Taking a company public can do wonders in terms cashflow and publicity, but it also presents a new set of challenges for its growth strategy. Along these lines, Nutanix Inc.’s recent IPO has some customers and industry analysts questioning its ability to continue to innovate.

Virginia Gambale (pictured), managing partner at Azimuth Partners LLC, a strategic advisory firm, shared some words of advice for the young company.

“I’m very impressed by the CEO, because I think the first and foremost role of a CEO is to have vision, and I really believe that this CEO has vision. The difficulty is now once you’re under the scrutiny of a public market and yet you as a company are in your infancy in how you grow, you have to walk that line between, ‘Yes, I hear you Wall Street, but these are the things that I need to do to be the best, the biggest and the most enabling to my customers that I can possibly be,'” Gambale stated.

Gambale spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this week’s Nutanix .NEXTConf in Washington, D.C., about why Nutanix must play the long game in a short-sighted public market (* Disclosure below.)

Stay the course

Gambale pointed out what she believes to be a major flaw in the way Wall Street forces companies to think short term, preventing them from pivoting into a long-term success.

“All the long-term businesses that have existed are standing on a cliff today looking down at the abyss, and that is a reality. If they listen to Wall Street, they’re just going to perpetuate getting closer and closer to the end of the cliff. Wall Street should be facilitating a conversation which allows them some time to actually speak about a transformative process,” Gambale said.

She recalled a specific example of being on a call listening to analysts getting caught blindsided by the long-term strategy played by Amazon’s web services business unit.

“The analysts were saying, ‘I’m going to have to re-write my model.’ For so long they were saying that Amazon was not profitable and were discounting that stock because of that. Meanwhile, they were siphoning off billions of dollars to create a business that is actually going to continue to support the technology revolution that’s happening today,” Gambale said. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Nutanix .NEXT US 2017 event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Nutanix .NEXT US. Neither Nutanix Inc. nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE