AUGUST 28, 2019 / 4:00PM, VMW - VMware Inc Financial Analyst “Bus-tour Style” Q&A Meeting at VMworld
Patrick P. Gelsinger - VMware, Inc. - CEO & Director
Yes. And I think one of the antidotes to that is culture. And I’ll just say we are maniac about the underlying culture of the company. And clearly, it’s easy to talk about culture, it’s hard to make it what you live, right, in that sense. And some of the things, tech for good, these innovation aspects, we put on RADIO, right, our Research And Development Innovation Offsite. It’s just a geekfest, right, a couple of thousand of our engineers together, right? Or our patent culture, right? Flings and just class A engineers hire class A engineers because they want to work together. If you have class B engineers, they higher class C, right? This huge focus on the top of the technical pyramid. Those kind of — so you’ve just got to keep building that culture all the time. And obviously, being a techie myself, hey, to me, a great day in the office is geeking out with some of our engineers and help getting into the bowels of it.
I think where we also have done well, but it isn’t acquiring, it’s acquiring, integrating and innovating on the things that we bring in. And the — we are going to paratroop, right, some of our best and brightest principal engineers into Carbon Black ASAP, right? Project Pacific, we took Craig, right, the integrator of Kubernetes and dropped him into the core team vSphere team, right, and just go architect a great product, right? It’s just that it has to be a great product or it isn’t VMware, right? And you’ve got to keep building — a mediocre product should never be part of our portfolio ever, right? We just got to keep making great world-class products.
We also have to be very clear about what we’re not, right? We’re not hardware. We’re not consumer. We’re not applications. This is our space, and our strategy has, I’ll say, the profit from the core mentality. Everything has an adjacency that we’re building on, either sales momentum, technology momentum, customer buying patterns. Everything is building on, and it makes the next one less risk, right, as well because none of these are jumping into radical other markets. They’re highly leveraging things that we’re already doing. But I think every company has this risk as it gets better as — I mean as it gets bigger, right, as we go forward.
And obviously, as you’re looking at the executives on today’s stage, hey, a lot of us are very technical right, as well. And — right? You can go to a lot of the top executive teams, right, and you’ve got to look 2 or 3 layers deep until you find deep technology. And that’s not who we are, right, at that level. And we’re pretty committed to be this deeply technical, product-oriented, innovative company at the highest levels and at the lowest levels of the company.
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Patrick P. Gelsinger - VMware, Inc. - CEO & Director
Great. And hey, thank you for the time. And obviously, many of you, we know well for over long periods of time. Thank you for spending time with us learning more about our strategy and where we are and, as I say, a very exciting couple of weeks for us, acquisitions, earnings and now the biggest party we throw in the year.
Fundamentally, we are out to build a truly great company when I say that’s a company that has a great culture, right? And cultures last longer than any products or strategies do, right? Second, that’s — we’re able to be this ongoing innovative, disruptive company in categories and in industries that — and somewhat building on one of the later questions that fundamentally if a product is a little bit better than a competitive product, it isn’t interesting to us. We’re just out to do these radical, disruptive, change industry, category-defining kind of innovations over and over again, maniacally focused on delivering the right thing for customers, right? And if you do the right thing for the customers, everything else follows.
Good business fundamentals. We’re a growing, profitable business, right, that has solid economics behind it yet we’re still sort of old-fashioned. People should make money, right? And it has to be based on good business fundamentals. And we think we have a pretty good view of what we are, what we want to become as well as what we’re not, right, so a clear strategic sense of where we are. And for that, we certainly hope to well reward, right, our customers, our stakeholders, employees and shareholders.
So thank you for spending time with us today.
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