Geek of The Week: Sudheesh Nair, CEO of ThoughtSpot Inc.
ThoughtSpot Inc. is a leader in the field of business intelligence and analytics. Their AI-driven analytical engine is capable of finding connections between the data a business collects to help inform them about what they should be doing. The AI search engine detects trends, anomalies, segments within the data as well as leading indicators. While it’s doing this, it learns from the search history what the client is likely to ask, so in the future, it can respond immediately with the most relevant information. The company boasts a roster of between 250 and 500 people. As the CEO of ThoughtSpot Inc., Sudheesh Nair chairs a company responsible for one of the most advanced analytical AI engines that the world has ever seen.
Sudheesh was previously the CEO at Nutanix, but he didn’t start at the top of the hierarchy. He began working as the company’s first head of sales. During his seven years at Nutanix, he brought the company’s revenue from zero to over $1 billion. Prior to Nutanix, his background in sales saw him hold a series of leadership positions in this field throughout his early career. Initially, Sudheesh was known as an angel investor, putting his money into disruptive startups, one of which was ThoughtSpot Inc. With the revelation of what ThoughtSpot could accomplish, Sudheesh left Nutanix behind to become CEO for one of the fastest-growing companies in the tech space today.
Sudheesh joined ThoughtSpot in 2018, intending to turn the company into a disruptor. He believes that business intelligence operations within the field of marketing were severely limited. Instead of the current paradigm which sees decisions made by the executives of the company, Sudheesh thinks that decisions should be more democratic. By pushing ThoughtSpot to challenge the mentality of the leaders in the field, Sudheesh has made waves and has led to many companies reconsidering the way they do business intelligence.
According to Sudheesh, ThoughtSpot is about creating a more fact-driven world – a very pertinent consideration seeing how polarized society has become. ThoughtSpot was designed to be approachable and usable by people who don’t have a background in programming. With Sudheesh at the head of the company, the software that his company makes represents his ideal of democratizing business intelligence. Instead of making enterprise tools obscure and specialized, he believes in the approachability of interfaces. ThoughtSpot will make it easier for regular employees to interact with the analytical engine and accept it as something they can use.
As more companies start to realize the benefits of having their entire employee-base hooked into their data analytics center, both Sudheesh and ThoughtSpot will have a massive task cut out for them – to stay ahead of the competition. For the time being, though, Sudheesh has his sights set on a bright future where everyone can have a say.
