A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
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.
00:06:49 · Arvind Jain, Pablo Srugo
[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. [00:07:26] S1: Now, weren't there – just thinking through this problem, like you said, it was a problem that everybody faced. In a sense, it classified in the world of obvious problems that are just really hard to solve, but weren't there some – I remember Dropbox I think had put something out in this space or was at least marketing that they had a solution. Were there a lot of big names going after this problem as well?
00:07:26 · Pablo Srugo, Arvind Jain
[00:07:26] S1: Now, weren't there – just thinking through this problem, like you said, it was a problem that everybody faced. In a sense, it classified in the world of obvious problems that are just really hard to solve, but weren't there some – I remember Dropbox I think had put something out in this space or was at least marketing that they had a solution. Were there a lot of big names going after this problem as well? [00:07:47] S0: Historically, this is not a new problem, helping employees find information at work. There've been companies. Google had a product, too, but nobody really solved it in a way where somebody liked the product, where the problem actually got solved. Overall, I would say it was more of a neglected space as opposed to a space where a lot of companies were thinking about doing something. When we came in, we built the product, we felt that we were the only ones who were truly focused on bringing assistance to employees with a product like ours. Most of our journey has felt more like creating the market for it as opposed to competing with other vendors with a better product. [00:08:30] S1: Walk me through those early days. You finally do decide to leave Rubrik. My understanding is you raised that, I think it was $15 million round, right out of the gate. What was that process like? I assume, was it relatively straightforward just because of your background and what you've proven so far?