Guest: Nikesh Arora, CEO and Chairman of Palo Alto Networks
Nikesh Arora has been in the C-Suite for more than two decades, including a 10-year stint as Google’s chief business officer and — most recently — five years as Palo Alto Networks’ CEO. But the COVID-19 pandemic made him radically reconsider the gap between the executive floor and the rest of the company. “There was a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear and uncertainty,” he says, “and this person I was talking to says, ‘Listen, your job as a leader is to create certainty.’ [...] It’s simple: Tell your employees you have their back.” That’s why, for the past 30 months, Nikesh has been making time to virtually meet thousands of Palo Alto Networks employees on Zoom; he gets candid feedback, communicates company goals, and provides a safe space for everyone to bond.
In this episode, Nikesh and Joubin discuss honest CEOs, not having a career plan, process vs. outcomes, remaining independent inside Google, organizational superpowers, understanding your competitors, “evergreen companies,” the ChatGPT disruption, integrating product and sales, blindfolded communication, Evian water, cloud vs. on-prem security, and problem solvers vs. problem representers.
In this episode, we cover:
- Amazing people at Google (02:15)
- T-Motion and T-Mobile (04:05)
- “You cannot control the outcome” (07:36)
- Growing up in India (11:12)
- 400+ rejection letters (14:38)
- Loving what you do (18:26)
- Joining Google (19:55)
- Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt (24:16)
- Relocating to “the mothership” (27:01)
- “He’s not Googly enough” (28:26)
- Profit, innovation, and paranoia (31:12)
- Cybersecurity and AI (34:04)
- SoftBank CEO Masa Son (38:54)
- Joining Palo Alto Networks (43:04)
- Hiring as home-building (47:04)
- “Nobody comes to work to screw up” (50:25)
- Product and the power of marketing (53:28)
- Cybersecurity “swim lanes” (56:36)
- M&A strategy (01:01:14)
- The two schools of due diligence (01:05:05)
- Moving past problems (01:07:42)
- Creating certainty for employees (01:10:59)
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