On this episode of Coins2Day’s Leadership Next podcast, Diane Brady talks to Nikesh Arora, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks. They discuss Arora’s path to heading up one of the world’s best-known cybersecurity firms; how his childhood in a military family shaped him; and what he learned from working with the founders of Google. They also talk about the reasons CEOs need to maintain a focus on cybersecurity instead of just chasing emerging technologies.
Listen to the episode or read the transcript below.
Transcript
Diane Brady: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte who, like me, are exploring the changing roles of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Diane Brady. This week I’m speaking with Nikesh Arora. He is the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, and he has been front and center on issues that all of us deal with now. You might have traveled recently and had to deal with that I.T. Outage because of a patch issue. You may have been in a company held hostage by ransomware. You may have been vulnerable to identity theft. Cybersecurity is something that everyone has to think about now, not just the CIO. Nikesh talks about that. He also talks about his background growing up in India. His dad was in the Air Force. He moved around a lot. He was one of the early employees at Google and that has very much shaped his leadership and how he looks at opportunities. And, of course, how he’s using AI. Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoy the conversation.
[Interview starts.]
So, Nikesh, Palo Alto Networks’ leader in cybersecurity protection. Does that capture the fullness of who you are right now or what you want to be?
Nikesh Arora: First of all, Diane, thank you for having me on here. And look, it’s a fun thing to do. I enjoy running businesses. I enjoy understanding businesses. I enjoy trying to get a lot of people to do their best. And yes, for now, this is who I am. This is what I do. But, obviously, like every one of us, there’s a lot more to all of us just outside our professional context. This is a part of my life for sure.
Brady: Well, it’s more, I often think about the job of the CEO. It’s to, of course, set the vision and the strategy and the teams, and you’ve got such a fascinating background. But cybersecurity is one of those realms right now where everybody comes out and says they have a solution. Nobody has quite the platform solution that you bring. But give me a sense of how you want people to think about Palo Alto.
Arora: Being a student of business and technology, cybersecurity is kind of at an interesting inflection point. Almost any company, any business, including yours, which would have been hard to imagine 10, 15 years ago, that you would be so reliant on technology that if the Internet went out, you know, you would not be able to work. Thirty years ago if the lights went out, you kind of found a way to do something. Now you can’t find a way to do anything without the Internet. And pretty much most companies don’t have some sort of ability for their consumers or customers to access them are not going to survive, right? You have to have a website at Coins2Day. You have to have, pick your favorite company, a bigger picture of every company and you’re extremely reliant on…
Brady: Multi-platform.
Arora: …technology. And as we become extremely reliant on technology, we’ve opened the doors to our infrastructure to our customers, whether it’s a newspaper, whether it’s a magazine, whether it’s Walmart. Every one of us has some technological interface with our customers, which means in our parlance, you’ve just exploded the attack surface.
Brady: Yeah.
Arora: When good guys can get in, bad guys can get in. And it’s, kind of, cyber security has been sort of a quasi-ignored sector in technology for many years. But every second day we hear about a ransomware attack. So what is becoming apparent is that the old way of doing things hasn’t worked so well. The question becomes what is the new way need to be? It’s really two very fundamental things. One is the attacks are getting faster. People are getting to infrastructure much faster and they have economic reasons now with ransomware to get there. So you have to be able to detect and stop bad guys as quickly as you can.
And secondly, the approach of having 40 different suppliers or vendors or partners — however you want to describe us — hasn’t worked. And the analogy I’d like us to think about is that, you know, 20, 30 years ago when I worked in technology, I worked at Fidelity and we had 30 applications which comprised our entire customer relationship management system or maybe 10 for finance. Today we rely on platforms like Oracle or Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. For our CRM we rely on Workday and others for our H.R. Systems, etc. So what has happened is the fragmented approach has converged into integrated platforms because they’re much easier to run, manage, and give you much better outcomes.
Brady: The one-stop shop.
Arora: Well, you know, it’s an integrated solution that makes it more efficient and faster. And I’m staying away from the one-stop shop comment because there is sort of like this notion of, you know, captivity and I’m bound to you. But no, I think the world relies on things that work amazingly well and get you superior outcomes.
Brady: You know, one of the things that’s fascinating, the perch you sit in, you get into rooms we don’t get to go in terms of talking to CEOs about the vulnerabilities. And I say CEOs deliberately because it feels like this is an issue that has really left just the CIO or the CTO. Give me a sense as to what are they thinking about and how is the threat environment changing? Because we’re right in the middle of this obsession with digital transition. What are you hearing?
Arora: Well, as you know, we can’t seem to buy and ingest and deploy enough technology today. I mean, you look at what’s going on with AI, people are buying GPUs. They’re trying to put up AI data centers. Everybody’s in a frenzy. So, you think you’ve just sort of just sat down and settled down and say, Thank God we’ve moved the public cloud and then you say, Oh my God, look what’s next? AI.
So, I think every CEO has some sort of large technology project on their agenda. And if you look at the enterprise risk management efforts or audit committees of CEOs, the number one risk now slowly and steadily continues to be cyber [attacks]. And that’s because of what we talked about, the sort of explosion of attack surface, explosion of our connectivity to our customers, that’s causing that to become a large risk. So it’s kind of impossible to get away from a conversation around cybersecurity at your board or your management team. It’s a bit of a black box, to be honest.
Brady: Yeah.
Arora: It’s like, I know I have a problem. I don’t know how to solve it, but I know I have a problem. I need to pay attention. So, I think we’re at that phase where CEOs are aware this is a problem. Some of them are hoping it doesn’t happen to them because it happened to somebody else in their industry. But they call the CIO and technology guys and say, Hey, do we have a solution for this? And, you know, like most in life, we always say, Yes, we’ve got this covered. But the question is how well do you have it covered? And how well are you protected against the bad guys? And in defense of technologists, CIOs, and chief security officers, this is a hard problem, because it depends on how big a battering ram do I show up with? If I show up with a very large one, you’re not going to be able to stop me. So it all depends on how do you strike the balance between having robust cybersecurity, being prepared for anything, and being able to repel or protect yourself against extremely well-equipped, sometimes nation-state hackers?
Brady: You know, philosophically, you’ve had a lot of acquisitions in the last several years, I think 19 I counted in the last six. And when you look ahead to how you grow Palo Alto, I think I always assumed you had a bigger market share actually than you do, which says something to how crowded this space is. Where are you growing? I mean, take us on a little bit of a journey as to what you see as the opportunities because what you bolt on or what you build tells us a little bit about how the landscape is changing.
Arora: So let’s go back and revisit why we did what we did from the 19 acquisitions perspective. I’ve had the privilege of interacting with some amazing technologists and leaders in the world and worked for Larry Page at Google and he obsesses about product and he couldn’t give two hoots about the entire business enterprise or me, when I worked there, it was all about product. You sit there and realize he sort of he had a very simplistic point of view. If you build great products, you survive. Companies that take their eye off the ball of products eventually die. It’s very simplistic point of view on technology companies, but it’s true. If you look around some of the carcasses of corpses of tech companies, it’s the ones who lost their their mojo in the product world. So when I came to Palo Alto and we looked and say, what’s our product? And our product was amazing firewalls and say, what’s our industry? And look at the industry and there were these people whizzing by with amazing products that we said, Oh, this is our swim lane like, well, this is not assuming this is our swimming pool. So we went back and said, Well, it’s very hard for us to go compete with all these amazing startups that are getting funded. It’s very hard for us to go have sort of a footprint in every category that’s going to evolve. So then you take the second principle you learn from technologists is like, you know, build your products for the future. Don’t try and clean up the past. Reimagine the future.
So I sat there and said, Look, I have had the privilege of meeting all these amazing people and the two biggest trends that are coming ahead of us are cloud and AI. This was six years ago. I know AI is very exciting right now. But we sat there and said the data is going to be important, the cloud’s going to be important. How do we reorient our portfolio and get there fast enough? Being impatient as I am, we sat there and said we can’t wait four years to start building the beginnings of a product because, in my humble opinion, it takes four to seven years to build a great product, and I didn’t have that. So let’s go find some people who’ve been at it for three or four years. We don’t want their customers. We just want their amazing product. So we went on a, let’s say, valuation spree. I must have seen 3 or 400 companies myself, allowed me to learn cybersecurity, and then we had our blueprints that were going towards cloud computing, towards the AI. So we found the right things to go and in some cases we had to integrate them with our platforms. In some cases there were net new areas which we had never played in, so we were just able to adopt and adapt what they had. So that’s kind of how we ended up where we did. So today, we possibly cover 80% of the cybersecurity landscape. I’d say we were 10, 15% six years ago. I think part of the insight here is a lot of cybersecurity companies have this like flavor of the decade bad behavior. They’re hot, they come in. People buy all of that for 10 years, and then a new trend happens, a new thing happens, and it’s the next ones, and then it’s the next one. And sometimes these guys get bought out by private equity. Sometimes they merge, sometimes integrate. And we’ve really not had a, I’d call an evergreen cybersecurity company in the history of cybersecurity.
Brady: You almost sound a little bit like a VC when you’re talking, and I know you are, I believe, an advisor to Silver Lake. That must…
Arora: I used to be.
Brady: Used to be. Forgive me. So but the perspective that you bring to the role is interesting because you actually didn’t have a cybersecurity background when you came to Palo Alto. I actually want to ask about that, but I want to walk back a bit. You mentioned Larry Page. Let’s let’s go back a bit just to the genesis of your career. You’re the son of an Air Force officer. How much did you move around when you were a kid?
Arora: Oh, I started counting the other day. I think I went to seven or eight different schools until I graduated high school. Not because they threw me out, it’s just because my father was [cross talk] and we just had to move. It didn’t really matter if it was middle of the term or not. You just got plucked from one place to the other thing until the last two years, my father said, Okay you should try and stick to the same school because it’s kind of important. But, you know, we moved around with our family and that was who we were. And you had to be adaptable because, you know, you had to go make new friends, you had to go understand new places, new homes, new rooms. So it was kind of like the first I’d say 14 years of my life, we were moved around every two or three years.
Brady: I’m fascinated by the fact you went to school in Varanasi [India], which is one of my favorite places on Earth. I think it’s the world’s oldest living city.
Arora: Yes.
Brady: I’m just curious, give me a sense of the perspective that it gives you coming into these industries where, to your point, flavor of the month, flavor of the year, flavor of the decade. I feel like you’ve had a lot of experiences of taking the long view.
Arora: Well, you know, if you grew up in India about 45, 50 years ago is a very different India than we see today. Today’s is way more, I’d say, well, technology enabled, progressive, one of the leaders in the world at that point in time. You know, I remember taking computer science courses first year they offered computer science at IIT Varanasi or what it used to be, now it’s IITBHU, and we had a PC without a hard drive. That was where you started. So, you know, just, just working so backwards, that part of civilization where in the U.S. They probably had better PCs with four, eight, six chips at that point in time. So, so we were always a few years behind in the early days of technology and then eventually sort of caught up. And I think now it’s at parity and people, people are equally qualified in both parts of the world or most parts of the world because of the emergence of the internet and sort of normalization of technology availability. But at that point in time, here you are the average wage for an engineer was about $1,000 a year and the U.S. Was possibly 30 times. Right.
Brady: Is that why you wanted to go to the U.S.?
Arora: Yeah, I think it is partly driven by the desire to be able to work on leading edge stuff, knowing that there was much more development there. And I had read something on an airplane flight, domestic, in my late teens where there was this amazing Indian who said I, I can’t remember his name, but he was, it was an article possibly written by one of you guys about an Indian executive who had said the future of the world is globalization. And I said if I want to be successful, it’s important for me to have perspective from not just one part of the world. So it was really that was the travel lust or the wanderlust. It wasn’t any more smarter than that, saying I need to get experience elsewhere. I need to go learn more. And remember, in India, at that point in time, it was like you had your periods of your life. You studied, you worked, and then you had family. So I had to get my studying done and that was kind of like, okay, finish my undergraduate, let’s go get a business degree.
[Music starts.]
Brady: The inequality in the health care system is one of the toughest and most critical issues to address. I read a Deloitte report recently showing that mental health inequities alone, if left unaddressed, could lead to staggering excess costs. But we also have a staggering opportunity to address it. We spoke with Jason Girzadas, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the longtime sponsor of this podcast. Here’s what he had to say.
Jason Girzadas: We actually believe that the health equity cost to society could rise by up to a trillion dollars by 2040. So this is an economic issue for all businesses. The role of business is to recognize that health equity impacts the workforces of every single business, and it’s needing to be on the CEO agenda and board agendas for all organizations. In our country your zip code can determine your health status, and that’s problematic if you think about the drain on worker productivity, the cost to businesses in terms of the health and well-being of their workforces. Making this a priority from the standpoint of looking at what actions you can take through your organization around health and benefits, as well as how it pertains specifically to the products and services and also the types of partners that organizations team with to address health equity issues broadly. There are resources to look at, the Deloitte Health Equity Institute, which has pro bono data and analytical tools to leverage that are accessible to all organizations to start on this journey of making health equity not just a societal concern, but actually a business priority.
[Music ends.]
Brady: I know you started at Fidelity, but I’d love to walk through a little bit the perspective you bring you from T-Mobile. You mentioned your time at Google. You were, I believe, almost two years at SoftBank. Let me just ask some of those pivot points maybe in your career that kind of took you to where you are now.
Arora: My first job in the U.S. Was at Fidelity. It was 1992, and it was one of those recessionary moments where it was very hard to get a job. So I had to literally apply to 400-plus places so somebody would hire me. And I had the funniest of experiences. I really had a recruiter on the phone saying, Oh, can you tell me — we don’t know that course is offered at Northwestern. I’m like, No, I went to Northeastern. Oh, excuse me, let me check. And boom, all kinds of stuff happened. And I was lucky that I applied to Fidelity with seven different people. Thankfully, they had no common HR system at that point in time so some people said no. The seventh person didn’t know that six had said no. So they had me come interview and I was lucky enough to get hired.
And the common feedback at that point in time was given was, Hey, you don’t have enough finance because Northeastern wasn’t known for its finance programs. So I went to school at night, got a master’s in finance because I found it was something I needed to have, and I got a CFA. And then I was teaching a CFA class and somebody from Putnam said to me, Why don’t you manage money? Well, nobody asked me. So I ended up trying to go be an analyst in 1997. ’99 was the bull market, the first Internet bubble. And I’m sitting there saying, How do you make sense of all of this? So plus, I you know, I felt I needed to be more operational in life. I was good at what I did, but so I packed my bags and I ended up going to work at Deutsche Telekom, of all places, because I met the CEO by being a telecom analyst. And he says, You should come work for me. So I did. And then…
Brady: Serendipity.
Arora: Sort of little entrepreneurial roots in there as well. Goggle started a mobile Internet company, which is before the iPhone existed, we had these really clunky phones from Nokia, which used to try and give you mobile Internet access and people say you’re crazy. I did that and then I worked at Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile for four years in Germany. I used to commute from London to Germany trying to see if I wanted to be an operational executive in a mobile telecom company, which I did. And then I was home and a friend of mine walked up and said, you know what? There’s this company from California, which just went public in a very strange reverse Dutch auction, which nobody should do, and they’re looking for somebody to work in Europe. They have a small 5,000 square foot office in some houses they just rented. Do you want to talk to them? That was Google.
Brady: Chief business officer. That’s not a title you hear very often. What does that mean?
Arora: Well, you know, I started at Google and Google Europe. Yeah, I was lucky enough that Larry and Sergey [Brin] were traveling through Europe coincidentally. They interviewed me there. I had a great boss who interviewed me and they decided that they’d have me run Google Europe. And it was an amazing market. We had lots of great people who worked there. Many of them are still at Google and run large parts of Google and we were able to make Europe grow and stabilize Google’s European presence to such a degree that they asked me to come from the rest of the world, including Europe, from here, because some of my peers, Tim Armstrong and Sheryl [Sandberg], went on to have amazing careers in different places, and maybe I was the last man standing. So here I was.
I came to California in 2009 and I spent five years doing anything but product. Eric was my boss for a while and Larry was my boss for a while and Larry wanted to focus on the technology parts of it and says, Go, go take care of the business stuff. And we had a great CFO, great head of legal, and I kind of did everything that wasn’t product, so it was sales, marketing, customer support, business development deals. I was lucky. I was blessed because here I was working for an amazing technology company, going through perhaps its biggest growth phase, and I had sort of the privilege of observing from that lens how the world was accepting technology, accepting the emergence of big tech, I guess, at that point in time.
Brady: It’s interesting because you think about the attitudes to big tech now, we think about the zeitgeist. One of the benefits of working also in different parts of the world is really getting a sense of maybe we don’t get out much here. I mean, globalization is not a term that people use with the same enthusiasm as when you came out of school. I mean, how do you look at the kind of global business landscape right now? What, is there anything you think perhaps we don’t get if you’re especially if you’re situated in Silicon Valley, because it feels like the mood has changed.
Arora: Well, I think there are two things at play here, right? One thing is that for all the innovation around the world, Silicon Valley still ends up being the center of innovation, right? Trend after trend, whether it’s mobility, whether it’s cloud, whether it’s AI, you turn around and look, oh, guess what? This was initiated in Silicon Valley. So there is something to be said about the DNA and the risk appetite.
Brady: Money, talent, academic excellence.
Arora: I think there is a risk appetite question, too. There’s enough money around the world. There’s no dearth of money in Asia or in Europe or in India. The question is, are you willing to lose it? And I think the risk appetite also adds to the aura and the secret sauce of Silicon Valley. So a lot of tech gets initiated here, which has its pluses and minuses because eventually you find that you have a large U.S. Business and then you start going globally and, you know, globally start going in chunks. So there’s Europe, but Europe is not a country, right? Your biggest gripe the Europeans have is, wait, we are our own country. France is a country. Germany is a country. We’re not Europe.
Brady: Yup.
Arora: So they expect tech companies to treat them as individual countries, operate in them like individual entities. But, you know, we’re here, we’re busy, we’ve got lots to do. So we start clumping them together. And that’s kind of where the points of friction sort of start to emerge, because we are not as considerate sometimes because we’re in a mad rush to go do our business here, whether an enterprise business, a consumer business. And then if you’re the Internet space, we’re all very worried about personal data now across the world. So that comes into play. There’s a whole question of wait, now you’re doing this in a very American way. We don’t want the American way. We want our way. And so you’ll find all these interesting…
Brady: What’s the American way? I mean, cybersecurity, one of the obviously, when you look to Europe, there’s a regulatory solution, and that’s always both a point of friction and maybe opportunity. But how would you, especially in the realm that you’re in, does the American way work?
Arora: Well, the good news is that in the technology platforms are pretty consistent around the world because we all have to talk to each other. The internet in London or in Frankfurt is no different than the internet in the United States or you and me buying something online is pretty consistent and pretty much all the same widgets are being used by all of us. So I think the technology platforms are a great normalizer, it doesn’t matter. It’s all going to be same from an infrastructure perspective which makes our life a lot easier. I think the other part, which makes life easier for most enterprise companies, less so consumer businesses and media businesses, is we don’t co-mingle customers data. So they’re very sure that their data is not being compromised. And we’re in the security business. For us, it’s like…
Brady: Table stakes.
Arora: …par for the course. We cannot, like, in many cases, we don’t even see the data, right? We give our product to our customers, but we run it in such a way that we can’t see it. Only they can and they can let us see it sometimes we literally have to call them, say, Can you let me see it, please? Because you have a problem. So from that perspective, we don’t run into some of those issues. But yes, there are regulatory issues as it relates to where is the public cloud going to operate? Is it a government certified public cloud? Where is my data going? So there’s a bunch of requirements we have. We have to prove ourselves that we’re not easily compromised because they are trusting their infrastructure to us in many ways, shape, or form.
Brady: I’d love to get your perspective, and you alluded to this a bit at the beginning, Nikesh, but you’ve lived through these, you know, boom and bust cycles. Obviously, we’ve seen this acceleration of technology innovation, but we talk about AI as if it’s some incredibly profound pivot point where now just put on your seatbelt, here we go. It’s going to be the most transformative thing since whatever. What do you think?
Arora: There’s that cliche that we always seem to overestimate the short term and underestimate the long term, right?
Brady: Right.
Arora: Go back to 1999. You know, if you remember the internet sort of boom, where all you needed was a domain name and a number of clicks to find your…
Brady: Eyeballs.
Arora: …the world was in a frenzy. You know, the Nasdaq was at 5000 at that point in time. It came crashing down to 3000. So there was that sort of exuberance associated with this revolutionary technology called internet. Now, I don’t think we were wrong. If you go back and say, what did we imagine in 1999? I think any domain you thought about actually exists today. Yeah, there’s a business around it. So there’s real businesses. Some of the largest business in the world are driven by the emergence of the Internet. So it was just we were early. Look at mobility, right? In 2004 and 2005, there’s a mobile phone that came out and people said, Oh my God, what is this thing? Oh, let’s just make a little mobile site because the internet is the thing. This will serve as a side act. Today there’s more businesses which are mobility enabled and driven that have more market cap than most businesses. Many of the mobile business don’t even have an internet. They can take your WhatsApp and take an Uber, take picture of your favorite [cross talk].
So I think we’re in the same sort of cycle with AI. There is tremendous amounts of enthusiasm. There is sort of like this notion that if you build it, they will come and we’re all busy building it. And I think it’s following the same cycle that we saw with the internet. First, you need the infrastructure. That’s why you’re seeing that sort of the infrastructure players in AI are going to do well in the current term. You look at all the chip manufacturers that people talk about, energy, people talk about the need for data centers. So you’re seeing the infrastructure parts. You know, the technology is still little ways from all of us embracing it fully and going and deploying it. But I think we feel a little left out because if cybersecurity was on the top of mind for CEOs six months ago, it’s possibly AI now, right? Because like they all want to talk about AI. They all want to be smarter about it. They’re all worried that if I miss the AI trend, you know, there’s a new Amazon and I become the old e-commerce company. So I think there’s a lot of…
Brady: It creates new threats. I mean, I think there’s an awareness of the specificity of the threat and how you protect yourself, and what does it mean to be a company in this environment? Well, when you think about the market shifts coming up, what’s on your radar you would put on ours.
Arora: There’s no doubt in my mind that some form of machine learning AI is going to be deployed functionally in almost everything we do. Now the amount of control that you give it, it will depend on the use case and will depend on its ability and its capabilities. But you don’t second guess Google Maps or Apple Maps. You say this is the way to get there. I’m just going to trust it and I’m going to drive. So, you know, we start relying on technology slowly and steadily over life. Like you don’t carry cash. You have a credit card that’s going to work everywhere. So we all get reliant on technology, but they don’t take over for us. Now, the question is, I think the biggest fear with AI is, Oh my God, it’s going to get so smart that it’s going to take over. Well, it’s only going to take over if you give it control. That’s still hopefully in our hands.
I think you’ll find that AI will get deployed in many ways, shape, or form, which is going to be extremely useful, extremely helpful to do what we need to get done. There’ll be lots of things that people do which will go away. And my view is this possibly the repetitive tasks, the inefficient tasks, the things that take a lot of time where it’s hard to normalize across tons of people, will get much better outcomes. Now we’ll see. But you know, we are a very resilient society. We’ve powered through so many technological changes, industrial areas, and agricultural areas. We powered through a pandemic. So I think the fear of AI being this thing that’s going to be bad for us is overblown. I think we’re going to see constant progress.
And in a way, it’s exciting to see leaders across the world of businesses or, I was with the president of a university yesterday and he’s chatting with me saying, hey, I just read there’s this guy starting an AI university. What is that going to look like? So we spent half an hour talking about it. He’s like, I should probably get on that bandwagon, see if I can do something about it. So there’s this palpable excitement around people about how this is going to manifest itself. I think there’s a bit of hype, I’m sure, and there’s a bit of apprehension, but I think that will be, that comes across every time there’s a level of the unknown.
Brady: Yeah, I think that’s it. And how do you think about India right now with [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi? There’s been this push toward digital India and it’s having a moment, but it’s had a moment for quite some time, of course, but especially as people try to really deemphasize China, it’s come on the map in a different way in the last few years. And prior to that, you go there yourself, how do you think about that market?
Arora: It is one of the largest beautiful populations which is extremely resilient and open to change. And I think what Narendra Modi has done has been amazing to have enabled the country with different technology at the right price point, which is always hard because some of the countries around the world which are developing cannot afford the resources that many large developed countries can. But somehow India has been able to deploy technology in a way that has enabled consumers. Almost everybody who can or needs a mobile phone has one. It’s extremely inexpensive, which means you’ve put technology in the hands of people. A lot of the infrastructure is slowly and steadily getting enabled by that mobility infrastructure. You can conduct transactions. A guy who’s pushing a push cart, which I’m sure you’re aware of, and selling street food at the corner. Now say it’s just, Venmo or whatever just pay me using your phone. That’s unheard of. You’ve got this large population that’s been enabled by technology, which also has its positive impact because now everything is trackable in a good way because now you understand this whole sort of extended economy, the challenge was how big is the economy? Because we don’t know how it works. But I think all those enabling infrastructure pieces are coming into play. I think having a stable government, having people who are long term oriented and having some certainty has worked to India’s advantage because it is the largest democracy. So you can’t just go out and do something without thinking it through and getting people bought into it. And the recent elections were an example of that, where even though amazing amount of progress has been made, there are some pockets of people saying, listen, I’m going to exert my right to vote and tell you that I’m in this small area, I’m not happy. So we’ve just got a bit of…
Brady: Keeps them honest.
Arora: …great endorsement. But also in some segments, a wake-up call. So I think the democracy is working, the infrastructure is being enabled. And I remember days when India had very little foreign exchange reserves and I was like, that’s amazing. So I think it’s on a slow and steady path to continued development and eventually 1.8 billion people and you get an economy that’s working and it starts keeps growing, it will become a relevant place and it already is a relevant place for everybody to have to pay attention.
Brady: Yeah, so I’d be remiss not to end by really talking about your own mindset. What keeps you up at night?
Arora: Um, I’m not an up-at-night person.
Brady: Okay, maybe that’s the wrong…
Arora: If you worry about things, there are so many things that you worry about all day from, you know, the world, your country, politics, technology, business, personal. So I think it’s more about stepping up, waking up in the morning, being really happy about going and doing what you do and going home and going to bed and saying really happy, I had a great day and I’m really excited to be home with my family and, you know, being able to roll the punches, I, I worry about this this notion of like, I’m not trying to get somewhere. I’m not trying to prove something. I’m trying to wake up and be happy and have people around me enjoy what they do and I enjoy what I do.
Brady: Well, then maybe I’ll end with what brings you the most joy. Obviously there’s family, but you know, anything that that keeps you centered and also keeps you passionate in the job or out.
Arora: When you come from a place like India, you’re trying to rise above people around you. It’s a competitive environment because there are limited resources and you have to fight for resources. Even when you go to school, you have to get a scholarship. If you have to get into an IIT [India Institutes of Technology], you have to go compete and you have to get there. So you can’t take that out of my DNA. And I am competitive. A little more mellow now than possibly I was earlier in my life. I still like achievement and achievement is important to me. It’s kind of like your sort of your work ethic, your karma. It is my karma to work hard. It is my karma to go achieve. So it doesn’t matter what I have or what I’ve achieved, there is still more I could. Maybe I’ve mellowed out and maybe people around me have become more and more important to me, which may not have been as important when I was youthful because you’re constantly sort of elbowing your way. And now it’s kind of like, you know, I have a lot. I should make sure people around me are also well off and happy, whether it’s a professional context or personal context. And, you know, I have an amazing family, which is where I want to spend more time to make sure that they get my time as well as possibly when I was younger, I wasn’t doing as well.
Brady: I love that. Any final points as to how you want Palo Alto Networks to look? I’m assuming it won’t look different five years from now. I don’t know what the right time horizon is, but in this sped up environment, anything else you’d want to put on our radar about where you’re going?
Arora: I think it’s important to look at the trajectory, right? Five or six years ago, nobody believed that we would get anywhere with what we were doing. Oh my God. Palo is out there buying these small companies that think they’re going to go stitch it together and reshape cybersecurity. In six years, we’ve gone ahead and proven that you can teach an old dog new tricks. So here we are and we cover 80% of our industry sector, and suddenly now we see there’s a lot of people copying our acquisition strategy to see they want to be relevant too, which is good, is good for the industry. I think, you know, from that perspective it is not a sprint, it’s a marathon. We’re going to be there. We’re going to be the first ever green company in cybersecurity. And the fun is to leave that kind of a legacy, saying, you know, I was able to take a small company, with the amazing people that were around me, and we actually transformed the cybersecurity industry and made it platform, and it’s kind of a business achievement. It’s not particularly the cybersecurity sector. And I’ve done consumer in my life. I’ve done investing with Masa [SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son] and I had the pleasure of working at a telecom company in Europe. So this is a collection of all those experiences and how that translates to business. I think all that wealth of knowledge is being deployed towards making Palo Alto the first ever green large cybersecurity company in the world.
Brady: I love it. Connecting the dots. Thank you for joining us, Nikesh.
Arora: Thank you. Thank you for your time.
Brady: Leadership Next is edited by Nicole Vergalla. Our audio engineer is Natasha Ortiz. Our executive producer is Chris Joslin. Our producer is Mason Cohn. Our theme is by Jason Snell Leadership Next is a production of Coins2Day Media.
Leadership Next episodes are produced by Coins2Day‘s editorial team. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Deloitte or its personnel. Nor does Deloitte advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.
