Jayshree Ullal: On People-Centered Leadership

Speaker A: Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I'm Rene Haas, your host and CEO of arm. Today I'm joined by Jai Sree Lal, president and CEO of, uh, computer networking company Arista Networks. Jai Sree spent her early career working in the semiconductors at Fairchild Semiconductor and Advanced microdevices, then spent a decade and a half at Cisco, where she led their data center, switching and services groups before going on to lead one of America's foremost tech companies. Jay Sri, welcome to arm. Welcome to Tech Unherd. Thank you for coming all this way.

Speaker B: Well, it wasn't that far. It's a mile away. But thank you for having me.

Speaker A: We didn't know where exactly you had come from, so only a mile away. So very happy.

Speaker B: I could have walked on a good day.

Speaker A: Yeah, today's a nice day.

Speaker B: Gorgeous. Yes.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us. You and I, uh, have not known each other super long, but in some ways we have in terms of when we think about our years in the industry and where our paths cross. And one of the things I love to do to kick these things off is just have the guests tell me a little bit about their upbringing and, um, not only where you grew up, but how you kind of got into the world of tech.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. Let me start at the very beginning. I was born in London in Paddington General Hospital. So my early years were very much shaped by British influence. Even today, I like a good cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches and I like to watch cricket, uh, when time permits, at least the highlights. But I was raised mostly in New Delhi, India. So a lot of my, uh, formative years was in India, where I went to an all girls Catholic school.

Speaker A: When did you leave the uk?

Speaker B: About four or five years of age.

Speaker A: Do you remember the UK, though?

Speaker B: I do remember. Cause my younger sister was born and I actually remember the cruise. My dad chose to go by ship rather than by, uh, plane. So it was 21 days, so I remember that well, including going through the Suez Canal. And it was a long journey which ended up, uh, in the port of Bombay. And my late aunt was so excited to see me because none of them had seen me since birth. She tried to lift me and she couldn't. So that's a different story. My parents certainly made sure that I was well fed.

Speaker A: So Delhi. And you went to, you said an all girls school?

Speaker B: Yes, yes, in those days. And, uh, I think it's still true in India that the best education is the Private schools that are typically run by systems defined abroad. So it was run by Catholic Irish nuns. You know, my parents are Hindu, so I had a lot of influence to the Hindu culture. But I also got to experience a lot of the Catholic culture, you know, and Christmas was a great holiday spirit. We learned all the songs and we knew all that good stuff. And so it was nice. It was a nice secular upbringing, I would say.

Speaker A: So what started to get your slant towards engineering and tech? When did that happen?

Speaker B: It probably happened much later, um, in the high school years, if you say. Cause I was there from kindergarten through graduation. And what happens is you are asked to kind of fork in the road. Are you in humanities or are you in science? Is kind of what the teachers pose to you. And mine was through a process of elimination because I wasn't good at a lot of the humanities subjects and I liked math and physics, although the biology dissections of the frogs left much to be desired. But they make you actually take a board exam where you decide which way you go. And in my case, it wasn't clear cut that I was absolutely good at science or terrible at humanities.

Speaker A: And this is what, like grade nine,

Speaker B: 10 equivalent teenagers out of the 200 students, 150 end up in humanities. Sections B, C, D. And section A is the science section of smart kids. So there's a little danger in that because all of a sudden all the smart kids are in one section. And, you know, you thought you were smart, but then so is everyone else. But through a process of elimination, I think I found myself in that field because the other ones I wasn't as good at. History, geography, needlework, foreign languages, those were all not my strengths. I, uh, veered to my strengths.

Speaker A: But did you have an interest in science and engineering, Electronics?

Speaker B: Yeah, not engineering and electronics so much, but I had more of an interest in pure science, pure sciences. Yeah. Because engineering and electronics were not fields in high school.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But if you're good at physics and you were good at math and you're good at chemistry, and in fact, had I stayed in India, I would have probably gone towards a pure science or science.

Speaker A: So then after that period, what to your university years, how did you make that change?

Speaker B: Yeah, so my dad had started the first five IITs in India, which is, uh, a incredible, huge deal. And he always said, oh, you gotta look at engineering, but as long as dads are involved with it, you don't think about it as much. Right. But when I came to this country, it became clear that applying my physics or math AKA engineering would be a much easier, uh, and much more applicable route than a, uh, pure science. So I ended up in electrical engineering. And actually back in my time, your time too, probably computer science wasn't even offered as a field and I really wanted to do computer science. So I ended up going to the math department to take some computer science classes and enjoying it. Doing well.

Speaker A: Yeah, without belying our ages. At that time, electrical engineering was electromagnetic fields and waves. Power distribution.

Speaker B: Exactly. Thermodynamics, um, a lot of analog to digital. I still remember this professor, Italian Professor Franco. One day we all failed the test because he had given us these sort of problems that were thinking problems. And then he said, this Duster eraser has more brains than you guys do and you're not going to make it in real world. And it's nice to see Dr. Franco's proud of me now because he says, you know, out of all of them you had the potential. So he's backtracked a little for me.

Speaker A: Our university offered computer, uh, engineering as a major, uh, which was this mix between hardware and software, which I really, uh, got into. And we did programming on IMSI8880s and things of that nature. What were you using back in the day?

Speaker B: Me too. I did some, um, uh, programming on the Z80 and the X86 and I actually got some. I used to come driving to the Silicon Valley to get some samples of chips that had, uh, been failed or flawed because obviously the good ones were sold. And that was more of the assembly programming, as you remember. And, and then we also did some FORTRAN high level programming where I had these batch cards. Do you know about batch cards? Yeah. Okay. So those kind of programming was challenging because you'd go there and get all of it done. And then, you know, I was a little, um, careless and ended up dropping the cards. And that was like a moment of, oh my God, I gotta reprogram the whole thing again.

Speaker A: X cards taught you to be precise.

Speaker B: They did.

Speaker A: And be very, very efficient. So I was always envious of kids like you who got to be in Silicon Valley and could go down the street to Fry's and actually buy Z80's we did.

Speaker B: I mean, in fact, right here, one of the companies that worked at amd, Fry's, was literally a tourism store, right? Uh, anybody who came would go to Fry's. Right? And it was right in our backyard, Fry's.

Speaker A: And there was a place called Weird Stuff Electronics in Sunnyvale. I would always be so jealous of you guys. So graduated Silicon Valley. What Was your first job?

Speaker B: Well, first I thought I'd go back with my parents, and this was just, you know, a short, uh, stint to get my undergrad done. But life had different plans, and I interviewed and ended up in a company called Fairchild Semiconductor, who doesn't exist anymore. I think it's part of onsemi.

Speaker A: Fairchild is the grandfather of all semicos.

Speaker B: That's right. A lot of the people I worked with and I trained with, certainly it had just gotten bought by Schlumberger, and I was a product engineer, and I had to come in to Milpitas to the design factory and do a lot of the memory chip product and design product. These are memory chips. These are 4k static rams that went into ECL. Not even CMOS bipolar. That's right.

Speaker A: Um, I don't think I knew that. I was a product engineer, too. I love that field at TI on memory.

Speaker B: There you go.

Speaker A: 64K dram.

Speaker B: Okay. Mine was 4K srams. Oh, my gosh. What happened in those years is like, first I got super excited. I said, I have a zircon tester. I have a sentry tester. It's all my own to do things. And obviously it was my path to immigration as well. You know, we talk about H1BS at $100,000, uh, a year right now. But, you know, back in those days, engineers were highly sought out, and we just couldn't get enough local people. So from there I went to amd, which is where I got my entree into networking.

Speaker A: Why did you leave Fairchild to AMD? I'm always curious. I left TI after about 3 or 4 years, not really knowing all the opportunities that a, ah, TI could have given me at the time. But what was your reason for leaving to go to amd? Oddly enough, that's a good reason.

Speaker B: Yeah. So. And it's very humiliating experience, which is why I would never do it to my own employees. But I should have seen it coming. They were like, you know, you're in Mountain View and your job is moving to Puyallup in Washington, and we're going to move all the folks there. And I said, okay, but I'm not moving there. And they said, all right. And they absorbed that piece of data and laid me off, which was the right thing for them to do for, you know, most of the things happen, not because they're taking it personally out on you, but it was a cost cutting measure. But it certainly made me think about what next. And so I took a little bit of a break in India and came Back and you know I had interviews with number of the semi companies. It was clear that with my semi background I'd be um. My husband ended up in intel and I and AMD which made for great Christmas parties when we went to see Jerry Sanders parties.

Speaker A: This is late 80s, early 90s.

Speaker B: Yeah, mid to late 80s.

Speaker A: Yeah. And AMD M also product engineering or something different.

Speaker B: Yeah. So from there I actually did started out in product engineering but I had an aha moment where one of my chips was failing and it had a packaging bonding problem with bit error rates and I had to do a lot of um, schematic review and check the chips, check the bonds. It was my first exposure to customers in a somewhat unfriendly setting because they were all angry that their chips weren't working. So did a lot of um, yield analysis and engineering analysis. And it got me thinking that there's another side of me. After having been five years in this field that I'd like to exercise. I went into a field called product planning. And some of my best learnings came from defining the networking chips that we went on to build including FTDI and Taxi which was a parallel to serial converter to cut down the number of cables. I remember those products so great years where every time you wanted to design a product you actually had to get in front of the CEO and have a justification like you do in front of a VC for a company. Right. To get it funded. So part engineering and this is when I really got into applying my engineering into product planning.

Speaker A: So refresh my memory. AMD I remember was big into networking chips.

Speaker B: They were back in the day.

Speaker A: Were they attacking kind of a custom network or a token ring? I'm trying to think now about AMD

Speaker B: Back then it was high speed token ring, it was called FTDI 100 megabit. But we were also very involved in the early days in Ethernet along with Xerox and Digital Deck again. Now we've gone from mainframes to super minis. You know we're moving up in the stack here and we even did some 1 megabit Starland. But um, my greatest memories were the 100 megabit FDDI backbone chips we designed which were super high speed for backbone, really high speed. But they were designed. You'd get a kick out of this on LSI gate arrays that were running at you know, 10,000 gates. You know we never talked about nanometer. They were all in micrometer technology.

Speaker A: Why gate arrays are not custom designed?

Speaker B: Probably because we were still feeling our way into and the cost of it too. So at that time, the early designs didn't even have much of a custom design component to it. You just sort of designed it and threw it to them. And through that experience, I realized, oh, my God, by the time you define a chip, design it, and get it out to the market, it can be five to seven years. Markets can go by then. And so that's how I went into the system side. I said, you know, this is fun, but I want a little more instant gratification. And joined a company called Langevin Vaas, which was actually at that time, bigger than Cisco, if you can believe it. So I ran there and they competed with 3Com, and again, somehow every company I joined ended up getting acquired. This one got acquired by Tandem Computers, which then in turn got acquired by Compaq, which then in turn is hp. So somewhere there's some ub there. But built the first bridges and routers even before Cisco did. They were XS routers, not IP routers. But we worked very closely with Cisco. Cisco was 5 million, and my division in Angam and Bass was 50 million.

Speaker A: This is now probably mid-90s.

Speaker B: Yeah, early 90s. 91, 92, 93.

Speaker A: Pre Internet.

Speaker B: Yes, pre Internet. And then I had to do what everyone does. Did you do your startup too? Did you do a startup? Which one was that?

Speaker A: I did.

Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I know that one. So mine was Crescendo Communications.

Speaker A: You made a good choice.

Speaker B: Well, it was a short lived choice. I was only there two years before we got bought in 93 as Cisco's first acquisition.

Speaker A: How many people are at Crescendo at the time?

Speaker B: Um, probably 50, 60 people.

Speaker A: So I remember when I joined 10 silica, uh, I had always had the dream of joining a startup. It was the one thing I wanted to do in Silicon Valley. I knew nothing about startups.

Speaker B: You don't till you get into it.

Speaker A: Uh, what were the things, looking back, that really surprised you about that experience?

Speaker B: Well, some things surprised me, but I had worked with them on the younger side. We had worked on an FTDI copper spec with them, and we were trying to figure out what they were.

Speaker A: Your customer?

Speaker B: They were not my customer. We were working on standards together. We were working on whether it would be Pam4 or what the technology would be. So I had a chance to get to know the people. And to me, in a startup, the people are the greatest choice you can make, because people can shape any technology and get a product, but products can only be shaped by people. So in some ways, it wasn't a shock. Because I'm like, okay, I think I know what I'm getting into. But I, I couldn't have imagined the complexity of, okay, you can get a product, but how do you get it to market and how do you get it to your customers? And that's where I came in. And certainly it was an exercise of one by one, we were fortunate. We won two important customers. And in fact, Microsoft's been a big part of my life. Not only in Crescendo, but Cisco and of course, now Arista. They were one of our early customers. And Redmond had just started. Then their new buildings were just coming up. It was an FDDI backbone we got a chance to work with. I could have estimated the complexity of building a technology versus going to market with a technology. It was hard.

Speaker A: I mean, back then, um, a lot of these companies were being acquired, snapped up super fast by Bay Networks or Nortel or 3 comp. Was crescendo when they started it. Did they view that ultimately this is going to be an acquisition or we're going to go ipo?

Speaker B: In fact, we were all very sad that day. You have to remember, back in 93, acquisitions were still not a fad. And we got bought for 90 million, which is pretty pittance if you think of it in today's age. But it gave us all a sense of accomplishment. And at that time, Cisco was less than a billion in revenue. Cisco was a huge acquisition, uh, in terms of strategy, undoubtedly. Cisco was a router company at roughly 800 million revenue. And I got a chance personally to go build their switching business and build and name the catalyst switches, which went on to become a, uh, $10 to $15 billion business that was the growth engine for Cisco. Absolutely. And part of it is, I think we all agonized about going there. And we had signed agreements to stay there two years, but we ended up being there 15 years, two years at a time. Right. And I think we contributed greatly, but Cisco also gave us a platform to contribute. It was both ways.

Speaker A: One thing that Cisco did, and as you said, you were one of the early ones, and then Cisco just went on a tear. Whether it was granite, et cetera, et cetera, did an amazingly good job of somehow integrating these startups into the company. And culturally, looking back, I'm just wondering, how did they work so well? What did they do?

Speaker B: I think John Moggridge was the CEO then. John Chambers was the head of sales. And they both taught me different lessons. John Moggridge was like, look at your margins. They're in the 50s, when are you going to get them up to our number 70s and 80s? I said, all right, we got to do some cost reductions and start building Asics and all the things you have to do to make your boards. John Chambers though was uh, a wealth and depth of knowledge in how to go to market. We didn't have much of a salesforce, but he was instrumental in investing in a salesforce and he told them all, don't just sell routers, you gotta sell switches. They are the future. So I think they both came at it and I thought I'd go nuts listening to two of them. One wants high margin, one wants to get to a billion. There's no way I'm gonna last here more than two years. But I think the biggest credit I would give Cisco at that time is they identified the talented people, nurtured them and left them alone. And that was a huge part of

Speaker A: how did the engineering cultures mix or did they need to?

Speaker B: They didn't need to.

Speaker A: You could be fairly self sufficient.

Speaker B: So here's a good example. So Cisco had iOS and um, that's old.

Speaker A: I, that's not the iOS.

Speaker B: No, not today's iOS, but the original iOS I should say back in the 90s and when crescendo came with Catalyst, we brought in something called Cat OS. Right. And so Cat OS and iOS were kind of two headed monsters. Even today when I talk to customers who see the Catalyst 6500 as the most successful product in the industry, they'll go, I like that product because it had iOS and somebody else will go, I like that product because it had CAT os. But we actually built a two headed monster because we just couldn't get it all in one. And practically speaking if we had tried to get it all in one, it would have taken us five years. So it would have been a long time and you would have seen the market go by.

Speaker A: So you're running both operating systems.

Speaker B: Yeah. So on a switching layer two basis we ran the CAD OS and then when we needed the layer three we brought in the iOS as a routing blade into that. So like I said, it was a two headed monster. Many didn't like it for that. And then we tried to mix and match it, but it was the right call from a business point of view because we were able to basically go from 40 million in revenue in the first year we were acquired to 365, which I remember that number well because it was million a day for the year to a billion the third year. And we, you know, obviously the this is the wave of AI and that was the wave of the World Wide web and Internet.

Speaker A: Then ended up being the switching business for.

Speaker B: That's right. We ended up buying Kalpana and Granite and Grand Junction because we built the high end switches. But then we needed the portfolio.

Speaker A: So how did you, how did you, I hate to use this word, but assimilate the Granites of the worlds and the kalpanas into the cat 5000 family engineering wise again, where they bolt ons?

Speaker B: No, we tried to keep their strengths, uh, each of them, when you look at Grand Junction and Grana, they had fantastic strength in building chips and Asics. We want to keep it, but we also tried to enforce the portfolio. We're like, hey, you can't go off and do another os, come and take ours. Right. So there were some moments, but it was really good portfolio management and the teams really got along. We called it Work Group Business Unit wbu. And today, the reason I know Andy and his team so well is they were the basis for the Cat 4K and they worked to integrate where it

Speaker A: made Cisco again, um, is almost the boilerplate for the success story on M and A. Why were they so good at it? What was the blueprint that made Cisco so good at making that work? Because they were in our world class

Speaker B: in that I think they had the success of a few good acquisitions that didn't just go well, but went very well, which could make up for some of them that went less well. It's always like that. So, you know, if they did 40, 50 acquisitions, maybe 5 and 10 were very good and that's the ones we talk about. And the others were not as good, but they weren't bad either. Right. So some of them are just home runs, you know, or like in cricket, they were fours and sixes rather than singles.

Speaker A: I just look at M and A on the top line. You can look at it the way an investment banker looks at it and you see that the bar charts and the revenue and what's accretive. But to your point relative to people.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Products come down to people and ultimately getting people to work together, particularly when you've got a small company culture into a large engine, that's hard.

Speaker B: I didn't think I'd stay there. But part of the credit I have to give Cisco is they nurtured the people and when they saw the success of the switching division, they let those people be leaders inside of Cisco. And I always tell people I was a misfit in Cisco because I didn't Fit the executive ranks and talk the talk, walk the walk. But in some ways I grew up in Cisco because they let me do and make mistakes or make success. Um, so I think a lot of credit goes to them for helping cultivate the entrepreneurial side.

Speaker A: I want to talk about Arista obviously and AI, but just one last thing. On the Cisco thing, they did the spin out and spin in of Luca, Mario and Prem a lot. Yeah, they did what made that work so well.

Speaker B: All great guys, great engineers. I think what started happening in uh, Cisco, like it happens in many corporations is the ability to innovate slows down no matter how good you are because you're a victim of existing products and things you're doing. Right. So the only way to get more innovation was to cordon them off, if you will. And you could have cordon them off in a different building or you could cordon them off to do spin ins. But you have to also remember hiring talent was non trivial at that time. So the combination of needing talent, putting a focus, not letting them worry about the legacy business, a traditional business so they could go do this, I think made it very successful. The flip side of that, which I never did and I never was part of it, is because it did create a huge morale issue when they came back on the haves and the have nots. Right. Because there are very many good engineers there. So I think it worked very well. As long as they built products that were complementary to what Cisco is already doing, then it was a natural. Nobody could object because they were adding a creative value.

Speaker A: It's a win.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Win. Win. Yeah.

Speaker A: So tell us about how 15 years at Cisco, you're doing amazing, you're running a giant business. What happens with Arista?

Speaker B: Well, you know the. I was in my mid-40s and there's this moment of, I guess midlife crisis, if you want to call it that, where you kind of say, uh, are you going to retire here or are you going to do something else? Right. And um, I felt like Cisco had become a very big company, but it also felt like I had contributed and done all I can. And while I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do next, it wasn't clear it was Arista. I knew if I stayed on and got comfortable I would never do anything different. So it was one of those forcing yourself to make a decision and think about it, where I knew if I had the gas in the tank to do one or two more, that now's the time to think about it. So it was less about leaving Cisco and more about not knowing what I'd do next, but wanting to do something next.

Speaker A: Yeah. Very similar to me, uh, I remember

Speaker B: you telling me the same thing. Right. There was nothing wrong, which is the best way.

Speaker A: Wonderful company. And obviously what they've done is legendary.

Speaker B: Oh, my God.

Speaker A: But for me, it was about scratching a different itch.

Speaker B: Right. And in fact, I had a lot of people say, you got a powerful position. Why are you leaving? The company's great. But I think, like you with Nvidia, you get to a point where you say, oh, that's true, but how can I make a difference again? And what I enjoyed at Cisco greatly was the impact and the contribution I could make to them. And is it possible to do it again? And I have to tell you, while I did it, there was an incredible fear of failure. I have to admit that I was scared about that decision, too. I had no idea what I was going to do. And everybody looks back and it looks like a rosy dream and journey come true. But it wasn't without its moments.

Speaker A: And the role you took was the CEO role at Arista.

Speaker B: Yeah. So, um, I took the summer off. I actually looked at a lot of different technologies and security and energy, and clean tech was very big at that point. So Vinod Khosla had a lot of companies I was looking at, ultimately concluded that I didn't have a PhD on these topics. I had a PhD in networking through work, not through a degree.

Speaker A: Um, I like how you put that. That's pretty accurate.

Speaker B: Yeah. Except for the honorary degree I got for speaking at Santa Clara graduation. But the point was, if I wasn't going to leverage what I knew and build on it, and if I wanted to start again, then I would be making myself a whole lot more uncomfortable. And I don't know if I could contribute in the same fashion. Right. So Andy and I have been friends. Back when he says we were kids, you know, he says I was a little girl, but I remind him he was a little boy. I was in my 20s. He was in his early 30s when I was at AMD and he was at Sun. And he said, hey, I funded this company and we're building the software stack. And they were just shaping what they wanted to do. They were thinking, should we build a switch? It was largely software. They weren't building any merchant silicon and hardware, uh, in any substantial way. And I said, switching, Andy. I just came out of that. Why would I, uh, do this again? Right. But when I met the team, there was again, back to the story, uh, you and I have talked about many times. It's the people. And I came away very impressed with the founders. Ken Duda built this amazing extensible operating system. And we didn't exactly know how it would shape. It was zero revenue, it was 30 engineers. But I remember Andy and I having this discussion saying it'd be great to go from 0 to 100 million. Right? And I said, yeah, right.

Speaker A: So pre revenue.

Speaker B: Pre revenue, zero. 30 people, 30 engineers.

Speaker A: That's a very fun and scary time.

Speaker B: Yes, it is. We were at the basement of a lawyer building that has since gone bankrupt. Uh, and we live to tell the story.

Speaker A: And that was 2000.

Speaker B: That was 2008. Right in the middle of the financial crisis and recession. Incredibly brave, that's what everybody says.

Speaker A: Incredibly brave.

Speaker B: That's what everybody says.

Speaker A: And when did arista go public?

Speaker B: 2014.

Speaker A: 2014.

Speaker B: So not long after six years. And it took six years because that's very, very fast. Uh, in one way it's fast, but in another way, you know, we did take our time. We took four years to build the software system and another six years to productize and get revenue. We wanted to get substantial size. You know, be careful what you ask for. You go public and then, as you know, you've got another whole constituent to please with shareholders. So we were north of 400 million when we went public, uh, with a market cap of 3 billion or so. But the best news of it all was we had a product, our high frequency trading, low latency. We had entered some of the world's largest cloud customers and defined and pioneered a leaf spine architecture, which until then was Maybe done in HPC by InfiniBand.

Speaker A: Just huge.

Speaker B: And I think the barrier to entry with our software was undeniable. So I think getting all the trifecta of great innovation, great team and great customers was important.

Speaker A: When you took the job, 30 engineers, 2008, how far could you see? In other words, how big did you think it could be?

Speaker B: It was one step at a time. I think we thought we could get from 0 to 100 million. I don't think we imagined a billion or 5 billion or the 10 billion that I promised the street in 2026.

Speaker A: Ever could ever imagine that?

Speaker B: Uh, no, No, I would be kidding. I was not clairvoyant enough to think that way. However, we did know we were attacking a large market, but we also knew, having been at Cisco, we had deep regard and respect for what they had accomplished over decades, not years. So we were realistic about really focusing on the niche markets.

Speaker A: So when you were doing all hands and people would ask the question about how big of a company could we be, how would you answer that question?

Speaker B: Yeah, that was probably a bad answer on my part, but we would say, yeah, we're not competing with Cisco. We're a niche networking company. We could get to 100 million, but there's a path to a billion dollar valuation. I remember Andy talking about the road to a billion. I said, andy, how can we say that when we have no valuation right now? So he was the bolder of the two, I was the conservative one. Uh, but between the two, I think what we could definitely tell the teams, all hands, is this is a special company. It's got a neat culture. It's engineers driving engineers. Even our customers were engineers. Uh, it's prioritizing innovation over sales quotas or, uh, commissions, or just selling the last thing we wanted to sell, and that we were building something with a strong foundation and a long journey. So that naturally attracted a set of people, and it didn't attract some people for sure.

Speaker A: Percentage of the original 30 who were there when you got there?

Speaker B: More than half.

Speaker A: Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, that's actually really incredible.

Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker A: And now inside our company, I tend not to like to talk about the numbers too much because to me they're kind of outcomes. But when we think about the opportunity in front of us now with all things with AI, it does appear almost unbounded.

Speaker B: Yeah. You know, there are days we all have been through the bubble, where you go, is this a bubble? But I think not, for a number of reasons that I'm sure you've thought through too, which is there may be moments of highs and lows, but there is a genuine need to improve applications and software, and therefore a genuine need to build an infrastructure to do that. Right. So unlike the Internet bubble, where you had a whole bunch of sea legs that kind of went, build it and it'll come and we'll wait for it to come. These are responsible companies that are building out this infrastructure that have financial depth, but also conviction to spend more, to do more. Right. So I think it is unique times. It may not last forever, but I think it's just like the Industrial Revolution and the Internet revolution. I think the AI, uh, revolution is

Speaker A: very real analogy, because the Internet revolution, remember that? Yes, there was a bubble in the sense of spend versus demand, but you had companies like Global Crossing and things of that nature that just vanished off the face of the earth.

Speaker B: Uh, they did, yeah.

Speaker A: And then the Other big difference is back in 2000, the most valuable companies on the planet were not Microsoft, Meta, uh, Nvidia, Amazon. We're now in a world where this growth is being fueled by the largest companies on the planet.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: There is a part of me though that looks at it and says at some point does gravity take over and can we really make use of 100 gigawatts, uh, a terawatt? But to your point, the dimension of problems that are unsolved that could be solved by artificial intelligence definitely appears to be unlimited. So I'm very much more on the bull side than the bear side. But it's going to be a fascinating thing to see where it goes.

Speaker B: I think you could argue that the training models require all of these multi gigawatt. But you could also argue that you can have a distributed inference set of models too that requires, uh, multiples of megawatt. Maybe it aggregates into a gigawatt, but whichever way you get there. Going back to our analogies, we went from mainframe to super mini to client server to the PC to the phone. Right. So it may come in a mini me mode or it may come in a m. More macro mode like it does right now. But it's here.

Speaker A: But we're going to be serving tokens

Speaker B: all day long, small, medium or large. Absolutely.

Speaker A: So obviously you've been hugely successful with Arista long career at Cisco.

Speaker B: AMD Fairchild, congratulations to you. Unarm Ryan. It's great to watch that as well.

Speaker A: Who are your mentors that you've had in your career? A, any you'd like to name and B, what did they teach you?

Speaker B: Well, I think along the way I've had lots of mentors. Let's start with my younger age. My dad and mom were heavy influencers. They raised two daughters and they raised them to do whatever they could do and pushed us to the limits. Right. My dad was a physicist himself, so, uh, you know, he believed in tough love and he, he gave a lot of tough love. But definitely, I would say they were my early mentors. My family, my husband and everybody, huge supporters. You can't do what we do without that support. I still remember Vijay, my husband, encouraging me when I was in pure engineering and saying, you can do it, you can go to the other side. And I don't consider myself a trained business person. I don't have an mba, but live and learn as they say. Right. So I think that's a huge part of, uh, the family support is so important as well. Along the way I've had some great bosses. Without naming them, some of them were an amd. You may know them. Do you know John East? John east is a wonderful human being, great mentor, and people there who trained me. Everything from, okay, you're taking your first flight to Boston. Let me show you on the map how you land and take the Sumner Tunnel and deal with those aggressive drivers there. Everything from how to travel to the first luggable I had. I think it was a compact, uh, luggable top or whatever. And, you know, to my professors, I owe a lot to my physics teachers, my professors in undergraduate, who came to my going away when I left Cisco. And it's so nice that they remember me as a studious nerd, but for some reason, they also remember me as having potential, which is nice, right? At that time, you're so not confident of yourself. And then obviously through my career, I would not call them just, I would call them colleagues, mentors, friends. Because after a while, it isn't who you work for, it's the circle you form, it is the ecosystem. And, um, I'm proud to call you a member of that ecosystem.

Speaker A: Ditto. And as we chatted before, uh, it's amazing the similarities of our backgrounds, how we all got here, but successful CEO, successful mother, grandmother.

Speaker B: J3.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me, Rene. It's an absolute pleasure.

Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this month's episode of tech unheard of. We'll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door to be sure you don't miss new episodes. Follow techunherd wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, techunheard is a custom podcast series from arm and national public media. And I'm arm CEO rene haas. Thanks for listening to tech unherd.

Speaker B: Arm tech unherd is a custom podcast series from arm national public media executive producers erica osher and shannon burner. Project manager colin harden, creative lead producer isabel robertson, editors andrew meriwether and kelly drake, composer aaron levison. Arm production contributors include ami badani, claudia brandon simon, jared, jonathan armstrong, ben webdell, sophia mckenzie, kristin ray and samal shah. Tech unherd is hosted by arm chief executive officer renee haas. Mhm.

Speaker A: Sam.