What happened
Cisco president Jeetu Patel handed Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, a 27-year-old ex-EzDubs founder who joined via Cisco's 2025 acquisition, a four-week test to prove a two-person team can rewrite legacy code, aiming for 98% within 24 months.
Why it matters
Patel is betting a small, young team can overhaul a $429 billion tech giant's legacy code, a scale of rewrite typically reserved for decades of experience.
WHO IT HITSThe bet lands on Cisco's engineering leadership and veteran developers, who may be asked to work alongside or learn from much younger hires, and on early-career job seekers who could see more entry-level roles framed as code-rewriting and 'reverse mentor' positions rather than data entry.
Summaries like this, every morning.
Cisco's president is testing whether a former founder buried in the organization can take on a legacy-code rewrite that would normally go to engineers with decades of tenure. Krishnamurthy, who joined through Cisco's $429 billion acquisition of his startup EzDubs, proposed the two-person approach himself, and Patel has given himself four weeks to see if it works before aiming for 98% of legacy code within 24 months.
The bet reflects Patel's stated view that fresh ideas come from people early in their careers, even when that creates friction with long-tenured staff. He describes tension as useful when it is aimed at ideas rather than personalities, and he has applied the same logic to interns and students, including a Stanford scholarship student he asked to email him monthly about AI. Patel says roughly one-third of his team are experienced operators, one-third systems thinkers, and one-third AI-native founders and engineers.
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