Are you burdened by the past, or are you creating the future? At some point in that journey, what I realized was that I don't exist because of all the circumstances around me. The circumstances exist because of me. So if you truly believe, if you truly believe who you are, and then if you say that to the world, the world will conspire to align with you, because this world is created by you, not created by the world.
So America has this perpetual relentlessness about progress, and many other countries are looking at it and saying, 'How do I get that?' If you're not misunderstood, you're not doing anything useful. So how do you create profit? How do you go from the noise to something that creates value? We are all prisoners of our own imagination because of the memory machine that we are.
Thank you, everyone, for being here. Welcome to our 11th episode of Effortless. Here with me I have Bipul Sinha, who is a friend, a really dear friend. We've known each other for more than 20 years now.
Absolutely, 2003, right? And it's been 22 years. You know, you hired me at Oracle. This is the year, I think it was June or July.
And remember, the one thing that's really common between us is Oracle and Larry Ellison. So we'll talk a little bit about Larry. We'll talk about change. We'll talk about, you know, just our lives in the last 20 years. So much has happened.
And of course, all things AI, which is one of the buzzwords of the Valley right now. But welcome, Bipul. Thanks for being here.
Well, let's take it back to 2003. You know, we'll walk down memory lane a little bit. You know, the bubble had crashed. I was in a startup for about almost three years. This was a company called Zambile. We were building file servers and stuff, and we had plowed through a lot of that mess between 2000 and 2003. But then I needed to cool my heels a little bit, learn a little bit of building software at large companies, and that's when Oracle happened. You know, a recruiter had reached out back in the day, and it looks like Oracle was on a hiring freeze. You made it happen. Say more about that.
So I was still a young manager, and somebody forwarded me your resume. And when I read through it, I said, 'This guy has something he is looking for, because he is making all these changes, going from a startup in Austin to Zambile, and then another startup that was eventually acquired by Brocade.' And I was looking at it, looking at your profile, and I was thinking that this guy has something going for him, and I should definitely meet him. And I had no headcount, and I distinctly remember coming down to grab you at the reception. And my first interaction — I typically have a blink reaction for people — and I saw you, and I distinctly remember you were wearing a T-shirt and jeans pants. And the way you kind of greeted me, and just the energy that you exuded, I always remember that time, because I thought I met somebody who has drive and charm and charisma — the combination. And since then, I'm a big fan, and obviously, the rest is history. But it was Larry's office that made an exception for this hire, and here we are, 22 years later, and I'm so fond of some of those years out there.
This is Building 400, the iconic Building 400, Server Technologies. Remember, I think Roger Bedford was still the SVP and stuff.
Absolutely. And we had a really good manager, Amit Ganesh, who really brought the best out in us.
And then Amit was a very special guy. I mean, Amit is a very special guy, but he was a great manager to us. In fact, a lot of things that I learned about hiring great engineers and operationalizing fast, and a sense of urgency, was instilled in us, in me, by Amit. And for so many years later, whenever I see him, I thank him for really — for young engineers and young managers — as to how to have the sense of operations.
Well, we were probably the two rare managers who were breaking a lot of glass. Remember when we would be called and like, 'Why are you making all these big changes?' You know, because Oracle was — this was a time when IBM and all these companies were competitors in some ways, and the largest customers of Oracle are like, 'Don't make a change, because if you make a change, it destabilizes things.' If anything, one of the things I learned from that whole experience — remember there was a TPC benchmark that we had, and MySQL was beating us left and right on simple inserts. I remember Amit was really not giving up on the laptop. He said, 'Well, I will prove to the world that Oracle can be installed in the laptop.' You know, and it was a struggle to the core, right? Because the developer was moving towards the laptop, and they found a lightweight thing called MySQL to really run things, and we were taking so much memory and so much CPU for everything. I think the issue of making it lightweight — we'll cover some of that with AI as well. But that's the power of great companies. If you look at why Oracle is a great company, it's because Oracle learned to disrupt itself. And that is the persona of Larry: to not have the burden of the past impede your vision to go far. And he empowered leaders such as Amit to go take risk and figure out how do we change ourselves to go compete with the new-gen platforms, new-gen software. And there's a lot to be said about — and this was like 20-plus years ago — a lot to be said about that monomaniacal drive to improve, to be better, and change and change and change. And that's the thing that I carried from Oracle: this personality of the company that has this long-term vision, and it is relentless.
Yeah. In fact, I remember they started the apps business in '87, 1987. 16 years of struggle, because it was still a tech company and infra company, and apps needed UI thinking, apps needed middleware thinking. We were doing so many things in PL/SQL. It was like everything is about the database. Everything, all app code had to run inside the database. It was such a struggle. And then obviously Chuck Phillips comes along as a president, new president, and he's like, 'We'll start to buy companies,' because the religion before that was, 'We'll never buy companies, we'll do everything on our own.' You know, I just learned that, you know, at some level you have to switch your religion 180 degrees. Oracle was one company to have done that really, really well. A lot to learn from that story.
It's been a tremendous part of my personal journey. I spent over eight years at Oracle, and a lot of like small, small stories that you look back and say, 'This is how you connect the dots.'
Yeah. In fact, including being lightweight, I don't think we became lightweight enough, because we were running on big honking Sun Solaris servers. The year I joined is the year when we made an overnight flip to Linux as the development environment for all engineers. Do you remember that?
Absolutely. And it happened overnight. I mean, I'm like, 'Wow, this is the pace at which companies move at that scale, right?' I mean, we had thousands of developers and probably a billion dollars coming from Oracle Database as revenue itself. But I liked it, because I was a Linux guy. I'd come from Zambile. I'm like, 'Oh man, the Solaris thing is going to be pretty slow.' And you know, right in the blink of a moment, we changed to Linux, which was amazing. Of course, Exadata happened. I mean, we actually were quite against hardware at Oracle, if you remember. I mean, you remember that procuring hardware was a very hard thing to do at Oracle. But this is again the power of thinking that we were focused on software, but there was a thought that, 'Hey, configuration and managing this software is a hard thing to do. So what if we give customers a solution as opposed to software that goes into hardware, and then everything has to be optimized and tuned for that hardware? If we can out of the box deliver a solution.' And this whole Exadata idea — and before that there was another attempt — but this Exadata idea really kind of pivoted. And in fact, Larry publicly stated that the reason he bought Sun was because of the success and what he saw in Exadata. So again, that is the power of like change and not being burdened by the past.
Yeah. In fact, 10 years before that, I remember there was this quote from Andy Mendelsohn, who just retired, by the way, from Oracle after 40 years. One has taken over, you know. But he talked about how portability was the biggest asset that Oracle had. They were running on 94 platforms. Remember the fact that we had this portability, and all of a sudden we go from being extremely portable to being extremely unportable. And Exadata, and to the point where even in the last five years, Azure and GCP are the new things that we are doing at Oracle. But before that, it's all OCI. Like, okay, we are not the portable software company. That whole journey from being the most portable to being the most unportable was also a big religion change.
Huge. And what is most interesting for me about portability was that every startup has to have — or every company, every new company has to have a unique thinking. And that unique thinking has to be controversial and non-consensus, because if 80% of people agree with your idea, then the idea has no merit, and you'll never build a big business on it. If you think about going back in the '80s and saying that you have one software that runs on every hardware — that was a crazy thinking. Just this idea that you can make it work and be optimized was a crazy thinking. But that was the secret of Oracle's success. And that idea became mainstream, but that was a controversial big idea. So that's why, like, every startup has to have a belief, and that singular belief of something that is different and that is disagreed by 70% of the people — only 30% of the people has to agree to it — then only does it become a non-consensus idea. And you make that non-consensus thinking mainstream, that's when you create value. And that is the power from the very beginning of Oracle: that every big shift was non-consensus.
I mean, I'm just thinking, had it not been for VOS, the Virtual Operating System that made Oracle portable, the Linux transition wouldn't have been as easy, because you know we had a layer of software that would abstract the operating system away from Oracle software. And I'm just like, 'Wow, in a matter of two years.' Because I don't know if you remember, there was a time you and I used to go to one and say, 'Why are we losing on Windows?' And he's like, 'Guys, like, you know, it is what it is. You know, at some level, Microsoft bundles SQL Server with Windows, and we don't get a chance.' Remember that conversation that we had?
Absolutely. And the fact that we went from big AIX and HP-UX and all these big honking Solaris to Linux, to me, was about change — like massive change. You know, itself, we also changed our own lives. I mean, you know, lo and behold, in 2009, you graduate, and you're — tell us more about the journey right after Oracle.
At Oracle, obviously, I learned a lot about technology and product building and how do you take product to market to some extent. But I realized that I'm not a like a hardcore engineer. I mean, I do it well, but that's not like my real passion. I figured that my real passion is business, and I wanted to look at businesses holistically. And with that thinking, I tried to apply for a few jobs outside of engineering, but I always heard that, 'You are an engineer, and you need like Wall Street experience or business experience.' Then I decided that maybe I need to get that stamp, and that's what led to going to business school. And at some point in that journey, what I realized was that I don't exist because of all the circumstances around me. The circumstances exist because of me. And that thinking about being an outcome of something versus a creator of other things really gave me this confidence that you can walk out from a successful career as a mid-level manager at Oracle to go restart a career in venture capital. But that thinking, that singularly you are the creator of your own future, really transformed — it's a very powerful transformed journey.
I think what you just said, you should repeat it again. 'I'm not the outcome of my circumstances, but I'm a creator of circumstances.' Just a powerful thing, you know. I mean, there's a reason why I'm a fan of you, by the way. You mentioned these things, and you hustled for a year at Bank of America, your first job. Say more about how you bumped into Blumberg, David Blumberg.
So I was doing part-time at one, and I wanted to switch into again a more of a business role where I would look at business holistically. And I had not thought about venture capital as a career. I knew about venture capital, of course, but I had not thought about it. And this is the worst time — 2008, this is financial crisis, really the worst time. And I started looking around, and on a job board I saw a posting by Blumberg, and I cold-called them, and I told them that I'm interested in this job. And there was a lot of discussion because I had no credential being a business guy, let alone being a venture capitalist. They had a lot of concerns whether I would be able to do that job. But again, that belief that you are going to go take this journey and explore and figure it out, and the belief to figure it out, was tremendous.
You probably — your second check, the first check was probably Hootsuite, if I remember correctly. Nanorex.
Well, like a couple of million dollars. I think we went on to build Nanorex together for at least another six years, and then you started Rubrik about five years into the journey or something.
You know, obviously these returns are massive. You know, we kind of returned like three, four hundred million dollars for those couple million dollars. Tell us a little bit about the VC world, like how these black swans and the black swan results actually create this industry and make it possible, and what happens to the long tail, and related to product companies, and what happens to black swan products versus long tail products.
I started to develop a thesis about what makes great companies, and what I concluded was that you need to have a controversial and unique idea about a given market. And it has to be controversial, because again, going back to consensus, non-consensus — that how do you have a point of view that you let it go in the marketplace, and then relentlessly make sure that you make that idea a reality. In some ways, founders have to live in the world of unknown, and then pull the edge of known to themselves. That's when you co-create value.
So I remember the partner meeting that we were having at Blumberg. There was a discussion, and also Naval Ravikant was in the room. And the discussion in the room was that the founders never had a successful outcome. They worked at Jamil, didn't work out. They worked at Aster. Aster was not exactly a rocket ship, kind of continuously going. And there was a lot of discussion about the Aster architecture and things like that, and how the market was changing. So there was a question around: if these guys had not created a successful product, how are they going to create a successful product now? That was question number one. And question number two was combining storage and compute in a single software. It was an outrageous idea for that time, for that place. And so if you think about a controversial idea, founders who were unproven and non-consensus. And so the question for me as a lead investor, first investor in Nutanix, was: people, what do you think? And this is when you have to singularly think: what is the invariant in the business? And the invariant in a business, particularly if structurally it makes sense, are the people. So I told my partners that I don't know the two other guys as well, but I know D because I hired him and we worked together, and I know this guy cannot fail no matter what. And that relentlessness to make this controversial idea a reality requires that level of grit and not taking no for an answer and not failing at all, whatever happens. So you combine the two: a controversial idea and a relentless founder who will not fail. That's when you go create a black swan outcome.
Yeah. You know, I remember, as you said, you know, it was — the first polls we did with customers, they're like, 'These are two buying centers. You know, server and storage, never the twain shall meet. One of them refreshes every three years, the other one refreshes every five years. One was stateless, one was stateful. How could you really bring this together?' And we didn't know virtualization at all. I mean, this was a market and architecture we had to learn from scratch. I mean, you guys had — you had never worked in infrastructure, nor did I. We were database.
Yeah, absolutely. File servers, databases, and we had never done hardware. So there was a lot of things. But you know what happened was that this — I mean, this notion of empathy, I was getting better and better at it, about being authentic with customers, high-quality stuff. I mean, look, Zambile, we were employees number 20, 25, and there were real big senior people sitting on top who were making decisions on product management, which I just didn't agree with. None of us actually agreed with. Some of the engineers coming out of Zambile have created 20, 30 billion worth of enterprise value ever since in the last 20 years. But it also mattered what leadership was trying to do. I think looking back at what made Nanorex successful, I would say it was authentic products, authentic customer service. Apple — learning from Apple was a big part of this. Design, basically, like how do you really disrupt competitors with design.
I know when you started Rubrik in 2014, there were some of these things that were going on in your head as well. What led you — of course, you moved from Blumberg to Lightspeed. You were there at Lightspeed for almost five years, and then this bug, which was about going and starting something, bit you. Say more on that.
In the six, seven years that I was in venture capital, one thing that I realized was that I have an understanding of what makes a startup team go and build a company. I also fundamentally — and I worked really, really closely with all my companies that I was involved in, really closely working with. You remember in the early days, it was just three of you and I as a board member, four of us, like figuring out who to hire and who are the customers. So all of that experience told me that ultimate creation happens when the buck stops with you. Because as much as — as a first investor in Nutanix, I told you that I'm a business builder. I was not ultimately — I will give you advice, but you will be the one who is going to go sleep on that problem and get up in the morning and own that problem. So I thought that all the entrepreneurs are running and I'm sitting on the sideline clapping. So that was one thinking. And then the second thinking was: if you look back at large successful companies, nobody remembers the funders of Microsoft. Everybody remembers the founder of Microsoft. So I love the way you put it: funder versus founder. And so ultimately, I thought, if my career trajectory — if I'm going to create an impact and create something for America that has given me so much, am I going to create an enduring institution? And what would that be? Can I create something that provides employment and career opportunity for hundreds, if not thousands, of people? And so would my story end as being the funder of companies, as opposed to one idea that I take and whatever happens, I go make it something substantial.
So Rubrik, you start in 2014. It's been a little over 10 years. Were there like three phases of this company? Like phase one, phase two, phase three. What was phase one like?
I have a fundamental belief that great stories have chapters. And even greater stories have chapters where the next chapter has some orientation from the last chapter, but it forgets the last chapter. That's how you invent new things. So great companies go in phases where every phase builds and then forgets, and then the next phase starts. If you just look at Nvidia, if somebody told you that there will be a company that would be a PCI Express card that is doing gaming acceleration, competing with ATI, and one day it will be the biggest AI company in the world and the most valuable company in the world, people will laugh at that idea. I mean, although that being said, the computing architecture they bet on, which was non-consensus, the opposite of x86 and Intel, was something that has been there for 30 years, you know, since 1993. They bet on the fact that this architecture, this SIMD architecture, is going to take matrix operations and really make the best out of it. The world is a matrix, they said this from day one. And no pun intended, but the world is a matrix. Everything is a matrix that they have stayed with.
You're absolutely right. This is where — so the thing is that again, every company has to have foundational value creation, but the application of that value creation has to change. So if you look at Rubrik, what our fundamental value was: that all of the enterprise data is scattered in all different systems, and then metadata about this data is also kept in a separate set of systems. So backup software has the understanding of application and context and data-application connection, which is separate from data that lives in these storage systems. And so our idea was that if you combine the data and metadata together in a single software platform, where data becomes self-describing, it will have significant positive impact for the company. Just like Nvidia bet on this architecture, we bet on this idea that data has to be self-describing. And the first use of self-describing data is going to be the backup. So when we were in the stealth mode, our stealth website said 'world's data management platform.' So that was the original idea. We didn't know whether cyber would emerge or AI will emerge, but fundamentally we had this controversial idea that you combine the data and metadata, make the data self-describing, and that will change how data is thought of in the enterprise. And we have been true to that thinking. So the first application of that, the first phase of Rubrik, was backup and recovery.
The second phase of Rubrik was our fundamental thinking that for the last 30 years in cybersecurity, the world has focused on securing the perimeter, securing the walls and moats, so that you don't get to the crown jewels. But you can't prevent the unpreventable. Otherwise, you don't need judges and courts. Police can stop all crimes, or doctors can prevent all disease. You don't need hospitals and surgery. But they exist in the world, which means that as much as you're trying to prevent outside-in, you have to do inside-out security. Protecting your crown jewels is as important as prevention, and cure comes from understanding of the data, understanding of data-user context, understanding of data-application context. Again, going back to the original thinking: metadata and data together. If you build cyber directly into that platform, then you're fundamentally at source level inside-out securing everything. Built on this original idea. And then the third phase of Rubrik is again: in the enterprise, you need to have data. Data needs to have integrity and security. That's what we have been doing for 10 years. So again, the same core idea of data, metadata, and security together. How do you deliver the next phase? So every business, if you go back to Oracle Database, is the same. It became video server, it became internet, it became grid, it became cloud, it became crypto. It's the same underlying fundamental rule-level locking, fundamental idea of portability. Those things still exist.
How has your developer changed between the first phase and the third phase now? Right now, tell us more about both the developer and the salesperson. How have they changed?
See, the interesting part is that you do not want to have developers who come from the space where you're going to disrupt their space, fundamentally, because you need outsiders. And here is the beautiful part of outsiders: outsiders are perpetual outsiders. They were outsiders to backup, they're outsiders to security, they will be outsiders to AI. So there is no need to change your developers if you truly thought about bringing outsiders. So what we did was we focused on getting top-class algorithmic software engineers, not somebody who has done storage or backup, because we were thinking of taking a fresh look.
