Building a business is creating a religion. When you create a religion, who do you try to find? Believers. First half year of Rubrik, we sold 5 million. First full year of Rubrik, we sold 47 million. Second year of Rubrik, we sold 168 million. And third year of Rubrik, we sold 350 million. I was driving back from work. I started thinking that this is the company where I put all my life. I'm not spending as much time with my family. I gave this everything and it is falling apart.
Bipul Sinha's story is truly extraordinary. Having grown up in pretty dire circumstances in India, Bipul went to IIT and then immigrated to the US in search of the American dream. By the age of 40, he had become a successful VC at Lightspeed. But never one to be satisfied with what he's already achieved, he then founded Rubrik, which today is a $10 billion publicly traded company and one of last decade's fastest growing enterprise software businesses. But what I find most interesting about Bipul is how he thinks and moves through the world. He operates from a set of mental models that are genuinely his own, and his belief in himself is second to none. I first met Bipul 13 years ago before Rubrik existed. His self-belief, his drive, and his ability to think larger than life were evident even back then. Today, we get into all of it: how he built this company, the mental models that got him here, and how he's rebuilding Rubrik for the AI era. Bipul, welcome to the show.
Now, I want to focus this conversation on you as a CEO. You were a VC for a decade at Lightspeed before starting this company. So you had a lot of exposure to founders and startups, but still, what's the one thing that nothing prepares you for to be a founder CEO?
Human beings have two mindsets: a state of intellect and a state of will. In the state of intellect, you are always thinking about downside. What could go wrong? You plan. And in the state of will, you execute. You don't think about downside. You see portfolio of one and 100% chance of success. And VCs live in the state of intellect because they meet 100 entrepreneurs and they invest in two companies. So they are eliminating all the things that could go wrong. But when you start a business and you are a founder, you are always in this positive will mindset. You want to walk through the wall. You want to manifest yourself onto the world and you want to succeed. You want to create something that is bigger than you. And I wanted to live in that state of will.
Were there things you had to unlearn that you had learned as a VC? Some good lessons that you had to unlearn as soon as you became a founder?
Absolutely. As a VC, since you think about the downside, you try to diversify your bets. As an entrepreneur, you want to maximize your bet because maximizing bet is what creates the outrageous large returns. So the idea is, how do I maximize the risk given my resources, given my people, given the market opportunity.
Now let's get to the crux of it. So one of the hardest and the most mission critical things when building a business is the founding team or the team itself. How did you go about finding those first 10 hires?
Most of the entrepreneurs delude themselves because they think that I'm hiring the top people. But my experience as a VC has been majority of them say that but do not follow up. And I really wanted a world-class team. So the first thing I did was to become a recruiter myself because I wanted to take the pain of hiring people that were better than us as a company. And we created this line by saying we'll not hire ourselves for the job we are in. That brought clarity of what are we looking for. And when you are going after the top of the top people, you have to work really, really, really hard. We had to create a pitch deck just like we pitched to the customer for engineering recruiting. I used to sit all day cold call people on LinkedIn and pitch them on why Rubrik would matter. And that level of pain for recruiting first, second, third, fourth engineers really transformed the trajectory of Rubrik.
How much of your time in that first year did you spend on recruiting versus other things, product, sales?
I was recruiting all the time. So I was recruiting probably 80% of the time and then 20% of the time was going into building the product.
That's kind of crazy. I mean, because nobody talks about it this way. 80% of time on recruiting. Most people would say if they're spending 20% of their time on recruiting, they already feel, should I be spending 20, 25%? So you took the stance that the team is everything.
My philosophy in business is work on the problems that are the most important problem for the company. For a new startup, the most important thing is talent density. If you're not solving for talent density, if you're just getting headcounts in the company, your company will not last.
And then how did you get to know that you were hiring top talent, to your earlier point? How did you assess it in the beginning? And I would love to understand also how do you assess Rubrik is still at the top of its game on hiring.
My thinking was that if I cold call someone who looks at my title and thinks that people will be successful as an entrepreneur, those are not the people I want to hire. I wanted to hire people who asked me very, very hard questions and rejected me a few times. In fact, our first EMEA sales hire rejected me for three continuous months and I used to call him every week religiously to convince him to leave his current job to join Rubrik. We were maniacal about recruiting.
But how do you assess that this person is top? Is it through back channel references?
We spend time with them. We understand why they do what they do. What is their life story? Have they done something in their life that for them is the driving force? Do they have a chip on their shoulders? And are they relentlessly passionate and relentlessly gritty?
Do you have interview hacks that you go for? How do you separate the bullshitters versus the real deals? People who interview very well versus actually who are good.
I always ask this one question that is my favorite.
So, we're giving away secrets here.
Absolutely. My favorite question is, what have you learned in your past two jobs about yourself that you didn't know before? And based on this answer, you can assess self-awareness. You can assess learning mindset. You can assess how they view the world. You can assess are they evolving.
The other piece then is to win the candidate. How do you think about winning that top talent? One of your own quotes I think is recruiting is like starting a religion. You need to find true believers. How do you find true believers?
Bottom line is this. If you think that somebody is joining your business because you have a great business idea, you are deluding yourself. People want to join other people. They want to join you as a founder because they believe that you are going to make a difference in the world. Do you have the passion for this business? Are you demonstrating that passion or exuding that passion to the candidate? If you are, then you will be a magnet.
Do you take that on yourself or also your founding team members were leading that charge on showing that passion? How do you kind of take that passion and institutionalize it at the top level of the company?
I mean, we did a very systematic process. So my job was to get folks interested in Rubrik and interested in me as the front face of the company, and then you bring them in and expose them to the talent pool of the company that will open their eyes that, oh my God, I want to be part of this winning team. I remember in the early days of Rubrik, one of my friends who used to be my partner at Lightspeed, he came to my office and he said, Bipul, there's a unique energy in this office. I can't define it, what it is. And the way I read that is the talent density there was something unique. When you have great people passionately working hard, it creates that energy.
The other difficulty of building a company on the people's side is scaling culture. You know, the first 10 people, that energy that you just talked about is nothing is easy in life, but slightly easier than maintaining that same level of energy and passion at the 100 people mark, at the 500 people mark. How did you scale Rubrik? Today it's 3,000 employees. How do you ensure that this energy, the culture has actually scaled?
The question is that have you hired the first 10 people with the same cultural principle and context that you're trying to do right now? The cultural context has to be set at the inception. So we created Rubrik's cultural principles before we hired our first employee because if you want to build an enduring institution, the foundation of the enduring institution has to be set on the contract that you have between Rubrikans, among Rubrikans. We are sleeping here in Palo Alto in the night and one of our team members are selling in New Zealand. How do we ensure that they do the right thing by the customers and don't lie? How do we make sure that we don't lie to each other? How do we make sure that we do things fast? How do we make sure that we have entrepreneurial energy in everything that we do? So what we did was we created the cultural deck and context before we hired the first employee. And every new hire Monday, me or one of my co-founders will go pitch what is our cultural context, what is expected out of a Rubrik. And that really propagated this cultural context as we grew. But look, we have made lots of mistakes because these things are not once and done. You have to repeat and repeat it and repeat it. And whenever you see a slack, you have to go in there and make sure that you create an example and fix it. So it's a living and breathing thing. It's not once and done. And we are maniacal about our culture.
I'm actually curious, did some of the operating principles or the cultural doc evolve or has somehow maintained itself as that original founding doc?
The same original founding document continues. There's zero change because in my mind, America is the biggest startup and this startup was created against European incumbency and America was the insurgent force. How did America make sure that we all behave in a certain way? So that cultural context was institutionalized as our constitution and the constitution, although we have had amendments, has not fundamentally changed. So for a startup to be an enduring institution, you need to have that cultural context ingrained in the institution and that's what we did in the early days.
I was talking to Kaiser Kausser the other day. He said either you got it or you don't. Where do you fall on that, on coaching versus somebody's got the gift of leadership or not?
Two things as we talked about, will and a skill. You can teach people a skill. You cannot teach people will. And will comes in many forms. How you behave with others. Do you control your ego or not? Do you have humility? Do you have a learning mindset? Do you have self-awareness? Are you living too much in the past, which means that you're too much egotist? All of that is inherent in you. But you can't find ideal people. So one of my learnings as a CEO has been to not look for myself in everybody. Understand your team. As long as there is a cultural context that matches, then accentuate their strength and diminish their weakness. Meet people where they are.
Can you talk about a mistake you may have made as a leader in the early years that you kind of fixed as you yourself grew and scaled to the CEO you are today?
We are all prisoners of our own experience and as an immigrant, when you come to a new country, you are very self-reliant because you know that you have no social network or there is no uncle who can come and rescue you. So that idea of self-reliant, I actually thought too much and applied too much into Rubrik. So in the early days of Rubrik, when an alliance partner or business development partner came to me to talk about how they can partner with Rubrik, I had this thinking that nobody is really going to help you. If there is a large company that you are talking to, they're never going to help you because you have to be self-reliant. So I didn't fully fathom the value of partnering with larger companies and riding on the shoulder of giants. So I ignored that concept, that idea that you can partner with a larger company and really accelerate yourself. And after several years, I realized my mistake. In fact, I frequently say that I get back to my senses after a few slaps. Then we went ahead and partnered with a number of companies that has really helped accelerate Rubrik.
Can you talk about how your week is today as an operator CEO? How does it break out today?
So I have stopped doing one-on-ones with my team because I feel like I have only 168 hours a week and given the breadth and scope of the business, I want to do one-on-ones more on an issues basis and then we do offsites and spend time with the team, but there's no need to do one-on-ones. And so I stopped doing one-on-ones. And the second thing is that I do not plan or prioritize anything. I only work on problems that worry me most. There's a Sanskrit word called adhogami, which means downward sloping. So as a human mind, you always are looking for easy solution, easy answer, easy path. So whenever you have a problem that nags you, you tend to procrastinate and do other things. And I've taught myself over the years to only work on problems that worry me and to not procrastinate. So I do not plan anything. When I get up in the morning, whatever the two, three things that worry me most, I immediately work on them.
Okay. So it's not even like it's more sales, more product, it's what worries you today is the thing you will attack.
But in terms of how the week breaks out in terms of culture, scaling, all hands, communication, is all of that kind of a little amorphous right now?
I mean, we have some scheduled things like after our quarterly earnings, we do all hands and things like that, but we don't spend too much time preparing for it. In fact, over the years, I stopped preparing for pretty much anything. I go in there and I think what is the right thing to do in this situation and circumstance. If I don't have some information that is needed for me to understand the problem, then ask question, otherwise just move.
So all of this is how you run the company today, but underneath all of this is a lot of frameworks that you've over the years been generous enough to share with me. One of your core concepts is product market fit is dead, and you said it like three, four years ago, maybe longer, to me. Today it's more relevant than ever before. Can you talk about what do you mean by that?
We are living in an age of acceleration and so anything that you think about, the time to scale and time to decay has really shrunk. Think about companies such as NetApp that has started 30 years ago. They had the advantage of 12 to 15 years of product market fit. When Rubrik started, we had three, four years of product market fit. Today the product market fit is three months because if you look at the product development cycle, it has shrunk, maybe it's 5% of what it used to be. And so time is also shrinking because there are so many ways that you can reach your customers, create awareness. Customers are knowledgeable, so the time it takes to put the word out and make the customer aware, understand their problem is also shrinking. So as a result, if you are relying on your product market fit to take you three, four, five years to hundreds of millions of revenues, it's not going to happen. So the fundamental principle that you have to apply is as soon as your product or first product or current product start to see traction, you need to build the next product. So essentially you have to stack the S-curves so that even when the cycles are shrinking, you have layers of protection.
Yeah. So how do founders in today's world think about the long-term vision, or you think long-term has also shrunk and it's become three years, not 10 years? Can founders have a 10-year vision for their company today?
The difference is 10-year vision has to be philosophical. Three-year vision has to be idea and six-month vision has to be market conditions. And you have to blend the three.
So you also have this other framework, which I think is related to this, is forward motion versus lateral motion. Can you double click on that for us?
So we talked about like stacking the S-curve. So once you have something that is working, you need to scale it to the max as fast as possible while you are trying to figure out the next S-curve. If you have the same team doing both, then you're going to fail because people love making money. And if they're making money on something that is working, they like to triple down because again, human mind, they want to see success. They want to tell themselves that I'm successful because creating a new product is going zero to one, which is nothing but full of disappointments. So you need to separate teams. So we created forward motion team and lateral motion team. The forward motion team's goal is to amplify the success that we are already having. And lateral motion team's goal is to create new success.
Even today that exists and separate team. The idea of the lateral team is that even if they do a 50k deal, you do a triple high five. And the forward motion team, you want them to create million-dollar deals.
The other thing that you have, which is I think core to your mental model, is nobody knows anything. That should be your first and only thought. If nobody knows anything, how do you even get advice from people?
Constantly thinking about building new products. We are both in the business of future and my fundamental contention is that future cannot be created from the past, otherwise the stock market will not exist. So if you are in the business of creating the future, then you have to fundamentally assume that nobody knows anything about the future. No amount of experience, no amount of serial entrepreneurship, no amount of investing in hundreds of companies can give you any ideas about how to create this future. So your own intuition and your own thinking is the only friend you have in terms of creating that future.
How do you think of people who can be mentors, who can have expert insight into a domain that you're entering? How do you separate who I should learn from versus nobody knows anything?
See, the thing is that experts never start a company because they are prisoners of the past. So you need to use experts, but you have to use experts expertly. So there are two things in the world. One is the known world, which is whatever has happened in the past, which is low-risk things because they have been done. And what has not yet happened will happen in the future, which is unknown world, which is high-risk thing. If you think about driving home from work, is that a low-risk or high-risk activity? It's a very low-risk activity because you have done it hundreds of times. If you think about starting a restaurant in San Francisco and making it successful, it's obviously a very high-risk activity. So you want to go talk to experts, talk to experienced people to get the best practices for low-risk activities. But for high-risk activities such as starting a restaurant, you have to go with your own intuition because nobody knows anything.
This is such an interesting framework and relevant for almost everyone in the world. What's the line there between intuition and arrogance?
Look, arrogance by definition comes from pride of the past achievement. But when you are in the intuition mindset, you are not taking the past into account because you are saying nobody knows anything. Where do people know things from? The past. So you are in this state which is t equals to zero and thinking about what should I do in the current situation, accepting the reality of now. By definition, arrogant people are not in the reality of now, they are in the reality of yesterday.
Another quote of yours that I think has been super impactful even for me: averages don't apply to individuals. If startup success rate is 1% for everyone, doesn't mean it's also 1% for you.
