Doug Merritt: Creating a decacorn in Splunk and identifying trends
Download MP3Welcome to Inside the Network. I'm Sid Trivedi.
Ross Haleliuk:I'm Ross Haleliuk.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:And I am Mahendra Ramsinghani.
Ross Haleliuk:We've spent decades building, investing, and researching cybersecurity companies.
Sid Trivedi:On this podcast, we invite you to join us inside the network, where we bring the best founders, operators, and investors building the future of cyber.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Today, we have a special guest, Doug Merritt, who has shaped not a unicorn, but a decacorn, a company valued more than $10,000,000,000. As the former CEO of Splunk, Doug steered this big data company to extraordinary heights. In just 6 years, under Doug's leadership, Splunk's market cap soared past $25,000,000,000 and its annual recurring revenues skyrocketed from $200,000,000 to a staggering $3,000,000,000 At its peak, over 50% of Splunk's revenues came from security applications. Join us today as we dive into the mind of a leader who doesn't just think outside the box. He builds a whole new one.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Doug's journey began as a coder and a developer before transitioning to sales leadership and eventually CEO of a publicly traded company. His entrepreneurial roots trace back to founding a company called Icarian, which was acquired by Workstream. He then went on to hold senior management positions at tech giants like Cisco, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Today, Doug is the chairman and CEO of Aviatrix, a secure cloud networking leader that has raised over $350,000,000 in venture funding and serves over 500 global customers. In our conversation today, Sid, Ross, and I will explore Doug's career evolution, insights from his founder experience, and key lessons learned while scaling Splunk into a decacorn.
Sid Trivedi:Hey, Doug. Welcome to Inside the Network. We have 4 different sections to talk about today, Doug, and we're gonna start with your background. And let's go all the way to the beginning. And the beginning was you kind of spent 3 years as a coder at Accenture, and then you diverted your career into sales.
Sid Trivedi:And you started as an inside sales rep, and you moved your way up at some pretty great companies from Oracle to Powersoft to Patrol. Many founders have this technical background that you started with, but they haven't spent a lot of time with customers. What advice do you have for founders who are trying to build that selling DNA that you have built over multiple decades now?
Doug Merritt:Yeah. It's really in my 2 years of quasi semi retirement, whatever I wanna call the time period between Splunk and Aviatrix. I spent a lot of time investing and advising. I jumped on a couple of boards and I was surprised that most of my time was actually on seed and series a companies because Splunk and some of the larger companies, people with SoftTest AB had been with, I thought it would be more scale oriented. But it was great to get back to, all right, so what's it look like when you're hiring your very first CRO?
Doug Merritt:Or you made a mistake and you're hiring your second CRO and second CMO. And this is an absolutely pervasive problem. Like I'll start with tech has shifted it a lot over the past 20 years. I think tech oriented founders were a thing, but they weren't dominant. And that has changed where I think with product led growth and a lot of the core lower level infrastructure enablement technologies, it's now much more typical to have an X engineer or a true deep technical founder as leader.
Doug Merritt:And that first time period, months, semesters, years of trying to get the company off the ground before you decide to bring in a professional sales and marketing person, there's so much that the founder learns about customer interaction and how do you get those deals across across the table and is really difficult for everybody to transition from that founder led sale to more of a professional marketing and sales orientation. And the two pieces of advice that I've had for those teams is 1, give yourself grace and recognize that you have not been a seller. And at this point in time as a founder, you probably are not going to be someone that's carried a bag and been on quota. And until you've done that, it's really you don't have the true understanding. Right?
Doug Merritt:The same respect that you'd give to the depth of understanding you have to have as a developer, that it's not something you picked up in months and you can't just read books. You need to actually do the work for a while. That exists also in sales and marketing. There's some art to it, there's a lot of science, a lot of experience. So my coaching to everybody is be super curious.
Doug Merritt:Like that growth mindset thing we talk about, it is really important. Be inquisitive, be curious, be hyper empathetic. And then 2, you've got to be patient because the second mistake that I've seen most early, most of these teams make is you're on a growth trajectory. The plan that you've sold the VCs is continued up into the right. Those sales were really hard fought.
Doug Merritt:Now you're dealing in the classic Jeffrey Moore cross knit chasm, you're dealing with those leading and early adopters and it was hand to hand combat and and you as the founder and whoever you're doing that with were pivoting and and learning and adjusting and tuning. There's this setup that I see with most CROs coming in. 1, not understand that's gonna take that while you and your mind have perfected the pitch and while you think you've got product market fit, it's probably not scalable yet. And you've gotta give the new person that comes in a couple of months of tagging along with you and listening aggressively to how you're interacting with customers and learning, going back to the few that you have, what really worked so it can be put into something repeatable that that person and other people can understand. But the other piece with that patience is that leader typically has 4 very different things that you expect out of them.
Doug Merritt:1, close deals. That's a full time job. 2, set up all the systems so that we actually have got a reasonable instance of Salesforce. We've got Gong or something like that in place and we're collecting data effectively. And that's a full time job.
Doug Merritt:3, create all the processes and enablement and methodologies. Like, how are we gonna sell? Are we MEDDIC or MEDDPIC? And are we gonna have a BDR team, an SDR team, and how they interleave with the core reps? And so a ton of work there as a full time job.
Doug Merritt:And then 4, be, use your network and be a super recruiter, which is also a full time job. So you give these poor people 4 full time jobs and sequencing and prioritization I just find is so important in every leadership role and you've got to help them with the prioritization. And I tend to emphasize, let them learn, let them understand and build the materials and put the sales processes in and begin to build the systems without this huge onus of go out and hire a bunch of people and you're responsible for closing all those deals. And the opposite usually happens, which is go close these deals, most important thing, and start to bring people in. But the people, they don't have time to really understand how to make it repeatable and they don't put any of the processes and infrastructure in place and then you hit a wall and that's why you're usually not too long down the road looking for your 2nd CRO and then your 3rd CRO.
Doug Merritt:And so it's just but that kind of goes all the way back to setting expectations properly with VCs on when you're ready to bring in a professional VP of sales, director of sales, CRO, whatever the title is gonna be, how do you set them up for success?
Ross Haleliuk:Many today think of you as a public company CEO, but you've also walked the founder's path. You started Ikarian back in 1996 and served as a CEO for 5 years right through the acquisition by Workstream. What were some of the key learnings for you as a founder, and how have you adopted that as a CEO?
Doug Merritt:Yeah. Great question. I had almost the opposite learnings of what I just talked about, which was I coded for a couple of years, very, very mediocre coder. So I was reasonably technical, but not deeply technical. And then I sold for a lot of years and I was really good at selling and pivoting and listening, very consultative.
Doug Merritt:And I over the course of my career, and I whipsawed the organization pretty dramatically. I didn't really understand what it meant to reliably and scalably and repeatably deliver software. I didn't brilliant. You intuitive, but you just haven't lived it. Going back to until you've been in that org, it's difficult to really understand it.
Doug Merritt:I didn't understand how much space product managers need to make sure they harden the p the MRD and the PRD and that they actually get a chance to define. And then engineering needs time to actually go through the full development release cycle. And so I'd be great at going and talking to a customer and they were a little bit different than the last customer. We had sold AT and T and on what Icarian did and then we talked to Kaiser Permanente, totally different organizations like, oh no, no, we could do that for you as well. And so my biggest lesson through Icarian was having walked a mile in different departmental shoes is really important to be a good CEO.
Doug Merritt:And I logically and kind of emotionally learned what it was like to be in engineering and where those mistakes were. And we wound up with a reasonable outcome for the company. And, but it wasn't what any of us wanted, which is what led me to take the head of engineering job at PeopleSoft because that was a huge radical departure. But so core lessons, again, be being a super aggressive listener and be really empathetic to all different facets across an organization. And while you're really urgent, you have to be as a founder.
Doug Merritt:And while you know more than most because you have got the image in your head, like you really have got to slow down and listen to your folks.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Thank you, Doug. I like the term super aggressive listener and, of course, being empathetic to not just a few, but all the different facets across the organization. Now companies like PeopleSoft, SAP, and Cisco are very different from the scrappy startup world that we live in. Help us understand some key differences in being a general manager at a company like SAP or Cisco versus being the CEO of a startup.
Doug Merritt:I think the number one thing that I took away from first PeopleSoft, but didn't carry it to SAP and Cisco is the the power of a platform, the power of of market share and customer base is is insanely powerful. Like you look outside and it's like, man, that's that's a pretty good thing to have. But and VCs definitely appreciate go to market is really tough. Building that large customer base is really tough and therefore enterprise sales is one of the key elements to get there. But until you sit inside those companies, you don't really understand the lock that these companies have with that, with the buyers that they serve.
Doug Merritt:And then one of the better examples when I was at SAP, the first division that me and my team kind of came up with, it wasn't really a charter, became the governance risk and compliance division. It was right after Sarbanes Oxley passed and we came up with the whole product suite to help the CFO function with all the chaos and craziness of managing finances in a Starbucks, a Sarbanes Oxley driven world. And then we bought this small little company and one of the top SAP customers at the time had bought a competitor and the CIO was actually on the board of advisors and I think he was an investor in that competitor and we had him out for a briefing in Palo Alto as part of the Palo Alto product team and walked through the roadmap of why, who had bought and why it was important and where the direction was going. At the end of that meeting, he called his team up and they'd already bought and we're rolling out the product, said, I mean, he's literally in the conference room, said to cancel the rollout and I'm stepping off the board of advisors because SAP is going this other direction.
Doug Merritt:So it's getting to the point where you have the customer loyalty that a large organization has is it's the goal that most of us want to pursue. It's very difficult to do and as a startup the more awareness you can have of how powerful that relationship is and think through how to take advantage of that. Like what can you do on 1 +1 equals 3 basis that really makes that large organization look good is one of the more important things you can do to get you across that chasm and again to get some of the volume. The other piece I learned is being a general manager of a big and complex division. It was a $1,000,000,000 plus division of PeopleSoft.
Doug Merritt:We went up building close to a $1,000,000,000 division at SAP from close to nothing. Cisco is very different. That was kind of a functional, leadership role, but as complex as that leadership is, it's still very different than being a CEO. And you can kind of delude yourself to an extent because you've got for me, especially at, at SAP, I had full span of control, everything down to sales, especially to sales groups. But when your neck is online every single day as the accountable person reporting to the board and the investors and every buck truly stops with you, it does change everything.
Doug Merritt:It's great, great training because you have to be good at, you have to understand engineering, you have to understand marketing, you have to understand sales to make these roles work. You do get some of that empathy that I was talking about earlier on how difficult it is, how how different the departments are and and how difficult it is to manage across them. But it's still not the same as being a founder or a CEO.
Sid Trivedi:I think this this comment and this point around empathy and humility just keeps coming back and and clearly that was something you learned, whether that be, you know, as an individual coder, as an inside sales rep, as a founder, and then finally also as a as a GM. And I I think it set you up in a very good position for that that time at Splunk.
Doug Merritt:Yeah. Definitely a set of life lessons. It's, we're coached early on in school, any of us super, super tight pay folks that you wanna sit in front of the class and be the smartest kid and always answer all the questions and the the the right answer is what matters. And once you get out of school and you start to work, you realize answer is important. Like getting to it the right answer matters, but there's lots of right answers.
Doug Merritt:And getting people to understand where you're going and understanding the feedback from them and that kind of that whole working organism that can evolve if you let it evolve, like that's the hard part is how do you get 10 ors or a 100 ors or a 1000 or 10000 or growing in close to the same direction? And I think a lot of people are writing about empathy and humility and and growth mindset and because that, to me, is one of the foundational elements of how you make that happen.
Sid Trivedi:Let's move on to the second section, and this section is really around scaling Splunk. And you first joined Splunk to run field operations under Godfrey Sullivan who had helped to take the company public and created this new darling in the SIEM market. And you became CEO in the fall of 2015. The company at the time had a market cap about of about 7 and a half $1,000,000,000 and about 200,000,000 of ARR. And it was back then best known as a log aggregation tool helping IT ops teams find the root cause of failure and decrease mean time to respond.
Sid Trivedi:Over the next 6 years, as you as CEO, you grew the business to nearly 3,000,000,000 of ARR, and the market cap peaked at $35,000,000,000. How did you decide to extend this market opportunity and evolve the platform so that it fully went across IT, DevOps, and Cyber.
Doug Merritt:It was an incredible seven and a half years because about a year and a half of of CRO slash SVP of field ops. And there's a lot of everyone credits all the brilliance that they have on these great leadership roles and a massive chunk is luck and timing. Like Splunk has this incredible product with the core index and landed and did a good job of helping the market be aware of the value of logs. And and I got I got to inherit that. But when I came in, SIEM wasn't a thing yet actually.
Doug Merritt:It really we were still selling to IT ops, a little bit of cyber. And Godfrey was adamant at that point in time, like we don't want Gartner talking about us as a SIEM or we don't even really want to go after cyber that aggressively. There was really good rationale around that. One, we were playing at a very different level than the SIEMs were. They're a structured data source.
Doug Merritt:You refine the data that goes into a SIEM so that you can create the incidents and event management alert frameworks. That doesn't generally happen against non structured index data. You want that in memory and refined. So it's more of an application and, and we were an index, but 2, security at that point in time was, didn't have the power they have today. And they were what we called Splunk huggers.
Doug Merritt:Right? We, what we wanted was people to dump a bunch of data into Splunk and then share it. So there's more and more use cases and insights that people would get from this non structured data store and cyber was really, really protective of the data, which went against one of our core tenants. Despite Godfrey's insistence and my carry on of, hey, let's not wander into that SIEM market yet. There's also a strategic element to that.
Doug Merritt:We tend to couple with HP ArcSight and the other SIEMs as the invest we were the investigative data lake that IT ops use first and then cyber eventually start to use as well. And we complimented the SIEM and I didn't want to go in and tell the people that just bought the SIEM or done a big renewal. Hey, that was a bad decision. Like, why'd you do that? Use us as a SIEM.
Doug Merritt:So we're really trying to be cooperative. But what we what we saw is there's a whole host of IT ops use cases and then there are a whole host of SecOps use cases Now if we could harden an app on top, it would do a better job of helping people understand what the platform did because this investigative better MTTR data lake thing based on logs was still hard for people to conceptualize. So I think there were 2 elements that really helped get Splunk on that continued really rapid hyper growth phase. 1 was despite the ubiquity of what the platform could do, constraining the number of use cases to a set of a high value, high volume, generally horizontal use cases across IT ops and SecOps. And SIM became the most important of those over time.
Doug Merritt:But we had a whole series of applications, ITSI and a bunch of others that tried to crystallize for different points in the IT ops and SecOps landscape, how you could get immediate value from Splunk without having to grow into it based on doing a bunch of queries and finding the answer for yourself. Now it's hard to get across to Salesforce because we were, Godfrey was really insistent, we're not a platform, but but we were a platform sales team in the sense that we went in and said, hey, here's this great tool. How do you want to use it? We could do here, there. Oh, what do you want to do?
Doug Merritt:And let's investigate with you and let's collaborate. And buyers don't generally like that. They want an answer. I'm fine with buyers. The more you make them think, the more frustrated they get.
Doug Merritt:It's like we're the experts, we've studied this, here is the answer. We've got a lot of customers like you, that's why you're doing business with us. Do it this way, please. So that was a big effort to get to more prescriptive selling and less consultative selling, and it really was use case back. The second piece was making a bet on the Cloud, which sounds stupid in 2024 and even in 2014, 15 it's like, what do you mean you're not in the Cloud?
Doug Merritt:But data is as we're seeing it's finicky, like there's people are worried about it. Where does it go? And how many people see it? And is it safe in the cloud or not? And what's happening with residency?
Doug Merritt:And what's happening with privacy? And so it was a bit of a gamble to go to cloud. We really got there. There's lots of good business model reasons, but the core was we had seen our bigger customers get to petabyte scale and then 10 plus petabyte scale and they're on their way to get to a 100 petabyte and potentially exabyte scale. When I looked at the complexity and the technical skill necessary when you got to 100 of terabytes and petabytes per day of ingestion, it's like, wow.
Doug Merritt:Yeah. A good tech company can do that. The Googles, the Apples, the Facebooks, but man, the average company, there's no way. So how do we help them? We've got to do it for them, which meant going to the cloud.
Doug Merritt:Yeah. That was a great tailwind and it also was made life incredibly complicated because at the same time that we're trying that we're in hypergrowth and we're trying to move to a use case orientation and we're going through a complete replatformization of the technology. It was not horizontal scale out. It wasn't microservices oriented. We had a lot of static relationship between the compute and storage layers.
Doug Merritt:So insanely difficult for the company. You're now taking the street through this crazy journey of, Hey, nothing's going to look good. Cash is going to go upside down. Revenues could go upside down. Op margins go upside, but trust us.
Doug Merritt:It's all gonna work out. It's not a journey for the faint of heart. But if you have customer success as a top metric, it was what we needed to do. And and it wound up being, I think, a big, big lever for the growth of the company.
Sid Trivedi:How much do you think the success of scaling that ARR 15 times from 200 to 3,000,000,000 was based on execution versus vision? Was it you know, was was the vision obvious, what you just described? And really, what what was hard to do was make executing on that vision, or was the the vision the hard part, no one else had thought through those things? And the execution was, you know, as good as you could do with all of the changes that you are making.
Doug Merritt:I am firmly in the cap, maybe too rotated, that execution's a premium, not the idea or the insight, especially in our industry. But I think in general, I think humans are really smart. And in tech, I you've you've gotta be super creative and smart. And any idea you have, I I assume there's a 100 or a 1000 or 10000 people that have the exact same idea. The premium is how do you actually bring that thing to life?
Doug Merritt:So log data, and we weren't the only ones. I just think we did better than anybody else. And then we out execute them, getting that platform to cloud. If anything, we were late. Making this platform use case centric, that's a tried and true orientation that you can go back to Microsoft and IBM at the beginning of tech and then that's bit of play that they've run.
Doug Merritt:So I don't, you know, putting that all together and making it digestible for people and selling to people on the vision, like, there's definitely skill to that. But the hard part is, so we wanna get to the cloud. How? What's the sequencing? How do you prioritize stuff?
Doug Merritt:How do you deal with the unexpected turbulence that always comes up? Happens if you gotta change personnel because you've got the wrong people? And that's just that's just the grind of these jobs. And I think all the premium's in the grind.
Ross Haleliuk:Talking about execution, a big part of that is always about the people. Throughout your time at Splunk, you hired, mentored, and promoted well known executives both across infra and cyber. From people like Haiyan Song, who now runs a big part of the business at NetApp, to Jason Child, who is now the CFO at ARM, to Sunil Antony, who went on to start his own company Horizon 3. What are the 1, 2 top trades you look for in executives, and how do you motivate them to do their best work?
Doug Merritt:Yeah. We had a great team at Splunk, and and some of those folks, Godfrey brought in, some I brought in, and we were lucky again to have this incredible brand that people actually wanted to work for. The way that I have learned to filter is when you're dealing with, SVP or EVP or C level hire, what we've been taught in most of our hiring through our careers is competence is really important. And most of us started in engineering or sales. And so you do a classic engineering hiring, coding tests and thinking tests, and it's all about competence.
Doug Merritt:You know, can you actually do this job? At that level, what I learned and had learned it the hard way a few times is to get to be a candidate at that level, your competence has to be high. You still have to test for it. Is it relevant? Is your competence relevant to what we're trying to drive?
Doug Merritt:But I think it all becomes grit, resiliency, empathy, creativity, operational efficacy. They're more of the intangible elements that come with these execs. It's so interesting to hear people talk about the past because they make it generally sound so predictive and linear and anyone that's gone through it knows it's so non deterministic and non linear and non predictive and therefore the skills really come back to how aware can you be of signals, which why I think empathy and listening is so important. How quickly can you process? How quickly can you make decisions often without information and without the comfort of assurance?
Doug Merritt:And then how humble can you be on admitting you're wrong and pivoting quickly? And then what kind of grit and tenacity do you have to be okay being wrong and picking yourself up after you've face planted for the 3rd time and still being excited about moving forward? I mean, those are harder to test for. I think, you know, set spend a lot of time with folks and ask them much more of those situational questions of how is how'd your life progress and tell me about the hard issues you went through and describe those in more detail and tell me all about your failure. There's a lot of standard review questions there, but that is where ultimately I've kind of pivoted to being the most important thing for the exec team hired.
Sid Trivedi:Doug, one thing you've done very well is you also identified when the right person would be great at that point in time, as well as assessing when they weren't likely the the right person for that point in time and and swapping them out. What advice do you have for founders on how to assess when, hey. We need to upscale this role. We need somebody else. What what's the the thought process in your head that you think through?
Doug Merritt:I'll do it. I'm I'll echo the trite advice of never ever can look back and say, jeez. I wish I'd taken more time and given someone more chances before I had a hard conversation, And I can 100% look back, like literally 100% say, oh my God, I knew in my heart, like my all my alarm bells are going off. And I just I was way too slow to act. And everyone will say that, like that's trite advice for me.
Doug Merritt:What it means is I really like collaborating with my team. I learned from them as well as hopefully they get some learning from me. So I want to be, I want to be involved. The signal for me is when I feel like I'm repeating myself over and over, I keep asking for the same thing. Like we've agreed that this, this one deliverable is really important.
Doug Merritt:You've got to get more granular on this aspect of operations, or I need you to create something in this area that's strategic or, and I'm back on my 3rd or 4th meeting and I'm asking for the same thing and it's still not being delivered. That is usually that first early warning of, okay, something's wrong. Because like they've got the IQ, like they've got lots of different facilities to make it happen. They probably don't know how to get it done. And I'm trying to collapse the time even now, still after so many years doing this, how do I help them see they're having difficulty?
Doug Merritt:What quick mentoring can I give to help them get over the hump that I'm trying to shorten time of if you don't rush to the water and take the drink, I'm trying to show you the water, I'm not going to force you a drink, then we've got to have a quick conversation of I think, you know, maybe I need to hire above you, maybe I we need to move you somewhere, maybe you need to move out of the company, but there's just no it's really difficult, I think, to drag someone through that given the speed of what's happening in our industry and the expectations that we all have to live with?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Thank you, Doug. You've given us some great insights on market dynamics and talent acquisition. Let us shift our focus to another crucial aspect of your leadership at Splunk, strategic acquisitions. You led several key acquisitions like SignalFX and Tandem Cyber. Can you walk us through the acquisition process from the buyer's perspective?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:As you were the CEO of a public company, what factors did you consider when evaluating potential startups for acquisition? And let's flip that script over. What advice would you give to founders who might find themselves in discussions with acquirers? How can they best navigate these interactions and negotiations?
Doug Merritt:So one, whenever I hear a founder or a CEO of a small company say, you know, what's your goal? And say to be bought, And we're targeting to be an acquisition target or something. It's like, I lose my mind. It's like, do you understand how difficult it is to get bought? That's the worst strategy in the world.
Doug Merritt:You can never build a company to be acquirable. You've gotta be open. You've got a fiduciary duty to yourself and your investors. You gotta be open to M and A if it, if it occurs, but M and A happens because you're building something really special and unique that is, has the opportunity to become an independent public company. And if not, it's gonna be very difficult to get bought I believe.
Doug Merritt:As a buyer, I've only been in high growth companies. So my view is very skewed. I know that people buy for market share. I just try to take out the competition. I've never done that in my roles.
Doug Merritt:And I know companies like Broadcom can buy more for operational efficiency and margin enhancement. And it's almost a great, I'd say it's a PE company to an extent. I've never, never been there. I'm always trying to figure out how do we accelerate growth. And to me, that's 2 different things that again, you have to have done this well to be interesting.
Doug Merritt:I'm generally not buying marketing and sales expertise because at PeopleSoft, at SAP, at Splunk, we had a lot of that and it's nice to get some additional great marketing and sales folks, but we already have got a great system in place. I'm trying to figure out a way to either fill out and round out aspects of the buyer's journey for what we do for that buying center. And it's just a build by partner approach. And we generally have determined like with Phantom, Hey, something like a security orchestration, automation and response is really important. And we could, but yes, it's software.
Doug Merritt:You can always build it eventually. But we looked at it, it's like it's at least 2 years to build this, maybe more. You always underestimate the market's moving pretty quickly. Let's go out and we could partner, but we think it's pretty strategic. We want to actually, we think it's very tightly coupled with the core SIM market.
Doug Merritt:We want to own that asset. So let's find the best property we can, which was the same thinking with signal effects. But there were a bunch of smaller tuck ins around signal effects that were trying to highlight different elements of the observability and DevOps world. But with that orientation, it's kind of a tech team tuck in and a technology augmentation piece, which goes back to, to build a great company, you know, laser focused on the buyer, what the problem is, how do you take unique approach to really solve that problem and ultimately disrupt the market because you're creating a brand new category, you're creating brand new capability, not doing product market fit, if I'm just gonna build a better, better mousetrap than the person behind me and actually reimagine the way it gets done. And if you do that super well, you'll for sure grow within your buying center and then you'll get potentially the opportunity of someone that Aurea is bigger than you in that buying center saying, I want that.
Doug Merritt:And if you do that right, you're in the catbird seat of, yeah. Yeah. That combination makes sense or no. I really wanna continue to try and go on my own.
Sid Trivedi:We've talked a lot about Splunk. Let's talk a little bit about new beginnings and and Aviatrix in that topic. You left Splunk at the end of 2021, and I remember sitting down with you and and grabbing drinks in Palo Alto, and you spent a year and a half doing various different things. And then in July of 2023, you joined Aviatrix where you are today as CEO. You had quite a few different options.
Sid Trivedi:I remember having a few of these conversations with you to be CEO at a whole different set of companies. You also had other options. You know, you could have joined a venture firm. You could have gone and, you know, started your own firm. You could have just taken some time off and served on board roles.
Sid Trivedi:Why did you choose Aviatrix, which at the time and still is as a private growth company, a few 100 employees, very different from Splunk?
Doug Merritt:Very different. Yeah. So I toyed with all that you talked about. I did a bunch of sidecar investing. I partnered with a couple of VC firms.
Doug Merritt:I toyed with, do I wanna be an investment partner versus venture or operating partner? But really cross the transom and be on your side of the table. And do I wanna be retired? And through all of that, it's like I'm just way too much energy to be retired. Investing is awesome and advising is great, but I like being on the playing field with the rest of the team and be in the middle of stuff.
Doug Merritt:So I did get to like 2 years of back and forth. It's like, no, no, I need to be on a team. I love the purpose, the vision, purpose mission, everyone's in it together. I was not targeting Aviatrix in any way. I did a little bit of networking at Cisco, but I would put myself as a very, very lightweight, I guess, advanced beginner on networking.
Doug Merritt:And it's a tough category, but we had 1, a couple of board members I'm close to that I deeply respect and we have a long lasting relationship with. And ultimately we all have that maxim of you join a company and you leave a boss, like your board is your boss and you've got to love your board. So that was, that was a strong draw. I wanted something with a decent So I determined private would be interesting versus public. If I would be back on the playing field with everybody, that means you're in the trenches and you're interacting with customers deeply.
Doug Merritt:You're going through product review cycles. You're deeply meshed in QBRs. You're in the day to day fabric of the business. As a public company CEO, you get that, but there's a reasonable chunk of your time. Yeah.
Doug Merritt:Today's blue screen of death is a good example. Like that's a huge distraction from what that CEO would normally be doing. There's a reasonable chunk of your time that is not that. And the bigger you get, the more time you spend not inside the company just by the nature of the job. So that led to private and then within private, there were a bunch of criteria, but at the core is who do you serve and how unique is what you do?
Doug Merritt:And, what Aviatrix does, so Aviatrix, I didn't know this before Aviatrix, is a female pilot. I guess you would call it an aviator, but if you're a female, it's an Aviatrix. And we had a female founder and that metaphor was, hey, we're cloud networking. And her idea was it's like a air traffic controller or a pilot. Like you're trying to make sure that things go from one spot to the other in the air, which makes sense from once I realized that it's like, oh, okay, it's kind of a cool name.
Doug Merritt:That describes what we do. But, what I found in my couple years off is the landscape is so, so crowded right now with so many companies that are well funded that are all look alike and for a whole series of reasons, networking has been overlooked to a large extent. And what we certainly found is we reconfigured Splunk completely to be a cloud native service to work well in the cloud. Everything has got to be rethought. And right now Aviatrix is the only company on the planet that has a cloud neutral data plane.
Doug Merritt:The actual packet mover. We touch filter route optimize packets at the packet layer across all the major clouds and now onto edge providers, the Equinixes and MegaPorts of the world and into some of the next generation L M providers. And I looked at it and said that it's like Splunk, you're serving a super technical buyer, network engineer, network ops is kind of like IT ops, IT ops engineer, underappreciated. Like they've got incredibly difficult job. The entire weight of the world sits on their shoulders because as we're seeing today, when systems crash, like the world stops and networking couldn't be more of a ring zero activity.
Doug Merritt:If you can't deliver packets, nothing works other than maybe if an OS crashes. I guess they're similar and it's not that crowded. The alternative is cloud native networking services and the cloud's the whole message was developers, you're awesome. All those other people, like, don't you want to get rid of them? Like, don't you just want to code?
Doug Merritt:Forget networking and storage and infrastructure and QA, like just go code and we'll take care of the rest of it for you. And that's just not true. And networking is really, really difficult. And what happens on that last mile and what happens as you traverse multiple different hops? You need visibility, you need control, you need resiliency and you need effective and efficient developed services.
Doug Merritt:And so that combination of board that I know and like a good balance sheet with the ability to maneuver and a really compelling problem for a difficult buyer that I think is harder to replicate without 10 other people that have something that looks incredibly similar, for me, was was a good concoction of, okay, get back on the playing field and see what you can do.
Ross Haleliuk:You've talked a lot about the reasons why cloud networking is such an intriguing market to go after. How are you looking to evolve the business Aviatrix is in? I would love to understand what your vision and your priorities are.
Doug Merritt:Continue that Splunk parallel. 2 of the major initiatives, there are a few others, are literally replicas of Splunk. One right now the software is completely customer self managed, which is an advantage. It's all native in the cloud, but because we're literally touching packets and we don't control the underlay, all the physical infrastructure is controlled by the cloud providers themselves, Then the customer's got to retain control of the data plane because they are accountable and they are responsible for, for the data inside those packets. But there's big chunks of what we provide that could be delivered as a service and we can make the data plane feel much more like as a service.
Doug Merritt:So one like Splunk with the big initiatives is all right, let's make it easier on people. Networking is a very difficult area, much like trying to manage complex and super high volume data environments. There's only so many people with skills to do that. Let's shorten that for the customers that we can actually provide them the skills that they might have a difficult time finding and procuring and give them a better experience. The second piece is Aviatrix has built this really broad based platform, networking platform.
Doug Merritt:We do all different combinations of routing use cases, load balancing use cases, network address translation, and adding use cases, firewalling use cases. And we're continuing to wander into other areas of networking. That's awesome. But like with Splunk customers need crisp use case. And so we're pivoting the company to be much more use case centric.
Doug Merritt:Yep, you can do anything with this thing. It's a box of Legos for companies like you. Here's the 2 areas that we've seen them start with over and over. And then here's where they go next and next. So it sounds trivial, really, really difficult to execute across the country company, especially one that is pretty firmly entrenched in let's be consultative, come in, see what you need, like we'll lots of investigation and we'll work together to figure out what you need.
Doug Merritt:The two areas I'm really excited about is long term what the world is wanting with networking, given how complex it is and how much more complex it's becoming. Like we thought everyone said cloud would make it the world simpler. Cloud made the world much more complex. There's hundreds of services per cloud. Those services are not defined the same across clouds.
Doug Merritt:So, and you still are holding onto your last generation technologies and you should for a while because not all those things belong in a cloud. Now we've got generative AI and the, invasion of a whole new set of data centers. So the complexity of the world I think is going to be exponentially increasing and having a consistent networking visibility, manageability, cost optimization, reliability layer I think becomes even more profound. So we're expanding what the current things we do across a broader, broader landscape. And then 2, the power of gen AI has been to do some of the more difficult and high pattern matching thought work for human beings so we can continue to kind of go up the stack.
Doug Merritt:And networking is one of those really, really difficult areas going back to that complexity I talked about. And where I think we eventually need to get to is autonomous, self healing, self managing networks. And because we're at such a low layer and we see so much with the way that we implement and we've been working for the past quarter or a couple quarters on how do we take this data we're accumulating and a lot more data we're going to start to accumulate as we begin to move pieces of what we do to as a service so that we can actually, go down that path. And, and again, take the load off the customers wherever possible on intent based networking. I'm trying to get this thing done, render the network for me.
Doug Merritt:Self adapting networking, self healing networking. And so those are the 2, We don't really fully play there. We were we've expanded to Equinix and Megaport on the edge. We've got more work to do across these next generation data centers. And then brand new ground on what we're doing with the Gen AI work.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:It definitely Sounds like an exciting time when Gen AI meets networking. And we completely agree that when we think about networking, we often do not realize its complexity. And so what you're building at Aviatrix sounds really cool. Let's talk about leadership changes as you bring your own fingerprints to Aviatrix. How do you see the leadership team evolving?
Mahendra Ramsinghani:How do you see its vision playing out over the next 5 years? Both Sid and I know John Donnelly, who used to be at Cloudknox Security, a company that both Foundation Capital and my firm Secure Octane had invested in. And John clearly is the kind of a guy that can go from 0 to 10. Who are some of the other people that you have identified to come in and help you at Aviatrix?
Doug Merritt:The interesting environment that I came into is like so many companies in fall of 22 and spring of 23, we went through a ton of changes. Funding environment had changed, buying environment had changed. And then through all those changes, a bunch of downsizings and restructurings. By the time I got there, the with the normal executive team, the C suite, whatever you wanna call them, had all left, almost all left. We had a CFO still.
Doug Merritt:And so I walked in and I forget the exact account. It is somewhere between 19 23 direct reports that were a combination of directors and VPs. And I did a very contrarian thing, the usual approach. And I fought my, I went back and forth with myself. I still go back and forth with myself, if I was the right approach, is immediately open up a bunch of racks.
Doug Merritt:I know I was going to need a CMO, a CRO, a SVP of engineering, a chief customer officer, like just a CHRO, just go across and open them all up. The quicker you can fill out that tune the better. But I had an appreciation coming in. Networking is really, really complex. That's one of the reasons why it's not overfunded right now.
Doug Merritt:And this company had been in business now, we're close to 10 years, that they've been at this for a while. Take the time and learn. They've got this rare opportunity to really understand what does the landscape look like? What's the culture of the company? Where do you want to take the company over time?
Doug Merritt:And then hopefully you'll do a better job of bringing in the right exec with the right skills, the right personality, the right cultural fit for what you need. So John was a good example. He started as a consultant for us and he's added a ton of value, but it was I was trying in every way possible to be be thoughtful so we could guide this company in the right direction. We're at the point now we've basically filled out that slate, which is great. We the latest hire, which I'm really excited about is our senior vice president of engineering and CTO, a gentleman named Anurban Sengupta, who most recently was running all the Kubernetes landscape at, at Google, at GCP.
Doug Merritt:So, but he had been NSX, the SDN layer at VMware that Nisara found his way into, or I guess Nysara helped start. And he was at Cisco before that and a kernel developer before that. So, you know, really good background. And I may not have gone there right away if I hadn't spent more time understanding the technical landscape. There's this really interesting combination of knowing the last generation network networking, knowing software refined networking, which never really got all the traction it should have, knowing cloud networking and knowing next generation compute and ephemeral workloads.
Doug Merritt:But I feel like, you know, we've got a really good team now and we'll continue to evolve that team. But a journey of patience. Like, there are many months. It's like, oh, my gosh. If I just would have accelerated this a little bit more, I wouldn't have yeah.
Doug Merritt:I wouldn't be up at midnight and and worried about this topic right now. So we'll see.
Sid Trivedi:Talking talking about hiring in this time when it's starting to get competitive once again to hire high quality talent, what advice do you have for founders on being able to go and get the people they really want on the team? How do you go and do that? How do you go and sell this this vision when you're at a startup?
Doug Merritt:I think it's one of the best times to be recruiting right now. There are a lot of people in flight. Right? There were a lot of layoffs. There's a lot of churn.
Doug Merritt:There's a lot of missed expectations out there. I think the hardest, hardest piece is spending the time to get truly clear on what is it you need and being patient, like having maintaining your bar and not caving. Even though the board is probably be on your back, you're going to be your own worst enemy and I've got to get this thing done to make sure that you bring in the right person, that you've spent the time on the role, you know what you're looking for both quantitatively and qualitatively, going back to some of those characteristics we were talking about, and then just don't cave. And it's and again, so trite everyone says it but when you're in the moment it's hard to actually live the advice. There's one way doors and two way doors.
Doug Merritt:Hiring is a one way door decision. It's reversible, It just is really expensive and difficult to reverse. And so giving yourself enough support, enough multiple pairs of eyes, rigorous interview frameworks and then patience to make sure that it's okay. Like you might even lose a candidate or 2 because there's a process you want to go through and there's assurance that you want to bring in the right person. And it takes a lot of courage to do that properly.
Doug Merritt:But there's so much talent out there right now. It's, I've, I'm blown away at, at how enthusiastic I mean, there's a whole new love of tech. I think Gen AI is completely people were trying to figure out blockchain and was it gonna be real or wasn't gonna be real and, and it's got its value and it but it wasn't a revolution like Gen AI is. I think Gen AI is the entire industry back leaning forward, and people are coming out of retirement because of it. And so I think there's it's a great time to be hiring.
Sid Trivedi:You already mentioned Gen AI, and we have to talk about it. And then our last section, we're gonna talk a little bit about catching trends.
Doug Merritt:And I
Sid Trivedi:think for the listeners who've listened so far, they will have recognized that you're particularly good at catching trends and figuring out how to build out a vision to to really scale a business. And one of those trends is is Gen AI. What are your thoughts on this Gen AI trend, and where do you think there are opportunities for innovation that that founders aren't thinking about today?
Doug Merritt:1 so I I came in it came in I was retired when Chat GPT 3 0 and 3 5 were released and spent a lot of time on YouTube videos and playing with both with Chat GPT and then the many that popped up, Claude and Mistral, and I know them had a sequence here. But I came into Aviatrix with the kind of Chamath perspective of this is going to change everything and I can change it now. So July August of last year, it's like we are a 100% gen AI based. We brought in a whole tool stack, whole abstraction layers. We could play with multiple LLMs, low code, no code framework, non NoSQL based data repository.
Doug Merritt:We had control over like everything that I thought we needed. And we were gonna rebuild all these applications and we're only gonna we're gonna be able to get to $500,000,000 in sales with 20 enterprise sales reps and couldn't be more excited about the potential of JNI. And what I've found at year end and we've got a good tech team is, wow, it's really hard. Like the promise is there for sure, and I have no doubt that we're gonna get there, but it reminds me of trying to build, multi tiered Internet apps in 1997, 98, 99. Doable.
Doug Merritt:Doable. Just a lot of bailing wire and bobby pins to try and get everything from the web interface before web app servers existed all the way back to the database. And I feel like that's where you are right now at Gen AI. So we're still on it and back in like crazy, but I still think we're still at that lower infrastructure layer. How do we make Gen AI oriented software development life cycle workable to crank out really meaningful and interesting enterprise apps that can radically change the legal department, the marketing department, the sales department, the support department?
Doug Merritt:I know there's all these stories of, oh my God, we're doing everything with JAN. We've got 3 support engineers. I literally do not believe it. Having played with 3 different frameworks now and the one that we're building, it's really hard still to make these tuned and interesting and interesting and learning oriented and non hallucinogenic. And so it really works at the quality level that we need.
Doug Merritt:So I guess my first breathing of it's okay is no one's losing their job anytime soon, but it will happen over time. Like it's it's going to climb the curve pretty quickly. But I'd be investing. Obviously, I think most companies have missed the core model wave that's being dominated by a few super successful, very rich. It's hard to do it well, but all the magic's going to come in building the in helping to build the applications and how do you have specialized models, vector DBs are obviously going to play a huge role in where we're going, but that plumbing is important and then the promise that everyone jumped to right away, but I think they're finding like I'm finding, you can get there.
Doug Merritt:It's just hard. The promise is going to be in apps. But we launched Cycarion in 1996, 1995, 96 when the browser came and again, none of the core infrastructure was there. And we got an app out and the app was a multi tiered app and it was all browser based, but it was 20 times harder than if we had built it in 1999 and it was 100 times harder than if we built it in 2,008 and it was 10,000 times harder than if we built it in 2015. We were buying data centers, leasing data center space, begging Cisco for core routing equipment and Sun for servers.
Doug Merritt:We had to build our own middleware layers and web app layers. We had to build our own coding frameworks, workflow engines, like all the stuff that's free, totally available, has been since 2015, 2014, 13 on the cloud. We had to build from scratch, and that's what I feel we are now with these Gen AI apps. And so the next Salesforce is out there, but the money is gonna be made right now. Obviously, chat GBT and the core frameworks where the money is immediately and that NVIDIA and the chips and then the frameworks.
Doug Merritt:But I can see that every cycle is the same. When I go back to mainframes, mini computers, client server revolution, internet apps, like you can go through the, I still believe in the OSI 7 layer stack. You can just see layer versus layer, what needs to be built and where are we yet on maturity and then where do you fill in? And so I'm excited about the networking layer in this world. Like that's way down there, layer 3, layer 4.
Doug Merritt:That means it's gonna be a lot of work as well, but, it's awesome. Like, it's I am definitely excited about the next 5 to 10 years.
Sid Trivedi:I I think the thing that I I've been reading about this pretty extensively, and one of the most interesting pieces that I recently read was I tracked these CIO reports from the different banks and the the research organizations quite closely, and and Morgan Stanley pushed their most recent Q2 2024 CIO report. And in that, they kind of asked the same question of within kind of your IT orgs, which are the areas that you're most in in interested in in adopting Gen AI in? And in the past, last year, it was very much around, we want to use Gen AI to help our customers. We wanna improve customer success. And that has completely turned.
Sid Trivedi:And I think part of it is exactly why what you mentioned, Doug, which is that folks have realized it doesn't work as well yet. So they're using instead of kind of focusing on the outward kind of customer of, focused experience, they're really focused on the inward. How can we improve employee productivity Yes. So that each of our different units can work harder?
Doug Merritt:Yep. Which which again was a whole series of applications. Like, you go back every generation. Like, what where where was all the big impact made? Well, it started with core financials, core HR, core sales, and then where did it migrate to?
Doug Merritt:Oh, it all systems engagement. It's all about customer. But until you get that core stuff built, it's hard to get the systems engagement to work. Yes, that is not it's not surprising. It's good.
Doug Merritt:This guy did not read the report. I'll have to look at it now, but it would follow my intuition.
Ross Haleliuk:You've been very good at catching trends and understanding how markets can expand. What is the secret behind how you spot these opportunities? Is it something you read or people you speak with that are giving you all these lines of insight?
Doug Merritt:I am I am super curious. I listen to probably 10 different podcasts, and I try and read a lot. But if I really trace everything back from Accenture, honestly, it's a network of people over time that most of the ideas that I don't think I've looked for a job since Accenture. A bunch of guys from Accenture that I knew, men and women, went over to Oracle and it was like, Hey, why don't you come over here? And then that has happened everywhere I've gone and almost every investment that I've made and I've gotten in way too many companies now.
Doug Merritt:We have talked about that separately. I've been over 20 private companies. Like, what the heck am I doing? I'm not a VC. But they've almost all been either friends at VC companies saying, hey, you know, we know what you like and this sounds pretty interesting.
Doug Merritt:Do you want to take a look? Or friends and ex coworkers. It's like, hey, I went out and I started this new thing. You know, can you help? Do you want to put some money in?
Doug Merritt:And so I think going back to Gen AI, like, there's humans are social creatures. And the premium on in real life, I think, is going to continue to go up month over month and year over year. And there's no substitute for the type of trust that you and I have because we've known each other for, I think, 20 plus years now. And we got a ton of face to face time together. And this modality is not bad and it helps, but that's most of my learning is my text threads, my friends calling me up, and people just, like, grabbing me by the ear and saying, hey, pay attention.
Doug Merritt:There's something interesting happening over here.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:Thank you, Doug. Listening to 10 podcasts is clearly one way to keep up with the trends. Maybe we should include in our show list a few of those podcasts. In your career as CEO scaling multiple companies to billions of revenues and even creating a decacorn, can you talk about 1 or 2 key traits that you've consistently observed in successful companies? What attributes seem to be crucial for achieving that level of growth and success?
Doug Merritt:Again, probably super trite, but customer obsession, that curiosity, growth mindset, and customer obsession combination is just so important. What got me excited about being in tech started with my realization interview cycle, because I thought I want to be an investment banker, that technology liberates information and knowledge and I've had a strong attachment of humans do better when we're less bordered on all aspects. Where can we wander to and what data do we have access to and what education we have access to. And it's like, oh my gosh, this is whether it's way back in the business or whether it's, you know, something like Khan Academy or this is unbelievably good for humanity, if I can be part of it. But then through that, I was all b to b, it really if you don't if you're not really hungry for solving someone's problem, like that deep empathy of what is it like to be a network engineer?
Doug Merritt:And I've never been one. So I, you know, spent a year now of of meeting with a ton of network engineers. Like, what is your day in the life like? Oh, wow. Like, that's really painful.
Doug Merritt:How do we make that better? But that customer obsession and genuine curiosity and empathy and, like, we're changing our whole tagline. A couple of them. 1, the network is the cloud, which I'm we've got to keep explaining and we've got to get better with videos and other, but I love that concept of you don't want to be stranded in a data center or series of data centers. You want to use the entire landscape to your advantage.
Doug Merritt:Like that's the whole point of these investments that people have made. And if you don't have networking flexibility, you can't get there. But the themes underneath that are we need to make networking cool again. It's so important to the world And those valiant network engineers that people think almost forgot existed, like, they're networking heroes. Without them, all this cool stuff, this conversation we're having, it's not possible.
Doug Merritt:The network goes down. We can't do this gosh darn podcast. So how do we give those guys, those men and women love? They're they've got a really hard job. They're the first people blamed.
Doug Merritt:They spend all their time trying to justify it's not their issue, and then they're trying to think around corners. Like, you guys think this is super easy. You don't have to worry about us. Hey. Connection is hard.
Doug Merritt:There's laws of physics. Networking is very complex. Like, thank God we are thinking about it so that you can actually get the way of life that you want. So that's that is it's kind of manifest in what we're doing here at Aviatrix. I just get so passionate about, like, how do you how do you find people that need help and then be open to think through how to really help them.
Doug Merritt:And I think if you do those two things, you're gonna wind up building a medium, large or extra large company. Likely not small though, unless you picked a tiny, tiny audience. But most of the audiences that we'll pick are are big enough that they can feel that that size.
Sid Trivedi:Last question. Where is Doug in 5 years?
Doug Merritt:If we do things right and we get lucky and the timing is right, now then hopefully I am talking to my successor about when it's time for that person to succeed me as the CEO of public company Aviatrix. And and hopefully at that point in time I'll actually be ready to retire and see the last few years of my kids' high school, my youngest kid's high school, and travel a little bit more, and that'd be ideal. But but in all cases, no no matter what pivots and twists occur, I can't imagine not being super deeply involved still in tech. I just it was interesting trying to take a break just how clear it was that I'm way too excited about this industry and what it does for people and how important it is to not be deeply involved in now as an operator, and and then we'll see what happens, with the outcome of Aviatrix and whether I eventually get to join you on your side of the table, Sid.
Sid Trivedi:Well, you are too kind, Doug. And I I think it's just been so amazing to see your journey and and career trajectory, and I'm so happy that you took on another CEO role, that you didn't go and retire. I know we had this conversation a year and a half ago, but I'm so glad that you didn't choose to kind of move away. And I'm just so excited to see how you build out Aviatrix, and, hopefully, we'll have you on in a few years as you're taking the company public.
Doug Merritt:I look forward to that as well. Thank you so much, Doug, for joining us. Thank you for joining us Inside the network.
Ross Haleliuk:If you like this episode, please leave us a review and share it with others.
Mahendra Ramsinghani:If you really, really liked it and you have some feedback for us, wrap it on a bottle of Yamazaki and send it to me first.
Sid Trivedi:No. Don't do that. Mahendra gets too many gifts already. Please reach out by email or LinkedIn.
