With strong opinions and a penchant for adventure, Nutanix, Inc. CEO shares the details behind his decision to shelve an IPO.

In Silicon Valley, business plans are like screenplays in LA — everyone has one. But the world is mostly followers, and to break ground and introduce something new and valuable to the market, you have to be a leader endowed with certain characteristics: daring with an insurgency mission and a strong opinion. But all that is hot air if not balanced with a certain pragmatism and patience for the marketplace.

Nutanix Inc. started with two guys, formerly of VMware, Inc., who had some ideas for building a new hypervisor to create and run virtual machines (VMs). Dheeraj Pandey, chairman and CEO of Nutanix, said at the time, many people said to them, “Why would the world need yet another hypervisor?” He told Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, that he gave his employees space to experiment and ignored the naysayers. “We just let them tinker,” he said.

Pandey believes that great companies create something out of nothing, and it often starts with a strong, perhaps contentious opinion. But in order to fit your product into the market, you have to be able to relax those opinions at some point and accept feedback.

NTNX

Nutanix has generated a lot of speculation about its decision to shelve its IPO. With a $75 million loan from Goldman Sachs, it seems Nutanix is well poised to make the move. So why the hold up?

Pandey explained that an IPO requires the same patience with the market as does any other type of offering. “We are a seller of a new product called NTNX [its NASDAQ symbol], and the buyers have to be ready,” he said, adding that investors have indicated that they are simply not ready to call it.

“We’ll do it when the market feels that they can appreciate our product — not Nutanix Systems, but NTNX,” he concluded.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT Conference 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE