When Asheem Chandna visited Rubrik’s Palo Alto office on a Friday evening in early 2015, he was eager to learn what the young company that hadn’t yet built its product would show him. Greylock’s partner was not disappointed.
The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan on a whiteboard to revamp the data management and recovery market. “The old and new architecture he presented was very convincing,” Chandna said. “With my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could become a big company. »
It was a premonitory call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik began life as a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of over $6 billion. Greylock owns a 13% stake, according to the latest filings with the SEC. As of Friday’s market close, with shares valued at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth more than $756 million.
But Chandna says it was more than Rubrik’s desire to tackle the dark data recovery market that motivated him to run Rubrik’s. $40 million, Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45/share, accounting for splits, according to these SEC filings. Although Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices , Chandna’s returns on it are significant.)
“The more I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture capital is a people business,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s offices and served on the nearly $100 billion company’s board of directors until last year. Chandna was also an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but also aware of their weaknesses and able to recruit people who can drive things forward in areas that are not the founder’s strengths.
Another essential ingredient for a founder is courage. “If you had adequate technology, but slightly inferior to mine, but were very self-aware and persistent, you would beat me,” he said.
This is what he saw in Sinha. The founder of Rubrik had always dreamed of starting a business. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find competent engineers willing to come and work there, Chandna recalls. The business he was trying to build wasn’t inherently sexy at the time.
Although she was an investor at Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent proved to be a big challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He contacted the engineers on LinkedIn, then invited them for coffee a few blocks from their workplace.
“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 courage and ambition that pushed him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.
“Rubrik has annualized recurring revenue of just under $800 million,” Chandna said. “That’s more than most companies IPOed in recent years. I think they just wanted to keep going.
Chandna declined to say whether he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik’s lead, but added emphatically that the firm’s top-performing early-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We will follow their fate closely.
