Andrew Rubin
CEO & Co-Founder, Illumio. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Andrew Rubin is the co-founder and CEO of Illumio, an enterprise cybersecurity company founded in 2013. He previously served as President and CEO of intrusion detection company Cymtec Systems.
2shows
2appearances
31statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
Everything Andrew Rubin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Market Adoption Dictates Startup Destiny Far More Than Internal Execution
“The reality is that I believe now more than ever, having been a part of helping to build this company, I believe that At the end of the day, the one thing that's out of your control controls more of your destiny than anything in your control, which is the mark…”
Andrew Rubin: The Difference Between Being Early and Too Early is Bankruptcy
“The difference between being very, very, very, very early in something and being too early in something T O O of course, it's really only one word. And the word is actually not time. It's bankruptcy.”
Founders Should Over-Raise Capital as Insurance Rather Than Optimize for Dilution
“Over raise. Cash is literally the single most important insurance policy that every single startup has years before they're profitable and capable of standing on their own two feet. There's no amount of optimizing for dilution that will ever convince me that r…”
Rubin: Achieving perfect visibility over all enterprise devices is a fool's errand
“Every CIO's dream would be to really, truly be able to have a perfect picture of everything that can access every application and every piece of data in their environment, no matter where it is or who provided it, but it's, in a sense, it's a fool's mission. N…”
Illumio and Microsoft See Graph Architecture as Cybersecurity's Future
“Now, literally everybody from Illumio all the way to Microsoft talks about the future of security is really being based on a graph.”
Cybersecurity Has Shifted From Total Prevention to Breach Containment
“We live in a post breach world. Every organization either has been breached or they're terrified they're next on the list. And they rightfully should be because this is no longer an anomaly. It's not if, it's when. If the biggest companies in the world and the…”
Disrupting Incumbents Reaches Product-Market Fit Faster Than Category Creation
“What I'm saying is that the journey for product market fit and go to market fit is a lot easier because the infrastructure has already been laid down.”
Illumio Reached 500 Employees Before Gartner Formally Recognized Its Market
“Gartner didn't write a report with the word in it until two years ago. And we had already become a company of over 500 people.”
Rubin: Category Creation Requires Evangelizing the Problem, Not the Product
“When you are going out into a market that doesn't exist, you are literally evangelizing. Not you. You're evangelizing the problem. You're educating on why the customer even needs to think about, let alone care. Then when they agree that maybe it is a problem t…”
Rubin: Illumio operated without a market for most of its history
“We've been doing this without a market for most of our life. And now I very much believe there is a market.”
Illumio Raised $40M With Under 20 Employees and $100M Pre-Revenue
“We raised in the first six, seven months of the company's life over forty million dollars. The team hadn't hit 20 people and we already had 40 plus million dollars in fundraising. And basically, the month we started generating revenue two years later, we raise…”
Rubin: Conviction based solely on belief leads to wasted startup capital
“I don't think that walking around with conviction that's based on nothing other than belief is a good strategy because you can throw a lot of good effort and a lot of good money after Bad if you walk through your sort of decision making that way.”
Rubin: Illumio could never have raised early funding from generic VCs
“We were never going to, in my opinion, we were never going to raise the capital for something this hard and this new from what I'll refer to as a generic VC.”
Pitching Generalist VCs is Useless for Technical Startups Without Domain Alignment
“Sometimes pitching a hundred is actually no better than pitching eight. If it turns out that there's only three that really are going to get your pitch, the other 97, it's going to make no difference at all.”
Illumio Has Never Conducted an Economic Layoff in Its Entire History
“One thing that I'm incredibly, incredibly proud of is that I can say that I'm working on a team For a company that literally has never done an economic driven layoff. We've never done a riff in the life of the company.”
Rubin: Headcount is the only software expense large enough to move the needle
“Almost all the money that a software company spends is in people. It's the only expense big enough that you can move the needle.”
Rubin: Illumio's early contracts were mostly seven-figure enterprise deals
“Our first customers were some of the biggest banks in the world. And fortunately they believed in us and the problem we were trying to solve enough that we didn't do a lot of 50 or a 100,000 dollar deals in the beginning. Quite frankly, most of our deals were …”
Startups Cannot Successfully Go Public Selling Only to Fortune 100 Companies
“You can't be a public company, or I should say, it's almost impossible to be a public company only selling to the Fortune 100.”
Rubin: Go-to-market fit is as essential as product-market fit
“Everybody talks about PMF and rightfully so. I can't have a company if you don't have a product that fits a market. But the other version of that statement, which is equally true and equally important is you have to have go-to-market fit. You have to understan…”
Rubin: Product-market fit is not a finished state but an evolving journey
“I don't think that you have true product market fit and then you're done. I think you have moments in time where you figure things out that now make it feel like it's closer than it's ever been.”
Rubin: Viewing cybersecurity as binary safe versus breached is no longer viable
“I think the aha moment for security, and it's recent, it's measured probably in months or maybe a year or two, is that this concept of being in a binary state of safe or breached is no longer a viable way to look at the world. Because with this much out there,…”
Rubin: Enterprise buyers are willing to replace legacy security architectures entirely
“Consistently across the board, customers are saying to us that they're finding that there isn't a natural or easy iterative path from the architecture of the past. What Groves said about having to rethink the problem from first principles, We're actually heari…”
Rubin: Enterprises are pivoting to protect high-value assets over blanket control
“What we're finding is that what customers are doing is they're actually identifying what they consider to be their highest value targets. They're identifying the applications and specifically the data that is the most important asset that they have. They're fi…”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Andrew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | CEO & Co-Founder, Illumio | 1 | 27 | 100% 4/4 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |
 a16zLEDGER | CEO & Co-Founder, Illumio | 1 | 4 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |