A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:00:54 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:00:54] S1: Listen, I've got your LinkedIn open right here. I'm looking through it. Ten years, distinguished engineer at Google. The claim to fame, as far as I understand it, is you made Google Search as fast as a blink of an eye. Then you go off, you start Rubrik. That actually is filing for IPO now. They're doing half a billion dollar on revenue, worth $5 to $10 billion, but that wasn't enough for you. You left halfway through that story, started Glean, which is what you're working on today. You just raised $200 million for that at over $2 billion valuation. My first question honestly is, what's the secret, man? What am I doing wrong? [00:01:27] S0: No secrets. I would just say I've been so fortunate to actually be with people who want to build great products and achieve some success with them. Excited with what we've done with Rubrik, what we're doing with Glean. [00:01:41] S1: Then let's dive in a little bit. We'll spend almost the entire episode on Glean, but just to get some context, walk me through just leaving Google, especially at the state that you were at. Obviously, let's call it, very comfortable position for a bit of a euphemism, but to decide to go off on your own and start your startup, what drove you to do that? Yeah, just walk me through that thinking.
00:01:41 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:01:41] S1: Then let's dive in a little bit. We'll spend almost the entire episode on Glean, but just to get some context, walk me through just leaving Google, especially at the state that you were at. Obviously, let's call it, very comfortable position for a bit of a euphemism, but to decide to go off on your own and start your startup, what drove you to do that? Yeah, just walk me through that thinking. [00:02:02] S0: I really enjoyed working at Google. I always got to get a chance to work on products that were really meaningful, that everybody around me uses. It was amazing. I had no plans as such to actually go and start a company. I was not feeling any unrest. Sometimes, problems come to you. In this case, my co-founder Bipul and I, we chatted about this problem that we ultimately built Rubrik for, and it was exciting to me. I just felt that it would be great to actually go and do something on your own, not have this… always have this big support system that you have behind. Because sometimes I feel like at Google, I was not feeling challenged anymore because we are such a successful company and we could always take big problems and work on them. It didn't matter if they failed because as an individual, yeah, you move on and you start a new project. Sometimes that also makes you dull. Here, it was actually interesting for me to actually see, okay, let me see what I can prove. [00:03:08] S1: No safety net, burn all boats. It either works or it doesn't.
00:03:08 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:03:08] S1: No safety net, burn all boats. It either works or it doesn't. [00:03:12] S0: Yeah, and of course, it was the – we know that, if you succeed, that actually is going to feel totally special. [00:03:20] S1: You go through this journey. Things are going quite well. I believe you raised this series E or so. This is the 2018, 2019 time frame. How does the idea of Glean come up? Then how do you work through – you're the founder. You're one of the founders. How do you work through exploring that and ultimately leaving? Walk me through that period.
00:03:39 · Arvind Jain
[00:03:39] S0: We ran into this problem that Glean solves at Rubrik. We were really, really lucky at Rubrik to grow the business really quickly. In four years, we were actually more than a thousand people in the company, but with that growth came challenges. One of them was that our productivity actually dropped quite a bit. As engineers, they're not able to write as much code. Salespeople are not able to sell as much stuff. Overall, we felt that you're investing so much, we actually tripled the size of the engineering team, but still write the same amount of code. It doesn't matter how many people you bring in, you don't get more things done. We would run these surveys, poll surveys, and ask people what's wrong with the company. What are the things we can do better on? Always you would see this one problem that was top of mind for people. This was one of the, I think, default questions in the survey, which was that people would complain that I cannot find any information in this company. I don't know where to go and look for things, and I don't know who to go and ask for help. This was a big problem. When it became clearly the largest problem there, I thought about it and it resonated with me because I felt the same way. In fact, everybody in the company felt the same way. There's so much data, so much knowledge across so many different systems. Nobody knew what stuff was there.
00:04:58 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:04:58] S1: Would you say that's even worse at a fast-growing startup? Just because if you think about zero to a thousand employees, that means most of them got hired in the last year. They don't even know what they don't know sort of thing. Was that exacerbated at Rubrik? [00:05:10] S0: Yeah, it was definitely exacerbated because it was a fast-growing company. When we saw this problem, we wanted to solve it. We went and talked to a few other companies just to see if they were running into this problem, what are the solutions for this. We realized that this was such a common problem. Every employee and every company in the world struggles with this. They're struggling more and more as we’re going through this SaaS transformation where suddenly businesses started to use hundreds of systems and applications and your knowledge got really fragmented. [00:05:43] S1: What was your role, by the way, at Rubrik at that time? [00:05:46] S0: I was the head of R&D so I actually was responsible for all product development, but I was also, I guess, founder. I would also look at issues these internally, how can we make our company better. Initially, and I'm a search engineers, when I see that people can't find things, I say, okay, let's go and buy a search engine. [00:06:04] S1: It's deep, yeah.
00:06:04 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:06:04] S1: It's deep, yeah. [00:06:05] S0: We tried to go and find one and I didn't find anything to buy. I was really shocked. I said this is such a commonplace problem. How come there is not even a single product that I can go and buy for this? That led to that initial thought process of, hey, maybe I should go and solve this. We thought about maybe I should build a second product in Rubrik, but it just felt like it didn't make sense for us. We were in such large market already with the small market share so all of our focus there had to be on our existing product. [00:06:40] S1: Was that a tough conversation internally? You ultimately going to your other co-founders and saying, actually I think I'm just going to go off on my own and start something new. [00:06:49] S0: It was tough for me internally first, before I even discussed with somebody. I had to figure out why, how, does it make sense, why? We actually built the organization to an extent where we had great leaders and they're doing great job. In fact, they're better than me. I felt I had the ability to do a really good smooth transition and start Glean, but I was so excited about it. It's a problem that is something that I feel is really fundamental. We believe that we make such a big impact on the lives of people who use our product.