Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha | Scaling with Intuition

Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of Editorial at Greylock. Today, Greylock General Partner Ashim Chandna talks with Bipil Sinha, who is the CEO and co founder of Rubrik. The company is a leader in data security and works with more than 5,000 customers around the world across every industry. Sinha co founded Rubrik in 2014 and the company quickly gained traction with customers eager to protect and manage their data. Rubrik experienced explosive growth each year for the first few years before hitting a bit of a challenging point. Sinha says this largely happened because the company lost sight of their intuition. From overhiring to trying to build too many products and new features at once. Many companies struggle to prioritize during periods of high growth, but it's possible to get back on track. Sinha says that refocusing on the company's original goals and operational practices, rather than just on growing as fast as possible steered Rubrikrik back into the right direction. Recently the company announced they surpassed the $500 million ARR mark and have achieved an NRR of greater than 140%. Sinha discussed the importance of listening to your intuition when incorporating other viewpoints and other leadership lessons in detail with Chadna as part of Greylock's Iconversation series. You can watch the video of this interview on our YouTube channel and you can read a transcript on our website. Both are linked in the show notes and if you aren't already a subscriber to Gray Matter, you can sign up wherever you get your podcasts.

So mipul privilege to have you here today. Bipil grew up in rural India, went to IIT in India and then moved to the us. Began at Oracle in the Bay Area, was doing a part time MBA in the evening and ran into a venture capitalist. Ended up moving from Oracle into a VC fund. Worked at a couple of different VC firms. Made fun defining investments at both those firms. Could have easily co stared as a VC or stayed in VC for many years. Got the itch to go to a company. So in 2014 he started Rubrik with three other co founders. Today it's a data security company. Business has been selling for about seven years since initial product. So with that framing bipol maybe first question to start is the business went 0 to 50 million in year one, which is a hard thing for any business to do and certainly for an enterprise facing business. So how do you do that?

Thanks Asheem, Glad to be here after that introduction, it only goes downhill from here. Be ready for it. When I started Rubrik, our idea was that how do we create a company that is the fastest ever? How do we create a new benchmark? Because we were obsessed with this idea that some people target good, some people target great. How do you target at potential? Are you playing at your potential? And our idea was that if you're playing at your potential means that you are going to get customers at geometric progression. You go 3, 6, 9, 3139, 27, 81 quickly. And you can't do that if you are doing like building product and talking to customers and trying to do things sequential. So we changed that into a parallel stream. Pravana is here. He is one of our founding engineers. What we did was we hired a sales, internal salesperson three months into the company and product was one and a half year out. And we started pitching and selling to the customer from that day. And when the customer was ready to buy the product, we would send them a $3,000 early access program contract for them to sign and get the approval and give the money and wait for one year for the product. What it did was it quickly filtered down who are tire kickers versus real believers. If you can't approve $3,000, you will not buy $100,000 product. And it actually created a very deep beta pipeline. We sold to almost all of those early beta customers. And before we went into GA, we had close to $400,000 worth of product that we had sold. And then we went onward from there.

So the first year went fast. The second and third year went fast as well. Three years into selling, I think we were about 350 million in sales. And then three things went sideways, things went down. Talk about what happened next and then how you handled that.

So in terms of the TCV selling, like total dollar that you sell, we sold almost 50 million first year, then 170 million second year and 350 million third year. So we grew so fast, so fast. And we hired like so many people in the company, we kind of lost the sense of our own intuition. And I started hearing other people. And that was the biggest mistake I made. Because what happens is that when you hire experienced executives and they come with lot of experience in building large companies and everybody's telling you that hey, I have done this and I have built this company and that company, you lose sense that every company is different and your company is different. And although you have never done this before or your first time CEO or first time in a Startup, you cannot just override your intuition by all the input that you get from boards and advisors and executives and everyone else. So I made a series of hiring mistakes where I brought folks who were trying to optimize the business as opposed to fundamentally thinking that why this business is growing rapidly and how do I make it grow even faster. And as a result, when they started changing the different parameters of the business, they didn't fundamentally understand the core growth engine. And at that speed, if you turn the dial a little bit wrong, the diversion that comes to you, you cannot stop it. So we were in a funk for almost four quarters before we got back on track.

How do you manage stress?

I went through my own journey in terms of stress. So in the early days, again this idea of time compression, my whole thesis was that if we time compress everything, then we can get to the scale faster, result faster, hiring faster, everything faster. So accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. But then I was very worried about the outcome. I was always worried about top line and what is going to happen. And once we hit the air pocket where first time I realized that there's something wrong with the way we are like making decision, hiring people, operating structure of the company. I figured that if I worry about the top line or worry about anything or stress, I'm not making the right decision. So that was a little bit of a change that I brought in myself where I said I'm going to live today and am I doing everything today to maximize today, not worry about whether the company will succeed, fail, higher scale speed, just maximize today. Every decision that you make today, make sure that you look at every input, make the right decision and maximize the moment. And that took the stress away. And that really kind of got me to a point where I don't stress at all. Good time, bad time, people leaving, people coming in. It adds no stress to me. Only thing is that am I maximizing right now?

So maybe we can open it up to questions, if folks have questions and then yeah.

Hi Bai Po. My question is there must be many other moments where you were influenced by others and the thinking the decision is made more robust. So can you share in hindsight what are some heuristics that you use to decide when to listen to others and change your mind and when not. Thank you. The way I think about this is for every situation, how do I feel about the situation or how do I feel about a decision? And that's all I make the decision on. And I ask a lot of people about their input and just check whether it jives with what I'm thinking or do they have very strong point that will veer me away from my point of view, But I don't make my point of view based on that. And that was my modus operandi as a VC as well. I would always make the decision and then try to create some boundaries and parameters to fix things, but never made the decision. After talking to people, you first make the decision and then create guardrails.

Nice to meet you. Absolutely love the talk today. Super energizing. Care a lot about going fast. One of the things I found most challenging is if you're growing at a rate where you're doubling over periods of months, maybe short years, whatever schedule you laid out three, six months ago is probably the wrong one. And so maybe my question for you is, what does your schedule actually look like Monday through Friday? If you could just describe your calendar. Has it been consistent? How has it changed? Like, I'd just love to know if I could look at your calendar. What is it? How do you do it?

And actually, maybe I'll jump in with one anecdote. In the early days. I remember the early days. There were some weeks Bipil was doing not one red eye to the east coast, but two, which was like. I mean, I was just. It was staggering to watch. Yeah.

One of the things that we did was, and I had a strong belief that we are all prisoners of our own imagination. You can become what you think you will become. And then everyone tells you that. This is the highest any company has done in their first year. This is the highest this company has done in the second year. I had the firm belief that if we think big, then we'll become big. So this idea of thinking huge, thinking so big that you don't define any limits to it, but when you think so big and then you look back saying that what am I doing to achieve that big? And big has no definition, no numbers, but massive. So, honestly speaking, my calendar is not as busy. And I used to think as a young CEO or early CEO, seven, eight years ago, in the early days of the company, every CEO I was talking to, they were like, super busy. They were saying, I'm this busy, that busy. And I feel like my calendar is relatively open. I used to think, am I not working hard enough? I'm not thinking big enough. And the company didn't have any numbers or. Or actual customers. I was thinking that maybe I'm not pushing hard enough. Slowly I realized that people work for two reasons. They spend half of the time working and half of the time showing other people that they are working. So if you take that other half out saying that I don't care what anybody thinks, I will do what I feel like doing, then your calendar is half empty. So you are never too busy. If somebody says I'm too busy, they are spending half of their time showing other people that they are working. One thing I also did was for the first six years of the company before the Rubrik security team said that you can't have open calendar. My calendar was open to everybody in the company from receptionists to interns to everybody. And it was not very full.

You know one follow on that prompts in my mind is can you talk a little bit about recruiting and just you know how you've built your leadership team and also how you went about recruiting those folks.

Recruiting is different in the different stage of the company. So in the early stage of the company I did all the recruiting myself. So I was the first recruiter in the company. First nine months there was no recruiter. I hired first 10 engineers, first, first go to market team, first business team. And all of it was LinkedIn cold calling. So I would go cold call people on LinkedIn. So I created a pitch deck just like you create a pitch deck for the customer and I would sit in a coffee shop and meet candidates one after other and pitch them on the pitch deck. So it was mostly done on intuition, your interaction, your feeling about the candidate and purely going with that. But once we got to like say 500 to 800 people then we started to have a processes because it is very hard when you hire an executive or experienced executive because they are very good at talking and your job is to cut the talking out and figure out what they can deliver. So then what I did was I created like a very formatted like process where I would have them present to the executive team and to the board like things that they would do differently and then create like a many to one interview situation where people will ask them like quick fire questions. And that created a very interesting dynamics. And Ashim has been part of few where you see the reaction of the people and how in depth they are as opposed to just saying things which is like pure recycled knowledge. And then you can fathom like how far or how deep they are.

People maybe asking the other side of the hiring question. There are a number of founders in the room, managing executives at progressing larger stages of the company where they haven't managed an executive who's seen that part of the journey before. So once you get the right person or who you think is the right person in the building, how do you learn how to manage and hold that person in the function accountable?

I always had the point of view that since I was a vc, I always thought that the failure mode of companies are that the founders are too overbearing on management teams, so you give management team freedom to execute. But I actually was wrong. When I sat on this side of the table, I felt that although people have experience and they have done it in other places, but every situation is different and every company is different. So what you have to do is you have to be close enough to not be in their head all the time, but you can't be far enough that you can't see what is going on. So you have to create like, you have to give them clear direction in terms of a strategic imperative and then clear accountability where you are measuring the actual outcome. If you just rely on them to do the right thing, they will not be able to do the right thing, however experienced they are. I have experimented this with so many people with so many different experience. I've come to the conclusion that you are the person as a CEO, as a founder, you have a special intuition about the business. And you don't know everything about the business, but you have an intuition about overall business. So what you have to do is you have to give people latitude to execute, but create accountability with some metrics that you are measuring. If the metrics go sideways, hold people accountable.

Take one more question. If there's one more.

So, Vipul, you talked a lot about the inherent directionality in the way you make decisions, right? This is like kind of a theme throughout a lot of the things you've been saying, but, you know, it's counterbalanced with transparency. And, you know, one of the things you mentioned is like, you know, you do an update, you do some heuristics, you. You change your mind. How do you communicate to the team that you've changed your mind as a result of their input and not necessarily just something you decided.

You have to be honest about it. So when you go into the meeting, you just say, hey, I have this point of view, but I want all of you guys to give me your input and you have to change their mind. And I have changed my mind so many times in front of my executive team that they know that I'll change my mind. And which is also teaching them that they also should change their mind. And this is a big test of an executive. An executive says, this is how it is. You Want to fire them immediately. Because every company is a learning environment and if you are not learning based on the parameters of the business, then you are taking a direction where business doesn't may not want to go. So I changed my mind a lot of time and in front of everybody. In fact, during COVID I publicly said that we'll come across as deterring. We are not making decision. And that's a good thing for the company because we don't have a strong point of view because we don't know whether we can work from home, whether we can come to office, how we collaborate, we have no idea. And actually this actually helps our attrition rate because we didn't have a strong point of view and we publicly stated that we don't have a strong point of view.

Maybe last question. Go ahead.

I'll try not to make it a hard one. Being at Rubrik early, we were on the other end of the decisions that you made. Right. So one of the things that the engineers always would say was a lot of the things that are coming down are very clear. There's a very clear line of sight. But to do that, to be operating at potential and to do this continuously, you need to have a really good retro process yourself.

Right.

For digesting what you're hearing and coming to what the decision that needs to be made is. We've always wondered, could you actually walk us through what is your process like when you go home? Right. Do you take time for yourself? What is the process of collecting all this feedback and coming to your decision and iterating on your gut feel?

I actually call a lot of people if I have a hard decision to make. I call people one on one and say I'm thinking about this, what do you think? And then I challenge them and first of all I tell them that hey, I'm challenging you, not as a CEO, but as a colleague. As a colleague, that I want your feedback, but I challenge them that why are you thinking this way? Sometimes they convince me that hey people, you're thinking it wrong. But then I do a lot of one on one calls and that's the process. So you have a point of view and then you're trying to create boundary conditions to make sure that you are not completely off and not all your decision will actually go right. So don't be afraid of making decision. My personal point of view is that if you are making at a high speed, more than 50% right decision for your company, your company will never die and you will succeed. I mean, it may take longer for you to succeed if you are only at 50%, but you will succeed if you are making more than 50% right decision.

As a closing question, asking the five year question so if you knew what you know now, five years ago, any reflection or what would you have done differently?

I already said that in some ways you got to have your own intuition and believe in your own intuition. Because again, nobody knows the future. However much people have experience, nobody knows the future. Neither you, nor your board, nor your employees, nor the market. So in that situation, if you substitute your intuition for somebody else's experience, I made that mistake because I thought, hey, I'm hiring this person. They have so much experience, they must know this better. And I actually didn't take my intuition into account. So now I know that. Don't be egotistic, be humble, keep learning, keep checking the boundary condition, but don't let your intuition be overridden by anybody, including a board.

And on that note, that's thanks so much, Vipul. Thanks for being here. Great session.

That concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can watch the video of this interview on our YouTube channel and you can read a transcript on our website. Both are linked in the show notes. And if you aren't already a subscriber to Gray Matter, you can sign up wherever you get your podcast. I'm Heather Mack. Thanks for listening.