When Asheem Chandna arrived at Rubrik’s office in Palo Alto on a Friday evening in early 2015, he couldn’t wait to seek out out what the young company that hadn’t yet created a product would show him. Greylock’s partner was not dissatisfied.
The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew on a whiteboard Rubrik’s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market. “The old and new architecture he presented was very convincing,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the industry, I knew it could be turned into a big business.”
It was a prophetic call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik began its operations as a publicly traded company with: market capitalization exceeding $6 billion. Greylock owns 13% of the shares, in line with the latest SEC reports. By the close of trading Friday, at a share price of $38, nearly 19.9 million shares were value greater than $756 million.
But Chandna says he was motivated to steer the Rubrik team by much greater than just a desire to tackle the arcane data recovery market. Series B for $40 million in May 2015. (According to SEC filings, the Series B round sold for $2.45 per share, adjusted for splits. Although Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandna’s profits from this round are enormous.)
“The longer I do what I do, the more I truly believe that venture is a people business,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in the Greylock offices and until last 12 months served on the board of directors of the nearly $100 billion company. Chandna was also an early investor Application dynamics, Sumo logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for individuals who are not only motivated and ambitious, but also aware of their weaknesses and can recruit individuals who can get things done in areas that are not the founder’s strong suit.
Another essential ingredient for the founder is sand. “If you had the right technology, but slightly inferior to mine, but you were very aware and persistent, you would beat me,” he said.
This is what he saw in Sinha. The founding father of Rubrik dreamed of starting a company all his life. Chandna recalls that when he founded a data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers willing to work there. The business he was attempting to build wasn’t inherently sexy at the time.
Despite being an investor in Lightspeed for 4 years before founding Rubrik, recruiting talent proved to be a major challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t quit. He called engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them to coffee breaks outside the workplace.
“The startup path is very difficult, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “I want people who won’t take no for an answer.”
Perhaps it was Sinha’s resolve and ambition that forced him to take his company public despite the unfavorable IPO atmosphere.
“Rubrik has almost $800 million in annual recurring revenue,” Chandna said. “This is more than most companies that have gone public in the last many years. I think they just wanted to keep it going.”
Chandna would not say whether he expects other Greylock portfolio corporations to follow Rubrik’s lead, but added emphatically that the best-performing late-stage corporations are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We will follow their fate closely.