Fireside Chat with Glean Founder & CEO Arvind Jain | Ep.05

I think either Harry used ChatGPT to produce that or he's a creative writer thinker.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so I spent a good amount of time, you know, in Cambridge in the Boston area because one of my first jobs out of college was here at Akamai, a company that's, you know, I guess neighbors, you know, from Harvard. And so spent like a good number of years here working at Akamai. I think from a difference, like if you look at the, like I think from a, if you walk on the streets, if you talk to people, I don't feel any difference between like, you know, if I'm on the Stanford campus or the Harvard or MIT. There are a lot of people, you know, deep in tech. And so very similar, you know, but from a, I guess there is definitely more density and less diversity I would say, like, you know, in Bay Area because almost everybody that you know there are tech people, people working in software companies.

Yeah, that's those are really good cues. So, like I was really really bad at cricket. So, nobody wanted me to be on the team and in fact I used to hate the sport because you like in cricket there are three things that you have to do. You have to field, you can bowl, like you can pitch and you can bat and the only fun thing is batting and you get to do that for like, you know, one minute in a full day sporting event. So I didn't really like the sport. But like as I grew up as a kid, I grew up in a small town, didn't really have much of an ambition growing up. It was more mostly like, you know, having a fun childhood and mostly not knowing anything about what I was going to do growing up. That's sort of like, you know, how my upbringing was. I was a good student, decent student. I would not say I was a straight A student. I was more focused on playing and sports than studies. But I think it changed when I was in my senior year of high school is when I actually worked hard to get into an engineering school.

Yeah. So as I was saying, like, you know, I was from a small town and mostly like, you know, it's a close-knit community, most people have small businesses, there are no large corporations and most people never leave the town. So that was sort of the environment. So it was very sort of relationship oriented. And I think that's one of the things, you know, that I guess probably inherent in like, you know, how I am as a person. Like, you know, we live, you know, like I love to spend a lot of time, you know, with people who I know, with family. My parents, you know, my mother and I, you know, we live together. And so those are part of like, you know, just our cultural values, like, you know, families staying together. And I guess in terms of like did it actually shape my career, I mean, I guess, you know, from the beginning, the value of hard work was actually made clear to us. And when I was a kid, like, it's not like, you know, I didn't come from a family, you know, where we went through struggle and I don't have a great story to tell like that. It was a very ordinary, normal, middle-class family. But I think, you know, we from the beginning were sort of taught to do things, you know, to help at home. We actually had help at home but also like for example my mother would actually ask me to go and buy fruits and vegetables every day. That was my chore, like, you know, to buy fruits. I'm actually a really good fruit picker. So that's I think, like, you know, so grew up in that environment where, you know, work comes naturally and finishing work is the thing that gives me the most satisfaction. That is sort of like, you know, throughout my career, that has been one of the core themes is it doesn't matter, you know, what work you do whether it is the deep research, the most exciting technology that you get to work on, it's just about finishing one small task and moving forward, making some progress. And that's sort of like, you know, how I've run all my, you know, I've sort of worked in all my jobs and also, you know, the companies that I've built.

Yeah. I mean it was a really incredible experience for me but I also remember the first day of, you know, coming, like these are the days, you know, when the internet was not a thing, mobile phones, communication, everything was hard. So like I'm actually going all the way around the world and I don't know where, like, I'm going to sleep, you know, that first night that I'm going to arrive. And like I'm not comfortable speaking the language. And so it was a scary experience. Like I knew that there were some students, like, you know, folks who actually went from my college to that college, you know, in the previous year. So I knew that like ultimately I will probably find somebody who understands who I am and will help me. But it was an interesting journey, you know, that's how we started. But really, like, you know, I really enjoyed that experience of graduate school. And the culture is so different and the opportunity is so different here and that was actually the most amazing thing for me, learning that, like, you know, in the US you can, like, you know, it doesn't matter what your background is, if you're going to work hard, you're going to have the opportunities to do whatever you want to do.

Yeah. Well, actually, so I spent time here, but I was always based in the west coast. So, sort of like, you know, we spend half the time here, half the time there. Most of the company was based here. So like, you know, I would spend a lot of time, you know, in Cambridge. But that was actually really really interesting. Akamai at the time was the hottest internet company of the time. It was the one that was basically promising, you know, internet to actually work because, you know, in those days like you could build a website but the internet itself was not strong enough like that, you know, somebody could actually load your web pages reliably. And so this was a company that was built to sort of make sure that whatever websites you build, whatever, you know, images and videos you put on it, that people can actually go and see them in their browser. So like pretty fundamental piece of technology, like, you know, core infrastructure. So it was a phenomenal experience for me. But I was sort of like, I think the gravity had pulled me to Silicon Valley because as an engineer, like, you know, that's where a lot of startup action was. And so that's why I sort of stayed there since then. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I mean, Google was actually a very interesting company. Unlike, you know, any other company that I had worked at before or after. So some of my recollections. So, the first thing I show up in the office day one and nobody really tells me what to do. You know, I'm at the lobby and I said, 'Well, I'm a new employee. Like it's my day one.' So the person says okay, I mean that's fine, like, you know, and then like there's no direction for like what's going to happen next. So I walk in and I was sort of somewhat puzzled because, you know, I came from a company, you know, like Microsoft, you know, where everything was like really really process driven, everything was clear. In this company, there was no concept of management. And as an engineer you fully control your destiny and that was a very foreign concept for me. I was always told, you know, what work I needed to do and I would finish that, like, you know, that's how I thought that was the definition of a job. So here I was confused, like, you know, what does this mean, like where nobody really asks you to do anything and you can be on your own. And so after, so I was uncomfortable, like, you know, I'm introverted so I was very very sort of nervous, you know, on that day one, like, you know, what am I really supposed to do. But ultimately I built the courage and I started to talk to people and say, like, you know, well how do things work here, what am I supposed to do, I don't have a machine, I don't have a...

Yeah. So yeah, and exactly, like, so it was being run like a research lab. Like where, and it was a playground for engineers. You go and build whatever you wanted. So then I spent a few days, I had to actually find a problem and this was my first unique experience of like, well I'm the one who's supposed to even find the problem to work on. And so I found one which was we noticed that the Google search index had not pushed for about 3 weeks. You know, there's a concept of like you build the index, you know, you crawl all the pages from the web, you then build this index and once you build this index you actually ship it to those few different data centers that we had so that when now people can get new and fresh results from Google. So in those days, like, you know, it was 3 weeks, there was some crash, something was happening and the index was not pushing. And but the engineers who had worked on it, and these are Google's most famous engineers, Jeff Dean and Sanjay, they moved on, like, you know, the index was built, like it used to work and they were building a new generation of technology called MapReduce. And so nobody's working on pushing that. And so Google search results were stale, like, you know, anything that happened in the last 3 weeks nobody could see it on Google at that time. And so then I said, well, I'm going to go and fix that. So that was my first project. So I worked on, you know, indexing and I was the only person working on it at the time. And things of course have, you know, moved a long way. Like now there's probably 10,000 people who work on the Google search index. It's so much more superior, better, faster, real time than what used to be. But my key observations from those early days at Google was that if you build a culture where you, you know, you hire, you know, motivated people, good technologists, and then you let them be, then amazing things will happen. And you really don't have to align, to manage, to strategize. The Google motto was good engineers will just figure it out all by themselves and it's okay, like, you know, if nine out of 10 initiatives fail, because the one that's going to succeed is going to pay for all the other ones. That was an interesting model. So like, you know, it's very hard for other companies to follow but like, you know, Google, you know, Google does have a bit, you know, had a good business but it was incredible. Like, you know, I would say that from 2001 or 2 till 2008, you know, that was the golden age of where it used to feel like, you know, all the only innovation that happens in the tech industry used to happen there, that's how dominant it was.

I think when I was in that engineering ladder we had about 20 to 25 people. Wow. Who were sort of elevated to that level of seniority. I think in engineering, like, you know, it's sort of subjective, like I didn't really make much of it. Yes. Like I think if you have a few systems, you know, that you built, you achieve success, like, you know, Google would recognize you with that. But it was more vanity than like really, you know, the change in what you do because, you know, you're still like being an engineer, you know, doing the same job that you always were.

Well, at Google, you know, I worked on Google Search and Maps, YouTube, all of these are consumer products and it was a lot of fun building products that you could use yourself every day. And also, like, you know, for, you know, my kids, you know, they used to love, you know, using YouTube. So it was great to sort of be in that consumer product domain, like, you know, it's probably, you know, a lot more fulfilling sometimes than building enterprise products. You mentioned this thing about like when is the right time to start a company? Like should you start with the goal of that, well, like, you know, look I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to start a company and now you're going to figure out what problem you're going to solve. And I feel like, you know, that's a very difficult journey. It doesn't usually pan out because, you know, you start thinking about an idea and like you've been thinking about it for 2 weeks or 3 weeks, you get excited about it but then, you know, you also get like not excited about it, you know, at the same pace. It's hard to build conviction that fast. And so like I feel like, you know, often, you know, it's better when, you know, when you sort of face a problem for a long time, you know, and then you want to go and solve it because at that time, you know, your conviction in it is, you know, it has withstood the test of time. So for me, like, but neither one of those situations were true when I was leaving Google. I had no intention to actually start a company. I had no intention of actually leaving the company. I had not run into this problem, you know, that we solved at Rubrik. So it was mostly just relationship, like, you know, this person who I started the company with was a friend of mine and he wanted to build, he, you know, at that time, you know, we felt that there's a lot of innovation that was happening in consumer world, where all these great products like Uber and Airbnb and Square, like these companies were coming out. But when you think about businesses, you know, they're really deprived of like any tech innovation. And so that was the interesting observation that we had. And he had this idea that he wanted to actually build a company in this space and he came to me and said he wanted to do it with me. And I actually had the same question that you had which is that well what has got to do with me or my experience, like I've not been in enterprise software for a long time. And he said that, you know, that's not what matters, like, you know, what matters is I want to build it with somebody who's good at building a product. And I want to do it with somebody who I trust. And so then that's how we got together. Like, you know, I resisted for a while, but then ultimately he had a good ability to convince and so he convinced me to start the company with him. So that was the journey there. But then when I started Glean, you know, it was a different situation and, you know, I can also share that story. So we were like five years in building Rubrik. We grew fast. We're about 2,000 people within five years. And the company was doing well. But with that growth, like ultimately we started to see a lot of drag and our productivity started to go down as number of people went up in the company. There was this one year where we had tripled our sales team size and we doubled our engineering team. But yet we're actually moving at half the pace of what we used to with less than half the number of people. And it was very confounding. It was very puzzling, very frustrating. That why is the per person productivity reducing so much. And we asked around, we asked people, we did surveys, we had this pulse survey that we would do every 6 months. Everybody in the company gets to say, like, you know, what are the things that the company can do better, what's in their way of productivity. And the largest complaint that we would see in those surveys was people complaining about not being able to find things. Not being able to get the information that they need to do their work, not being able to connect with colleagues, you know, who could help them with whatever problems they had. And this was interesting, like, you know, when I saw that as a question that we were scoring even lower than compensation, like, you know, compensation is the number one, you know, is the worst question typically in these surveys, you know, nobody's happy with how much they get paid. And so when we have a question scoring even lower than that, that was very alarming to me. But given that that was a problem and my background, like, you know, the fact that I actually was one of the engineers working on search at Google, like, you know, my first reaction was that if people are having trouble finding things, why not just go and buy a search product that can connect to all of our systems? And then people will be, you know, it'll be easy for people to find things. And so that was observation. We looked around in the market and we realized that there's no product to buy. There's nobody was focusing on search for businesses. And so that sort of led to the creation of Glean. So that was an example where the problem came to me and it was a big one and I was familiar with it. I had gone through this pain forever, like even at Google. And I know, like, you know, we have some Google people here, I see Lee here, you know, we knew it, like, you know, we were both working on search at Google but we never really worked on search to help ourselves inside the company. Even at Google it was really really hard to find information inside the company. So...

Yeah but I think it used to be really really bad. Yeah, I mean like I think now people like it, like, you know, that's a change that has happened but it used to be super bad, like we couldn't find anything inside, you know, at Google. So anyway, so that was a problem, like, you know, we saw it in front of us, you know, we've faced that problem our whole lives. It's like okay fine, like, you know, I'm going to go start a company and build this product. And this is where conviction matters.

The investors wanted to invest in me because I had one success behind me, so they felt that I could go and build one more product. But there were folks who actually came in. There's one person who actually gave me a check, a blank check literally, like a real physical paper blank check signed. He says, you know, you can put the amount of money in there and put the name of your company, you know, if you have one, whatever it is, but just promise me that you're not going to work on search because that's not a cool thing to work on. And that could be, you know, when you hear that, and we also talked to a few CIOs and everybody told me that yeah, it's a problem but I don't know if I'm going to pay for it and it feels like a vitamin not a painkiller. So there was a lot of, when you go and start a company, you will have people who will support your idea and you'll have people who will not. And if you don't have conviction, more than likely you're going to be the first one to kill your own idea. But here, nobody could actually dissuade me because of my own experience, because the problem was so familiar to me.