Rubrik

“It's been actually a much more challenging problem to build agents within our product than I think I thought it was going to be a year ago to really deliver those outcomes.”

“And our vision here is that eventually you can operate all of rubric through this interface, that you do not need the UI and dashboards at all, that it will be a fully agentic experience.”

“So instead, what we're using is we're using like all the LLMs to help come up with the plans, but the plans themselves Of how you're going to do a recovery in a cyber scenario are deterministic and then are explainable to the customer.”

“At the end of the day, we're still responsible. Even when a customer makes a mistake and something isn't working, they blame us and rightfully so. They should. It's our responsibility to make it obvious what the right choices are.”

“People are going to make mistakes more than agents if we build our agents with the right guardrails around it. And so our belief is that actually we'll make fewer mistakes in an agentic world We'll tell people what the right solution is. We'll keep, take more …”

“I actually believe it will exist. I think, you know, it is one of those long lasting, independent, successful businesses.”

“It was a hair on fire problem. It was number one, number two, number three priority for the Rubric CFO and all the CFOs I had worked with in the past.”

“In fact, the rubric CEO was my reference call for all the VCs, and rubric CFO is a huge mentor of mine.”

“I think I took about 18 to 24 months to figure that out. I went through 12 co-founders.”

“The advantage that Arvin had was that he was previously the co-founder of Rubrik. So he noticed this problem at Rubrik, left Rubrik to start Glean, and he basically built Glean for Rubrik, right? And the bet that he was going to make was like, rough and tumble…”

“If you're growing less than 20% of a cherry pick basket, 5.1 X AR, Wix is lower. It's not in my basket. 20 to 30, 11.8 X AR. And then the 30% plus, which is Rubrik, Palantir and Figma, average 23.7 X AR, but Palantir and Rubrik push that up.”

“The ability to scale to petabytes to kind of like just run like massive amounts of compute. That technology was simply absent from enterprise data centers.”

“One of the superpowers of like this Scaling technology is that you can start small. So, you know, like when we go into a new organization as a small company you know, and you say, okay, give me a million dollars. Even if you believe that you should get a milli…”

“Ten million? Yeah. So that was the, that was one investment.”

“Our first customer is this, like, think of them as, like, a local hardware chain, like, in New South Wales Australia. Just like, as, like as far out as you can fly from here, that's where our first customer was. Yeah, I mean, I remember the name Lang's Buildin…”

“So we always did paid pilots at Rubrik. I think the rationale was that, you know, you want some skin in the game. And then, you know, there is a, there is this like data center hardware component, right? So it's kind of like, it's a lot of effort to kind of ge…”

“Facebook ended up being a customer, I would say in year two, and they said, you know, our data centers run on something known as IPv six. It's just a, it's a particular way in which, you know, servers are identified. It was all the rage. The idea was that the …”

“I would say, like two quarters, two-ish quarters, I would say. It was quick. It was, I mean, again, like, look, don't compare us to cursor, right? I mean, that's a, Different. Yeah, these days Quake has taken on a whole new meaning, but. Like, think about it. …”

“Sub, sub one percent churn. Right. It's like, I'm glad I'm not there yet because I don't know the exact numbers, but like churn was just not a thing. And that was quite remarkable. Churn was not a thing. And you know, NRR was like, you know, even like at IPO t…”

“I would say year two, certainly we were, we had hit ten million. That's well before year two ended. Year two of selling, right?”

“So the very first year we bought like this, like Massive premium booth and bought like this DeLorean machine. I don't know if you've seen it, the Back to the Future car.”

“I think here, I would say after first five customer conversations, to me, it became very real that first of all, I mean, these guys, Are willing to pay so much money for this thing that barely works.”

“Microsoft was like, it eventually became an investor in us. And the reason for that was that we were the biggest driver of data into Microsoft Azure. Even to date, we have you know, given like a few hundred petabytes of data.”

“It was like fifteen million total. Again, like my co-founders, they're essentially folks I have kind of worked with within rubrics. This is like a strong bit of a rubric mafia here within the founding team.”

“One of the things that Rubrik got right was picking like an old problem which nobody was, ignored problem, right? When you ignore a problem, You get to be the only person kind of doing it. That was like one secret sauce that Rubrik had.”

“All the IPOs that we've had in B to B recently, Klaviyo, one stream rubric that was here on, they're all five hundred million growing 50%.”

“A lot of the new products that we sell today in our portfolio all started with the hackathon project. We've been running hackathons since we just finished our 10th hackathon last year. So we've been doing it from our, from year two of the company.”

“So the way it works is when you're starting a new product, typically if it's a new buyer, It's hard for a large core sales team to go and do that because they're selling, they're used to selling in a certain way. And then how does it fit into the new product? …”

“I know there's this advice that say no to a 95%. I don't believe in that. I think you have to say yes to yes to everything, right? Because if you lose, if you miss a large fortune, 500 customer, it may be a hundred K deal down the road. That's a 20, 30 X lifet…”

“Most of the time is not spending, it's not spent in foundation models, nobody's training models. The work is in, okay, how do I get access to the data that I need to solve this particular use case?”

“Almost like we've heard, like, 80% of AI POCs don't make it to production.”

“Definitely in, on, on coding, we are seeing some potential, huge potential gains that we see. So we are really pushing everybody to start using AI for their coding.”

“In Rupert, we're an established market, like the budget, several dollars, and you had to actually replace an old technology with a new technology. Here we were in a market where we had no budgets. There was no concept of buying a search product in the enterpri…”

“This is a data management and security software platform that went public in April with a market cap of 5.6 billion dollars. They were around eight hundred million of ARR and are now trading at seven times ARR multiple. And you'll notice that difference in cas…”

“On the marketing side, A lot more rests on the go-to-market and having a good go-to-market story to tell and is less, a little less about the quality of the product. The quality of product obviously always matters, especially in retention and other things like…”

“We had no one on my team who had ever built or sold a security product before. I was like, this is including me. So I was like, this is pretty bad. If we want to be a security company and we sell a lot to IT, but we wanted to do more in security. It was like, …”

“So I actually did that work myself until I brought someone on, and that actually gave me the context to then be able to help that person on board, understand the nuances of that business so I could make sure that I could shepherd that and hand that off success…”

“We've started having new product managers go through the sales engineering training. We just launched a new first meeting deck at the company and did a big training with our sellers. All the sellers have to certify, get certified on the first meeting deck. And…”

“One thing that I've learned and I've learned this from our CEO rubric and I, it's, Just really gotten embedded into the way that I operate is that you need to just have one killer differentiating feature that you can sell on to begin with. So whatever that is,…”

“I think when you think about building your second big product as early as possible, identify sales, S E marketing resources that are going to be dedicated to figuring out how to get traction with this new product together. And don't make it 20% of their job, m…”

“I'm concerned that we've only had two SaaS-ish IPOs since twenty-twenty-one. We've only had two since HashiCorp was the last one of the bubble of December of twenty-twenty-one, right? Just got bought for IBM. If only had two, we've only had Klaviyo and Rubrik.”

“The IPO markets don't care. They actually don't care whether you raise nothing right in primary like Atlassian or whether you raised a crap load like rubric. Or whether you raised almost nothing like Klaviyo and then a bunch and then all, and then burn nothing…”

“There've only been two SaaS IPOs since the crash of December of 20, 21. There's only been two. In fact, there's only been one point 1.5 because rubric is in process of going IPO.”

“That actually is filing for IPO. Now they're doing like half a billion dollar in revenue, you know, worth five to ten billion dollars.”

“We actually tripled the size of the engineering team, but like, you know, still write, you know, the same amount of code.”

“Many times we do get involved in companies where they not only reach a hundred, but they have a path to a billion of revenue or ARR, as we've seen with Netflix, and we think that potential exists with, Datadog and CrowdStrike and many other companies that are …”