When Asheem Chandna drove to Rubrik’s Palo Alto office on a Friday evening in early 2015, he was excited to see what the young company, which hadn’t yet developed its product, would show him. The Greylock partner was not disappointed.
The company’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, outlined Rubrik’s plan to reshape the data management and recovery market on a whiteboard. “The old and new architecture he presented was very compelling,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the industry, I knew it could become a large company.”
That was a forward-looking decision. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubric began life as a publicly traded company with a Market capitalization of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake. according to the most recent SEC filings. As of Friday’s close, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth over $756 million at a share price of $38.
But Chandna says it was much more than Rubrik’s desire to conquer the arcane data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45 per share, adjusted for splits, according to these SEC filings. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandra’s returns in this round are notable .)
“The longer I do what I do, the more I am convinced 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 found Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s offices and served on the nearly $100 billion company’s board until last year. Chandna was also an early investor AppDynamics, Sumo logic and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but also aware of their weaknesses, and can recruit people who can get things done in areas that are not the founder’s strengths.
Another essential ingredient for a founder is courage. “If you have technology that is adequate but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very confident and persistent, you will beat me,” he said.
He saw that in Sinha. The founder of Rubrik had a lifelong dream of starting a business. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn’t find strong engineers who wanted to work there, Chandra recalls. The business he was trying to build was not inherently sexy at the time.
Although Sinha was an investor in Lightspeed for four years before founding Rubrik, recruiting talent proved to be a major challenge for Sinha. But he didn’t give up. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them to a coffeehouse outside of their workplace.
“Startup journeys are very tough, even for the most successful companies,” Chandna said. “I want people who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Perhaps it was Sinha’s courage and ambition that compelled him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.
“Rubric has annual recurring revenue of just under $800 million,” Chandna said. “That’s bigger than most companies that have gone public in recent years. “I think they just wanted to keep going.”
Chandna declined to say whether he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik’s lead, but added emphatically that the company’s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.
We will follow their fate closely.