It’s now two months since Nutanix CEO Dheeraj Pandey announced that he was stepping down from the management team at the pioneering datacentre company he co-founded 11 years ago, but I still can’t think of a comparison among modern tech companies for his pending departure.
Most CEOs leave because company performance is tanking, because they did a bad thing or because they get old but Pandey is walking away at the age of 45 from the top seat at a company with $1.3bn in annual revenues. Nutanix has a market cap of over $5bn, is still growing in the teeth of a pandemic after successfully executing a switch to subscription selling and has many opportunities to do more.
So, what gives?
Having met the man several times over a period of about seven-and-a-half years, I would say that he is atypical of CEOs in that he has a questing spirit to learn about the world outside technology and about himself. Oh, and the pandemic played a role too, giving him pause from the hamster wheel of corporate life with its spirit-sacking demands on time, brain-addling travel schedules and constant, tiresome focus from market watchers marking every action up and down and, well, people like me in the media.