Nikesh Arora has been in the C-Suite for more than two decades, including a 10-year stint as Google’s chief business officer and — most recently — five years as Palo Alto Networks’ CEO. But the COVID-19 pandemic made him radically reconsider the gap between the executive floor and the rest of the company. “There was a tremendous amount of anxiety and fear and uncertainty,” he says, “and this person I was talking to says, ‘Listen, your job as a leader is to create certainty.’ [...] It’s simple: Tell your employees you have their back.” That’s why, for the past 30 months, Nikesh has been making time to virtually meet thousands of Palo Alto Networks employees on Zoom; he gets candid feedback, communicates company goals, and provides a safe space for everyone to bond.

In this episode, Nikesh and Joubin discuss honest CEOs, not having a career plan, process vs. outcomes, remaining independent inside Google, organizational superpowers, understanding your competitors, “evergreen companies,” the ChatGPT disruption, integrating product and sales, blindfolded communication, Evian water, cloud vs. on-prem security, and problem solvers vs. problem representers.

In this episode, we cover:

(02:15) Amazing people at Google
(04:05) T-Motion and T-Mobile
(07:36) “You cannot control the outcome”
(11:12) Growing up in India
(14:38) 400+ rejection letters
(18:26) Loving what you do
(19:55) Joining Google
(24:16) Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt
(27:01) Relocating to “the mothership”
(28:26) “He’s not Googly enough”
(31:12) Profit, innovation, and paranoia
(34:04) Cybersecurity and AI
(38:54) SoftBank CEO Masa Son
(43:04) Joining Palo Alto Networks
(47:04) Hiring as home-building
(50:25) “Nobody comes to work to screw up”
(53:28) Product and the power of marketing
(56:36) Cybersecurity “swim lanes”
(01:01:14) M&A strategy
(01:05:05) The two schools of due diligence
(01:07:42) Moving past problems
(01:10:59) Creating certainty for employees