Nutanix Inc. shocked the investment and technology worlds this past September, more than doubling its Friday trading debut after its initial public offering raised $238 million, surpassing expectations of $196 million, and becoming the second “unicorn” to IPO this year. (Unicorn is defined as a private company with a market valuation of about $1 billion.) Nutanix pioneered hyperconvergence infrastructure, a market that is anticipated to reach $5 billion in 2019.

Dheeraj Pandey, co-founder and CEO of Nutanix Inc., joined Stu Miniman (@stu), co-host of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during the Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe event in Vienna, Austria. They discussed the current state of the company, how it is trying to define itself and the importance of giving back to the community.

Miniman spoke about the buzz of Nutanix’s IPO and asked Pandey about the current state of the company.

“For the next six to eight quarters, it’s heads-down execution. The public market investor is going to expect a lot from us in the next two years,” Pandey said.

He explained that Nutanix has a need to establish its identity, to find a category in which it comfortably fits. Does Nutanix think of itself as a compute company, a storage company or a hypervisor company? Pandey said that the word ‘hyperconverged’ does not clearly convey what Nutanix does. “To say we can solve real problems for people, and do it faster, quicker than anybody else, release the OPEX; to me, that’s where the real delight lies,” he said.

Nutanix’s true north

Miniman asked Pandey what he believes the “true north of the company” to be at this time in their development.

“We have to think about the end user; the consumer of infrastructure is not the infrastructure admin; the consumer is a developer or an apps administrator. They’re thinking about apps, not about VLANs and load balancer rules or firewall rules or VM or container; they’re thinking about the whole thing,” Pandey said.

That convergence becomes the blueprint to clone, provision, migrate and backup; and once it is brought together, into an application, that is when it becomes interesting, Pandy added. “The real true north for Nutanix is [thinking about] what an app needs, and how would the app user think about using these elements — which is networking, security, compute — things like that,” explained Pandey.

Supporting the community and women in tech

Miniman mentioned Nutanix’s .heart initiative. Pandey explained that as a company matures, it needs to think about not just the business and the financials, it also needs to think about getting connected to the community at large.

“As a company matures, it needs to think about not just the business and the financials … it needs to think what’s really good business, getting connected to the community at large,” said Pandey.

He said there’s definitely a lack of women in the tech field and how he has no women direct reports.

“Why aren’t there enough women in tech? People always point back to schools or colleges, [that] there are not enough women and girls graduating,” he said. “So we’re focusing on hiring more women from universities and looking into going to schools and seeing if you can teach girls — try to fix the problem upstream rather than just question why the problem exists downstream.”

*Disclosure: Nutanix Inc. and other companies sponsor some Nutanix 2016 .NEXT Europe segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Nutanix nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.

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

Photo by SiliconANGLE