Jayshree Ullal, CEO of Arista Networks, joins host and Arm CEO Rene Haas to talk about her path from engineer to executive.
Before leading one of America’s foremost tech companies, Jayshree Ullal worked in both large companies and startups, as an engineer and executive. She and Rene chat about everything from Cisco’s acquisitions to programming with batch cards as young product engineers, as the two CEOs swap stories about their parallel paths to the C-suite.
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Rene Haas [0:00]
Welcome to Tech Unheard, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the most exciting developments in technology. I’m Rene Haas, your host and CEO of Arm. Today, I’m joined by Jayshree Ullal, president and CEO of computer networking company Arista Networks. Jayshree spent her early career working in semiconductors at Fairchild Semiconductor and Advanced Micro Devices, then spent a decade and a half at Cisco where she led their data center, switching, and services groups, before going on to lead one of America’s foremost tech companies.
Rene Haas [0:37]
Jayshree. Welcome to Arm. Welcome to Tech Unheard. Thank you for coming all this way.
Jayshree Ullal [0:41]
Well, it wasn't that far. It's a mile away. But thank you for having me.
Rene Haas [0:45]
We didn't know where exactly you had come from, so only a mile away. So very happy to have you.
Jayshree Ullal [0:48]
I could have walked on a good day.
Rene Haas [0:50]
And today is a nice day.
Jayshree Ullal [0:51]
Gorgeous. Yeah.
Rene Haas [0:52]
Thank you so much for joining us. You and I have not known each other super long, but in some ways we have, in terms of when we think about our years in the industry and where our paths cross. And one of the things I love to do to kick these things off is just have the guest tell me a little bit about their upbringing and not only where you grew up, but how you kind of got into the world of tech.
Jayshree Ullal [1:10]
Yeah, no, absolutely. Let me start at the very beginning. I was born in London in Paddington General Hospital, so my early years were very much shaped by British influence. Even today, I like a good cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches and I like to watch cricket when time permits, at least the highlights. But I was raised mostly in New Delhi, India, so a lot of my, you know, formative years was in India where I went to an all-girls Catholic school.
Rene Haas[1:36]
When did you leave the UK? What age?
Jayshree Ullal[1:37]
About four or five years of age.
Rene Haas[1:38]
Do you remember the UK?
Jayshree Ullal[1:39]
I do remember, because my younger sister was born and I actually remember the cruise – my dad chose to go by ship rather than by plane. So it's 21 days. So I remember that well and including going through the Suez Canal, and it was a long journey which ended up in the port of Bombay. And my late aunt was so excited to see me because none of them had seen me since birth. She tried to lift me and she couldn't. So that's a different story. My parents certainly made sure that I was well-fed.
Rene Haas[2:12]
So Delhi. You went to, you said an all-girls school?
Jayshree Ullal[2:16]
Yes. Yes. In those days, and I think it's still true in India, that the best education is the private schools that are typically run by systems defined abroad. So it was run by Catholic Irish nuns. You know, my parents are Hindu, so I had a lot of influence to the Hindu culture. But I also got to experience a lot of the Catholic culture, you know, and Christmas was a great holiday spirit. We learned all the songs and we knew all that good stuff. So it was nice. It was a nice secular upbringing, I would say.
Rene Haas[2:44]
So what started to get your slant towards engineering and tech? When did that happen?
Jayshree Ullal[2:49]
It probably happened much later, you know, in the high school years, if you say, because I was there from kindergarten through graduation. And what happens is, you are asked to kind of fork in the road – are you in humanities or are you in science, is kind of the teachers’ pose to you. And mine was through a process of elimination because I wasn't good at a lot of the humanities subjects, I liked math and physics, although the biology dissections of the frogs left much to be desired. But they make you actually take a board exam where you decide which way you go. And in my case, it wasn't clear cut that I was absolutely good at science or terrible at humanities.
Rene Haas[3:30]
And this is what, like grade nine, ten equivalent?
Jayshree Ullal[3:32]
Yea, grade nine is probably your teenage years. Out of the 200 students, 150 end up in humanities sections B, C, D, and section A is the science section of smart, smart kids. So there's a little danger in that because all of a sudden all the smart kids are in one section and, you know, you thought you were smart, but then so is everyone else. But through a process of elimination, I think I found myself in that field because the other ones, I wasn't as good at – history, geography, needlework, foreign languages. Those were all not my strengths, so I veered to my strengths.
Rene Haas[4:06]
But did you have an interest in science and engineering, electronics?
Jayshree Ullal[4:10]
I did, not engineering and electronics so much. But I had more of an interest in pure science.
Rene Haas
Pure sciences, yeah.
Jayshree Ullal
Because engineering and electronics were not fields in high school, right? But if you are good at physics and you’re good at math and you're good at chemistry. And in fact, had I stayed in India, I would have probably gone towards a pure science route.
Rene Haas[4:28]
So what – after that period, to your university years, how did you make that choice?
Jayshree Ullal[4:33]
Yeah. So my dad had started the first five IITs in India, which is an incredible, huge deal. So, and he always said, ‘oh, you got to look at engineering’, but as long as dads are involved with it, you don't think about it as much, right, but when I came to this country, it became clear that applying my physics or math, aka engineering, would be a much easier and much more applicable route than a pure science. So I ended up in electrical engineering and actually back in my time, your time too probably, computer science wasn't even offered as a field. I really wanted to do computer science. So I ended up going to the math department to take some computer science classes and enjoying it, and doing well.
Rene Haas[5:14]
Yeah, without belying our ages, you know, that at that time, electro engineering was electromagnetic fields and waves, power distribution.
Jayshree Ullal[5:20]
Exactly, thermodynamics. A lot of analog to digital. I still remember this professor, Italian professor, Franco. One day we all failed a test because he had given us these sort of problems that were thinking problems. And then he said, ‘this duster eraser has more brains than you guys do and you're not going to make it in real world’. And it's nice to see Dr. Franco’s proud of me now because he says, ‘you know, out of all of them you had the potential’, so he’s backtracked a little.
Rene Haas[5:47]
For me, our university offered computer engineering as a major, which was this mix between hardware and software–
Jayshree Ullal
That’s great.
Rene Haas
– which I really got into. And we did programming on ImpSci 80-80s and things of that nature. What were you using back in the day?
Jayshree Ullal[6:04]
Me too, I did some programming on the Z80 and the X86, and I actually got some – I used to come driving to the Silicon Valley to get some samples of chips that had been failed or flawed, because obviously the good ones were sold. That was more of the assembly programming, as you remember. And then we also did some Fortran high-level programming where I had these batch cards. Did you know about batch cards? Yeah. Okay. So those kind of programming was challenging because you'd go there and get all of it done. And then, you know, I was a little careless and ended up dropping the cards and that was like a moment of, ‘oh my God, I got to reprogram the whole thing again’.
Rene Haas[6:42]
Batch cards taught you to be precise and be very, very efficient. So I was always envious of kids like you who got to be in Silicon Valley and to go down the street to Fry’s and actually buy Z80s.
Jayshree Ullal[6:53]
We did, I mean, in fact, right here, one of the companies I worked at, AMD, Fries was literally a tourism store, right? Anybody who came would go to Fry’s, right, and it was right in our backyard.
Rene Haas[7:04]
Fry’s and there was this place called Weird Stuff Electronics in Sunnyvale. I would always be so jealous of you guys. So graduate in Silicon Valley. What was your first job?
Jayshree Ullal[7:11]
Well, first I thought I'd go back with my parents. And this was just, you know, a short stint to get my undergrad done. But life had different plans. And, you know, I interviewed and ended up in a company called Fairchild Semiconductor, who doesn't exist anymore. I think it's part of OnSemi.
Rene Haas[7:26]
Fairchild is the grandfather of all semicos.
Jayshree Ullal[7:29]
That's right. A lot of the people I worked with and I trained with, certainly – it had just gotten bought by Schlumberger. And I was, you know, a product engineer and I had to come into Milpitas to the design factory and do a lot of the memory chip product and design.
Rene Haas[7:43]
They had products?
Jayshree Ullal[7:44]
These were memory chips. These were 4K static RAMs that went into the ECL, not even CMOS. Bipolar. That's right.
Rene Haas[7:52]
ECL. I don't think I knew that. I was a product engineer too.
Jayshree Ullal[7:55]
I love that field.
Rene Haas[7:57]
At TI, on memory. 64K DRAM.
Jayshree Ullal[8:00]
Okay. Mine was 4K SRAMs.
Rene Haas[8:02]
Oh, my gosh.
Jayshree Ullal[8:03]
So what happened in those years is like, you know, first I got super excited and said, I have a zircom tester, I have a century tester. It's all my own to do things. And then obviously it was my path to immigration as well. You know, we talk about H-1Bs, $100,000 a year right now. But, you know, back in those days, engineers were highly sought out. And we just couldn't get enough local people. So from there, I went to AMD, which is where I got my own train to networking.
Rene Haas[8:30]
Why did you leave Fairchild to AMD? I'm always curious, because I left TI after about three or four years, not really knowing all the opportunities that TI could have given me at the time. But what was your reason for leaving to go to AMD?
Jayshree Ullal[8:40]
I got laid off.
Rene Haas[8:41]
That's a good reason. Yeah.
Jayshree Ullal[8:42]
Yeah. So it's a very humiliating experience, which is why I would never do it to my own employees. But I should have seen it coming. They were like, you know, you're in Mountain View and your job is moving to Puyallup in Washington and we're going to move all the folks there. And I said, okay, well I'm not moving there. And they said, All right. And they absorbed that piece of data and laid me off. Right, which was the right thing for them to do for, you know, most of the things happened not because they're taking it personally out on you, but it was a cost cutting measure. But it certainly made me think about what next. And so I took a little bit of a break in India and came back and, you know, I had interviews with a number of the semi companies. It was clear that with my semi background, I’d be – my husband ended up in Intel and I in AMD, which made for great Christmas parties. When we went to see Jerry Sanders parties.
Rene Haas[9:30]
And was this late 80s, early 90s?
Jayshree Ullal[9:31]
Yeah, mid-to-late eighties.
Rene Haas[9:33]
And AMD, also product engineering or something different?
Jayshree Ullal[9:35]
Yeah. So from there. I actually did start out in product engineering, but I had an aha moment where, you know, one of my chips was failing and it had a packaging bonding problem, a Bit error rate. And I had to do a lot of, you know, schematic review and check the chips, check the bonds. And, you know, it was my first exposure to customers in a somewhat unfriendly setting because they were all angry that the chips weren’t working. And so did a lot of yield analysis and engineering analysis. And it got me thinking that there's another side of me, after having been five years in this field that I'd like to exercise. So I went into a field called Product Planning, and some of my best learnings came from defining the networking chips that we went on to build, including FDDI and Taxi, which was a parallel to serial converter to cut down the number of cables.
Rene Haas[10:29]
I remember those products.
Jayshree Ullal[10:30]
So great years where every time you wanted to design a product, you actually had to get in front of the CEO and have a justification like you do in front of a VC for a company, right, to get it funded. So part engineering and this is when I really got into applying my engineering into product planning.
Rene Haas[10:46]
So refresh my memory. AMD, I remember, was big into networking chips back in the day.
Jayshree Ullal[10:49]
They were, they were.
Rene Haas[10:51]
But were they attacking kind of a custom network or token ring? I'm trying to think now, but AMD back in the day –
Jayshree Ullal[10:55]
It was high speed token ring. It was called FDDI, 100 megabit. But we were also very involved in the early days in Ethernet, along with Xerox and Digital Deck. Again, now we've gone from mainframes to super minis, you know, we’re moving up in the stack here. And we even did some one megabit StarLAN, but my greatest memories were the 100 megabit FDDI backbone chips we designed.
Rene Haas[11:18]
Which were super high speed for back in the day.
Jayshree Ullal[11:19]
Really high speed. But they were designed, you'll get a kick out of this, on LSI gatarays that were running at, you know, 10,000 gates. You know, we never talked about nanometer, they were all in micrometer technology.
Rene Haas[11:31]
Why gatarays and not custom design?
Jayshree Ullal[11:33]
Probably because we were still feeling our way into – and the cost of it too. So at that time, the early designs, you know, didn't even have much of a custom design component to it. You just sort of designed it and threw it to them. And through that experience, I realized, oh my God, by the time you define a chip, design it, and get it out to the market, it can be 5 to 7 years. Markets can go by then. And so that's how I went into the system side. I said, you know, this is fun, but I want a little more instant gratification. And joined a company called Ungermann-Bass, which was actually at that time bigger than Cisco, if you can believe it. So I ran there. And they competed with 3 Com, right. And again somehow every company I joined ended up getting acquired. This one got acquired by Tandem Computers, and which then in turn got acquired by Compaq, which then in turn is HP. So somewhere there's some UB there, but built the first bridges and routers even before Cisco did. They were XNS routers, not IP routers, but we worked very closely with Cisco. Cisco was 5 million and my division in Ungermann-Bass was 50 million.
Rene Haas[12:37]
And this is now probably mid nineties –
Jayshree Ullal[12:39]
Yeah, early nineties, ‘91, ‘92, ‘93.
Rene Haas[12:42]
Yea, pre-internet.
Jayshree Ullal[12:43]
Yes, pre-internet. And then I had to do what everyone does. Did you do your startup too? Did you do a startup? Which one was that?
Rene Haas[12:50]
I did Tensilica.
Jayshree Ullal[12:51]
I know that one. So mine was Crescendo Communications.
Rene Haas[12:55]
You made a good choice.
Jayshree Ullal[12:56]
Well, it was a short-lived choice, I was only there two years before we got bought in ‘93 as Cisco's first acquisition.
Rene Haas[13:04]
How many people were at Crescendo?
Jayshree Ullal[13:06]
At the time, probably 50, 60 people.
Rene Haas[13:09]
So I remember when I joined Tensilica, I had always had the dream of joining a startup. It was the one thing I wanted in Silicon Valley. I knew nothing about startups.
Jayshree Ullal[13:17]
You don’t until you get into it.
Rene Haas[13:19]
But what were the things, looking back, that really surprised you about that experience?
Jayshree Ullal[13:24]
Well, something surprised me, but I had worked with them – on the Ungermann-Bass side, we had worked on an FDDI copper spec with them and we were trying to figure out what –
Rene Haas[13:32]
They were your customer.
Jayshree Ullal[13:33]
They were not my customer, we were working on standards together. We were working on whether it would be PAM4, or what the technology would be. So I had a chance to get to know the people. And to me in a startup, people are the greatest choice you can make because you know, people can shape any technology and get a product, but products, you know, can only be shaped by people, right? So in some ways, it wasn't a shock because I'm like, okay, I think I know what I'm getting into. But I couldn't have imagined the complexity of, ‘okay, you can get a product, but how do you get it to market and how do you get it to your customers?’ And that's where I came in. And certainly it was, you know, it was an exercise of one by one. We were fortunate, we won two important customers. And in fact, Microsoft's been a big part of my life, not only in Crescendo, but Cisco and of course, now Arista. They were one of our early customers, and Redmond had just started then. Their new buildings were just coming up. It was an FDDI backbone. We got a chance to work with them. I don't think I could have estimated the complexity of building a technology versus going to market with a technology. It was hard.
Rene Haas[14:38]
I mean, back then, a lot of these companies were being acquired, snapped up superfast by Bay Networks or Nortel or 3 Com. Was Crescendo, when they started it – did they view that ultimately this is going to be an acquisition or we're going to go IPO?
Jayshree Ullal[14:51]
Not at all. In fact, they were all very sad that day. You have to remember, back in ‘93, acquisitions were still not a fad and we got bought for 90 million, you know, it's pretty pittance if you think of it in today's age. But it gave us all a sense of accomplishment. And at that time, Cisco was less than a billion.
Rene Haas[15:09]
For Cisco, it’s a huge acquisition – in terms of strategy.
Jayshree Ullal[15:13]
Undoubtedly. Cisco was a company at roughly 800 million revenue. And I got a chance personally to go build their switching business and build and name the catalyst switches, which went on to become a $10 to $15 billion business.
Rene Haas[15:28]
That was the growth engine for Cisco.
Jayshree Ullal[15:30]
Absolutely. And I think part of it is, I think we all agonized about going there and we had signed agreements to stay there two years. But we ended up being there 15 years, two years at a time, right, and I think we contributed greatly. But Cisco also gave us a platform to contribute. It was both ways.
Rene Haas[15:45]
One thing that Cisco did – and as you said, you were one of the early ones, and then Cisco just went on a tear, whether it was Granite, etc, etc – did an amazingly good job of somehow integrating these startups into the company and culturally, looking back, I’m just wondering how did they work so well? What did they do?
Jayshree Ullal[16:02]
I think John Morgridge was the CEO then. John Chambers was the head of sales, and they both taught me different lessons. John Morgridge was like, ‘look at your margins. They're in the fifties. When are you going to get them up to our number of seventies and eighties?’ I said, ‘All right, we've got to do some cost reductions and start building A6 and all the things you have to do to make your boards’. John Chambers, though, was, you know, a wealth and depth of knowledge in how to go to market. We didn't have much of a sales force, but he was instrumental in investing in a sales force. And he told them all, you know, ‘don't just sell routers, you got to sell switches, they are the future.’ So I think they both came at it and I thought I'd go nuts listening to two of them. One wants high margin, one wants to get to a billion. There's no way I'm going to last here more than two years. But I think the biggest credit I would give Cisco at that time is they identified the talent and people, nurtured them, and left them alone. And that was a huge part of –
Rene Haas[16:55]
How did the engineering cultures mix or did they need to, in other words –
Jayshree Ullal[16:58]
They didn’t need to.
Rene Haas[16:59]
You could be fairly self-sufficient.
Jayshree Ullal[17:01]
Here's a good example. So Cisco had iOS and–
Rene Haas[17:05]
And that’s old iOS, that’s not the iOS that most of our listeners would think of –
Jayshree Ullal[17:08]
No, not today's iOS. But the original iOS, I should say, back in the nineties. And when Crescendo came with Catalyst, we brought in something called CatOS, right? And so CatOS and iOS were, you know, kind of two headed monsters. Even today, when I talk to customers who see the Catalyst 6500 as the most successful product in the industry, they'll go, I like that product because it had iOS and somebody else would go, I like that product because it had CatOS. But we actually built a two headed monster because we just couldn't get it all in one. And practically speaking, if we had tried to get it all in one, it would have taken us five years. So it would have been a long time and you would have seen the market go by.
Rene Haas[17:43]
So you're running both operating systems?
Jayshree Ullal[17:44]
Yeah, so we're on a switching layer two basis, we ran the CatOS and then when we needed the layer three, we brought in the iOS as a routing blade into that. So like I said, it was a two headed monster. Many didn't like it for that. And then we tried to mix and match it, but it was the right call from a business point of view because we were able to basically go from 40 million in revenue in the first year we were acquired to 365, which I remember that number well because it was million a day for the year, to a billion the third year. And you know, obviously this is the wave of AI and that was the wave of the World Wide Web and internet.
Rene Haas[18:19]
Well, Crescendo then ended up being the switching business for Cisco.
Jayshree Ullal[18:22]
That's right. We ended up buying Kalpana and Granite and Grand Junction, because we built the high-end switches, but then we needed the portfolio.
Rene Haas[18:29]
So how did you, I hate to use this word, but assimilate the Granites and the Kalpanas of the world into the Cat-5000 family engineering-wise, again were they bolt-ons or –
Jayshree Ullal[18:40]
No, we tried to keep their strengths, each of them. I mean, you look at Grand Junction and Granite, they have fantastic strength in building chips and E6 and we wanted to keep it, but we also tried to enforce the portfolio. We’re like, ‘hey, you can’t go off and do another OS. Come and take ours.’ So there were some moments, but it was really good portfolio management and the teams really got along. We called it Workgroup Business Unit, WBU. And today, the reason I know Andy and his team so well is they were the basis for the Cat 4K and they worked to integrate where it made sense.
Rene Haas[19:11]
Cisco, again, is almost the boilerplate for the success story on M&A. Why were they so good at it? What was the blueprint that made Cisco so good at making that work? Because they were and are world-class in that.
Jayshree Ullal[19:22]
I think they had the success of a few good acquisitions that didn't just go well, but went very well. Which could make up for some of them that went less well. It's always like that. So, you know, if they did 40 or 50 acquisitions, maybe five and ten were very good and that's the ones we talk about. And the others were not as good, but they weren't bad either, right. So some of them were just homeruns. You know, or like in cricket, they were fours and sixes, rather than singles.
Rene Haas[19:48]
I just look at M&A, you know, on the top line you can look at it the way an investment banker looks at it and you see that the bar charts and the revenue and what's accretive. But to your point, relative to people– products come down to people and ultimately getting people to work together, particularly when you've got a small company culture into a large engine, that's hard.
Jayshree Ullal[20:08]
I didn't think I'd stay there, but part of the credit I have to give Cisco is they nurture the people and when they saw the success of the switching division, they let those people be leaders inside of Cisco. And, you know, I always tell people I was a misfit in Cisco because I didn't fit the executive ranks and talk the talk, walk the walk. But in some ways, I grew up in Cisco because they let me do it and make mistakes or make success. So I think a lot of credit goes to them for helping cultivate the entrepreneurial side.
Rene Haas[20:40]
I want to talk about Arista, obviously, and AI. But just one last thing on the Cisco thing. They did the spin out and spin in of Luca, Mario, and Prem a lot. What made that work so well? All great guys.
Jayshree Ullal[20:52]
And great engineers. I think what started happening in Cisco, like it happens in many corporations, is the ability to innovate slows down no matter how good you are because you're a victim of existing products and things you're doing, right, so the only way to get more innovation was to cordon them off, if you will, and you could cordon them off in a different building, or you could cordon them off to spin ins. And so you have to also remember hiring talent was not trivial at that time. So the combination of needing talent, putting a focus, not letting them worry about the legacy business, the traditional business so they could go do this, I think made it very successful. The flip side of that, which I never did and I never was part of it, is because it did create a huge morale issue when they came back on the haves and the have nots. Right, because there are very many good engineers there. So I think it worked very well as long as they built products that were complementary to what Cisco's already doing. Then it was a natural. Nobody could object because they were adding accretive value.
Rene Haas[21:52]
So it's a win.
Jayshree Ullal[21:54]
Exactly, win-win.
Rene Haas[21:55]
So tell us about how 15 years at Cisco, you're doing amazing. You're running a giant business. What happens with Arista?
Jayshree Ullal[22:01]
Right - you know, I was in my mid-forties and there's this moment of, I guess, midlife crisis, if you want to call it that, where you kind of say, ‘oh, are you going to retire here or are you going to do something else?’ Right. And I felt like Cisco had become a very big company, but I also felt like I had contributed and done all I can. And while I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to do next, it wasn't clear it was Arista. I knew if I stayed on and got comfortable, I would never do anything different. So it was one of those, you know, forcing yourself to make a decision and think about it, where I knew if I had the gas in the tank to do one or two more, that now's the time to think about it. It was less about leaving Cisco and more about not knowing what I'd do next, but wanting to do something next.
Rene Haas[22:47]
Yeah, very similar to me.
Jayshree Ullal[22:49]
Yeah, I remember you telling me the same thing, right?
Rene Haas[22:51]
There was nothing wrong.
Jayshree Ullal[22:52]
Which is the best way, right?
Rene Haas[22:54]
Yeah. Wonderful company. And obviously what they've done is legendary. But for me, it was about scratching a different itch.
Jayshree Ullal[23:02]
Right. And in fact, I had a lot of people say, ‘you've got a powerful position. Why are you leaving? The company is great’. But I think, like you with NVIDIA, you get to a point where you say, ‘oh, that's true, but how can I make a difference again?’ And what I enjoyed at Cisco greatly was the impact and the contribution I could make to them. And is it possible to do it again? And I have to tell you, while I did it, there was an incredible fear of failure. I have to admit that. I was scared about that decision too, I had no idea what I was going to do. And everybody looks back and, you know, it looks like a rosy dream and journey come true. But it wasn't without its moments.
Rene Haas[23:37]
And the role you took was the CEO role at Arista?
Jayshree Ullal[23:40]
Yeah, so I took the summer off. I actually looked at a lot of different technologies. And security and, you know, energy and clean tech was very big at that point. So Vinod Khosla had a lot of companies I was looking at, but I ultimately concluded that I didn't have a Ph.D. on those topics. I had a Ph.D. in networking through work, not through a degree.
Rene Haas[24:04]
I love how you put that. That's pretty accurate.
Jayshree Ullal[24:05]
Yeah, except for the honorary degree I got for speaking at Santa Clara graduation. But the point was, if I wasn't going to leverage what I knew and build on it, and if I wanted to start again, then I would be making myself a whole lot more uncomfortable. And I don't know if I could contribute in the same fashion, right? So Andy and I have been friends back when he says we were kids. You know, he says I was a little girl. But I remind him, he was a little boy. I was in my twenties, he was in his early thirties, when I was AMD and he was at Sun. and he said, ‘Hey, I’ve funded this company and we're building the software stack.’ And they were just shaping what they wanted to do. They were thinking, should we build a switch? It was largely software. They weren't building any merchant silicon and hardware in any substantial way. And I said, Oh, switching, Andy, I just came out of that. Why would I do this again, right? But when I met the team, there was, again, back to the story you and I have talked about many times. It's the people. And I came away very impressed with the founders can do to build this amazing extensible operating system. And we didn't exactly know how it would shape. It was zero revenue, it was 30 engineers. But I remember Andy and I having this discussion saying it'd be great to go from 0 to 100 million, right? And I said, ‘yeah, right.’
Rene Haas[25:21]
So pre-revenue -
Jayshree Ullal[25:22]
Pre-revenue, zero.
Rene Haas[25:23]
About thirty people.
Jayshree Ullal[25:24]
30 engineers.
Rene Haas[25:25]
That's a very fun and scary time.
Jayshree Ullal[25:27]
Yes, it is. We were at the basement of a lawyer building that has since gone bankrupt. And we lived to tell the story.
Rene Haas[25:34]
And that was 2000-
Jayshree Ullal[25:36]
That was 2000..8. 2008. Right in the middle of the financial crisis and recession.
Rene Haas[25:40]
Incredibly brave.
Jayshree Ullal[25:42]
That's what everybody says. That’s what everybody says, yes.
Rene Haas[25:48]
And when did Arista go public?
Jayshree Ullal[25:47]
2014.
Rene Haas[25:48]
2014. So not long after.
Jayshree Ullal[25:49]
Six years. And it took six years because –
Rene Haas[25:51]
That’s very, very fast.
Jayshree Ullal[25:53]
In one way it's fast, but in another way, you know, we did take our time. We took four years to build a software system and another six years to productize and get revenue. We wanted to get substantial size. You know, be careful what you ask for. You know, you go public and then, as you know, you've got another whole constituent to please with shareholders. So we were north of 400 million when we went public with a market cap of 3 billion or so. But the best news of it all was, we had a product, you know, of high frequency trading, low latency. We had entered some of the world's largest cloud customers and defined and pioneered a leafspine architecture which until then was maybe done in HPC by Infiniband.
Rene Haas[26:35]
That’s huge.
Jayshree Ullal[26:37]
And I think the barrier to entry with our software was undeniable, you know. So I think getting all the trifecta of great innovation, great team and great customers was important.
Rene Haas[26:46]
When you took the job, thirty engineers, 2008, how far could you see? In other words, how big did you think it could be?
Jayshree Ullal[26:53]
It was one step at a time. I think we thought we could get from 0 to 100 million. I don't think we imagined a billion or 5 billion or the 10 billion that I promised the street in 2026. Ever.
Rene Haas[27:06]
You never imagined that.
Jayshree Ullal[27:07]
No, no, I would be kidding. I was not clairvoyant enough to think that way. However, we did know we were attacking a large market, but we also knew, having been at Cisco, we had deep regard and respect for what they had accomplished over decades, not years. So we were realistic about really focusing on the niche markets.
Rene Haas[27:25]
So when you were doing all hands and people would ask the question about how big of a company could we be, how would you answer that question?
Jayshree Ullal[27:31]
Yeah, that was probably a bad answer on my part. But we would say, ‘yeah, you know, we're not competing with Cisco, we're a niche networking company. We could get to 100 million, but there's a path to a billion dollar valuation’. I remember Andy talking about the road to a billion and I’d say Andy, how can we say that when we have no valuation right now? So he was the bolder of the two. I was the conservative one. But between the two, I think what we could definitely tell the teams at all hands is this is a special company. It's got a neat culture, its engineers, you know, driving engineers, even our customers were engineers. It's prioritizing innovation over sales quotas or commissions or just selling the last thing we wanted to sell and that we were building something with a strong foundation and a long journey. So that naturally attracted a set of people and it didn't attract some people, for sure.
Rene Haas[28:23]
Percentage of the original thirty who were there when you got there?
Jayshree Ullal[28:26]
More than half.
Rene Haas[28:27]
That's incredible. Yeah, it's actually really incredible.
Jayshree Ullal[28:28]
Yeah, absolutely.
Rene Haas[28:30]
Yeah. And now, you know, inside our company, I tend not to like to talk about the numbers too much because to me, they're kind of outcomes. But when we think about the opportunity in front of us now with all things with AI, it does appear almost unbounded.
Jayshree Ullal[28:46]
Yeah. You know, there are days we all have been through the bubble where you go, is this a bubble? But I think not for a number of reasons that I'm sure you've thought through, too, which is there may be moments of highs and lows, but there is a genuine need to improve applications and software and therefore a genuine need to build an infrastructure to do that, right? So unlike the Internet bubble where you had a whole bunch of sea legs that kind of went, ‘build it and it'll come and we'll wait for it to come’. These are responsible companies that are building up this infrastructure that have financial depth, but also conviction to spend more, to do more, right. So I think it is unique times. It may not last forever, but I think it's – just like the Industrial Revolution and the Internet Revolution, I think the AI revolution is very real.
Rene Haas[29:28]
It’s a good analogy because the Internet revolution, you remember that, yes, it was a bubble in the sense of the spend versus demand. But you had companies like Global Crossing and things of that nature that just vanished off the face of the Earth.
Jayshree Ullal[29:39]
Oh, my God, they did, yeah.
Rene Haas[29:40]
And then, the other big difference is, back in 2000, the most valuable companies on the planet were not Microsoft, Meta, NVIDIA, Amazon. We're now in a world where this growth is being fueled by, you know, the largest companies on the planet.
Jayshree Ullal[29:55]
Exactly.
Rene Haas[29:56]
There is a part of me, though, that looks at it and says at some point, does gravity take over and can we really make use of 100 gigawatts, a terawatt? But to your point, the dimension of problems that are unsolved that could be solved by artificial intelligence definitely appears to be unlimited. So I'm very much more on the bull side than the bear side. But it's going to be a fascinating thing to see where it goes.
Jayshree Ullal[30:18]
I think, you know, you could argue that the training models require all of these multi gigawatt, but you could also argue that you can have a distributed inference set of models, too, that require multiples of megawatt. Maybe it aggregates into a gigawatt, but whichever way you get there, going back to our analogy is we went from mainframe to super mini to client server to the PC to the phone, right? So it may come in a mini me mode or it may come in a more macro mode like it does right now. But it's going – it's here.
Rene Haas[30:49]
We're going to be serving tokens all day long.
Jayshree Ullal[30:51]
Small, medium or large. Absolutely.
Rene Haas[30:53]
So it's obviously been a huge success with Arista, long career at Cisco, AMD, Fairchild.
Jayshree Ullal[30:58]
And congratulations to you on Arm. It’s great to watch that as well.
Rene Haas[31:00]
Thank you so much. Who are your mentors that you've had in your career? A, any you'd like to name and B, what did they teach you?
Jayshree Ullal[31:08]
Well, I think along the way I've had lots of mentors. Let’s start with my younger age. My dad and mom were heavy influencers. They raised two daughters and they raised them to do whatever they could do and pushed us to the limits, right, my dad was a physicist himself. So, you know, he believed in tough love and he gave a lot of tough love. But definitely, I would say they were my early mentors. My family, my husband and everybody, huge supporters. You can't do what we do without that support. I still remember my husband encouraging me when I was in pure engineering and saying, ‘You can do it, you can go to the other side’. And I don't consider myself a trained business person. I don't have an MBA, but, you know, live and learn, as they say, right, so I think that's a huge part of – the family support is still important as well. You know, along the way, I've had some great bosses. Without naming them, some of them were in AMD. You may know them, do you know John East? John East was a wonderful human being, a great mentor and people there who trained me – everything from, okay you’re taking your first flight to Boston. ‘Let me show you on the map how you land and take the Sumner Tunnel and deal with those aggressive drivers there.’ Everything from how to travel to the first luggable I had, I think it was a compaq luggable top or whatever. And to my professors, I owe a lot to my physics teachers, my professors in undergrad who came to my going away when I left Cisco. And it's so nice that they remember me as a studious nerd, but for some reason they also remember me as having potential, which is nice, right? At that time, you're so not confident of yourself. And then obviously through my career, you know, I would not call them just – I would call them colleagues, mentors, friends, because after a while it isn't who you work for, it's the circle you form.
Rene Haas[32:52]
It is the ecosystem. Absolutely.
Jayshree Ullal[32:54]
It is the ecosystem. And I'm proud to call you a member of that ecosystem.
Rene Haas[32:57]
Ditto. And as we chatted before, it's amazing the similarities of our backgrounds, how we all got here – but successful CEO, successful mother, grandmother. Jayshree, thank you so much for joining us.
Jayshree Ullal[33:09]
Thank you for having me, Rene. It's an absolute pleasure.
Rene Haas[33:17]
Thanks for listening to this month’s episode of Tech Unheard. We’ll be back next month for another look behind the boardroom door. To be sure you don’t miss new episodes, follow Tech Unheard wherever you get your podcasts. Until then, Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media. And I’m Arm CEO, Rene Haas. Thanks for listening to Tech Unheard.
Credits[33:38]
Arm Tech Unheard is a custom podcast series from Arm and National Public Media.
Executive producers Erica Osher and Shannon Boerner. Project manager Colin Harden. Creative lead producer Isabel Robertson. Editors Andrew Meriwether and Kelly Drake. Composer Aaron Levison. Arm production contributors include Ami Badani, Claudia Brandon, Simon Jared, Jonathan Armstrong, Ben Webdell, Sofia McKenzie, Kristen Ray, and Saumil Shah. Tech Unheard is hosted by Arm Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.