Bipul Sinha on Rubrik, Risk, and Reinvention
24 Oct 2025 · 40 min
In this podcast, host Imran Khan interviews Bipul Sinha, the engineer‑turned‑venture‑capitalist‑turned‑Rubrik founder. Sinha explains how his three‑fold background (engineer, investor, CEO) shapes his view of risk, product‑market fit, and rapid reinvention. He frames the rise of generative AI as a shift from a knowledge economy to an intuition economy, arguing that AI will replace many application‑level software and create a new “agentic AI” layer that expands the cyber‑attack surface. Rubrik’s response is a cyber‑resilience platform that treats AI‑driven threats as a core risk, exemplified by the recent “Agent Rewind” feature that lets customers undo undesirable AI actions. Sinha discusses Rubrik’s origin in the forgotten backup‑and‑recovery market, the counter‑consensus strategy that turned it into a cyber‑recovery platform, and the relentless recruiting and product‑market‑fit tactics that accelerated its growth. He shares his talent philosophy—hiring learners with a beginner’s mind over deep expertise—and how Rubrik’s culture emphasizes grit, self‑awareness, and first‑principles thinking. The conversation then moves to Sinha’s venture‑capital career, highlighting the importance of counter‑consensus ideas, learning‑oriented teams, and aggressive growth inflection. He predicts a restructuring of the VC landscape: fewer mid‑market IPOs, larger capital checks for AI‑intensive companies, and a shift toward “intuition economy” startups. Finally, Sinha reflects on his personal preference for entrepreneurship as the role that lets him live in the unknown while staying in control.
Chapters
Foreign. Excited. My dear friend Beepul Sina actually my idol. I want to be like you man. You are engineer, you are an investor and you founded Rubrik and obviously founding investors and first board member of Nutanix and also Hootsuite. So, so excited and so many things to cover with you. Thank you so much for making the time. I know you're very, very busy.
Thank you Imran. So good to see you my friend. I'm excited to be here.
We'll cover a lot of things. So let's start with your background. You had a fascinating journey, right? You went to Wharton for business school but you're also an engineer, you were an investor, you're an entrepreneur. Talk us through. Most people only do one thing in life, you know and how, you know, you have done all different things, you know and how that changed you.
I jokingly say that I sat on all sides of the table. I'm three things. I'm an engineer, I'm an investor. I'm also a founder CEO. Being an engineer teaches you how to build. Being an investor teaches you as how to spot a market opportunity. And being a founder CEO you think about how to scale a business, how to create an enduring institution. And I bring all three skills together in navigating the products and market and business. Because if you look at the era that we are living in, we are living in an age of acceleration where the product market fit are short lived and almost dead as a result. You have to always reinvent and reinvent. So being an engineer and being an investor helps me to understand risk and the product market and and then being a CEO allows me to create framework to scale innovation. So it's a fascinating time and I'm very happy to be a part of it.
You are absolutely right. This is the kind of time that people need like you who can think from three different angles. So we want to talk a lot about Rubrik but given your different perspective, I want to hear A lot of times it's coming out as I talking to a lot of investors. We used to say software going to eat the world. Now AI is coming and disrupting software. And for the first time technology companies are being disrupted by technology companies. So what do you think about AI? Do you think AI will significantly change the software landscape? A lot of software companies will really struggle. What's your view on AI and how that impacts software industry?
Let me give you a little bit of my own framework as how to think about AI. If you go back in time, we were an agrarian economy, call it like 300, 400 years ago from agrarian economy we went into industrial economy. And with the advent of computer we went into the knowledge economy. And knowledge economy stayed with us for many, many years, several decades. And with this ChatGPT moment with generative AI, we are transitioning into an intuition economy from a knowledge economy. And knowledge economy is pretty much over. Because knowledge is now at the fingertip of everyone around the world. Anybody with high bandwidth data access and a mobile phone has all the world's knowledge in their fingertips. So how do they create value? They create value by connecting new dots, by creating new knowledge, by finding something that has not been found yet, by going into the unknown. And this is where the value will be created. And AI worker will do the knowledge work and human workers will do intuition work. So now think about software. Software in the era of knowledge was there to enhance our productivity. We went from adopt having a few apps to having a lot of apps, lot of SaaS, platforms, lot of software to augment human productivity. In the world of AI, human labor will be replaced by software labor or AI labor. So in a world where human labor is going to be replaced by AI labor, the applications don't matter. Because applications was built to augment human productivity. What you will have is a set of infrastructure and tools where you can build agentic capital, so to say agentic solution to do human work. As a result, I believe that in the next five, ten years the whole application, particularly productivity and other business application will disappear.
Wow, that's incredible. The disruption going to be massive. So we'll talk more about it. But I want to go back beginning, you know you started Rubrik. How did this idea came about and why did you, you know you had so many things you could have done. Why did you decided to start the.
Company as a venture capitalist? I always loved underserved market or forgotten market. And because you know all the cool kids, when they go in a certain direction, that's where the consensus is. But there is no money in that space because you have too many innovation, too much delusion. I like spaces where people have forgotten about it or they think that there is no money because that's where you have counter consensus opportunity. What I saw in backup and recovery was it was a 20, 30 year old market, there was no real innovation. Most of the cool kids didn't even know how to pronounce backup and recovery. And this is a place where all the enterprise business data were kept. Our idea was can we take an A team an A technology to go after this forgotten market and can we transform this landscape? So our idea was, can we transform backup and recovery into a data security platform to solve for cyber disasters? And that's how we started the company.
As you pointed out, a lot of cool kids who are doing different things, but it's also a market that was quite fragmented. So how did you become such a big player and how do you think? I think you call it cyber resiliency. And how do you think your business will be evolved from here?
So what happens is that a market that is older and fragmented, you have to bring a new perspective into that market. You have to figure out one use case that is so far superior and so differentiated that customers will give you forgiveness to build the rest of the capabilities. We saw cyber disaster as the number one problem statement for our customers, but none of the products were capable of cyber recovery. So our idea was, can we bring a purpose built platform to deliver cyber recovery, cyber resilience? Because that is one vector that will compel our customers to buy Rubrik and give us forgiveness to be able to build the rest of the capabilities. And that's how you rise above the noise. And once you rise above the noise and you have the time, because you have taken a counter consensus bet that not everybody agreed to, which means that you got time to build the capability and when you launch in the market, you are ahead of everybody else, then you keep iterating and that iteration allows you to be ahead in the market. So we started this whole idea about cyber recovery and then we transformed that into a resilience platform. Because if I tell you that you have to be ready for a cyber attack, you need to understand risk and you need to deliver recovery. So we actually built a number of capabilities around risk. So this was the continuum that we went on. Obviously we are not holding steady. We are always innovating and finding the next disruptive curve.
So then how, you know, we talked about AI, how the application layers will go away, how do your business cyber resiliency, you know, get impacted by AI? And also do you think because of AI we're going to see more cyber attack now? Also because all of our cyber protections are not necessarily. All the crowdstrike guys and other guys may not agree with me, but are not really ready for all these agents and how they can break into your firewall and things like that.
If you look at what AI is doing is it is inserting more software in more places because all AI systems are software systems. And when you have more software in more places, you have a larger and larger surface area of attack. So the cyber resiliency will get even more important and prominent in the age of AI. Because cyber resilience is your truly AI resilience. Because you need AI resilience to be able to continue working even when you have cyber attack or other hallucination and other kinds of risk. So we believe that what we are seeing Today, it'll get 10x bigger in the whole cyber. The essence of cyber resilience in the era of AI. But the other interesting thing is that AI has two things. One is AI is not simply AI compromise is not simply credential compromise to steal data. AI actually allows a threat actor to run your business process because AI will write your code, return your customer money, approve your purchase order. If somebody sitting in North Korea can run your business operations, think about how much damage they can do and what could go wrong.
So how are you preparing your company for that? Right, so these are all new problems. And I'm sure maybe you did like three years ago, you were not thinking about it because the AI is having at such an accelerated pace. So how do you build the product so that you can roll that out quickly to your customers?
Our idea about innovation is that you have to start the next S curve as soon as you're current set of products start to see success. Because to be a long term company in this age of acceleration, where the product cycles are shrinking, you have to stack multiple S curves. So we actually launched something called Agent Rewind a few months ago to really solve the problem for AI agentic actions going heavier because of cyber compromise. So we are giving our customers a rewind button that if AI agents take actions that are not desirable either because of hallucination or cyber compromise, you can undo those actions and get back into a clean state. And those are the things that we are bringing to the market to not only give our customers confidence to do AI transformation, but we want to accelerate the AI journey.
So you think AI is good for your business? Right. Because you, you can now you can bring out so many new products that you probably couldn't have before.
Absolutely. I mean, AI again, for everybody, AI is 100 times more opportunities and 100 times more risk. And what we are doing is we are giving our customers an ability to transform their business into an AI enterprise so that they can take advantage of the AI capital, which is the AI worker, as well as human capital, which is your human worker. And how do you combine the two to really unleash this era of abundance?
So you know, I want to go Back a couple of questions before you kind of address it, but I want to double click on it. How do you think this whole AI and all this agentic AI, you know, perfect example, somebody in North Korea now controlling your agentic AI, how does that mean for the entire cybersecurity industry? How do you think that change over the next five.
Yeah, next five years, cybersecurity industry will transform a lot. First of all, as I was Saying before now, AI cyber compromise can do 10x more damage in 1/10 of the time. So you don't have enough time to react. So how do you create prevention and detection, which is more real time? How do you augment or create AI SoC? Recently, CrowdStrike launched AI SoC. I mean, that's a effort in the right direction that. How do you create a defense mechanism that is AI? Because AI is getting adopted by the threat actor. How do you ensure that only the right user has access to the right data on the right platform at the right time for the right duration? How do you ensure that not only the permissioning is tight on the data, but also the sensitivity of the content is taken into account? These are again, new problems that has to be tackled with.
Yeah, sounds super exciting. So one of the things I'm trying to think a lot, that many of the companies have to make a pretty sharp pivot of their product roadmap. And then I'm assuming for that the talent pool also has to be different, right? Because AI talent might be a little different than your core talent. Is that true? First of all, if that's true, how do you really reshape your team around it?
We have a fundamental thesis in talent, is that we are not looking for expertise per se, as in deep expertise, but because expertise in some ways is not relevant anymore because things are changing so rapidly. So we always look for people who are learners as opposed to knowers, and we always look for great engineers, great salespeople, great marketeers who are learning. And when you have a learning mindset, when you have a mindset about figuring things out, AI is no different. I mean, think about it. AI is merely three years old. Who can claim to be a deep expert in AI? Everybody is learning and evolving at the same time.
This is a great insight and I learned that at Snapchat. Also, like, sometimes experience could be a liability. You want to hire people who are great learners. So talk about it. How do you create a corporate culture of hiring great learners? Right? Because people always, like, if you're a supervisor, you want to hire somebody who knows the thing or two so that it reduces your workload. So how do you create a corporate culture where you can hire people who are always learning and the kind of people you want.
When I was in venture capital, one of my big aha moment or realization was nobody knows anything, especially when it comes to future. Because anybody who could say new world future, they will not be in the business because they will be already hundred billionaire person. So nobody knows about the future and nobody knows anything. If you take that as a fundamental principle of nobody knows anything, what would you hire for? You hire for grit, you hire for learning abilities, you hire for self awareness. So one of the questions that I always ask anybody I meet particularly for job interviews is tell me something that you didn't know about yourself, that you learned about yourself in your last job. And the way they answer that question, it gives you indication that they have a learning mindset or not, because that is so important. So that has been the key ingredient in building a talent pool. The second thing that we did from the early days was I have an easier way to communicate who do we want to hire? I said I'll not hire myself for the job I'm in. What does that mean? That I'm always looking for better and better people, which increases the average quality of the team. So you have to have this relentless focus in bringing top talent, learning mindset and looking at problems from the first principles. In a fast changing world, your biggest enemy is your experience and memory because you always go back in time and find an analogous situation and then you reflect that into the future. But the future is not going to be very past repeating. So you have to think from first principles what Buddhism says beginner's mind. And you need to have that beginner's mind from the first principles thinking as how do I tackle this situation? Not knowing anything. And that's how future gets created.
That is a super, super incredible insight. So thank you. Let's talk about building rubric, right? I'm assuming you know, you, you were so accomplished. Raising money was not a problem which a lot of people struggle with. And but talk about, you know, like where you started the vision and what are the sum of the two or three major challenges that you faced. And you said, oh man, this thing not going to make it because every founder has those moments and how did you tackle the problems?
So obviously being in venture capital, raising fund was at least the first round was not extremely hard. Nevertheless we had to do the work. But it was not like impossible task. Having said that, I had this in My mind that hey, I'm a vc, I know so many people, I can overnight create a 20 people team and rush to go build the product. And I had three co founders, they were all brilliant engineers. And I said, I'll become the recruiter and I'll bring people for you guys to interview and then we'll select some people. And I said, oh, I know so many people. And overnight we'll hire 20 people. And 45 days later we had zero hiring. And I remember I would bring people and then these guys will reject them. They say that hey, this person is not good enough. Then there were some great people who had life or family situations. They said, we can't leave the job. And finally think about 2014, January. This was the peak era for local mobile social and I'm starting this backup and recovery company. So recruiting was a hard task. And 45 days later we had zero hiring, as I said. And I used to get up in full sweat two o' clock in the morning thinking what did I do with myself? Did I just kill my career? I was a good vc, I started this company. My co founders are not letting anybody join this company. As in like they don't like anybody. What will happen? So I remember I was telling my wife that hey, next 90 days give me a hall pass. I will not eat breakfast or dinner at home. So I used to get up 6 o' clock in the morning, by 7, 7:30 I will sit, I'll find myself next to a Starbucks, next to a Google office, Facebook office Starbucks with a pitch deck to pitch to engineers to join Rubrik or why Rubrik would matter. And it was that relentless focus in recruiting that really allowed us to hire the first wave of engineers. And those engineers were like such a high quality engineers that they built the company. That is the lesson that I learned. Struggle is success, struggle is progress. Struggle is not negative. And throughout my journey, anytime I have avoided a struggle, that's when things have gone wrong.
That is such a great advice. I'm going to repeat that to others. So actually one really interesting thing that come to my mind, you guys had four co founders, right? And most VC always tell or if you have two more than two co founders, it's a travel, right? How did you like 4 co founders get together? How did you guys get along? You know like, because that's not very rare to have four co founders to starting a Silicon Valley company.
It's true, four co founders are not common. And also it's not common for four co founders to stick together. So Here was my thought process. We were embarking on a technically hard problem to solve and I wanted to ensure that we have the best technical team to solve that problem. And so I said, this is an engineering company, this is a product company. And the two representation of product companies that engineers are overrepresented in the founding team. So that was the first thing. And then the second thing was for first five years, all four of us were together. That's a record in Silicon Valley. And then for next, for total of nine years, three of us were together and then two of us are still in the company. We are almost 12 years. So you hear about like rock bands fighting and splitting. We are still great friends. We get together, we ask each other how we are doing. In fact, one of my co founders left Rubrik after five years to start Glean. He is the founder CEO of Glean. My other co founder left Rubrik to start a company called Wisdom AI Soham. And they are all thriving. But that's the beauty of four people coming together with this ambition and vision to create an enduring institution. And I'm happy to report that all four of us kept Rubrik ahead of our own personal ambitions.
So for 45 days they didn't take any of your engineers. So I'm sure there's a lot of disagreement. How did you settle those disagreements with four people?
One thing that we were very clear on from the early days was that I will not interfere in engineering unless something has gone completely off the rails and they will not interfere on business unless I'm completely screwing up. So when they said that these guys are not great engineers, find better people, I took it very positively. Again, it was hard because finding anybody is hard. But you know, high bar, it was the benchmark that we created. Our goal was to have a better team back then than the Google Search Infra team, which was supposed to be the pinnacle of engineering. And we created that team. I remember a lot of people walking into our office. They were wowed by the quality of engineering and it's also reflected in number of startups that have come about from Rubrik. We have two unicorns and probably 10 other startups between series A and C.
Yeah, and it's a Rubrik mafia, so. So you got these great people, now you're building product, but you're still trying to prove a concept, right? When is that aha moment? You said, you know what, you came home and you told your wife, I'm off to something big.
I always thought that I'm onto something big because you need to have that in your mind, the clarity that why am I here and what is it that we are going to build? Having said that, as a vc I learned that many entrepreneurs first build the product or put more time in building product and less time in interacting with the market. So the first product, when it gets out, it is 60, 70% in the zone. And then they iterate next 18 months to 24 months to find the true product market fit. I wanted to accelerate that. So the one way I accelerated it is within 3, 4 months of starting Rubrik, I hired my first SDR which is cold caller to set up meetings and he was my cold caller and I was the sales guy. And so two of us will go pitch to customer to get their feedback. So we did 60 calls in the next few months to get an understanding of what messages are getting received. Do they like what we are building? Are we giving too much value proposition? And those feedback allowed us to accelerate our product market fit. We also hired our first marketing person during that time so that she helped us with the messaging and what messages are getting received or not. And that really accelerated our company. So in Rubrik we did a lot of these experiments where we try to parallelize a few things to to compress the time to product market fit.
You know, I cannot agree more with you because this is the mistake I made because you know, Snap was such a product vision and Evan, you think a product and launch and I was on the business side and later when I founded my own company, I made that mistake is that tried to spend too much time building a product without understanding what the customer really, really want. So that's a very good advice. So thank you for sharing that.
You know what happens, right? Because our mind is accomplishment oriented. And when you are building the product, you have this sense of I'm doing something because when I try to find product market fit, many days you have highs, many days you have lows. So you don't feel like you're accomplishing something when you're trying to find the product market fit. But that struggle of finding product market fit is the real value creation in the company because anybody can write the product. But finding product market fit and proving that there is a buyer for this concept is a real value shift or positive value shift. And that's what I focused on. So this is one thing that I have instilled in Rubrik of again, the idea of tackling the hardest problem first. How do you prioritize work on things that worries you the most.
Great advice. I'm loving this podcast because you're sharing so many great insight. I want to talk about you being an investor but before I go there, maybe last question. As an operator and rubric founder, what are the two or three advice? You know you obviously shared one really great advice, but what are the other one or one thing or two things you want to tell other founders and CEOs or other entrepreneurs who are listening to the call about building a business? What advice you have?
I have only built venture backed business. I'll have advice on venture backed business, not bootstrapped business. Always remember that in venture backed business this venture capital is given to you to create disruptive fast growth. If you're not creating a disruptive very very fast growth, you are not creating any value. Your job is to not be in business for long period of time. Your job is to create disruptive growth and prove this concept that dog will eat the dog food. So one idea that I had was and that I implemented that even when I raised a series A, B C capital, 10% of that capital, 15% of that capital, I invested in even higher risk activities to inflect the growth curve. Because the inflection of the growth curve and growing faster is the only way to create value in venture backed businesses. Otherwise you're not creating value.
Very cool. So let's talk about you being an investor, right? So you were an engineer. How did you get into investing from there? Like I think you were at Oracle and then you moved to venture. Like what triggered you to become a venture capitalist?
I was at Oracle building database kernel. I learned a lot about building product and thinking about the market. Back then I didn't have the full realization but I was also working with extremely smart people. Extremely smart people in fact. Founder of Nutanix I used to work with the founders of Snowflake I used to work with. So it was like a very very high quality team. But one thing that I always had was I'm a good engineer, I know how to write good code. But I was not a passionate engineer. I wanted to look at businesses more holistically. I have more than 30 patents in distributed computing. I know I'm good at it, but I wanted to look at businesses more holistically and I applied for a few business related job but the main feedback was get street experience, go business school. So I decided to go to business school. And during business school one of my professors called me and he said you have good understanding of financial systems, you should go to Wall Street. So I did a summer investment banking.
Oh wow. You were like.
But I was doing the relationship banking side, like investment banking on the relationship side. So I felt like I'm going a little bit too far from the core. And that's when I decided to go venture capital. And it was not easy for director of engineering to get a job in venture capital but I applied many places and I really persisted that this is something I want to pursue. And Blumberg Capital, David Blumberg gave me an opportunity to be part of his firm and they were two core partners and they hired me as a third person on the investing team and that's how I got my start. But I didn't know much about venture capital when I joined venture capital and I had to really learn about what it means to create value in terms of which companies and what markets you can make an impact. And obviously I did that for several years before starting Rubrike.
So. And then you wrote the first check to nutrinix and what is about nutrition that you know that got you excited and obviously knew the founder and write the first check and how did you convince him to write the good check? Like a good founder, like coming out, a strong engineer coming out of Oracle probably had a lot of options definitely.
So I knew Dheeraj from my Oracle days. I had hired him as senior engineer in my team and then he went on to become VP of engineering at Astor Data. And then he left Aster to start Nutanix and he called me and he said I'm starting this company. And obviously I knew that he was talking to other venture firms and obviously there was a lot of interest in his company. And so I worked with him and his co founders and I convinced them that taking money from Brahma Capital and me joining the board would be positive and kudos to them. They gave me that opportunity because I was not a proven venture capitalist and they were all first time founders but they gave me that opportunity. We wrote the first check in Datanics and there were three founders and I we started this journey together. But you know when you are new to something and and you don't know what the test looks like or what is the benchmark looks like you work extremely hard. So a lot of credit goes to the founders of nutanix who really had this idea to combine two separate product which was server and storage into a single hyper converged software that didn't exist back then and they disrupted a massive, massive market. The other learning that I had was that the founding team, especially the CEO, founder, CEO so critical because their ability to persist even through good and super bad times to give this idea the shape again. They did tremendous job. Obviously they reaped a lot of rewards for it. But what a tremendous market creation, establishment of a new category and a company which is almost $20 billion today.
Yeah, no. Incredible, incredible success story. And then you invested at hootsuite. So what are the biggest learning lessons? Like if somebody wants to go to venture capital, what are the few things that you learned that you would share that with somebody?
I'll tell you a funny story on the venture capital before I answer your question. So when Jeremy brought Snapchat for the first meeting, I was part of the deal team with Jeremy along with Justin Callback taking the first meeting with Evan and how clear he was about the market transformation. I distinctly remember somebody asked him like why does the photo disappear? And he said in our parents generation, when people made phone calls to each other, there was no paper trail of it. Why should there be a paper trail on social media?
Very radical thinking.
That was a radical thinking. That's what counter consensus ideas and that's what creates a long term business. So fundamentally in venture capital I learned a few things. Number one was chase counter consensus ideas. But there is a thin line between craziness and brilliance. So consensus ideas are often wrong. So how do you find a great counter consensus idea? And my benchmark is if 70% of the people disagree with you on your idea and then 30% of the people are super hardcore positive on your idea, then you have a counter consensus idea. So that's number one. Number two is don't invest in lots of expertise, invest in competency and learning mindset. Because learning mindset and relentless people, they always figure out an answer. If you have too much expertise, then they are living in the past, they are not creating the future. And then the third thing is, as I said before, the venture capital is given to you to create disruptive amazing growth. Because if you're not creating amazing growth, you're not creating value, you are creating a zombie company which will not have any value. So your job as a founder is to find disruptive growth, take risk to create disruptive growth.
No, that's very, very helpful. You know your number one that you've talked about that if 70% of the people disagree and 30% is hard to agree with you, that actually true for public market also. So if I look at stocks like Tesla or even 20 years ago when I was covering Netflix, same thing, 70, 80% people didn't like it. But there's a 20% hardcore people so it's actually true for public market investment also.
I guess this is a risk framework that if you are any kind of risk situation where you have to deal with the future and nobody knows anything, that's the kind of like framework.
Yeah, no, that's great. So let's talk about, you know, venture capital today. You know, you were seeing all these companies as staying private for a very long period of time and they're raising a lot of money and, and deals are getting very, very competitive. So what do you think about venture capital business today? You know, as an opportunity set? Do you think the market is too, too hot? Like what, what's your view about the. The landscape of venture business to get.
Venture capital has now fundamentally changed. My view is that there will be very, very few if any IPO between 1 to 10 billion, 1 to $10 billion IPO market is going to disappear. There will be a lot of M and as under a billion and there will be IPOs. 20, 30, 50, 100, 200, 500 billion IPOs. So the mid market in venture capital is disappearing. Because what has happened is, or even in the IPO market what is happening is any idea given the expertise is dead and product market fit is dead, any idea if anybody starts something, there will be 10, 20 company in the same market because there is a lot of money in the market. And then one company among 10 companies will figure out a way to get the escape velocity and then the rest of the companies will get consolidated very, very quickly. And whoever gets escape velocity, they will grow so rapidly that they need lot of capital. Particularly AI driven companies needs infrastructure cost because AI has a factory model. It's not like software which is a low cost model. And so because of that cost dynamics, they needed to raise a lot of capital to kind of scale the business. So in venture capital you will have firms that can write 500 million a billion dollars check and then firms that are writing 2, 3, 5, $10 million check in the seed stage. So there will be a lot of artisan venture capital and then there's a lot of like large scale firms who can write 500 million a billion, $2 billion checks. And so being an entrepreneur today is harder because of the rate of change and rate of market change. But the good news is that there's a lot of innovation, lot of capital and we are truly in this intuition, idea economy. If you have an idea, it can grow extremely fast in a very, very short period of time.
So I guess the question is, does this environment change the return profile of our venture industry, right? Because use Today's benchmark of CK would write one check and then it became WhatsApp and you make, you know. But now if there's so many companies not going to make it and only wanted to make it and they require a lot of capital, does it change the return profile of the venture industry?
I think overall venture industry, if you look at it, the multiple will shrink but magnitude will increase because you could have like venture style return in a $20 billion raise or $10 billion raise.
Right? That is fair. That is fair. This is great. So I have one last question. Kind of an unfair question between entrepreneur founding, being a CEO, being a venture capitalist and being an engineer, what's your favorite? Which one do you like the most?
What I have realized about myself is that I live in the unknown. And I also like to feel that I am in control. And if you combine the two, entrepreneurship is the only thing that allows me to live in the unknown. As in like we are always pushing to create the future and then in control in the sense that controlling my own destiny. I'm not depending upon my partners or others to make a decision.
This is great. I absolutely love the conversation. Thank you so much. And I learned so much from it and hopefully everybody learned a lot and I can't wait to have another conversation like this with you people soon. You are full of wisdom.
Thank you. Imran, so good to see you as always.
Thank you again for tuning in and I really hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. Subscribe to our show on Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast so that you don't miss an episode. See you next time. All opinions expressed on this podcast are solely those of the host and guest, are for general information purposes only and do not constitute professional investment advice.
