The interviews
Innodata CEO: ‘We believe 2025 will be a growth year’
“What we're essentially doing is we're attempting to repeat a playbook that we executed with our first large customer at these others.”
Nutanix CEO: ‘A little hard for us to predict’ the macroeconomic situation in 2025
“It's been four years since I got here, and I think we've created a fair amount of value here for our shareholders.”
Amplitude CEO: ‘We’re not here to build a single-digit-growth business’
“We’re going to win the enterprise, and we’re going to win across the platform.” Read the interview.
The TL Podcast for November 24th: A special podcast interview with AMSC’s CEO
“A lot of what I spent my career doing is getting the company to focus on the vertical integration of the beachhead applications, to get traction in a market; they understand it's real, it's valuable, and they can buy it again and again.”
AMSC CEO: Building the electric grid for the next generation
The grid is being asked to do things it just wasn't inherently designed to do … We’re asking it to do basically everything in our lives.”
Synopsys CEO Ghazi: A new spin on the chip business
“Today, we build a standard, and sell it multiple times. Can I take some of my portfolio here and customize it for three, four companies?”
Ceva’s CEO: Banking on the rising complexity of the chip world
“Scarce resources are becoming more and more scarce, worldwide […] While we all think AI will replace the engineering force, so far, it's actually done the opposite.”
The TL Podcast with Check Point’s Gil Shwed: Faster growth is our biggest challenge
“That's one of the biggest business challenges that we have in years to come, translating that technology, brand and expertise that we have into higher growth,” says Shwed. “I think we can do it.”
Trend Micro: Cyber-security with unusual appeal
“When we finish the year … we will show unbelievable operating margins on the bottom line, and the dividend yield is quite impressive.”
Nutanix CEO: Cisco, Dell ‘could be a good lift for us’
“More and more big names are wanting to partner with us.”
Dynatrace CEO: CrowdStrike, industry consolidation, have brought new opportunities
“The go-private of some of the competitors in our space, the acquisition of Splunk by Cisco — all of these, from my point of view, generate demand.” Read the interview.
OneStream CFO explains a new software platform
“We're the platform for the CFO: It’s the ServiceNow for finance, and there really hasn't been a platform for the CFO prior to that.”
Innodata CEO: ‘There really is a flywheel effect’
“I think we've really developed a moat around the business, and differentiation.”
Dynatrace CEO: The game plan is stabilization this year, acceleration next year
“As we enter fiscal year ’25, we are really enthusiastic about the opportunity to come.”
Pure Storage CEO: Gen AI is ‘a very uncertain market’
“I think what's going on with AI right now, other than you and I playing around with it in our spare time, is that it's not ready for enterprise infrastructure yet.”
Impinj CEO: ‘We’ve got a tiger by the tail’
“We’re going to connect every item on the planet.”
Informatica CEO: We’re only at the top of the second inning with Gen AI
“You have to give a new technology about twenty-four to thirty-six months to incubate, to scale, to settle down. But, I do think that the curve will be exponential once it settles down.”
Snowflake CFO explains a few things you don’t understand about this business
“No one has figured out how to do data sharing the way we do data sharing.”
Procore CFO: A peak into 2025’s potential
“I want to be clear that the most important thing for us right now is to identify and have signals of areas that we can invest for that growth because there's so much opportunity there.”
DigitalOcean CEO: a ‘spectacular’ opportunity in Gen AI
“We have big plans for using generative AI across the whole lifecycle of build, deploy and operate your cloud application.”
D-Wave CEO: ‘We will be profitable before any other quantum company’
“We are at that kind of watershed moment in quantum where you transition from research experimentation to business benefit.”
Secureworks CEO: This is the best buy in security, for certain
“I am not just selling something to secure some piece of technology, but I am trying to secure that entity […] That’s the kind of longevity and mindset that lets you get a company to a billion dollars and beyond.”
GitLab CFO: We will continue to operate against our plan
“We have a number of new growth vectors that will start contributing in fiscal year ’25, but it takes a while for them to make a meaningful impact.” Read the interview.
Tarana Wireless: One of those great unsolved tech problems that could go big
“Wireless technology has advanced to the state where, five years from now, we're going to look back and people aren't going to blink when they say whether it's wireless or fiber — it’s not going to matter.”
Elastic CEO: Companies will lean into public cloud for AI
“AI is insanely compute-intensive; I think people will keep moving more into the cloud.”
Nutanix CEO: ‘AI moves to where the data is’
“Data doesn't move to where AI is, AI moves to where data is and data is not all in the public cloud.”
Enovix CEO: No cell phone maker wants to be left behind with a new technology
“OEMs are very sophisticated…They have very exact knowledge of where every milli-amp of power goes.”
Innodata CEO: We are critical to tech giants’ AI ambitions
“The thing that is most within our control is our performance, and that’s not nothing, it’s everything.”
Informatica with a clean sheet of paper
“Without proper data management, there is no value in Gen AI, right?”
Smartsheet CEO: The race for productivity is still on
“There is a productivity gap that has allowed us to build a billion-dollar business.”
Absci: Onward to the clinic
“We're on track to put the first de novo designed antibody with generative AI in the clinic in early 2025.”
Elastic CEO: Still in the early innings of Gen AI
“In the long term, Gen AI is going to be massive.”
Pure Storage CEO: More and more, a software company
“We have been told by Adobe and other companies that have gone through this that fifty percent is roughly the turning point […] That’s when investors start paying attention.”
Zscaler CEO: ‘These things are not trivial’
“It is hard to find a CIO who doesn’t need what we sell … And it’s not easy to build.”
MongoDB CEO: ‘We've earned investors' confidence’
“Every time a new-fangled functionality comes out, like vector databases, everyone says, Oh, is that going to impact your business? We’re a show-me company.”
GitLab CFO: AI becoming a commodity helps us tremendously
“Most of the people actually creating generative AI don't have a distribution channel […] We sit at the epicenter of where those people are making the models, and the developers who need to use them.”
UiPath CFO: 'We are positioned very well for long-term growth’
“Feedback across software is customers don't want to be nickel-and-dimed for little AI features here and there.”
Roger McNamee: There will be a reckoning for generative AI and all the excesses of easy money
“I've been absolutely blown away by how successful the hype campaign's been for generative AI. I mean, it is Hall of Fame class.”
Informatica CEO: There is no doubt generative AI will create value
“Any new technology is over-hyped in the short term … We’re in the very early stages of a generative AI hype cycle.”
Enovix’s year to get the formula right
“We had to give the cell volumes this year because people didn't believe we could build them […] I think what's more important to us next year is the machines coming online, and the yield, the throughput happening.”
After a 42% plunge, how does Confluent’s CEO assess the road ahead?
“There has been a pretty rapid evolution of customer buying behavior in cloud over the last year […] It's important that we be in sync with that as quickly as possible.”
The tech hunter: Seligman’s Paul Wick offers picks and pans
"I look at a few beaten-down names that we own like Synaptics, Skyworks, Qorvo. We think the risk reward on all those companies is very good.”
Innodata CEO: In the midst of an AI ‘revolution’
“The thrilling thing is we've persisted for many years in a market that wasn't big enough to enable us to steadily grow and expand […] the market opportunity has changed for us to basically accommodate what our specialty is.”
GitLab CFO: We are very early in the process of seeing Gen AI’s value
“I still haven't found a lot of really detailed third-party reports on what productivity enhancements these AI features that have been launched are actually creating.”
Dynatrace CEO: Still set on capturing an enormous market
“There is a need to become more predictive, not just, Oh, my God, something broke, how do we fix it?, but, rather, when it is based on predictive AI, it’s about to break.”
Elastic CEO: Gen AI ‘becoming a big tailwind for us’
“We really have not modeled any benefit from [Gen AI] in fiscal year ’24 […] It will be mostly in the calendar-year 2024.”
Informatica CEO: ‘Everyone else has fallen off a cliff’
“There will be a whole democratization of [artificial intelligence], not necessarily the one world view that we are seeing right now.”
Enovix CEO: building the world’s next great battery
“What the investors are betting on, is, that these guys will execute.”
MongoDB CTO: ‘The sky’s the limit for this company’
“If, in 2006, we had known about what was happening in AI in 2023, we would have built the MongoDB we have today.”
Elastic CEO: Selling shovels for the AI gold rush
“We want to be the group that’s selling shovels to everybody that wants to participate in the gold rush.”
Zscaler CEO Chaudhry: disrupting the old guard is a mega-opportunity
“We said, don't do network security, instead, simply build a smart switchboard that connects party party A to party B securely, and that's what has created a big opportunity.”
Applied Materials CEO Dickerson pursues the grand alliance
“Whoever creates effective alliances, they can move faster and better, and they are the winners.”
GitLab CFO explains the generative AI prospects
“Generative AI is another way to make all the personas more effective and more efficient […] from releasing applications every two weeks to every two hours.”
Cambium CEO optimistic amidst global economic uncertainty
“The future is with gigabit technologies and not just providing one hundred megabit-per-second service to the home.”
Synopsys CEO de Geus: AI is a productivity revolution in chips
“If one can just reduce by a percentage point the cost to do things, that has major impact on mankind.”
Procore CEO on becoming a global company
“When you're reaching this threshold where you’re towards a billion dollars in revenue, everything changes.”
Informatica CEO: Cloud is moving full-speed ahead
“Our whole team is focused on selling cloud […] all indicators of raw demand are very positive.”
DigitalOcean CEO Spruill charts a sane course through the generative AI craze
“We look at GPUs as an aspect of cloud-as-a-service that we’re going to want to provide, especially with this emergence of large language models.”
C3.ai CEO Siebel: ‘We are committed to run a sustainably cash-positive, profitable business’
“I have been lucky in identifying some trends that have endured … CRM is a hundred-and-twenty billion-dollar industry this year, and I created it … I don’t think enterprise AI is ephemeral.”
GitLab CFO: Long investors believe in the company and the product
“Since before the IPO, we have used the same phrase: Our number one objective at GitLab is to be a company that grows responsibly.”
Sarcos Technology CEO: ‘We will change the industrial landscape’
“The next generation industrial worker needs to be a kid who likes to play video games; you don’t need to go to a trade school for that.”
Cambium Networks CEO on the 'expansion year’
“The importance of communications has increased quite a bit for every military worldwide … Whatever you do, whatever projects you are on, whatever theaters you are active, mission-critical communications are becoming essential.”
Read the interview.
PagerDuty CFO Wilson: ‘There’s still so much opportunity’
“All of these [software] companies that have grown up the past ten or twenty years have all grown up around delivering, in essence, a better consumer experience, so, I think this is an environment where there’s still so much business to be done.”
ON Semiconductor CEO El-Khoury: We’ve built the scale to support billions of dollars in silicon carbide
“There’s a thesis out there that companies can’t grow without giving up on margin … I think that’s a false assertion because that basically says, you don’t have value.”
Confluent CEO: In a big market, you have to go out and win it
“We are seeing a whole paradigm shift to streaming across the data landscape, where the Web apps are getting better at capturing streams, the data warehouses are getting better at loading and ingesting data in real time … the streams are coming around from everywhere.”
Informatica CEO: ‘a great opportunity for us’ in a stormy cloud market
“Some of these [cloud] companies have sold some massive large commits … We can be drawn down against that … that’s a great opportunity for us.”
DigitalOcean CEO: ‘We have to be a compelling alternative for investors’
“At four or five percent interest rates, there’s a lot of money moving to alternative assets outside of tech because they can earn real returns with less risk … We have to be a compelling alternative for investors.”
Dynatrace CEO: ‘The great news is the fundamental momentum in this market’
“At the highest level, there is a huge tailwind here behind automated observability … this notion of automation is moving from optional to mandatory.”
C3.ai CEO Siebel: our stock price is a ‘steal’
“About the time the Fed takes its foot off the brakes […] C3 will be a cash-positive, profitable business […] and the stock price will take care of itself.”
Check Point CEO Shwed: You don’t pick your battles, they pick you
“The worst that we've seen is networks that have fifty million mobile phones, and the application was installed on them […] In a very short period of time, you can actually create an army of agents, fifty million, and you can turn on anything that you want in a matter of minutes.”
Juniper CEO: The bet we made on the enterprise is really starting to work
“The problem is not just about the performance of the network, which was sort of the problem of the past … the problem right now is battling complexity … so much of the team just keeping the lights on.”
Absci: Will ‘zero-shot’ AI change drug discovery?
“You’re not going to have this iterative traditional drug discovery process that takes years and, ultimately, gets sub-optimal hits,” he says. “We can get everything right the first time and dramatically reduce the time it takes to get into the clinic.”
Procore CEO: Taking the construction business from ‘analog’ to rational
“We will take the industry from analog, where they're playing golf, to actually making good business decisions with the data.”
GitLab CFO: We’ve executed really well in a tough market
“I think the economy is really helping push people towards doing more with less, greater collaboration, get more efficient, show an ROI.”
Alteryx CEO Anderson: the platform is next
"I've been in tech for 35 years and platforms win in every other area like operating systems, public cloud, security — platforms win because customers want fewer necks to choke.”’
Qualcomm CFO Palkhiwala: We are becoming a different company
“It becomes a different company … it’s about diversification, it’s about expanding the technology portfolio that we have … from our numbers and our guidance, we're very much on track in those areas.”
Cambium CEO: 5G progresses, and the software story emerges
“The U.S. will lead, and many other countries will follow, and 6-gigahertz will be a mainstream broadband access connectivity.”
Confluent’s CEO sees a vast, expanding world of streaming
“A lot of what was previously batch processing will move into real-time streams … You can view every business process as taking in some data streams and producing some other data streams.”
Nutanix CEO: A time of ‘inflection points’
“Historically, people have gone to the cloud because that's often the easy button to push […] I think going forward, people are going to be more careful about how much they want to be locked in.”
Alteryx CFO: In a downturn, customers may need us even more
“If you're a company that's going through hardship [in a recession] it becomes even more important that organizations have an intense focus on the data around them to make decisions.”
DigitalOcean CEO: It’s hard talking strategy when the Street wants to talk recession
“We have looked at historical patterns in other recessions … What we see is that small and medium businesses perform similar to enterprises … they tend to be like cable and utilities: pretty stable.”
Dynatrace CEO: We’re keeping companies away from the cloud precipice
“Companies are getting hordes of customer calls saying, Oh, my god, your software is down … The problem is getting not modestly worse, it’s getting much worse … It’s going to get to a precipice where they can’t operate effectively.”
DriveNets: A challenge to Cisco that’s intriguing
“The mainframe of IBM moved to x86 … storage became software-defined … but networking is still the mainframe of the world.”
Couchbase CEO: There is lots of room for database competition
“Think about how many times you’re touching things on a mobile device … it’s a fundamentally different challenge to support that from a database, and we have architected that from the beginning.”
Informatica CEO: More deals being ‘pushed out’ as customers take a cautious stance
“Even if the economy slows down, I would rather have adoption continue to happen because demand will always come back, but the proof of your portfolio is customers are using all of it.”
Databricks CTO: Making our bet on the lake house
“We're trying to make the lake into something so that you can have everyone work with all the data … that’s actually the model that a lot of the tech companies like Airbnb and Uber and so on use internally already.”
Informatica CEO: One metadata to rule them all
“Every organization has not only the old databases, they have AWS databases, Azure databases, Oracle databases, Snowflake, Databricks … how do I get a single view of the entire data by not putting it in one place, but by seeing the metadata?”
Nutanix CEO: Cloud supply and demand may be the key
“Cloud operators’ business model is that they spend a lot of capital ahead of time, they have this stuff sitting there, and then they bring in tenants … they are motivated to partner with us because this is a way for them to get more applications into their data centers.”
Pure Storage CEO Giancarlo: potentially a lot of large cloud deals down the road
“Eighty to ninety percent of all the bits in the world are still on hard disks … with the next round of price reductions coming for flash, we feel we're going to be able to replace the cheapest disks.”
Sumo Logic CEO Sayar: The complexity of the trans-cloud is our friend
You and I are inundated in our personal and professional lives every single day with this dichotomy of work versus personal stuff on every device … The back-end of that experience are cloud applications … spending on that is not going down.”
Zuora CEO Tzuo: Media giants are learning not just to explore but also to exploit
“The subscription economy, ultimately, is a scale business … if you have more subscribers, then you have more revenue to invest in creating what the subscribers are hungry for.”
Like an aircraft carrier: Procore’s bet with investors on a $14 trillion opportunity
“I asked one customer how would they benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act, he said, We just got ten years of guaranteed backlog for our solar and wind division — he was like, Dude, I’ve never in my career had ten years of committed business!”
GitLab CFO: We sell essential things for no more than the price of a Netflix subscription
“Companies are saying, I can save money, I can be more productive, I can hire fewer engineers if I deploy GitLab … That doesn’t happen unless you’re fairly priced, you offer a good business outcome, and your time to value is quick.”
Informatica CEO: The opportunity is ginormous
“The cataloguing, governance, master data management —those use cases have ginormously scaled … our investors are back in because the opportunity is a lot bigger.”
Confluent CEO: Kafka is essential even in tough times
“We tend to serve these mission-critical software apps that are significant areas of investment. I think that criticality tends to help when it comes to tighter times, which is probably what we’re entering now.”
Cambium is ready to ‘ride the new growth curve’
“Three years back, if you gave someone fifty or sixty megabits per second, people were reasonably happy … the need now is hundreds of megabits per second … from a single-lane highway to now a four-lane highway.”
Amplitude CEO: building the machine for the journey to a billion dollars
“We’ve seen a lot of traction for Amplitude in spite of the macro because we are just so critical to how people build their products.”
DigitalOcean CFO: ‘We are masters of our own destiny’
“It cracks me up about CEOs that re-affirm their commitment to being cash flow positive in 2025 … There’s a lot that can go wrong between now and then.”
Alteryx CFO: ‘You're beginning to see the fruits of everything that we put in place’
“The enterprise focus that we have today is very prescriptive about who are the prospects, and who are largest companies in the world that we want as customers, and we have very strong campaigns and initiatives to go after those prospects in that regard.”
Dynatrace CEO: There’s still a lot of investor capital for profitable companies
“You look at the hyperscalers having just delivered a quarter that was, in aggregate, on the order of forty billion dollars in revenue growing at thirty-five percent … a huge percentage of that are dollars that easily could be available to Dynatrace in the future.”
Cohesity’s new CEO Poonen: I want this to be bigger than VMware
“I hope we can create a twenty-billion-dollar revenue company here; we just have to keep focusing, focusing and growing, and I think that opportunity exists.”
Verra Mobility’s CEO will be happy to leave the SPAC phenomenon behind
“De-SPAC’ing means, ‘Hey, now you’re public, you have to go convince the markets you’re a normal company and not a SPAC’.”
Arista CEO Ullal: To be strategic is always the thing
“Whether it's because they're frustrated with the existing quality or whether it's because we are just amazing, it’s the combination of both that's giving us more customer relevance … Customers are giving us a seat at the table in a way that's far more strategic, far less tactical.”
ForgeRock, the company gunning for Okta: The market is changing, it’s time for something different
“Identity is a very interesting market opportunity …the market's changing … everything we do now is digital, and identity is really the front door to those services.”
Sumo Logic CEO: You can't have investors dictate your business
“The one trillion dollars that’s shackled in the data center is being unlocked and moved to the cloud … and every one of those workloads that moves to the cloud generates two to three times the volume of data.”
Commvault is one of the year’s better performers; CEO Mirchandani discusses what’s next
“This isn’t Commvault of five years ago … from a business model point of view, we have tilted into a recurring revenue model across the board, we’re growing again, we’re profitable.”
Procore CEO: ‘As things get tougher, Procore is something that's sought after’
“If the economy completely falls apart, capital projects that have already been allocated or started tend to just continue…the construction industry is driven by the fact that we need hospitals, we need roads, we need harbors, we need bridges.”
Zuora CEO: You have to run a business that transcends the investment cycle
“The subscription business model is recession-resilient…Every time there is a recession, the SaaS model booms.”
Semrush CFO: The virtue of being predictable
“Search will probably be the last that any company should be giving up on. It is a longer-tail, sustainable traffic source for any business which needs to be visible.”
Dynatrace CEO: ‘Growth at all cost is done’
“Profitable growth with positive cash flow will win — that plays to our strength.”
Read the interview.
Amplitude in the land of giants: to capture lightning in a bottle twice
“The hardest part of any SaaS company’s journey to go from a hundred million dollars to a billion, is, can they build additional products that work.”
DigitalOcean CEO: ‘I haven’t sold a share of stock’
“It's frustrating to look at the price, which we think is dislocated from the value we're creating, but we’re pretty confident with what we're doing, and over time, that’s going to be reflected properly in the stock price.”
Wolfspeed CEO: We are a knight in shining armor
“Demand for this this technology is just exploding … we're talking about a decade of pretty phenomenal growth.”
Nutanix CEO: ‘We are the Airbnb of cloud’
“I think our stock is hugely undervalued … at some point I think the stock is going to go back to what we think the intrinsic value should be, which is higher.”
Smart Global CEO Adams: ‘It’s a good time to be an operating company’
“Times like these, operating companies do better than a lot of speculative names.”
Bread Financial CEO: Buy Now, Pay Later is no fad
“A lot of these companies have never managed through a credit cycle … We have been through that cycle.”
C3.ai’s Tom Siebel: ‘If we succeed, we will be one of the world’s greatest software companies’
“Everyone is so confused about this AI thing … It’s a lot simpler than people think, it’s not pixie dust.”
On Semi’s El-Khoury: Silicon carbide is a commitment to a whole infrastructure of electrification
“If you put your strategy on silicon carbide, and the mega-trend of electric vehicles, you can’t wait till it happens to you by somebody else; you have to drive it yourself.”
The Cloud has been like AOL, but it’s growing up, says Backblaze CEO
“We see the cloud evolving. People say, I might want my CDN with Cloudflare or Fastly, I might want my compute coming from DigitalOcean — they want their different pieces.”
Confluent’s CEO explains the network effect
“Over time, this is critical infrastructure, and as it spreads across the company, the trick is to get that gradually, bit by bit, through expansion, delivery of value, not one big sale.”
Pure Storage: Entering our second phase, says CEO Giancarlo
“We are a different company, we have built out a fairly broad portfolio that makes us more attractive to a larger set of customers,” says Giancarlo, “and we have built out business models — sales, support, engineering, etc. to serve multiple markets.”
DigitalOcean CEO: People who buy the stock now are ‘going to feel really, really good’
“We are enabling the economy to function even in the face of inflation … I was a child of the ‘70s, when inflation was a big, scary demon … the technology businesses thrived in that time because they do drive productivity.”
Cambium makes progress despite continued supply chain turmoil
“The supply chain is gradually improving, and we anticipate it will improve well in some segments of our business in the second half.”
Dynatrace CEO: Rule number one is be indispensable
“Dynatrace is not optional; for our customers, it is indispensable because that is how they run their businesses.”
Smart Global CEO Adams: finding diamonds in the rough
“I think there's a recipe here that's a little bit anti-tech but in the middle of tech, and I think it's kind of unique that way.”
‘We’re back,’ says Cognizant CEO Humphries
“What we’re setting out to achieve is to reposition Cognizant with clients to have a stronger point of view rather than being a provider of time and materials staff augmentation, or bodies, for want of a better word.”
Lam Research CFO: ‘Business is amazingly strong right now’
“We have done extremely well over the last decade, and that is very much the strategy of the company: competitively differentiate ourselves with the technically most difficult applications in the fab and then deploy R&D across a broad set of applications […] to leverage that R&D.”
Dynatrace CFO: Observability and security are on a collision course
“The friction between DevOps and security is high. If we can minimize that friction there and help both the organizations innovate faster, by putting secure code into production, that’s ultimately the goal, and that’s where we see the convergence.”
Qualtrics CEO: Tapping into the ‘vast exhaustive data’ of the Internet’s hidden signals
“At the core of what we do is a research sciences system that helps to connect with what's on people's hearts, what's on people's minds.”
Kornit CEO: Transforming the fashion industry, saving the world, and dealing with the supply chain mess
“It has totally changed the equation [of production]. You produce really what you need, and you sell it, versus producing a year in advance what you think the consumer would like to buy.”
Cambium CEO: The urban wireless opportunity remains
“We are focusing on what’s in our control, our innovations, and our innovations are actually doing very well.”
Semrush CFO: Finding what works with the future billion marketers
“We believe there will be millions if not billions of marketers down the road … Attention is a finite commodity, it is not becoming larger.”
Alteryx CFO: Rebuilding credibility
“Being able to have those really deep, strategic conversations, and be able to, kind-of, lay out a vision at the enterprise level is incredibly helpful in the expansion that we see in those accounts.”
Broadcom and software: What are the ‘synergies’?
"In effect, what you're saying is, how do I leverage a platform on the semiconductor side, how do I embed or enable connectivity with some of our software capabilities.”
DigitalOcean CEO: When revenue hits a billion dollars, you’ll be glad you bought the stock
“We have a long-tail opportunity here. There’s a hundred million small and medium-sized businesses, and for generations, they've been underserved by technology.”
On Semi CEO El-Khoury: supply-chain disruption is going to be a fact of life
“Maybe this year is COVID, but how many climate events have we had? How many cost disruptions? How many fab fires? Last year, Texas froze.”
SecureWorks: What if an economist looked at the whole computer security problem?
”The return-on-investment equation for cyber criminals for attacking organizations becomes drastically lower. When the return becomes more difficult, the extent of those attacks, and the impact on our lives, goes way down.”
Confluent, Kafka, and the nervous system of the cloud
“If you think of how software is used in companies now, it’s much, much more connected … It’s not ten things, it’s hundreds of things.”
The harvest is the thing, says Veeva
“We’ve planted seeds over the last eight to ten years, we’re harvesting some today, and we will continue to harvest over the next three to five to seven years.”
Sprinklr: can ‘soup to nuts’ run the front office?
“A database is a database, they all have similar capabilities; we're trying to solve this other problem.”
The world will be meeting virtually forever to some degree, says ON24 CEO
“I have more first-person engagement data than anybody else; no one else has hours of engagement data.”
Zuora CEO: the ‘multi-product’ strategy is starting to work
“We are pretty confident eventually people need our products. They are going to hit the challenges we see other companies face.”
StarTree, the software that built LinkedIn, and the data-obsessed future
“Pinot is what happens after Kafka. The last five years, thousands of companies are already using Kafka to collect this data, and now these companies want to capitalize on that data.”
Alteryx CFO sees ‘encouraging signs’ the turnaround is on track
“We expect we will go into 2022 in a really good position relative to people and alignment and strategic focus.”
Quantum Computing CEO: finding a practical approach to a very heady field
“Realistically, the more that goes on with hardware vendors, the more companies such as us will be valued correspondingly higher.”
Cambium holds its head up amidst supply chain challenges
“As the government starts to spend money for bringing digital connectivity to all communities, we have those affordable and high-quality solutions. Cambium will play a key part in making sure we help eliminate the digital divide.”
Semrush CFO threads a needle of financial forecasting
“It is always challenging to forecast your revenue, and more so in this environment where things change with lockdowns, reopening, and fairly pronounced change in the consumer and small business behavior.”
Read the interview.
Digital Ocean: You’ll be glad you bought the stock, says CEO Spruill
“I think everyone woke up this morning and said, Wow, this really is going to be a very big business.”
ZoomInfo: Selling the modern sales machine to those who sell
“Inside companies, the sales department is one of the last to truly digitize. It is a huge white space opportunity.”
N-able eyes a snowballing market opportunity serving the service providers that serve small business
“We have this cool extra lever … they grow, and they service more small and medium enterprises, and we grow.”
Semrush CFO: Please don’t call it an ad-tech company
“Our customers need to be found, it’s getting more difficult, so let’s give them tools.”
Clearfield has an infrastructure plan for America
“The time for broadband deployment right now isn’t a question of if, it’s a question of how fast.”
Qumu and the asynchronous corporation
“The greatest moment of trust for me was when you climb out of that helicopter every time for the beginning of a rescue. And there's this moment of truth where your hoist operator looks at you, and gives you a thumbs-up that it’s time to go, and you have to let go of everything.”
Pure Storage CEO Giancarlo: Enterprise is about to have ‘an explosion of re-engagement to do new things’
“As customers go back, we are going to be our most advantageous self because customers are going to want to go to the new.”
Zuora: The end of the beginning, as the metrics start to produce
“We have a big R&D staff, we’re innovating like crazy, and you’re seeing us be able to monetize the innovations.”
And then there was one: revamping Lattice Semi
“It was a company that was ripe for being cleaned up … No plan as to how to get there, a hope and a prayer, it was just, We think we can do it.”
Extraordinary measures: Synaptics weathers a global supply chain mess
“We will fare above par, but no one is going to do well in this environment.”
Cambium CEO: Scaling 5G is next
“Scaling the network, make them a utility, very reliable — like electricity; that’s what you’ll see in the next five years.”
Stress test: Can Hassane El-Khoury refashion not just On Semi but the automotive industry?
“No business person is going to say, I will invest billions of dollars on hope.”
Arista’s next phase: ’We’re entering a much larger market opportunity,’ says CEO Jayshree Ullal
“I think Arista’s magical role is to be thoughtful.”
The push-button corporation: Suplari’s software might be savvier than most of your employees
“The consultants are being automated-away by software.”
Splunk has been a hot mess, but that’s changing, says CFO Jason Child
"They asked me, why are you so confident? Because it’s cloud.”
EXPERIENCED IN ROUGH SEAS: THE FIRST-DAY STOCK DROP DIDN’T FAZE DIGITALOCEAN CEO YANCEY SPRUILL
“The experience curve is very steep in an IPO.”
ON THE PATH TO A BILLION DOLLARS: A CHAT WITH ZUORA CEO TIEN TZUO
“We think the subscription economy is going to take over all business … The winners of the subscription economy are going to be the biggest and best companies.”
PURE STORAGE: A KNIFE FIGHT IN A PHONE BOOTH, AND IT SEEMS TO BE GOING PRETTY WELL
“Either in the first couple quarters after an acquisition you get some really quick wins, or people say, ‘Well, you just wasted $350 million of our money.’”
THE 5G WAVE IN CITIES: CAMBIUM’S CEO REFLECTS ON THE ‘NEW BUILDING MATERIAL’
“It’s going to find its way into very innovative applications, it’s going to change the way computing is done.”
YOU CAN’T MAKE A MISTAKE IN A MARKET MOVING THIS FAST: TURNING ALTERYX AROUND
“If you make an educated guess, and make another mistake on top of that mistake, it’s compounding. You can’t compound mistakes as fast as this market is moving, especially now.”
PULLING FORWARD THE FUTURE: A CHAT WITH LAM RESEARCH CFO DOUG BETTINGER
“I’m describing a pull-forward in the digitization of society; I think we've permanently changed how we work and live”
FOCUS MAY PAY OFF FOR PURE STORAGE IN 2021
“Our ambitions are very big, we have to continue to gain share. We are very excited about the year ahead.”
THE PRAGMATIC STREAK IN ZUORA’S OUTLOOK IS REFRESHING
“I would continue to expect investors to have a high interest in continuing to purchase technology stocks, especially companies that are growing and performing well, and showing that they’ve got a long runway of growth.”
‘HUMANS ARE AMAZINGLY RESILIENT CREATURES,’ SAYS RINGCENTRAL CEO
“There will be a multi-modality situation. Some people will be all together, and some will be distributed, and it’s easy to imagine situations where you have multiple physical conference rooms, interconnected via technology, local clusters connected remotely.”
WHY DOES EVERYONE SUDDENLY WANT TO REINVENT THE INSURANCE BUSINESS?
“We had a very strong response to the IPO from large institutional investors and well-known hedge funds and asset managers. So, I think we’ve seen a broad interest across the investment community for a quality software company like Duck Creek.”
BRILLIANT AMBITION: SYNAPTICS CEO HURLSTON EXPLAINS GETTING TO SCALE
“The semiconductor game has become a big company thing. I’d like to see if we can play this thing out and be a consolidator in the space.”
CAMBIUM CEO: WIRELESS CONNECTIVITY IN EVERY CORNER OF THE GLOBE IS THE NEXT REVOLUTION
“This story repeats around the world so many times, you will see quality-of-life improve significantly in those hard-to-reach areas.”
THE SALESPERSON AS VIDEO STAR? VIDYARD’S PRODUCT GROWTH HAS INTRIGUING LESSONS FOR CLOUD COMPUTING
“There are sales organizations that long ago moved away from the golf game and the steak dinner.”
NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN: AN INTERVIEW WITH ZUORA CFO TODD MCELHATTON
“When I was at SAP, I oversaw all the cloud properties — SuccessFactors, Concur, Ariba, etc. A lot of those companies were about a similar size to where Zuora is today. And three of them now, are well over a billion dollars” in revenue annually.
LETTER FROM HERTZLIA: CLOUDIFY AIMS TO AMELIORATE A MESS AMAZON AND COMPETITORS HAVE CREATED
“The move to the public cloud that was supposed to take companies two to five years to do is ending up taking ten to fifteen years.”
CAMBIUM HAS IT ALL: 5G, A COVID-19 BOOST, NEW PRODUCTS IN STORE
“We have good wind in the sails, and we are doing the right things. The thing I always thought is, just do the right things, build the right products, satisfy the customer, run a profitable growth ship.”