DevRev's Dheeraj Pandey: From Distributed Work to Intelligent Teams
If you’d like to join me – and peers – for deeper conversations on innovation and leadership, get on this list for Fortt Knox Executive Communities, launching soon: mba.fortt.com.
This is an AI-assisted summary of my Fortt Knox 1:1 with DevRev CEO Dheeraj Pandey. View the full interview here:
In this Fortt Knox 1:1, Jon Fortt sits down with Dheeraj Pandey, CEO of DevRev, to explore how generative AI is reshaping work, leadership, and enterprise software itself. Pandey argues that modern work has become fragmented, tribal, and transactional, spread across departments, tools and geographies. Meanwhile, CEOs are left to manually stitch organizations together. DevRev’s core insight is that AI can only deliver real ROI if enterprise data is reorganized into a unified “machine memory” that spans sales, support, product and engineering, enabling agents to reason across the entire company rather than operate as shallow bots bolted onto legacy systems.
Pandey also traces his personal journey from Bihar, one of India’s poorest states, through elite technical education, early exposure to the internet, and formative engineering roles that culminated in founding Nutanix. He reflects on times Nutanix nearly collapsed, the mental endurance required to survive them, and how those lessons now shape his leadership philosophy. Looking ahead, Pandey frames DevRev’s ambition as nothing less than delivering a ChatGPT-like experience for enterprises: deeply customized, data-rich, and product-led, capable of serving both employees and customers at scale.
Today’s Toughest Problem
Pandey sees fragmentation as the defining problem of modern work. Talent is distributed, offices are optional. Departments have become tribes with their own data, incentives, and tooling. Earlier waves of enterprise software moved systems to the cloud but never truly solved internal collaboration or shared understanding. As a result, executives rely on human glue: managers who carry the company’s knowledge graph in their heads. DevRev’s answer is to replace that fragile, human-only stitching with AI agents grounded in a unified data model that captures customers, products, people, and processes together.
Origin Story
Pandey’s worldview was shaped early by scarcity, instability and education. Growing up in Bihar during periods of political corruption and economic strain, his family relied on extended relatives when state salaries failed to arrive. Academic excellence became a path to opportunity, leading him to IIT, early exposure to the internet, and eventually graduate study in the U.S. The combination of constraint paired with intellectual freedom instilled a bias toward systems thinking and long-term leverage rather than short-term fixes.
Death Valley
The hardest period of Pandey’s career came during Nutanix’s early years, when the company nearly failed multiple times. The challenge was making reliable software run on unreliable commodity hardware while depending on partners whose platforms could shift underneath them. Those years tested not just technical architecture but leadership. Pandey says entrepreneurship is fundamentally a mental game: resisting panic, avoiding blame and sustaining team belief through repeated setbacks until the system finally works.
Core Belief
At the heart of Pandey’s philosophy is endurance and integration. He believes great companies are built by people who keep trying without turning on one another, even when failure feels imminent. Culturally, that means stoic persistence; technically, it means building systems that integrate rather than silo. AI, in his view, should augment human work by holding institutional memory, spotting patterns and enabling self-service. People can then focus on judgment, creativity and relationships.
Strategic Imperative
For 2026, DevRev’s mandate is to deliver a consumer-grade AI experience for enterprises. Pandey is skeptical that incumbents like Salesforce or ServiceNow can fully make that leap given their legacy architectures. DevRev aims to unify agents for employees and customers on the same platform, reviving true product-led growth and making advanced AI accessible not just to large enterprises, but to startups and mid-market companies as well.
If you’d like to join me – and peers – for deeper conversations on innovation and leadership, get on this list for Fortt Knox Executive Communities, launching soon: mba.fortt.com.