How To Inject Speed and Transparency Into Your Startup with Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha | Greymatter

Hi everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter. I'm Ashim Chandna, partner at Greylock. It's a privilege to be here today with Bipil Sinha, the CEO of Rubrik. Rubrik, started in January 2014, is one of the fastest growing enterprise companies ever. Just exited its second year of selling at a $300 million run rate, just started the third year of selling. The company has over 900 employees, is already operating in 29 countries around the world, is adding over 50 to 60 employees a month. Bipul, welcome. Pleasure to have you here today. Tell us a little bit of Rubrik just to get things started.

Thank you Aseem, really appreciate the opportunity to be here and speaking with you. As you mentioned, we started Rubrik in January 2014 with this vision to create a new data control plane across on premises and public clouds and really to simplify backup recovery archive Dr. For applications, whether they run in the customer's data center or in the public clouds. With that vision, we assembled a core team and really ran very, very fast to this market. And we have had great reception from the market so far.

So Bipil, can you maybe just tell us a little bit about cloud data management and why Rubrik matters?

So what we are fundamentally observing in the marketplace is an explosion in terms of number of applications and data being processed and generated. And our customers are really struggling to manage this data explosion and application fragmentation. And we saw a fundamental need to simplify and automate the whole Backup Recovery Archive Dr. Infrastructure by creating a single software fabric that brings both metadata and data together and really gives our customer independence from the infrastructure. Now they can take their data and application into the cloud, out of the cloud, and really get leverage out of their data.

So essentially you can be on prem, you can be on cloud, you can change those decisions in the future. Your data can be anywhere, it can be backed up and recovered from anywhere. And then you have complete analytics on top of that and compliance and security and data protection.

Absolutely, because think about the value that is hidden in all these data. And the legacy architecture was metadata and data were separated. As a result, customers could not unlock the value of the data. Rubrik brings the deep metadata and data together and really creates self describing data. So now data knows where it originated from and how to power it on for better use of the data and all its history. So we are really helping our customers because better understand their data, get leverage out of the data and most importantly secure the data.

And that probably leads us to the topic of cloud data management. So what began as backup Recovery has really led us into a journey around cloud data management. So maybe tell us a little bit about that.

So cloud data management is the Rubrik's flagship product. We had the initial vision of this product and that's what we brought to the market back in 2015 and continue to escape scale the business on this particular platform. Essentially what we do is we bring the power of public clouds to the enterprise data center and really create a single software fabric across data center and public clouds for customers to be able to manage their backup data, get instantaneous recovery, get search capabilities and really have peace of mind to have a deterministic recovery for their applications wherever they run their application, where they run on premises or into the cloud.

So essentially future proofing customers for a hybrid multi cloud world, that's where our.

Customer want to go to because they want to get the agility of the cloud, they want to reduce cost, they want to expand on demand and they really want infrastructure to be just be around in an automated orchestrated manner so, so that they don't have to worry about application delivery. Essential goal of our customers is to not buy Rubrik product. It is a means to an end. The end is how do they deliver better products and services to their customers. And Rubrik really eliminates the headache of managing backup recovery infrastructure that is needed for recovery, compliance, governance and really helps the customer to be more agile, more more innovative in their quest to deliver better services and product to their customers.

So at a recent board meeting we heard about this new product, this new SaaS product that the company is working on called Polaris, which is complementary to the cloud data management offerings today. Can you maybe tell us a little bit about that?

Polaris is critical because as the data challenges are increasing for businesses, they want to have a platform where they can leverage the whole data infrastructure and deliver higher value applications on it. We are seeing this in the enterprise application realm through force.com platforms and other platforms that people are building to take the structured data and allowing businesses to build newer applications for analytics for other reasons. Similarly, for the unstructured data, all the data and metadata across on premises and cloud that businesses have, how do we create a unified system of record backed by global catalog orchestration workflow capabilities that businesses can build newer applications through APIs that Rubrik delivers. In fact, Rubrik will deliver many of these data management applications ourselves and we'll also enable third party application developers to build other applications.

Let's switch gears now and talk a little company culture and values. So Rubrik has something called Rivet Perhaps tell us a little bit about that.

So when we started Rubrik, our goal was to build the next 30, 40 year company. Not something that we would build and sell to someone and move on. But when you want to build the next 30, 40 year company, then the foundation of such a company has to be laid on solid grounds. And we felt that we needed to create a set of cultural values or principles. Think of it as guardrails by which to live by what are the code of standards that Rubrik and its people have to live by. And we defined our cultural values as Rivet. R of the Rivet is relentlessness. So we don't take no for an answer. Whether to to hire someone or sell our product or build a new technology. I of the rivet is integrity. So we do business with high moral standards. We don't lie to each other or lie to our customers. View of the rivet is Velocity. So we go more distance in less time. And E of the rivet is excellence. So everything that Rubrik does, whether to hire employees to take customer calls for support, or just every interaction of Rubrik employees to the outside world has to have this seal of approval where people have to feel that they met someone special, they met a company that is special. We like to leave things in a better shape than we found them. And that's our excellence. And finally, transparency. We want to make sure that we tell all of us, all of the employees of Rubrik, not only what are good news, but also what are bad news. What are the challenges in the company so that we can all row in one direction to solve companies problem and really build a great company. Something to reckon with.

Maybe if you can dive into a couple of those a little further. What are some key lessons you would say around velocity for other CEOs and entrepreneurs from the Rubrik journey?

This is a very good question, Ashim. Particularly because when you think about creating a startup and building a company, what is the biggest weapon a startup has against incumbents who have all the money and all the resources in the world?

Speed.

The biggest weapon is speed. So if we can inject the DNA of speed in the company, then a startup can really take on large companies and defeat them. So how do you inject speed? How do you make sure that people understand what speed means? Because the biggest struggle of every company or any organization is how do we break our own mental limits? How do we. Because we are all prisoners of our own imaginations. So what we did was we said we'll define what it means to be fast. What it means to have fast speed. So then we said two things. Number one was that hey, make decision fast. No more than two meetings for any decision. And then the second thing about speed is it's okay as long as we make more than 50% right decision, it's okay to make less than 50% wrong decision. Because as long as we are making more than 50% right decisions, we live to see another day to fight. So that's the first part about velocity and second part about velocity is living up to the potential of the company. A lot of people say that they are a good company, some people say they are a great company. But our definition of living is by live up to the potential of the company, are we hitting the edge of possibilities and what it means to be at the edge of possibilities. Whether we have the best in class, best possible sales cycle, do we have the best possible average sale size, average deal size, do we have the best possible largest deal that a company can sell at any given point in time in its life. So really living up to the potential of the company, and that's the big discovery.

How do you get an organization at large to kind of embrace this the.

Way you have the organization embrace such an idea is to simplify it in smaller chunks. So we say, hey, no more than two meetings. So it's easy for people to understand that it's not okay to have the analysis, paralysis, action orientation. We ask our sales team, our engineering team to go do more. So we set high goal for ourselves and we say that this high goal is possible. Past is not a predictor of what's possible in future. Because every day we are seeing new things and discovering new things. So that's how we kind of inspire, encourage, push ourselves to really see where is the real limit of what's possible.

So maybe let's switch gears to transparency.

So transparency is very important to us as a company. It's very important to me as a person because all of my life I always felt that I was an outsider and I was outside looking in and always felt that a group of people are making decision and I have no input or no knowledge of the parameters or criteria that they were applying into the decision making. So when we started Rubrik, first thing we thought about was how do we take the power of information out of the equation? How do we align everyone to say and do things? Which is in the best interest of Rubrik versus best interest of the managers or the CEO or the best interest of people around them? Not try to make others happy, make Rubrik happy. So we said to be able to do that, what is the ultimate power center or ultimate information control that a company has is the board. Because everything ends there. We said if we can go and make the information discussed in the board open and public within the company, then all levels of the organization will be inspired to actually demand transparency. Because no manager can say, hey, I can't tell you this, because as an employee I can say, if I can listen to the board, then there is no other information in the company that is more sacred than that. And that was our way to create an example because they want to see is it okay to do X because Y has happened.

So how has that been received on the positive side? Or are there any challenges around that?

With any new path that you go on, there's always negative side to it. One thing that we decided early on that we are willing to pay the cost of transparency and cost of transparency is sometime when you're open to people about their feedback, when you actually talk about a team or a group or an individual in the board meetings, when they are hearing about it, they may not feel good about it. So these are not easy things to express. But, but because of the culture of transparency, people understand that we have to be honest with each other and we have to honest about not just where the person is, but we have to also honest about the potential. But that means that I'm admitting to the potential possibilities and that was important.

I guess I would also add that as a board member, coming to the open board meetings at Rubrik also means I gotta be on my best behavior and I gotta be attentive. So I gotta be, you know, it's game on in a positive way.

It is true for everyone, right? Because we are here to build the best possible company, the fastest company ever. We want to build a long term, long lasting company. And foundation of such a company cannot be laid on things which are not meritocratic, which are not open, which are not transparent.

So you also conduct all hands meetings with the company and I've heard you enable anonymous feedback or anonymous questions. So maybe just comment around that.

Certainly. So what we observed was that as the company started growing, we had a lot of engineers in the company. Then we started to hire sales teams in the company with completely different characteristics. Some people were very introvert, some people were very extrovert. And. And we didn't want a situation where we were not answering the questions for introverts because they are as valuable to our company as an extrovert person. So we said that if we allow anonymous questions and anonymous questions has to be asked real time, no prior preparation or anything like that, then it is as if the introverted person is asking that question. And we have to, as a management team or as the leaders of this company have to react to it real time. And it had a profound impact because people were asking questions about their salaries and bonus and questions about fundraising and why did we decide to pick a particular round or size or valuation. So it brought a level of accountability and clarity in the functional leaders and management team's mind about what is important. Why are we doing things the way we are doing? If we cannot explain to our people, it means that we have not thought it through.

That's great. Maybe talk for a few minutes just about any other aspects around transparency.

When we initially started Rubrik, Slack was a new platform. But we definitely wanted to adopt Slack because Slack has this inherent instantaneous nature to it. And we said that as the company is growing and will be operating around the world very quickly, how do we make sure that even if a person sitting a couple of Cs away can express to each other what's going on instantaneously, how do we democratize the knowledge within the company? So Slack turned out to be the life blood vein of Rubrik, where all the sales team and all the engineers and all the marketing person, everyone is in this together.

So there's multiple channels running in the company with different groups.

Different groups, but people actually join other groups. So sales team will join, engineering teams will join sales groups. So the intermingling has more power than the individual groups. And what it has done is it has brought another level of transparency. Because in a typical enterprise company, the sales team is outselling, engineering team is out building, they don't talk to each other a lot of times. And we wanted to reduce the time to learn the market in Rubrik. And that became a significant factor. I remember when we first started deploying our product Pre Beta, we used to have a Slack channel per customer. Obviously we had very few customers back then. And people would go and see like a screenshot of live installation of the product and people will watch it like tv so that they'll know, hey, sales engineer is having this difficulty implementing this feature. Let's fix it, let's kind of simplify it. Let's build a better product and that feedback loop instead of somebody installing it and capturing that information and telling a subset of people versus the whole company knew exactly where we stood.

Yeah, no, that's excellent. Switching gears, let's talk for a few minutes about hiring and recruiting. So, you know, what's your philosophy around recruiting and hiring and, you know, what works well for you and for the company.

At Rubrik, we had this goal that we'll not hire ourselves. It means that our standards are so high that we will not pass our standard. And we felt that was the only way to bring clarity to people who are interviewing, to make sure that we are raising the bar, not reducing the bar, or even keeping it constant. And we said that we have to find the best people and the relentlessness of the culture plays into it. So we wanted to bring that clarity. So for engineering team, we said that our engineering team has to be better than Google's search infra team, which is supposed to be the crown jewel. So we defined a bar that was high and same thing in the sales team. We said that we'll work hard and talk to the ecosystem folks to figure out who is the best salesperson in any given geography, to make sure that we go see and calibrate ourselves against the top talent. It was not an easy thing to do. It was very hard to get attention from someone who is a top engineer or a top salesperson to come into a company that had pretty much no product and no sales. But our relentlessness and drive to be in front of the right person helped us understand the quality. Because to me, as a venture capitalist before Rubrik, I felt like a lot of people didn't know what top talent even means or has not even seen top talent. So once we identify the top talent, then we go and see that whether they are a cultural fit because somebody may be great, but may not be.

A fit for you. How do you interview for cultural fit?

What I personally do is ask them to tell me about your origins and journey, where you grew up, what your parents did, and tell me about your journey. The way they describe their journey gives me a lot of signal about what drives them, what risks they take, whether they are forced from their parents versus their own internal drives. So a lot of subtle signals come about and when I'm hearing somebody speak for five minutes, I know a lot about them versus I'm asking questions, they're answering that question.

How do you go about actually finding the very best people out there?

Finding very best is through the network. I remember in the early days of Rubrik, we had to find people in different parts of the US for the local market. So for example, we wanted to hire somebody in Southeast. So what we did was Mike Toninkas, our head of sales, and I We sat together and we said, let's do a LinkedIn search to find out from all the salespeople that live in that three or four state region who are the top people from the LinkedIn. We actually collected the names of the top people, at least from the LinkedIn and then we called local reseller partners saying that who is doing the maximum deal with you? So who is driving the most money for you individually? And then collected that information and then combined the two information to see like what are the intersection of the top people we think are top in terms of the company velocity and what the.

Channel is telling us and what is.

The channel telling us. And and then we said that here are the five people that really matter. So how do we get in front of these five people? And knowing the five people is the first step. The second step is that how do you get them to the table so that you can have a real conversation? In many cases they would not respond to email or LinkedIn or Facebook. So we had to physically send someone through some other connection to go meet with them and have a coffee to prepare them to take a meeting with us. And so it was a set comes.

Back to the recklessness.

Exactly. There's no stopping.

Let's talk about various aspects of company building all the way from defining a problem to go after product market fit roadmap, go to market scale and other challenges. How do you think about product market fit? And how should other CEOs and entrepreneurs think about product market fit? And when do you know that you've got product market fit?

When you start a company, you need to have a thesis with a unique perspective about the market. And your perspective has to be slightly different than what is an accepted norm. And so then the whole early days of the company is proving that perspective is right and the customer are listening to you. What I did at Rubrike and even before Rubrike, I have this fundamental belief that you need to have a point of view, but the source of truth is with the customer. So how do you take this point of view to the customer as fast as possible and start to listen to them and really understand their reaction to it, not what they are saying, but their free flow reaction to it. And then glean from that free flow reaction what are some vectors of thoughts that they are attaching to. And then you combine those vectors of thoughts to really coherently state what value your product delivers. So for example, in Rubrik, to do this, within the six months of founding the company, I hired inside salesperson Jason Draughtman. And Jason would sit next to me and he would cold call and set up appointment and I would go pitch the product to the customer. We had no product, we are not even in alpha. But we'll pitch the product to the customer and hear their feedback. And based on the feedback, we'll refine our pitch. So every day we'll pitch to new customers. And we wanted to also have geographical diversity. So we would hire, we'll cold call into Midwest and South and north and east and west so that we can collect fully diverse data. Before we actually got our first set of sales team, I had made 60 unique customer calls with a fair degree of understanding of what would sell if we go and sell this product. Because product can have many aspects to it, but you have to sell only one or maximum two.

And how do you figure out which customers to listen to more?

So what happens is that when you deliver, we would also look for cold call customers from SMBs all the way into the enterprise. And then based on the reaction we were trying to glean who has a real pain point or real value for the customer. Think of it this way. You are delivering a Ferrari. If somebody doesn't have an appreciation for a car, then they are not looking for Ferrari. They may be looking for a Honda because Honda is good enough to go from A to B. So similarly, when you take your product and go to market, there's a segment of the market where they have more inclination to buy this product because it solves some things that are very applicable to them. So the job of this market discovery is to eliminate segments of the market where it has no value or even marginal value because they have a fundamental belief that you have to sell to believers in the early days. And if they have a marginal need, then they are not a believer.

No, I like that. Both the, you know, the unique point of view, source of truth to the customer, sell to believers in the early days. I mean, you know, how should entrepreneurs and CEOs think about early go to market into enterprise markets?

So one of the things that I'm always a fan of multiple source of information. So if you have like one or two sales teams in the early days and if they are going to the market and they are seeing success, it is unclear whether your product does the magic or these people have enough of a relationship or force of will that.

They are able to sell, the reverse is also true. If it is not working.

Yeah, because you have so many confounding variables into the game. So how do you solve for the confounding variables. So I have a fundamental belief that you need to get at least four or five distinct sources of feedback. So in the early days of Rubrik, when we actually took product into ga, we had like six sales teams that we took the product to market and we had some good early signals because of the early calling customers and understanding their reaction and messaging them the right way. So we got some early signals. And as soon as we saw early signals where they were messaging in a certain way and customers would take them through a certain cycle and buy early product, we said what we have to do is we have to double down in areas where we are seeing signals. So we also did one interesting experiment where instead of hiring individual contributor sales team as the first set of people, we hired a first level manager who are new manager like less than two or three years into the management as individual contributors in the field.

But you put scalability into the system.

Exactly. Because we knew that as soon as we see signal that it is working, they can multiply themselves fast. And that started the whole dense tree formation and that gave us the scalability fast.

Now you still continue the player coach model at some level as the system scales.

Our thesis has always been pay for performance. We didn't want to create a system where we didn't test the limits of the productivity that is possible. And to that end, what we also did was another experiment where we said, next four quarters of Rubrik sales, every sales team will have a fixed flat quota and very modest quota. So what that allowed our sales teams to do early sales team is to really push hard and see how far and how fast they can sell so that they can make the max money. Because after a modest quota, the money doubled. So not only they tested their own limits, but they gave data back to the company saying what is possible. And that what is possible is again opening up the minds that hey, just because we are a new company doesn't mean that we have to go slow down. Just because we are a new company doesn't mean that we can't sell a million dollar deal. Just because we are a new company, we don't have to accept two deals a quarter. I can as an individual salesperson, I can make four deals a quarter, five deals a quarter, eight deals a quarter. So that kind of broke the artificial limits that we put on ourselves and really went for the possibilities.

It's been wonderful to watch Rubrik's growth. I think one thing that's extraordinary is how quickly Rubrik has garnered the trust of so many large enterprises around the world. Any lessons learned around that or what key takeaways would you say other CEOs could have in terms of watching the Rubrik journey?

So large enterprises are not making a decision on a product based on a few feature being there and not there. They're really making a decision whether this company will be around for a long time and so that it can keep pretty close to where the innovations are happening. And also whether this company has, at least even for a short time, a track record of delivering what they promised. So what they saw in Rubrik was we were releasing features and capabilities very rapidly. And as a result, the capabilities of Rubrik were growing very, very rapidly. And if you combine that with disruptive value that we were delivering to the customer, where their experience from the existing product to this new product was 10 times better, when you have 10 times better value and then you are able to demonstrate the ability to execute on innovation rapidly and you are also demonstrating the ability to win customers rapidly, it means that you will stay for long time. Then their guard come down and they want to adopt you because they're also competing in their own market space against nimbler or other companies which are trying to disrupt them.

And how about on the demand generation side? I mean, are there any particular lessons or key takeaways in terms of just extreme growth or very high velocity growth?

So we did a few experiments on the marketing front as well. So we started the company in January and we made a decision in November, before we even had alpha product, to actually sponsor as gold sponsor at VMworld. Because that's a big demand generation source for a product such as ours. It was a bold move because it costed us between US and Europe north of $250,000. But we made that call because I had a fundamental belief that this product, the way we are thinking about it and driving in the market, if it hits that trajectory, we need to have the pipeline to execute fast. And without that level of deep demand generation through events, because events is the primary source of demand generation, particularly for a young company, will not have enough leads to plurality of deals to be able to drive this at a rapid pace. And that also became a goal in itself, so that the whole company aligned to deliver product, to launch the company, to have better customer, to have sales. So that going into the VM world we had to look bigger than our actual size. So it became like a self fulfilling prophecy. And that allowed the company to have a significant presence at VMworld. And that momentum drove the next level of wave of demand generation. Through local events, lunch and learn. And then we went on and on. It has been a lot of learning experience for us. I mean one thing that was my discovery through this journey is that this early sales process is not like an arithmetic progression, it's a geometric progression.

So if what does that mean?

Yeah, that it goes from like 1, 3, 9, 27 versus 1, 2, 4, 6, 8. As a result, if you have the initial pipe which is strong, then the growth is also faster.

Yeah, I see. How about just in terms of phases of company, there's the very early phase, then you start to add teams and grow at a particular level. And now you know, you get into a multi hundred million dollar run rate heading towards, you know, a multi billion dollar run rate not very far away. So just as you know, one goes into kind of the scale phase at the next level. Any additional thoughts around that?

So every stage has its own challenges. In the early days you need to have lot of leads and a lot of demand generation activities to be able to continue to scale the business. But at some point it has to go from individual heroics into a system on processes that can predict growth. So to that end, when we're hiring our sales team pretty rapidly, we actually focused on sales enablement because how do we hire sales team and make them dangerous fast so that they start to pay for themselves? So we invested in sales enablement much before a regular company would go invest in that area. So we have been always kind of taking early risk to make sure that we are covered because the ambitions are much larger. So at every stage of the game. So at tens of millions of dollars we started to build enablement at 50, $100 million range, we started to do lot more systems and processes and predictability and inspection. And as we are getting into now, hundreds of million and forward now we are looking at the whole portfolio of deals and which deals and understanding customer lifetime value and how do we deliver more value to our customers. We create repeat purchase dynamics that going into the quarter we have a lot of visibility into how much money we can actually get from our existing customer base who have more needs for this product versus new customers. All of that plays into it.

That's excellent in terms of the life of a CEO of a very, very fast growing company. So what is a typical week like for you or a typical day?

It has changed and evolved. So in the early days of Rubrik, I was doing both recruiting and products. So I designed, I worked with designer and built the first product of Rubrik. So I was spending a lot of time in in product building and recruiting in the early days, recruiting engineers and product building. So that was the first year of the company. In the second year of the company it evolved from product building and early market interaction to going and meeting a lot of customers to reassure them that we are not flash on the pan. It is a company that will be long lasting and they can take an early bet on us. And as we grew up then my engagements got limited to a set of strategic locations and areas and markets. So my typical week these days is a lot on the road meeting customers and partners and plotting strategies in different geographies. Plus a lot of time working with the executive team to understand our growth, our risks, which products, which markets, how we are doing sales, how are we creating financial foundation of a long term business?

The ability to prioritize or the ability to focus is a core requirement for success for most organizations and most leaders. Any thoughts around that? Or takeaways for other CEOs or entrepreneurs that may be listening?

So one thing that I do is I think about everything that I have on my plate and which one is bothering me the most. So I like listen to my instinct and things that bothering me most. I just focus on it and that's how it goes.

So not necessarily the things you want to work on but the things that bother you the most.

Exactly.

On that note, that's a good place to close. Thanks so much Bipul. Pleasure talking to you and it's a privilege to be on this journey together with you and the rest of the Rubrik team and looking forward to building a multi billion dollar size business from here on.

Thank you Aseem. Really appreciate your support and championship of our business from very early days. Really fortunate to have you on the board and look forward to working with you for many years to come.

No thank you. Yes I'm here.