Gaurav Dhillon: Silicon Valley is poised to grow up to seize a more spiritual future
Summary
You only have to think of the twin brothers Thomas and George Kurian, CEOs of Google Cloud and NetApp, respectively, born in India, both educated at IIT Madras and Princeton, and both alumni of McKinsey and Oracle. While at Unisys, Dhillon says he saw the opportunities opening up as enterprise IT moved beyond the mainframe to distributed computing systems, as Y2K loomed and as the internet – pre-web in the early 1990s, but still a nascent force field – emerged. “Indeed, I did that for one of our early investors, Neal Dempsey, in a café in Palo Alto.” At that time – in the mid-1990s – business intelligence software had emerged as a front-end interrogation toolset in the face of data warehousing. I remember going to deposit that initial cheque for a few million dollars at a branch of Bank of America, and we felt like lights would go off and bells would ring!” He moved on from Informatica in 2004, feeling a need to build new things. Dhillon’s top tips for anyone planning a technology startup is get the chemistry of the founding team right, in terms of being complementary, and above all, “do something you feel passionate about, otherwise it won’t work, and don’t underestimate how hard it will be”.