Hi everyone welcome to the A6 and Z podcast I'm Sonol and today we have yet another of our special book launch

episodes on the upcoming new book titled Play Nice to Win a CEO's Journey from

founder to Leader the book is by Michael Dell,

founder and CEO of one of the world's largest tech companies, Dell Technologies,

and while his book interweaves the journey of starting, transforming, and

keeping one's company, we focus primarily on the how to keep

and how to transform in this episode. We also discuss the challenges of being public while trying

to innovate beyond the behind the

scene stories with activists investors and we debate the underlying

tech platform shifts from the death of the PC to the current Cloud Wars.

So also joining this episode are A6 and Z general

partner Martine Kasato who is co-founder of Nysera which was acquired by

VMware. Martine's also written a ton about the trillion dollar paradox of cloud which you can find

at a six and z.com slash cost of cloud and we have a six and z co-founder Mark

Andresen who joins as well and plays Devil's Advocate throughout.

We begin with the Cloud Wars, then the Company Wars,

and finally end on leadership.

For context, Dell's company famously went public,

then private, then public again.

And we also referenced the write-up that we did here years ago called Making Sense of Dell

plus EMC plus VMware in 2015. There were many analyses of that deal at the time through the tech lens and there were many

analyses of the complicated financing of the transaction, but we were one of the very few who dug into

...