Jayshree Ullal Quotes

“Building a good company takes constant hard work and heavy lifting. Making a great company is an even harder work-in-progress, demanding tenacity.”

“Going from a good to great company takes a monumental series of changes that are not incremental but exponential.”

“The ability to question the status quo of engrained habits and even oneself to navigate the right direction is vital.”

“What destroys many companies is complacence, stifling innovation, denying new trends.”

“An undisputed champion of an industry today can become stagnant in merely a few years.”

“Short-term profits, growth, momentum stock price and exit strategies are rewarded instead of differentiated engineering investment and customer quality.”

“A dedicated strategy and commitment to execute upon it defines courageous leadership with a culture of innovation and teamwork setting the tone.”

“Sometimes you need that re-architecture or significant shift in direction.”

“In the pursuit of greatness, the leader must be unassailable as a visionary and a person of action.”

“Our industry and those who judge us emphasize the wrong metrics in the evolution to greatness.”

“I had gained a lot of experience and growth at Cisco, where I had been for 15 years. But the company had grown from a billion dollars to over 40 billion by the time I left, so it had become a very large company.”

“She took slightly more than an engineering team doing some good technology and turned it into the thriving network switch company it is today.”

“Clearly, AI and campus are going to grow and do great guns for us, as it should, because they're two very large TAMs. These two are going to grow substantially in double digits.”

“One of the huge attractions of Arista was that it was small and entrepreneurial, with only 30 engineers. Most importantly, it was people I knew. The beauty of knowing the people you work with and creating a professional family is probably the biggest attraction.”

“Despite the data-driven era we live in, good leaders must make decisions without all the necessary data and be comfortable with some ambiguity. A clear, crisp extrapolation from available data to a decision is better than sitting on the fence in a prolonged manner.”

“What destroys many companies is complacence, stifling innovation, denying new trends, blinding people with overconfidence and even arrogance.”

“This great San Francisco State institution shaped me and guided my future. And it can be your rock just like it's my foundational rock.”

“In today's world, interdisciplinary fields are more important than ever. If you're in engineering, you might have to learn some business. If you're in computer science, you might want to learn something about data science and analytics.”