Last but not least, I am excited to introduce my good friend who needs no introduction, Bipul, to the stage.
Good to see you, brother.
Okay. Can I actually respond to something that we just talked about with Vinod? I looked this up. Rubrik's headcount has grown by 30% over the last two years. There is a lot of talk about how you can do so much more with so much less, primarily through less headcount. I'm curious, like, what your reaction is to that.
I mean, we are applying AI in every aspect of the business, from coding to legal to marketing to finance. In fact, somebody who left Rubrik to start a finance closing business as an AI. So we are looking at AI in every aspect of the business, and there we are seeing how we can make the company more productive. How can we give our current people more tools? At the same time, we are operating in a very large market with a very unique product.
I'm an entrepreneur. I'm going for it.
You are. Can I, when you started, when you left India and you came to this country, your mom told you not to start a company. Why did she give you that advice, and why didn't you follow it?
My dad was an entrepreneur, and it didn't work out for him. So she had a very difficult life, and she thought that her sons should have a more fixed life where you can get a fixed salary, you have visibility into the next month. Growing up, we had food security issues. So she didn't want me to repeat probably what she feared was the life that he led.
What did she think when you did this?
For me, I got to a point in America by mid-2000s where I felt like I'm not going to fall back into poverty because I was an IT grad, and everybody in this room is an IT grad. And then I went to Wharton and studied finance. I said, if I'm not getting a job in America, probably 99.9% of the people in America will not get a job.
And that was the kind of like a story that I told myself as a baseline.
In today's day and age, do you feel like you have to move faster as a 4,500-person company than you did five to ten years ago when you were far fewer people, because the technology ground underneath you is moving and shaking?
I always felt that the only advantage that a startup or new company has is time. There is no other advantage. Neither technology, nor people, nor location. Time is the only advantage. So I have been maniacal about time, compressing time, compressing in building the product, compressing time in go-to-market, compressing time in scale. Because if you're operating in a large market, you have to be relevant. If you're operating in a $50 billion market and if you're not a $200 million company, then you're not relevant to that market. So the market relevancy requires acceleration, and you have to parallelize lots of different operations to really hit the mark in the quickest time. With AI, we are now in this accelerated stage where time to scale and decay for products is compressing. So the commoditization cycle is progressing very rapidly. So I actually talked about in our earnings call that our job is to stack S-curves. So as soon as your first product becomes successful, you have to start building the second product and plan to build the third product.
Why don't most people do that then?
It's very jarring because as soon as the first product starts to work, and if you start thinking that this product will fail someday, that's a dichotomy that people can't live with. Because think about how hard it is to find the product-market fit for the first product. But this is where you have to forget the past, let go of the past. You have to embrace the reality that this product is going to die, and die sooner than you anticipate. So let's start the next one and the next one. So business building is as much about opportunity and drive and everything as how you think.
Does your team think you're nuts when you finally find product-market fit with one product after scorching the earth to do it, and then you tell them, 'Great, this one's going to die. We're going to go to the next one,' and are you ready?
We actually created two teams in Rubrik. What we call the forward motion team, and their job is to scale what is working. And then there is a separate team we call the lateral team. Their job is to find new product-market fit, incubate new products. So we have completely separate teams, and that allows us to confront the reality while we are trying to maximize on what's working.
How has hiring been for you? Has it changed? Are there certain... In the AI world over the last couple of years, has it become less or more competitive? Question one. Question two, has the type of person that you are looking for, has your hiring persona changed at all?
We always had this notion in Rubrik that I will not hire myself for the job I'm in. So we are always looking to increase the capability or the average intelligence of the team. So we have had a high bar from day one. It was really, really difficult, but that really created the DNA of the company that we do hard work to get the top people. And so whether the market is changing today is AI, tomorrow is something else, yesterday was crypto, we continue to hire top people all through it because we accept the reality that it's never easy.
How much time do you think you spend to this day, right now, public company CEO, on recruiting and hiring?
10%. What are the other big buckets? Where else does your 90% go? How much is meetings? You're stuck in meetings all day.
I spend 20% of the time on a new big initiative so that I have all the time for that initiative. I clear up my calendar and make sure that I spend 20%.
One day a week. And then last quarter I did 100-plus customer meetings. Last year I did 400 customer meetings in 25 countries.
Last quarter you did 100-plus customer meetings. That's a lot.
And so you're asking the sales team, bring me on the call.
Because the customer is where the magic is. One of the things my dad taught me was business doesn't happen in the office or headquarters. The truth is with the customer. So you have to go out there because in Silicon Valley we are imagining things. Those guys are taking our technology and innovating things. So we have to be at the edge. So you have to go at the edge, learn from it, come back, educate people, think about new ideas, go back to see if the dog will eat the dog food.
If your dad saw what you were doing today, having tried and failed at different companies, how proud would he be, like, sitting here? I don't know. I just, how special would that be for you?
I mean, he was there when I was talking at an IoT conference in 2019. He would tell me that this is good beta. What's next?
Your personality actually reminds me of Vinod's in certain ways, where I could also see you working till 100 years old. Like, I could see you being the CEO of...
If I can live through 100.
Well, if Vinod has his way, we're going to maybe live to a couple hundred years old. I wonder, do you agree with that? First of all, like, if I could wave a magic wand and say you're the CEO of Rubrik until you're 80 years old, was that your dream?
Not really. I feel like there comes a time when companies need new ideas, and if the company is dependent on you for such a long time, then you have not built a company that will stay beyond your lifetime. I want to build Rubrik into a 100-year company where the generations of people will actually propel this company forward. In my mind, company life is in decades, not in a few years. In Silicon Valley, we have this four-year mindset. But if you look at great companies in the world, they last hundreds of years. So I want to build a 100-year company, and I want to build a company where someone else takes from me and does an even better job of building the next chapter of Rubrik.
When was the company founded?
