← In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen
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- [00:01]
A
Hi everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund. And today I'm here with somebody who is absolutely vital to AI, namely the remarkable Jaishree Ulal, CEO of Arista Networks. Jaishree has more than 40 years background in networking, so nobody is back better able to talk about this than her. So Jaishree, super to have you on there.
- [00:33]
B
Great to be here, Nicola. I have a bit of a cold, so apologize if I sound nasal.
- [00:39]
A
No problem. No, let's start with the beginning.
- [00:41]
B
I don't have to sing on this podcast, right? So we should be fine.
- [00:44]
A
No singing. Let's start with the beginning. What does Arista do?
- [00:49]
B
Yeah, that's a loaded question. So Arista is building the world's most demanding mission critical networks, which is high performance, high scale, low latency, high reliability, high availability, high automation, high telemetry. So it's a lot of demands across a lot of spectrums. And Arista has emerged, especially over the last decade, to be both the pioneer and the leader in this.
- [01:22]
A
I've heard that if you think that kind of chips is the engine, then the networking is the highway between them, right?
- [01:29]
B
Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. I think the chips fuel a lot of, especially in this world of AI processing with GPUs, APUs, XPUs, whatever you call them. But as you process this, you have to get worried about are you processing it to full utilization. And so if a car is rated at 100 miles an hour, but can only go 30 miles an hour because the, the infrastructure cannot support going farther, then you're grossly underutilizing the car or in this case the gpu. So yeah, we are the information highway to all accelerators, users, mission critical workloads, you name it.
- [02:12]
A
So let's say now I sit in my office, I do a prompt on ChatGPT. How do I touch your products? Just what happens with the sales?
- [02:20]
B
So we are very much behind the scenes. This is something my parents always used to say. What do you do? Because you can't see what we do when you type in a prompt of Arista. Basically what at that point we're doing is connecting everything to everything. This conversation on this podcast is not possible without it. The traffic patterns of high intensity, whether it comes from a user, a device, a workload, a machine, a server, a storage, or now more and more the AI killer applications we connect and we do that through a set of switches and routing platforms. We call them leaf spine architecture, where you can have multiple leaves that connect into an aggregate spine. And these days you can also have an AI spine. So these are some of the world's largest high scale platforms, but they need to be powered platforms and chips need to be powered with the right software. That's where Arista's hallmark has been, its extensible operating system eos where we fuel these platforms and networking connectivity with more and more types of data. We can deal with structured data, unstructured data, flow data and make that all work through our purpose built software.
- [03:35]
A
You were at Cisco during the Internet boom. So how does this compare?
- [03:38]
B
I was. I was.
- [03:39]
A
How does this compare with what you saw at that stage?
- [03:43]
B
Much greater. The Internet boom happened in a very steady fashion. There was a period of time where there was a peak in 99, 2000 due to the dot com boom and bust, I would add, and then Y2K as well. But for most part that Internet took 15 years to develop. I was there from the very first acquisition in 1993 of Crescendo, when the company was less than a billion dollars, to when I left in 2008. It was a 40 or close to $50 billion company where the catalyst switches, which I think are still Cisco's most successful product line, were contributing at least a third. The point though was it happened slowly and steadily. But there was a peak, there was a bubble for two years. This one feels very different for a number of reasons. First of all, that 15 years that I was talking about is collapsing literally into five to seven years. The time aspect of this is shrinking. Secondly, the scale aspect of it is just exploding in magnitude. It's 1000x more. The third, perhaps the most important one because people like to make this parallel to are we in a bubble? I think it's a lot of responsible companies and therefore we're not in a bubble, or if we are in a bubble, we're in a prolonged bubble. It's not CLECs that came in, were funded and then they collapsed. These are responsible companies like Microsoft, Google, Google, Meta, Oracle that are taking responsibility of building all of these, not to mention the NEO clouds as well, such as OpenAI and anthropic. So I would say more than a bubble, it feels like an explosive mega trend that is here to stay for some time.
- [05:24]
A
Now you could probably have been the next CEO of Cisco. So why did you want to jump? Jump spaceship.
- [05:33]
B
You know, I don't know if I would have been, I would have been the right CEO for Cisco because I was an accidental executive at Cisco. I didn't plan to even be the executive I was. I love products I love.
- [05:46]
A
Don't you think most people are accidental executives? I mean, it's not like, it's not like you're five years old and you sit in India and think, hey, I'm going to be a superstar in, you know, Cisco.
- [05:56]
B
Oh, heck no. That, you know, you can ask my parents how little of a superstar I was when I was five years old. But leaving that for the moment, I guess what I'd say is I loved product, I loved working with the engineers to enable products to customers, and I was too steeped in the technology interests to think I had broader capabilities or desire to be a CEO at Cisco. So actually when I left Cisco, the fact of the matter was I thought I would do something entirely different like clean tech or energy or solar or battery. And I really wanted to get back being in Silicon Valley to the roots of what I love, which is being an entrepreneur. And so I joined Arista when it was zero revenue with 30 engineers. And the most important thing I loved about that, which is working with the people I enjoyed.
- [06:50]
A
How would you describe Arista's culture in one word?
- [06:54]
B
Do the right thing? Because it's too easy to be, especially when you're a public company focused on the quarter, focused on something. And no doubt every company has a business model that we have to focus on and all that. But if you look past that and do the right thing, then all the intermittent things take care of itself.
- [07:12]
A
How do you make sure that this attitude is shared across the organization?
- [07:16]
B
It's not easy, especially as you get bigger. But what's beautiful is as a management team, we have pretty much been the same management team for the last 15 years. We lose people occasionally due to alternate goals or financial success. But I think when you have the same management team and leaders, and obviously now we're bringing in next generation leaders, and you reinforce that culture, then that permeates throughout. The other big thing I would say is while we of course have middle management, we make sure that the middle management plays an important role in this culture and isn't just a professional manager, but a coach player that they're contributing with their own two days of coding. My president and cto, Ken Duda, who's a founder of this company, he still codes that, tells our employees that we're leading by example. We're not saying one thing and doing another.
- [08:16]
A
Can we go back to Your upbringing in India, you grew up in New Delhi. So what were you dreaming about when you were five years old?
- [08:25]
B
Yeah, well, yeah, I was born in London, raised in Delhi and then have spent majority of my life in the United States. My dad was an educator, so he was dreaming about my education and making sure I do well. He started the first five IITs in India, which as you probably know are very well known and high reputation, famous. So I think education was a huge part of being a middle class family and institution. So doing well in school, excelling, not just doing well, excelling in school, going to the best schools. My parents made sure they could afford the best education. So I didn't dream what I'm doing now. I dreamt more, one step at a time about how do I do well in school, how do I go to the best colleges. And there was no long term plans per se, but I could tell that my parents had high expectations of me. Probably me myself didn't have as many high expectations of myself.
- [09:25]
A
What does it do to a person to have all these expectations on you?
- [09:29]
B
Sometimes it forces you to perform better than you would. Because it's a very interesting thing that anytime I, dad or mom went to meet my teachers at a parent teacher association, they'd always say Jai Sree has a lot of potential, but she's not using it all, she's not fulfilling to her highest potential. And so they come back obviously demanding more, expecting more. But I think what it taught me was, you know, one of my best friends in India, you rank all the students, so she always came first and I didn't come first. And I noticed that she would work about eight hours a day in terms of studying and to do well in these exams, I would work more like three to four hours a day. And to me that roi, if you want to call it that, to get a rank that was not as good as hers, but still I did well. I was in the top 10%. I tried to convince my parents that I was playing the long game and today it may look like I was. But at that time it was more an excuse to not study eight hours a day.