Building a billion-dollar company

On October 22, Rajiv Batra came back to the department he graduated from in 1983 and spent an hour on the half of a startup nobody puts in the pitch deck. Not the idea, not the funding. The organization you have to build around them.

Batra co-founded Palo Alto Networks in 2005 with Nir Zuk, after founding VitalSigns Software and serving as the first employee at Peribit Networks, which Juniper bought. He has watched three companies from the inside, and what he told a room of computer sciences students was mostly about people.

Hire the very best for the first fifty seats and do not compromise. Thirty engineers who are genuinely the best, he said, will out-build two hundred ordinary ones. Build the culture in the first year, because you cannot install it in the third. Give equity widely, so more than five people feel they own the thing: fewer people means everybody gets richer. Do not micromanage, or your life as a founder will be miserable and the company will still fail. And when someone is not working out, deal with it, because most leaders avoid that call and the damage spreads.

He was blunt about quitting, too. Set goals a couple of years out. Miss them both and walk away rather than run what he calls a living dead company, the kind that saps your energy for a decade without ever arriving.

The questions were good ones. Can you build a company outside a tech hub? His answer was honest rather than encouraging. What about AI — does it end the software startup? He thinks not, and he thinks the people in that room are the ones who will sit between humans and the machines. And how do you pick a co-founder? He described fifteen minutes with Nir Zuk, before there was a company, that told him everything he needed to know.

His line about rules sums up the hour: “there’s no rule. You are it.”

The full transcript is online with the audio. Select any timestamp to hear that moment.