Cisco chief found a 27-year-old ex-founder ‘buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic’—now the Gen Zer is rewriting 98% of its code
Source: Fortune ·
Meet Paddy, the 27-year-old Cisco’s president calls an “energizer bunny.” The Gen Z ex-founder has been given unlimited AI tokens and told to “go nuts.”
From the source
Gen Z can’t catch a break. Entry-level jobs are vanishing; some 40% of bosses say they plan to hire fewer grads because AI can do the job cheaper, and young workers are routinely slammed for showing up late and refusing to put in overtime for free. Cisco’s president and chief product officer Jeetu Patel isn’t buying it—he’s just handed one of the company’s biggest jobs to a 27-year-old he found hidden in the org chart “five levels” below him. “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune at a small roundtable dinner. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.” The “him” is Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, or “Paddy,” as Patel affectionately calls him. He joined Cisco in 2025 after the $429 billion tech giant acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup Krishnamurthy cofounded in 2023. And despite coming in as a former founder with CEO experience, he was, in Patel’s words, “buried away in the organization doing something unstrategic.” That…