Jeetu Patel

I recently noticed that for the past couple of decades, my LinkedIn “About” blurb is all about my professional background. I realized that that is a very incomplete story and not useful for anyone looking to learn about me or learn from my experiences. So here is an attempt to provide you additional context.

Background: I was born and raised in Mumbai, India. I was the only child and couldn’t do any wrong in my mother’s eyes. That remained the case until she passed away in my arms on Feb 7, 2023. I miss her so much every minute of every single day.

I moved to the U.S. in 1991. A very long list of people helped me along the way. Pure dumb luck! I have one daughter who is infinitely more mature than her dad and I live with my partner Jyoti and our daughter in the Bay Area.

I wish I could say most of my accomplishments were my own, but frankly I would say 1% is what I did with the opportunities and 99% was a combination of luck, and angels in the form of humans who helped me along the way. LinkedIn is becoming a great way to pay it forward and sharing my learnings with others who are going through struggles or looking to capitalize on opportunities they are afforded.

Accomplishments: the older I get, what I am most proud of in my life are the people I call loved ones who are a combination of friends, family and work colleagues that I choose to be with. But unlike what social media tells you about people, for me, not every day is great. There are hard days and easy days. There are sad days and happy days. For everyone. Yes, at every level. But most importantly there are long days that feel short. If your life has too many days that feel very long for too long, remember that life is shorter than you think and make the change.

I like surrounding myself with optimists and believe you become the sum average of people you spend the most time with. Professionally, I consider myself a builder. I love working with teams to build high impact products at scale that help build great businesses that improve lives of people globally. I’ve been lucky enough to be involved in infrastructure & apps, hardware & software, enterprise & SMB, for small, midsized and large companies across a multitude of technology areas over 3 decades in the workforce.

I am attracted to scale, impact and continuous learning, being surrounded by a smart group of hungry, curious people who are clear thinkers.

Lastly, I fundamentally believe AI is the most profound shift we have experienced in humanity and everything I do today at Cisco, I try to make sure I approach from an AI-first lens.