Most companies have the classical strategy of starting with a product that fits into a targeted market (product market fit) and when reasonably successful or looking ahead into realizing the ceiling of said market, expand to adjacent products, and if successful, over time transform into a platform player. Salesforce is a classic example.

Many other companies started with an ambitious goal of being a "category maker" or "platform player" but with little success due to lack of having initial product market fit which eventually led them to becoming more practical or in many cases resetting.

Sunil will talk about the learnings at Nutanix (and some of our emerging peers) that were "born as platform companies under the shroud of a product company". Our thesis is that while successful single product companies are worth billions of dollars, and multi product companies can be worth 10s of billions, true "born as platform" players can become iconic companies of our time.

Sunil Potti is Chief Product and Development Officer at Nutanix. Prior to Nutanix, he was the VP/GM for the NetScaler business at Citrix and spent time at F5, Cisco and Sybase over the years.