Drop out after high school and prepare. I failed for the first time and then made it the second time, and that really changed the fortune of my family and my career trajectory.
Easier said than done, though. I know you just said that your father said you shouldn't be a prisoner of your circumstances, and I know that many of us would want to believe that and many of us work towards that. But what was it that made you sort of ignore the deterrence, the challenges, the obstacles, and be clear about the path that you wanted to follow?
And it was truly, I mean, I'm sitting here talking to you, I'm the spokesperson of my dad's ambition because he had this supreme belief in a kid that had no high school, middle school, real education, no good grades, but he had this belief that I would amount to something and it is in me to go out and achieve that. And you know, belief is a very powerful thing. Sometimes we forget of this belief and this ability to manifest things based on this ultimate idea that you can do it. And he taught me very early on that you can become what you really thought of yourself to be.
What are you manifesting today? I mean, in some ways...
Starting Rubrik, four of us sat in a room with a whiteboard, and from that point ten years ago to over 3,000 people, more than 6,000 customers, we guided public market to over a billion in ARR in just eight and a half years of selling. I mean, many of it is obviously a lot of hard work and ambition of all of the Rubrik, but we clearly manifested this company, and now we are in the second chapter as a public company.
Well, you know, speaking of that second chapter, I remember that you wrote saying that 2024, you listed, but it's like going back to 2014 because you will have to continue to operate with that mindset of driving growth, of creating momentum, and building on momentum. What has life been like, you know, post-listing? And more importantly, to many people who are watching here, because we've seen a spate of IPOs in India, what's the lesson?
Going IPO is a milestone in the journey, and in some ways it's the rebirth of the company because people who put money when you go public, for example, in Rubrik's case, we have pension funds, somebody's college fund, somebody, a single mother in Ohio is putting her hard savings into Rubrik. We have to deliver to them. She doesn't care that we went from zero to IPO because that doesn't create any return. So I actually called an all-hands meeting after IPO and I told every employee that old Rubrik is dead. We have been reborn as a public company, and now we have to go create an outcome for the new set of investors who are looking at us to create returns for them. So in some ways, the risk posture, the mentality, the drive, the edginess of the company, same as 2014, we have to go create an outcome.
But you look at risk differently today as a public company versus when you were private.
There are two kinds of risk. One risk is, are we taking enough risk to move the agenda of the products and the market? We have to have the same mindset, but we have to reduce the disruption mindset because when you have no asset, you are at your disruptive max. But now we have an asset, so in addition to an entrepreneur and disruptor, we are also an asset manager. So we can't take too much disruptive risk because it can destroy the asset.
But it's a fine balance, isn't it? Entrepreneurship is always a fine balance between visionary and craziness. So what do you believe the job of a CEO is today?
The job of the CEO is a singular-minded pursuit of market transition. In my mind, the product-market fit is dead. We are living in an age of acceleration. It took Microsoft 25 years to become a household name, Facebook it took two years, ChatGPT took three months. So things are changing so fast that if the founders and the CEOs don't have their ear to the ground and the ability to transform the company every single year and disrupt yourself, you'll not exist as a company. So, you know, and this longevity and the company life cycle, forget product life cycle, dev life cycle, company life cycle has changed dramatically. I mean, from 67 years, which used to be the average, you know, going back four, five decades, it's now down to 17, 20 years.
How do you operate? How do you make choices when you know that things are changing so quickly?
Because you have to take risk. People forget that just because you have created an asset, you can't just rest on your laurels because the market is going to change in front of you. And the single most task of the CEO is to lead the market transition as opposed to be left behind and catching up.
So what's the mechanism? I mean, how much of it is gut? How much of it is, you know, just reading the tea leaves and connecting the dots? How do you decide what you believe the market transition is likely to be, which you should bet on?
It's as simple as thinking about Gita. What does Gita say? Forget your past, and every day is a new day, and discover from the first principles why are you relevant today. So as a business, you have to do three things. Number one, the things that are working, super amplify that thing. Then things that are somewhat working, make it work. And then the third thing is that things that don't exist today, go create a portfolio of risk so that things that don't exist today, can you create something in the next couple of years that will somewhat work.
How much of your time is going in creating those opportunities for the future?
That's where I spend all my time because things that are working, that are already working, I need to figure out things that would work three years or five years from today.
So as you look at the space that you operate in, first of all, explain to everybody what Rubrik does exactly in the area of cybersecurity and cyber resilience. What's that one big differentiator that you have that sets you apart from your competitors, from your peers?
Rubrik is a cybersecurity company, and our fundamental thinking was that the cybersecurity company is mispositioned because it is focusing on stopping attacks. You can't stop the unstoppable. Some attacks will get in. So how do you ensure that banks continue to dole out money, hospitals remain open, kids can go to college or school, because you want to keep your service up and running? That's what Rubrik does. We deliver cyber resilience so that you can remain operational even when attacked by cyber attacks such as ransomware. And that's what we are focused on. And as the market is evolving, we are focused on delivering cyber availability, data availability wherever you are. And in the world of AI, all that matters is data, because if you don't have the right data, you don't have confidence in the data, your AI models will have garbage in and garbage out.
