scale, but with a lot of people that had never seen$6 billion in their life before.

29:33And so the operating fundamentals of the company were like an overgrown startup. Yeah. When you became CEO four years later, do you remember your first all hands? Like, do you remember the first time you stood in front of the company and created a list of, here's what we're going to go do? First of all, I was extraordinarily surprised to be told that I was going to be a CEO. Actually? Absolutely. You weren't putting your hat in the ring? Nope, I had no idea. It was actually, it's a funny story. And if you don't mind, I'll tell you the story. Tell me. I was headed to the 25th reunion of my college of Princeton.

30:17And I was on my way to the airport when my assistant said to me, the chief human resources officer wants to meet you. And I was like, hey, I've submitted all my annual paperwork for my employees. I've done my reviews. It's all in your inbox. And my assistant said, no, she really wants to meet you in person. And I said, well, okay, I'm going to have to rush it because I'm running late to catch my flight. So I went up to her and I said, hey, Gwen, what's up? I'm in a rush. Can I help you? Is there something quick? And she said, no, you need to sit down. and I saw two board members. And I was certain that I was getting terminated.

31:00I looked at her and I said, what did I do now? And she said, no, you need to listen to these guys. So they told me, it was a Thursday, and they told me that I would be named CEO. And I said, well, I'm sure we can have that conversation when I get back, I'm trying to catch a flight. And they said, no, we're going to announce it on Monday. I remember telling them, are you crazy? and I said, we're going to need to hold a minute. I need to talk to my wife and kids and make sure that they're okay with it. And I called them and I talked to them and they said, hey, this is a great opportunity for you.