Time to say goodbye

Exactly 9 years ago I started in a rather small startup called Nutanix. I was 45 years old and always worked for large American IT companies before. I really felt that it was time for me to try something different. This also meant taking some more risk. At the time nobody knew Nutanix, not rarely I had to spell the name so that they do not confuse it with Nutella ??

So I started at Nutanix in August 2014 with the Sales Kick Off in Las Vegas, what a start! There were roughly 200 people there. I immediately felt something very special, some kind of belonging, some caring for each other. Although I was a newcomer, everyone welcomed me in a very gentle way. I made friends from India, from Latin America, from Europe and the USA.

I still remember how Sudheesh got his head shaved because he topped the expectation of the fiscal year. What a party later that evening with the entire company singing together at the bar ??

Sudheesh was also the person delivering extremely inspiring presentations about our vision. After listening to him I just wanted to go back to Switzerland and tell the story to my partners and prospects.

The first few months I was alone in Switzerland but had strong support from my two SE buddies Klaus Peteratzinger and Bas Raayman out of Germany.

As the years passed, we grew our team and our footprint in Switzerland. We used to say that we had customers of all sizes and verticals from a local bakery to a large international pharma.

It was a great learning experience for me to grow a company from literally 1 person to an organization of roughly 30 people with sales, inside sales, system engineers, channel, marketing, technical account managers, services etc.

This was really applying what is called “from build to scale”. I would like to express my gratitude to Nutanix for the trust I got from my management (forgive me for the ones I forgot) such as Frank Mild , Dirk Marichal , Sudheesh Nair , Dheeraj Pandey , Jonathan Gosselin , Venugopal Pai , Chris Kaddaras , David Sangster , Aaron White and Andrew Brinded . But also from my team ( Tiziana Giorgetti , Beat Müller , Dominique Wuethrich-Erni , Cédric Mégroz , Adriano Fiore , Bernd Jehle , Chrystelle BERNARD , Andre Schmid , Cindy Delvallée , Caroline Vincent Darbelet , Oliver Graf , Fredy Nick , Alex Rechsteiner , Phil Dino Gesess , Mauro Brunetti , Didier Wenger , Tristan Kelkermans and peers ( Hugues Heuzé , Alberto Filisetti , Ivan Menendez and Jorge Vazquez Gonzalez ).

The wonderful success story wouldn’t have been possible without the strong partner network that we established in Switzerland! And of course our customers who trusted us and embarked with Nutanix on a journey to disrupt the legacy IT infrastructure. I could tell many wonderful stories how we won new business, how we fought for customer satisfaction and how we created strong relationships in the Swiss market between channel, alliances and customers.

At Nutanix we had a cultural principle which was “Hungry, humble and honest”. I could really identify with these values because I personally agree with them and because the company applied these values in everyday life. And I also believe that these values match Switzerland well, it is almost as if we wanted to have Roger Federer's attitude in business ??

Now after 9 years at Nutanix it is time for me to take a little break before I will embark fully energized on another journey. I am looking forward to this next journey even though the destination is not determined yet. It is like when going on holiday, it is much more important with whom you spend your holiday and in what mood then the actual destination.?