When Asheem Chandna arrived at Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he couldn’t wait to see what the young company that hadn’t yet built its product would show him. Greylock’s partner did not disappoint.
The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, laid out Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market in one board. “The old and new architecture he presented was very exciting,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the industry, I knew it could be integrated into a large business.”
This was a wake-up call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik began life as a publicly traded company with one market capitalization of over $6 billion. Greylock owns a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. As of Friday’s market close, with shares trading 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 $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45/share, adjusted for splits, according to these SEC filings. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandra’s returns on it they are huge.)
“The more I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture 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 helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s offices and was on the board of the nearly $100 billion company until last year. Chandna was also an early investor AppDynamics, Sumo Logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but also self-aware of their weaknesses and can recruit people who can do things in areas that are not the founder’s forte.
Another essential ingredient for a founder is grit. “If you had technology that was adequate, but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very aware and persistent, you would beat me,” he said.
This is what he saw in Sinha. The founder of Rubrik had a lifelong dream to start a company. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers who wanted to come work there, Chandra recalls. The business he was trying to build wasn’t inherently sexy at the time.
Despite being an investor with Lightspeed for four years prior to Rubrik’s launch, recruiting talent proved to be a major challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them for coffee away from where they worked.
“Startup journeys are very difficult, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “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 company public despite the tepid IPO environment.
“Rubrik has just under $800 million in annual recurring revenue,” Chandna said, “That’s bigger than most companies that have gone public in the last several years. I think they just wanted to get on with it.”
Chandna declined to say whether he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik’s lead, but emphasized that the firm’s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We will closely monitor their fate.
