A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:23:17 · Arvind Jain
[00:23:17] S0: Absolutely, and actually, it's always been part of Glean. Even on Day 1, our product, we're using LLMs. Now, of course, everybody talks about LLMs and we've all seen how powerful they are, but they were actually, initially, all of this research happened in Google and LLMs were actually, or these language models were actually built with one purpose, which is to make search better, to make Google Search better. When we started, we were actually able to use these BERT family of language models that Google had actually published in Open Domain. These were language models that were trained on all of the world's knowledge. They understood things like a user manual and a product guide are semantically equal and things. This model actually has all of that language understanding buried inside of it. We were able to use these models from Day 1 to build a really smart semantic search experience. We were doing vector embeddings and now everybody calls this vector search. There's no name for it like when we were using it initially. The journey has been a continuous one for us. It's not that four years later we realized that there's this massive new language model thing and we need to change our stack with it. We're progressively using it. These models just kept getting better and better. It allowed us to actually also make our product better. Initially, it looked more like the traditional Google where you come and ask questions and we'll surface that information back to you. The technology has been amazing enabler in terms of making a product better, but it's also amazing for us in terms of helping us push our business. This is where the transition happened from the vitamin to the painkiller. People saw that if only I had something like Chat GPT inside my company or all of my company knowledge, people realized that, whoa, no, this is something I absolutely have to have.
00:25:09 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:25:09] S1: It makes sense. I think a lot of these products that are step changes you only realize later how much of a painkiller they are. I mean, Google itself, search itself is that. I'm sure before it, you ask people, hey, you could ask a million different questions a day, you’d be like, well, I don't have that many questions. Then you realize you do and you just constantly, everything that pops in your brain, right? Let me ask this final question. You take these two years. In 2021, you raised the $40 million series B. My question is, around that time frame, I mean, once you launch this product, how fast did revenue grow? How long did it take to get to $1 million in revenue or $5 million in revenue? Do you remember those days? [00:25:43] S0: We've been actually growing about 3x to 4x every year in terms of multiplying our revenues. We probably hit, right after we launched, because we did have a good set of design partners. There's a big pipeline that was already built for us. I think our first year of selling, we did $3 million, if I remember right. [00:26:06] S1: Perfect. Well, we'll stop it there. I appreciate you taking us through the journey. I'll just end with two questions that we always end with. The first one is, I mean, in your case specifically, you understood the problem deeply, but I'm still curious, when did you really know that you had true product market fit?
00:26:06 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:26:06] S1: Perfect. Well, we'll stop it there. I appreciate you taking us through the journey. I'll just end with two questions that we always end with. The first one is, I mean, in your case specifically, you understood the problem deeply, but I'm still curious, when did you really know that you had true product market fit? [00:26:25] S0: I think I knew it on day one. I mean, that's it. I knew that we were going to go through this challenge of trying to convince people of the value of the product, but we were ready for that. We were ready to actually build our team, evangelize, and convince people because there's never a doubt in my mind that the people want this product. Whenever I go and talk to anybody, they tell me they want this product. Then there's no doubt. It was just a matter of cultivating the market. We thought that the journey would be slow, but in the sense, if we had to constantly go and create the market, evangelize, it changed in the last 18 months and now suddenly we have something that everybody in the world wants. It's accelerating us and our business. [00:27:14] S1: Perfect, and the last question is after going through founding Rubrik and now founding Glean and creating two multi-billion-dollar companies, what advice do you have, taking everything you've learned, for first-time founders that are starting, or maybe not even first-time founders, but founders that are starting something new today?
00:27:14 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:27:14] S1: Perfect, and the last question is after going through founding Rubrik and now founding Glean and creating two multi-billion-dollar companies, what advice do you have, taking everything you've learned, for first-time founders that are starting, or maybe not even first-time founders, but founders that are starting something new today? [00:27:32] S0: Yeah, I mean, my number one advice to founders is conviction and persistence. If you see a problem that's out there, then don't think too much about who else is solving it or how big the market is. Just go and solve the problem and persist and believe in it. There's going to be ups and downs. There's going to be enough people telling you that, hey, look, I see this problem, but I don't see myself paying for it. Don't worry about all of that part. If you think that it's a large enough problem, a lot of people face it, then having that conviction and belief and staying on course is, I think, the most important thing. As engineers, a lot of times, founders are engineers and our mindset is to doubt. I tell people, you hear these stats that nine out of ten startups fail. I like to tell them, look, no, it's not nine out of ten. It's 99 out of 100 because you didn't count all the first 90 startups that the founder killed themselves. Sometimes we say the startup – but most of them fail in the mind of the founders. If there's a problem and you can solve it, then it doesn't matter who else is out there. [00:28:41] S1: Perfect, love that. Well, Arvind, thanks a lot for spending the time. This is great.
00:28:41 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:28:41] S1: Perfect, love that. Well, Arvind, thanks a lot for spending the time. This is great. [00:28:46] S0: Appreciate that. Thank you for having me. [00:28:48] S1: If you listened to this episode and the show and you liked it, I have a huge favor to ask for you. Well, it's actually a really small favor, but it has huge impact, but whichever app you're listening to this episode on, take it out, go to Product Market Fit Show and leave a review, please. It's going to help. It's not just going to help me, to be clear. It's going to help other founders discover this show because the algorithms, whether it's Spotify, whether it's Apple, whether it's any other podcast player, one of the big things they look at is frequency of reviews. It's quantity of reviews. The reality is, if all of you listening right now left reviews, we would have thousands of reviews. Please take literally a minute, even if you're just writing great podcast or I love this podcast, whatever it is, just write a few words. Obviously the longer the better, the more detailed the better, but write anything, leave five stars and you'll be helping me, but most importantly, many other founders just like you discover the show. Thank you.