AI is a very powerful technology but it's also very different, very unique. It's a machine like one that you've never seen before, but where AI today is still early.
What was the moment where you decided to make the plunge?
I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.
You are in the seat of the CEO. How does it feel?
Being a CEO is a very, very different job.
How to quantify the productivity boost which Glean can do?
In future, majority of our work that we do today we won't be okay doing that work anymore.
Well, I mean, I think a company is nothing more than its people.
How do you pick a problem when you do a startup?
That's a really good question. You know, there are a lot of folks who are actually trying to start a company and then they start to go on a hunt for a problem. That's a very difficult way of doing things.
Do you want to change something about the way you learned?
I think the education could be a little bit more fun.
What made you so tough? How do you say yes to a problem?
Hello and welcome to another fantastic episode of Control Alt podcast. Today we have with us someone who's changing the landscape of AI agents at work. This is probably the hottest trend to double click on, but our guest of honor today is co-founder and founder of two successful unicorn startups in Silicon Valley. This is a very extraordinary moment where we are talking to people who are catching up with the fast-moving landscape of AI and they are architecting it. This is a moment I don't want to miss at any cost. So without further ado, let's bring on Arvind Jain, who is the CEO and founder of Glean. Arvind, welcome to Control Alt.
Thank you for having me. Truly an honor.
To have you here. You're one of the movers and shakers in Silicon Valley today. You're just coming out of Glean Live 2025 and then you launched Glean agents. This is a super exciting AI-powered search engine for the enterprise workspace. So tell us, Arvind, you come from IIT Delhi, then your stint at Akamai, Google, and then Rubrik, and now at Glean. Who is Arvind Jain? Who's the person who's creating these waves?
Well, that's I guess that's me. You know, as you said, I actually went to IIT Delhi, studied computer science there, and then I went to University of Washington to get my PhD, which I never really completed, and then been in the tech industry for the last 27 years. Many startups, one after another. Actually, Glean is the fifth startup that I'm working at. And I just love the chance that we get to build fantastic products, solve technically challenging problems. So yeah, really excited to be here.
Wonderful. So Arvind, I was listening to some of your interviews. You have manifested your dream of becoming a founder. How did that happen? Here you are at Akamai. You were instrumental in starting Google India, one of the largest companies running the show today on the internet. And what was the moment where you decided to make the plunge? Like you're ready, you know, how did that moment happen?
Well, I mean, so when I think at IIT, there's this spirit of entrepreneurship. You know, we had it even like 25, 30 years back. And so I always wanted to be an entrepreneur, build a company. And I think maybe mostly that motivation was coming from, you know, they were flashy, you sort of wanted to be like them. But I actually felt that I had to learn how to do things. I really didn't feel that I know how to code, how to build systems, how to talk to people. So I joined my first company, that was Microsoft in '97, and then after that I started to work at startups like Akamai and Riverbed, and then Google was a startup when I joined, as well as then starting Rubrik and Glean. I had that desire when I started my career, but actually didn't start a company. The closest I got was being part of the founding team at Riverbed. Over the years, that desire was no longer as strong for me. I forgot about it essentially. I was enjoying my career at Google, getting the chance to build really amazing products like Google Search, Maps, YouTube. And so my journey into starting Rubrik was largely accidental, in the sense that a friend of mine, he wanted to start a company and he wanted to start it with somebody else as a partner. So he came to me, Bipul who's the CEO of Rubrik, and says let's start a company together. I didn't really know what he wanted to do. He said he wanted to do something in enterprise software. I said that's not what I do, I'm building consumer products. But of course we knew each other for a long time and I believed in his capability to lead the startup and make it successful. So we just got together with our other co-founders and that's how Rubrik got started. So it's ironic, you know, we started that when I was not looking to start, when I wanted to start and I didn't start in your companies.
Wonderful. No, that's an incredible journey. Here you are in the seat of the CEO. How does it feel? This is your company, you're running the show. Do you feel like there are new challenges which you are learning on the go? And obviously you have not short of startup experience, but your structured thinking which got you here, you know, from the IIT days, how did that whole journey evolve? Like you are the CEO of Glean and it's a different experience.
Yeah, being a CEO is a very, very different job. But I'll tell you, every job that I've had, you always have to learn new things. And you better have that challenge. If there's nothing new to learn, then you'll be bored, and I don't want to be in that situation. So I am embracing this challenge of doing many things that I've never done before. Most of my career I've been an engineer. I built systems, I write code, sometimes I manage teams. So being a CEO, of course, has a very wide range of tasks that you have to think about. And I like that. It's been a great experience. It's been six years, and I've learned a lot. I made a lot of mistakes, learning from those mistakes as well. But I think we're fortunate to be in this time today where AI is such a big thing. There's the potential of this technology to change our world, how we live, how we play, how we work. It's just mind-boggling to have this amazing technology platform available to us. So it's exciting times for Glean, building great products, making success. And we feel very proud to be one of the most important enterprise AI companies out there.
Absolutely. Tell us about the future of work. You know, here you are building this amazing enterprise productivity tool. They say, if there's a problem thrown at you, spend 95% of the time framing the question and 5% you think about how to solve it. So search is all about framing the question. So what is that tool you're building to make search super efficient and targeted?
Yeah, well, so think about Glean as a few different things. It's the Google for your work life. Think of it also as a ChatGPT but inside your company. So what Glean does is, when an enterprise deploys Glean, Glean connects with all of the data and knowledge and systems that you have inside that company. For example, you'll connect with systems like Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, all the different systems where you have your company's data and knowledge stored and where work happens on a day-to-day basis. Now once Glean has connected with all of this information, it understands all of that institutional knowledge that exists within your company. And now you come to Glean and you can use it like you use Google. You can come and ask questions and Glean will surface the right relevant information from inside your company back to you as a user. Or you can use it like you use ChatGPT, just come and ask questions in free form, whether you ask questions in English or German or whatever language. And Glean will use all of the world's knowledge, but in addition, it's also going to use all of the internal enterprise and company's knowledge to actually figure out where's the right information that can answer this question. And then it'll deploy AI and LLM technology to go read that information and figure out the answers and share those answers back with the users. So you can think of it as a more powerful version of ChatGPT but inside your company. So that's what the product is. And then there are a few more things that we do, we'll talk about that later. When you think about how we built this product, what technologies we have done, we've been doing this for the last six years. Search has fundamentally changed as a technology. LLMs and transformers and language models play a big role in how these products work today, and they're much smarter and richer than the search experiences of the past.
Yeah. You mentioned the use of RAG to hone your agent capabilities. So let's say you have an agent which a CIO uses or you have an agent which an entry-level employee uses. So are you using RAG to fine-tune the response to what these people are asking, or is this more at a different level that we don't know?
So fundamentally, you know, I explained to you that Glean is a search product and it's also an AI assistant like ChatGPT. So these are products that don't think of them as agents. These are very general-purpose AI assistants that every employee in a company gets to use, and they use it just like how you use ChatGPT. You can go in there and you can ask it to help you write some code, you can ask it questions like who's an expert on this area in our company, who should I go and talk to to learn more about this technology. Any questions that you have, just imagine the mental model for how to think about Glean is that imagine that there is an employee in your company that's been there from day one. They've read every single document that has ever been written inside your company. They've been part of every single meeting, every single conversation that has happened between any two people, and they don't forget anything. And they sit next to you 24/7, always just ready to help you with any questions that you have because they have all the knowledge, all that institutional knowledge available to them, and they're smart and they can reason over that knowledge and answer questions for you. So that's fundamentally how you think about Glean. So I say with three different products: we have the search which looks like Google, we have AI assistant which is a more powerful version of ChatGPT, and then we have agents. We allow people to build AI agents on our platform. The architecture is indeed RAG is one of the core technologies that we use underneath. So the way things work is that when you come and ask any question, we'll first use our core retrieval and search technology, and the fact that we're connected to all of your enterprise systems. And so we're able to pull and assemble what we think are relevant pieces of information given this question that you just asked. And now we have this body of knowledge, and we're going to use LLMs to say, look, here's the question that the user asked, here is what we think is relevant information, try to answer this question. And if you can't, then tell us what more information do you need, and then we'll go and use again our core search and retrieval technology to fetch more information. And that's where the agentic flows come into play. This is how the architecture works, where basically the language model and the AI technology is working along with the search technology to bring the right information so I can work on it, and that is how we go and answer questions.
Amazing. So Arvind, information is power in today's world. Do you also help the companies work with backup or archiving data or organizing the data, because you are literally like a soulmate for the company, your company is a twin of your client. So what do you do with that kind of?
Yeah, well, backup and archiving, that's not the area of focus for Glean. In fact, it's funny that you ask it because before I started Glean, I was one of the founders of Rubrik, and that's where our core focus in that company was to protect business data from any security attacks or any issues with your infrastructure. So in Rubrik, that's what the problem that we would solve, which was for every enterprise customer of ours, we will understand all the information that they had in all the different systems and we'll actually start to make a copy of it, sort of like a time machine of all of that data in a new system. So if something bad happens in your source systems, you have this backup and archive, or time machine, of all of your business data in the Rubrik system, and you can sort of take it back from it and resume your business. That was the focus there. Here, our focus is more on building this companion. So one of the things with AI today is AI is a very powerful technology, but it's also very different, very unique. It's a machine like one that you've never seen before. As a human, we have a certain model for machines: they do a specific thing and they do it in a very deterministic fashion. That's the definition of a machine for us. But when you think about AI, it doesn't work that way. You go and ask a question in AI, go to ChatGPT and ask a question four times, it's always going to use different words to answer those questions. Hopefully the gist will be the same, but sometimes even the gist is different, a little bit random. So people have to get used to this technology. All enterprises, all businesses, they want to actually stay ahead on AI. They want to drive this transformation of their company. They want everything to be AI. I think that's the goal that every business has. But the first step of that, how do you actually get that going? The first step is you need to have your workforce trained on AI, educated on AI. You have to make every one of your employees become very comfortable with AI and also knowledgeable in the sense of what can they do with AI, how do they leverage AI and its power. Once you have your workforce transformed, people who are now AI experts, they can now actually look at your business processes and see how to bring AI into each one of those business processes and drive the full transformation. So it's a two-step process. First, educate and train your employees with AI, and Glean does a great job at it because Glean assistant is probably the most natural tool that will come to anybody's mind in terms of using AI. It's very general purpose, like ChatGPT, and it's connected to all of your enterprise context, is very helpful to you in your day-to-day work. It's always sitting next to you, ask questions as you go through your day, and you get that education going, you become comfortable with AI products. That's how you get ready for that second part, driving the AI transformation, and that's where agents come into play.
