From being fired to leading an $8bn tech company

Sanjay Poonen’s journey to leading an $8bn cybersecurity and AI company did not follow a predictable path. In fact, one of the defining moments of his career came when it appeared to be derailed entirely.

“Effectively, I was fired”, he recalls of his time as a marketing executive early in his career. At the time, the decision came as a shock. But in hindsight, it became a turning point, one that reshaped how he viewed leadership, identity and growth.

“The human spirit is incredibly resilient,” he says. “Sometimes you need those types of events that allow you to bounce back.” That idea of resilience runs through Poonen’s leadership philosophy today.

He argues that careers and businesses are rarely linear. “Your life is not a straight line, it curves,” he says. The key is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to become comfortable with it.

This mindset is closely tied to what he describes as a “growth mindset”, a concept popularised by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck. At its core is a shift from certainty to curiosity. “A fixed mindset is a know-it-all. A growth mindset is a learn-it-all,” Poonen explains.

For leaders, that distinction matters. Organisations inevitably hit moments where progress stalls. The response, Poonen argues, should not be to double down on existing assumptions, but to question them relentlessly. “The most important question any leader can ask is why, why, why,” he says.

That culture of inquiry is something he actively builds within Cohesity. Growth mindset is not a slogan, but a practice, reinforced in meetings, embedded in leadership training and modelled by the executive team.

The goal is to create an environment where learning is continuous and challenge is encouraged. Equally important is how leaders position themselves within that environment.

Poonen rejects the traditional top-down hierarchy, where authority flows from the top. Instead, he advocates for a more inverted structure. “We have to invert that pyramid,” he says, placing leadership in service of employees and, ultimately, customers.

Poonen’s own experiences have shaped this perspective. Being fired taught him not only resilience but empathy. “It teaches you to have tremendous empathy for someone you’re going to have to fire one day,” he says.

His approach is to support departing employees, often acting as a reference and maintaining relationships. “Don’t treat people any way different from how you’d want to be treated.”

Beyond leadership, the conversation also highlights the rapidly evolving technology landscape. Cybersecurity threats are growing in both scale and sophistication, driven in part by AI.

“In the cyber industry, you have to be right every single time… they’re right only once,” Poonen notes. The implication is clear: prevention alone is no longer enough. Organisations must build resilience, the ability to recover quickly when breaches occur. This shift from defence to recovery is becoming a defining feature of modern cybersecurity strategy.

At the same time, AI is creating new opportunities. Cohesity’s use of generative AI to analyse vast datasets illustrates how technology can unlock insights that were previously inaccessible. From summarising contracts to identifying patterns across millions of documents, the potential is transformative.

Yet Poonen’s focus remains grounded. Technology may change rapidly, but the fundamentals of leadership endure: curiosity, resilience, empathy and a willingness to learn.

Or as his own story suggests, sometimes the moments that feel like setbacks are the ones that shape what comes next.