YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeetu Patel

lines on the record: 107
first: 2026-02-26
most recent: 2026-02-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Don't delegate the storytelling and the storytelling is not a marketing exercise after you built the product. The story is why you build the product to make the story come real. And so make sure that the story is there first. And then that story has evidence. Based on the products that you're building.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is it massively Lenny simplified our business? And you know why? Because we have such a broad business with so many different industries, it's impossible for someone to be a deep expert in every single one of them across the board. There's just way too much surface area. But the things that we want to convey to the market that the market should take away from us, if that story is not something that I understand well enough to be able to convey it, How do I first expect 20,000 of my sellers to be able to go tell it to the market? And how do I expect my customers? Be able to digest that story, there's zero chance that would happen. And so That was my kind of big takeaway from this”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three, four, five, six, seven layers between you and the person who's actually doing the job on the front line. What you don't want to do is play the telephone game and assume that people will just cascade it when you go to your team and then say, okay, that team will cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team, cascade to the next team. Every one of them will add a flavor with well-intentioned And then by the time it gets to the end, people won't know what it is. So always own telling the story. And I'm like, that seems like it's a lot because if you have a very broad portfolio, we do all of these events. It's, you know, like I'm going to have to stand on stage for. 90 minutes and just talk about please do that. Make sure you don't. And I initially, the hidden benefit that”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got this job, he pulled me aside. He's like, Git, I'm going to tell you something. I'm going to give you some advice and take it or leave it, but I think it's going to be important for you to keep it in mind. Like, what's that? And he goes. Whatever you do, don't think about your story of the company as a marketing exercise. Think about it as the most intrinsic Foundational exercise of the company. And always be the custodian of the message. Don't delegate that to someone else to give it. Because if you have”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the presence of scale. And operating within scale seemed like it was like, yeah, you have more opportunity to do it. What I found. Over the years, not just at Cisco, but even because I ran a small startup in Chicago for like 17 years before I moved over to the valley. I found in the large companies communication framework and the lossiness of communication, the telephone game, so to say Has a profoundly negative effect if you're not intentional about it and if you're not careful of it. Was this board member that we had? There's a couple board members, our lead director, Michael Capellis, is amazing. There's this other board member. Kevin is amazing. And then there's this one board member, Wes Bush, who we recently rolled off, but he used to be on our board.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know if it was, I mean, I instinctively kind of knew it, but it was very, very accentuated at Cisco because when you like, you know, when people say, oh, is... Scale hard And my perspective has always been that the absence of scale is way harder What do I mean by that? Like if I have a startup. With three people And we need to prosecute another idea. And that idea requires five people working on it. Have to go raise money It's an intel, or I have to pivot my entire business If you have 30,000 people and you have an idea that requires five people, you just figure out a way that you allocate the dollars internally. And say, let's go prosecute this idea So, in my mind, I always felt like absence of scale was way harder.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not long conversations at our point in time, but we're constantly in contact with each other. And I feel like that only happens when you've established enough trust. My first boss when I moved to California is this guy named Rick Devenuti. And another guy named Jeremy Burton, Rick Devenudi is still my coach. I see him every two weeks. Jeremy is someone that's a very dear friend of mine and your neighbors and be moved and bought a place next to his just so that we could be close to him. And these are like special people in your life that have enriched your life in very different ways that I think you just have to make sure that you treasure.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every six weeks in Palo Alto, we have done, you know, and it's one of the most special things that I still do, and it's a tradition now. It's been going on for six years. And I love it. You look at someone like Chalk. We have start with my day with talking to him in the morning. We text each other. And then I end the day talking to him in the evening. And we probably touch pace at least four or five times a day.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. He's the CEO of Cisco. He's the chair of the business roundtable. He's very dear friend of mine. And I feel like there's a lot to learn from that kind of mental model and mindset. And I've been lucky enough for any of that. This is just dumb luck. The people that I've worked with and for are all very, very close to me. And I just don't let them go from my life. And so one of the things, for example, is I worked with Aaron. And then when I was leaving, it was very emotional. But I wanted to do something different, but we committed to each other that we're going to have dinner every six weeks. And Aaron, and there's another co-founder, Jeff Kwiser and I, three of us.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's just way too confident to let anything. And so the thing I've learned from Chuck is the importance of confidence and the importance of knowing what you're good at and what you're not good at and where you're not good. You're going to assemble a team of people around you. He's just masterful of that. And it happens by the way.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have happened if he had not hired me and given me agency to go do the things that I needed to get done. He was very much completely in sync with me on what needed to happen. And so, you know, when I saw this article, I had no idea the report. I reached out. I'm like, hey, I just want to let you know this was not me saying it's someone. I said, don't worry about it, man. What I've learned in life is if you don't care about who gets the credit, you just go a lot farther. In life, and it's so profound. In so many ways that.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chuck Robbins is one of Favorite humans, and not just because I work for him. I work for him because he's one of my favorite humans. And I've learned from him, he had this kind of great line. There was this. A piece of press that I Our media is very sensationalist by definition. They will try to create a very polarized view about the world where there actually isn't one. And most things in my life, things are not as extreme as you hear on the headlines of the media. It's somewhere in the middle, right? And there was one time that there was this. Article that ran And it was about giving me an unnecessary amount of credit. And frankly, not giving chuck is much credit about something that he has actually done.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why are we not going out and building things that are very, very B2C? Because I don't think we have a distribution channel that actually is within our DNA Don't think that we've got permission to play there. An area where it would be extremely hard for people to grow that Cisco should be the one who's participating in that. Now, can we do it? Of course we can do it. Is that where we want to go or do we want to go where there's so much opportunity in the areas where we can actually prosecute with the ability to have operate from a position of strength? That you just get a much better return for the dollar that you invest.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then, and those new ideas that keep coming up, people will always say, Oh my goodness, this company is doing so well. We should just go into that market, or we should just go into this market. And 90% of the times, 99% of the times, I find myself saying no. And the reason for that is you have to be extremely selective of where you expend your calories. And that caloric expenditure is where, you know, if you expend your calories in a very focused way, the results you'll get from that focus area tend to be outsized and disproportionate. You dissipate That caloric burn across multitude of different areas, nothing gets enough girth to be able to go out and drive it all the way through. And so why are we not in... Business to consumer tech at Cisco”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Level of intuition on what problems are the right ones to solve, you still, and yes, AI can help you with all of that, but it's not something that's where humans have a superpower. They have instinct, and they can actually make sure that they can fulfill out a vision that says this is what I think this could be in the fullness of time. And so that I think is pretty important. So the more it gets for us to get the bottlenecks out to generate code, the harder it gets for us to make sure that there's not AI slop in the market and that we actually are very selective on what are the things that are going to be the most important things that solve the most important problems moving forward. Example of permission to play is, I mean, there's so many ideas that a company the size of Cisco, we have constantly New ideas that keep coming up”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Agree with you in the sense that if generating code is something that becomes abundant. That doesn't mean you're going to have better technology just because you can generate a lot of code. You still need human judgment. You still need...”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that is not the biggest reason he's successful. The biggest reason he's successful is he has an enormous amount of staying power in the game. Going back to my daughter's comment of no matter what everyone else says, his convictions and belief, he will actually stick by them and actually get through the hardest times.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your scale as an advantage, and you have to use the areas where you've got the ability to have permission to play, where people feel like this is very logical for a company like Cisco. Like when we say we are going to network the GPUs and make sure that we actually have a trusted system in AI, that is not far-fetched for someone to go out and think about because it's a very natural thing for us to do because for the past 40 years, we've been doing it for the rest of the infrastructure that was not AI. And so that's not a far cry to say, okay, we'll now do it for AI. And I think that was an area that Aaron and I spent a fair, and by the way, I'm glad that he took that out of me. There's so much I've learned from him. The biggest area I've learned from him is you never give up. And persistence beats intellect and stamina beats intellect any day of the week, twice on Sunday. And that guy is as smart as they come.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“End up spending a lot of money on product where the product people think these sales guys don't get it, they don't know how to sell it, especially in enterprise software. And the salespeople think these product guys don't get it. They don't know how to build it. And so I think in order to stop that, what you have to do is you have to actually use”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That box built it versus another company building it. Is it going to be logical for people that Cisco built it versus another company building it? So that's this notion of permission to play, the right to win. Do we have a right to win in that area? Because we have permission to play. Do we have the route to market to be able to take that product and get it to mass scale distribution? And if you can do those things right, then actually your dollars that you expend on building product actually have an outsized return. If not, then you can actually spend a”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things that we would always talk about is. In the areas that we're going to participate Do we have permission to play? Every company Has to make sure that the way in which they provide points of insertion and logical entry into a market is a lot of times dependent on do you have the permission to play in that market? Do you have an avenue to get to have a route to market to be able to take that product? Just by building a product that is amazing in some area, you don't end up actually getting it to mass scale distribution. And so, one of the things that we would always do is ask ourselves the question we're building this new category or we're building this new capability. Going to be logical for people”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. And by the way, some of your beliefs and your System around you might change, but values tend to be pretty long lasting, and culture and a company tends to be pretty long lasting. Like, you know, when we Ben Hovitz talks about this very eloquently, the culture is just a set of norms that a company actually. It's not a set of beliefs, it's a set of behaviors that you exude within a company. It's actually very, very true. Because when things aren't going right, how do people behave to go solve problems and come together? And that actually forms your cultural norms. And I think those cultural norms are, it's very important to be intentional about it. And as you have more automation in the world, being intentional not just with humans, but also with machines and what you want to do to create the guardrails, I think is a pretty important.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would take zero credit for it. I think she deserves a lot of credit for growing up to be he or she has become and her mother.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Higher, and we were lucky on that front. And we know it can go sideways the other way too. But I do feel like right now, at least for my one daughter, what we try to do is get her exposed to the technology, but make sure that we focus a lot more on the values that we need to have that govern us on a day-to-day basis, you know, kindness, you know, not being arrogant, hard work, work ethic, those things matter. And I don't think those are timeless in my mind. I don't think those change because take risks, be creative, that kind of stuff.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everyone disagreed with me, I'm still good. Now, by the way, I have to kind of coach her on that hey, when you get new data, be open minded to changing your mind. But it was actually a very interesting dynamic, which is, you know, if we can have them be exposed to technology but have the right value system, you might actually have the best of both worlds. And the day ain't over yet, she's 15. There's a lot of chances for her getting influenced by external factors and all of that. But what you have to do is make sure that you instill the right values, but then also expose them to the reality of what the world is today and not complete the insulate them from that. And so the way that it worked out, it did end up working well. And we were lucky for no credit to us. She was able to use technology to get her EQ higher.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's like, well, can you name five things that you feel so convicted about that if the entire world disagreed with you? This is the day before she's turning 15, okay? The entire world disagreed with you, you would still feel like you were right on that, and that would not waver you. Like, I have a certain core set of things that I believe in Where I am completely confident that if.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Constantly being glued to your phone all the time and not being able to actually put that down and have a conversation. I think it's an important skill in humans to have and preserve over time. And in fact, as AI does more for us, we should be able to have more of this time. I don't have to worry about every notification that's coming on my phone every minute of the day because maybe I can be more present in the moment that I'm in. She just turned 15 and the night before she was turning 15 what I realized is she is so emotionally mature. We were sitting down one night and she's like, hey, dad, just so you know. Feel really good right now about having a very strong value system. Oh, okay. What does that mean? And say more.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We made a choice, and I didn't know how the choice was going to go. That was actually not even an active choice, it was a passive choice. Frankly, even might have been slightly intellectually lazy in the way that we did it, but it actually worked out pretty well. The sense that we didn't really deprive her of the use of technology. Like as a school of thought that says keep technology away from the kids for a while, we didn't do that. And frankly, I didn't know how it was going to work out because there are things about the way that the generation is, and by the way, all of us, not just any generation, but this kind of.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, the things that he is doing right now are nothing short of extraordinary. And for all the critique that one can have, the level of kind of deep thinking that's going on with his company, it's just crazy.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The society by itself. And I do think that those are important kind of checks that you have to keep in mind. But the thing that people sometimes miss out in this very polarized narrative, which is we are either going to have nothing to do in society or this is going to be completely useless as a piece of technology, I think that's not a helpful narrative. In fact, what is helpful is saying as we reconstruct society for the next phase, how can we make sure that life gets infinitely better? How can we make sure that diseases get solved? How can we make sure that poverty gets eradicated? How can we make sure that how people learn and find excitement and joy out of life gets compounded meaningfully? If that happens, I think there's goodness that comes out of this.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Writing code with OpenAI's kind of model and development tool was the first three months we were screwing around with this. Then there was this light bulb that ran off. In fact, there was a forward deployed engineer from OpenAI that told us about this. She was like, hey, stop trying to think of this as a tool. Think of this as a teammate that got added to your team. And your framing will change. And the way in which you actually use the technology will change. That essentially, if you compound that to how society operates, that's going to be pretty profound as an implication. While keeping in mind that the safety and security risks are non trivial. And they're real. And you can't be completely flippant about them because how an AI Identifies its own success and its own ambition. Because it is in service of humans. It is not to go out and.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI is looked at largely as a productivity tool and an aggregation mechanism. I have data all over and I'm going to be able to make sure that language can be used to compose that data in a way that I can give you, Lenny, the answer to the question that you're looking for. That, I think, is like the 0.0001% of the tip of the iceberg, right? The reality is we will have. Original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge, and we will have the physical world get augmented to language. Where capacity is augmented to humans Will we have to be careful of is that that capacity is working on behalf of humans. But if that capacity is augmented to humans, you can now do things. You really care to do. Not do things that you don't care to do. And so our biggest realization that we had when we were using Codecs, for example.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to keep in mind that exponentiality happens across multiple dimensions all at once. So if you do have an indefinite span of life, Have to assume that humans are creative enough, that they're going to find a way to have three day crop cycle. And they probably will have 5,000-story skyscrapers. And there will be a bunch of things in society that we have assumed are not solvable that will now be solvable. So when you go back to your question and say, what changes in this entire equation that has not been factored in well? Think today.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago, I'd had a chance to meet with Ray Gurzwell. He was the chief scientist at Google for a while, and I think he still is. And he had talked about, he was writing this book called Live Long Enough to Live Forever. And so I was talking to him. I'm like, what is the impact to human population if all of a sudden you can have 15 generations living simultaneously because we have an indefinite span of life? Because now all of a sudden, everything has to change. Housing work, how does agriculture work? How does transportation work? How does everything changes? And he looked at me and he had the most profound answer. And he said, you know, most people can't think exponentially because they always think exponentially maybe on a single dimension. What ends up happening These things is you can sometimes”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That need to operate like one coherent cluster, which means that they're completely in sync. Every GPU is in sync with each other. When you're doing a training run, and that requires a very sophisticated set of technologies that we build to make sure that you could have two data centers, 800 kilometers apart, but boy, they run completely in sync with each other. And that's what Cisco does. We provide the networking, we provide the optics technology, we provide the safety and security technology, we provide the observability. We provide the data platform, all of those things together for making sure that we provide critical infrastructure for the AI era.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That connected together is the operative word. That's what we end up doing is Nvidia makes the GPUs and we connect those GPUs together. AMD makes the GPUs, we connect them together. And now what's happened, Lenny, is you have these data centers that might be hundreds of kilometers apart.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does Cisco do then? If you think about a GPU, which is what everyone now is very clear because of the great job that Jensen has done, that here is what a GPU's core contribution is to AI If these GPUs aren't networked together, you don't have AI because it used to be that you could train a model on a single GPU, but then what happened was the model got too big to be put on a single GPU, so then you had a server with eight GPUs that got connected together so you could train a model with eight GPUs. But then that wasn't good enough. So then what happened was you said, I'm going to have a rack of servers that I'm going to network together. That at some point wasn't big enough. And so then they said, I'm going to have a cluster of racks that are connected together.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number two there's a trust deficit. If people don't trust these systems, they're not going to use them. And right now, there's a lot of mistrust in these systems. You know, hallucination is a feature when you're writing poetry, but when you're trying to go out and run predictable systems, hallucination can be a bad thing. And these models are unpredictable. They're non-deterministic. And so they have to make sure that they have safety and security kind of factored into them. And then the third area is a data gap. So far, we've trained these models with human generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models. And every company is going to differentiate based on their own proprietary enterprise data being used to train the models, synthetic data, and machine data, which is where most of our growth is. And that third category of machine data we can play a massive role in at Cisco.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cisco is a critical infrastructure company for the AI era. What does that mean? You think about where the constraints are right now, if you think that AI is going to be one of the biggest movements and then you ask yourself the question, what could hold AI back? There's three things where we feel like we can have a direct impact that can hold AI back. Number one is there's an infrastructure constraint. There's just not enough power, compute, and network bandwidth in the world to go out and satiate the needs of AI.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's okay. We don't have to think about this in a zero sum manner in order for me to win, someone has to lose. We can partner because if a customer has made a choice of going with company A and company B and we happen to be one of those two companies, we owe it to the customer to invest in their success in that other company. Because if the customer succeeds, that success has a flow-through rate to you. That's going to be pretty high. And so that's what we did. And I think that's been those principles are building great products, but making sure that it operates like a platform and having an open ecosystem. I think has been kind of central. And then not being confused about the fact that we'll be AI first from the top down.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't have to buy everything all at once because we also want to be realistic about the fact that not every customer only uses Cisco top to bottom. There's an ecosystem. So loosely coupled, but tightly integrated. You don't have to buy everything all at once. But boy, when you do buy two things together, they work like magic. So that was the second big thing we did. And then the third one we did was we said, let's make sure that we have a mental model shift in the company. And we did this about five, five and a half years ago when I first joined this was a very deliberate decision, which was... We cannot operate in a walled garden. We have to make sure that we operate in an open ecosystem, which means we have to be completely comfortable. With having a competitor that we're going to partner with.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're going to just run a bunch of $40 million businesses and break it up into a series of $40 million businesses. That's actually not a good thing for the company. So the thing we did was we said we have to become not a holding company of 251 acquisitions and thousands of different products. We have to become a platform company. And the characteristic of the platform is you have to be tightly integrated where the customer feels the same emotion no matter what product of ours they use, right? There's the same set of expectations that can be served. Reliability, trust, elegance and design, solving a problem in the most efficient way. Those are the things we want to strive to do.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me to move up the ranks, I need to be a general manager, which means I need to have my own sales team, I need to have my own marketing team, I need to have my own product team, I need to have my own engineering team, I'm going to make sure I run my own silo. And if you're a $40 billion business in product revenues, $45 billion, whatever we were at the time. And then all of a sudden your goal is...”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to reassure them that that was not the case, but the reverse was guaranteed to be the case that if you didn't use AI, if you weren't going to be dexterous in whatever job function you're doing, Then your job is probably not going to be that relevant over here in the long run. So that was the first thing that we did was a, I'm not a big fan of top-down hierarchy of going out and doing things. In fact, deep down inside, I don't respect hierarchy as much. I feel like it can constrain you at times. But I wanted to make sure on this one, we were very, very deliberate. The entire company is on the same page. We are an AI first company, right? And this happened. We were kind of working towards it even prior to Chad GPT, but ChatGPT became that seminal moment in November of 22 that we actually did that. So that was one. Number two was we had to make sure that we defined what success looked like. The way that individual success was defined was everyone wanted to be a GM at Cisco. They wanted to own their own fiefdom, be a general manager, because they felt like in order for...”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when you have conviction about something that's happening that is going to be a bet that you need to place, like, you know, what most people think in large companies is large companies don't experiment. That is in fact not true. Large companies experiment a lot. What large companies don't do is when an experiment works, they don't go all in and double down. They try to keep hedging. Didn't hedge on AI. We said we're going to go all in. That was number one. What that meant was we had to get people to understand that their personal success and the success of the company are very aligned in us getting dexterous with the use of AI. That means that if they feel like Some reason AI is going to take their job, or AI is going to be negative for them.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We are dealt with, you know, like every company has their own set of constraints, and we have our own set of constraints, and we have to make sure that given those constraints, we have to actually innovate really well. Now, what has, what are the two or three things that have happened that have really helped us out? One was being very clear on what is up for debate and what is not up for debate. Because what can end up happening is you can always have a pocket veto in a large company where if you ask enough number of people, people say, no, if you're a large company, you ask enough number of people, someone's going to say no.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Innovation in my mind is a choice. So, like, you know, I always find it interesting when people say, well, you know, you're a large company, you can't innovate, you're a small company, you can innovate. It's like, no, it's just a choice. Every day you come into work and you can choose to be thinking about being creative or you can choose to not be creative. It's like a little choice you can make every hour, right? Every minute of every day. And so we made that choice that says Cisco is going to be not just an iconic company and not Chuck Robbins, our CEO, says this very eloquently. He's like, I want Cisco not just to be an iconic company. I want Cisco to also be an iconic and innovative company. And so we got to make sure that we are actually Innovating with the set of constraints.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things are The odor I get, the more I believe that we are actually in a simulation. The first time I heard that concept, I thought it was such an absurd concept. Now I'm like, you know, this might actually be happening. Never know.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Birth rates are going down, and we have a demographic shift that's happening in the world, and there's going to be more people that are in the older age bracket than the younger age bracket. And those older people are going to need... Folks to take care of them. And historically in society, that's actually always been the case, but we might be at a point where that might not be the case. And when that's not the case, we worry about AI taking our jobs. I think that survival of humanity depends on a successful AI. Because at some point, if you have In a demographic where you don't have enough people who take care of them, that could cause a lot of human suffering. So I don't think people talk about this enough. And that's something that we have to take a moment and digest that this is so important for our collective success moving forward.”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is I'd say that it's harder when you go beyond some of the most more obvious use cases. Like, for example, coding is a very, very good use case that you're starting to get a lot of success in. I mean, we just had our first product that we think we'll be in the next two weeks, 100% written with AI, right? I don't think that's as easy when you go into every other function in the business. And that was actually very apparent that, hey, this is going to require some nuance and understanding of how every business works. And then the third one, which is a really interesting takeaway, and Mark Andreessen talked about this in your podcast a few days ago. In fact, when I talked to him, I actually started with your podcast because it was so interesting. And then we dug into it a little bit more. And then, you know, Kevin Scott was also talking about this. But this notion of the fact that”
2026-02-26 · Lenny's Podcast · AI is critical for humanity’s survival: Cisco president on the AI revolution | Jeetu Patel · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source