When Asheem Chandna drove as much as Rubrik’s workplace in Palo Alto on a Friday night time in early 2015, he was trying ahead to studying what the younger firm that had but to construct its product would present him. The Greylock companion wasn’t disenchanted.
The firm’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan to revamp the info administration and restoration market on a whiteboard. “The old versus new architecture he presented was very compelling,” Chandna stated. “Based on my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could be built into a large business.”
That was a prescient name. On Thursday, 9 years after that assembly, Rubrik started its life as a publicly traded firm with a market cap of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake, in line with the most recent SEC filings. By the shut of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, these almost 19.9 million shares had been value over $756 million.
But Chandna says it was way more than Rubrik’s need to tackle the arcane information restoration market that motivated him to guide Rubrik’s $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B spherical offered for $2.45/share, adjusting for splits, in line with these SEC paperwork. While Greylock additionally participated in later rounds at greater costs, Chandna’s returns on this one are hefty.)
“The longer I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture is a people business,” stated Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable monitor file of profitable exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s places of work and was on the almost $100 billion-worth firm’s board till final yr. Chandna was additionally an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo Logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna seems for people who find themselves not solely motivated and bold, however are additionally self-aware of their weaknesses, and may recruit individuals who can get issues carried out in areas that aren’t the founder’s robust fits.
Another important ingredient for a founder is grit. “If you had technology that was adequate, but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very self-aware and persistent, you will beat me,” he stated.
That’s what he noticed in Sinha. Rubrik’s founder had a lifelong dream of beginning an organization. When he based the info administration and restoration startup in 2013, he couldn’t discover robust engineers who wished to return work there, Chandna recalled. The enterprise he was attempting to construct was inherently not attractive on the time.
Despite having been an investor with Lightspeed for 4 years earlier than launching Rubrik, recruiting expertise turned out to be an enormous problem for Sinha. But he didn’t surrender. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn after which invited them for espresso blocks away from the place they labored.
“Startup journeys are very hard, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna stated. “I want people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Perhaps it was Sinha’s grit and ambition that compelled him to take his firm public regardless of the lukewarm IPO setting.
“Rubrik has just under $800 million in annualized recurring revenue,” Chandna stated, “That’s larger than most companies that went public in the last many years. I think they just wanted to get on with it.”
Chandna declined to say if he expects different Greylock portfolio firms to comply with Rubrik’s lead however added emphatically that the agency’s best-performing late-stage companies are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We can be following their destiny intently.
