When Asheem Chandna drove to Rubrik’s Palo Alto office on a Friday night in early 2015, he was eager to see what the young company that hadn’t yet developed its product would show him. The Greylock partner was not disappointed.
The company’s CEO Bipul Sinha drew on a whiteboard Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market. “The old versus new architecture that he presented was very compelling,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could become a big business.”
That was a prophetic call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik began life as a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of more than $6 billion. Greylock owns a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. At Friday’s market close, with shares priced at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth more than $756 million.
But Chandna says it was much more than Rubrik’s desire to take on the arcane data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik’s business. $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold at $2.45 per share, adjusting for splits, according to those SEC filings. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandra’s returns on this are considerable).
“The longer I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that entrepreneurship is a people business,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for more than 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in the Greylock offices and was on the board of directors of the company valued at nearly $100 billion until last year. Chandna was also one of the early investors in Application dynamics, sumo logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but are also aware of their weaknesses and can recruit people who can do things in areas that are not the founder’s strengths.
Another essential ingredient for a founder is determination. “If you had adequate but slightly inferior technology than mine, but were very self-aware and persistent, you would beat me,” he said.
That’s what he saw in Sinha. The founder of Rubrik had a lifelong dream of starting a company. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers who wanted to work there, Chandra recalled. The business he was trying to build wasn’t inherently attractive at the time.
Despite having been an investor in Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent proved to be a big challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He pinged the engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them to coffee a few blocks from where they worked.
“The path to a startup is very difficult, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “I want people who don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Perhaps it was Sinha’s guts and ambition that compelled him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.
“Rubrik has just under $800 million in annualized recurring revenue,” Chandna said, “that’s more than most companies that have gone public in recent years. “I think they just wanted to move on.”
Chandna declined to say whether he expects other companies in Greylock’s portfolio to follow Rubrik’s lead, but he strongly added that the company’s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We will closely follow his fate.