In pic: Cisco president Jeetu Patel. Credit: X (Twitter)
Cisco president Jeetu Patel is backing a 27-year-old engineer. Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy has been tasked with a project to rewrite 98% of the company’s legacy code within 24 months, a Fortune report claims. His approach combines ambitious targets with trust between employees, allowing younger recruits and experienced staff to question how work gets done. Krishnamurthy joined Cisco in 2025 after the company acquired EzDubs, the real-time translation startup he co-founded in 2023.
Because you want to have enough friction on the ideas, “I actually try to create tension in the teams.
Patel sees the assignment as an example of why younger employees should have opportunities to challenge established approaches, even when they work alongside colleagues with decades of experience. “Tension is good, ” Patel said. Despite his experience as a founder and CEO, Patel said he was working five organisational levels below him and was “buried away in the organisation doing something unstrategic.” You don’t want to have friction with people and personalities.
The report describes an initial four-week window to demonstrate the approach, with the broader 98% target set over two years. “We brought her in so that she could actually teach our people how to think completely differently.
It does not establish that the work is complete. “I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel told Fortune. Refactoring involves restructuring existing code. Patel, also Cisco’s chief product officer, said experienced employees can generate fresh ideas, but newcomers may ask questions that established teams no longer consider. “If you don’t hire the early-in-career [workers], and you just let your workforce continue the way that they were, where do fresh ideas get injected? How do you challenge the status quo?” he said. He argued that teams need enough trust to pursue difficult goals without turning disagreements into personal conflict. “What you have to do is establish enough trust with people to say you are going to be expected to create unreasonable goals for yourself,” he said. “And so, in order to go out and achieve those unreasonable goals, think outside of the box.” Patel said he treats interns as reverse mentors, learning from their perspectives rather than assigning them only routine tasks. After consistently following through, she secured a Cisco internship and redesigned something experienced staff had struggled with, although the report did not identify the project. “I didn’t bring her in so that she can do grunt work and do data entry,” Patel said.
The two spoke during Patel’s visit to Cisco’s San Francisco office. Krishnamurthy proposed that a two-person team could rewrite the company’s legacy code, which is older software that remains in use. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts. Tokens are the units AI systems process when handling requests and generating responses. He described meeting a Stanford student named Baya and asking her to email him monthly about what she had learned about AI. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.