The Founder Formula

Bipul Sinha - Co-Founder of Rubrik

• Trace3 • Episode 40

Share episode

This Founder has years of experience helping billion-dollar companies realize their full potential, including the data security company he founded, Rubrik. In Bipul Sinha’s world, data is the most critical asset.

Co-hosts Todd Gallina and Tony Olzak sit down with Bipul and discuss the importance of selling strategy, and then share some valuable insights into the world of data security, entrepreneurship, and venture capital.

Listen to this and all of The Founder Formula episodes through your favorite podcast platform or Trace3.com.

Todd Gallina:

The founder formula brings you in behind the curtains and inside the minds of today's brave executives at the most future leaning startups. Each interview will feature a transformative leader who's behind the wheel at a fast paced and innovative tech firm. They'll give you an insider's look at how companies are envisioned, created and scaled. We hope you're ready. Let's get into the show. Hey, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of the Founder Formula. We are thrilled. This is our 40th. 40th episode. The big 4-0. Super excited. My name is Todd Galena, and with me is Tony Olzak. He's the Chief Technology Officer here at Trace3. Tony, welcome. Hey, good morning, Todd. Glad that we were finally able to get together again and do another one of these episodes. Yeah, we are in our kind of like early stages of our sweet recording studio.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, this place is pretty awesome. It's great to be able to do one of these in person because we've done all these remote until now.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, yeah, it was good. And yeah, it's good to be in here. It's good to see you. And you are now, you know, you're back. You're a full-time resident here in

Tony Olzak:

California again. Back in Orange County paradise. You got it. Yeah. You know, it's funny. about that. I moved to Denver right before the pandemic. And so probably the worst time ever to move to a new city to have like everything shut down brand new place don't know anybody don't know anything about the place and then you're just like locked in your house for and i could have been anywhere right yeah and every single year it would snow like crazy and every year all the coloradans would say oh it isn't like this this is abnormal the next year would happen like no no promise it's never like this and the next year would happen at some point you think like is it me like is it am i bringing this on and so i got sick of that snow and all this stuff happened like it would snow in like may or june and i love denver i love colorado the people there and everything but it's a gorgeous place so i moved back to orange county and i'm just back here now and it snows in la county last week it's like the first sign of the apocalypse and i'm like oh my god it is me and all the californians like oh no we

Todd Gallina:

swear this doesn't happen yeah yeah yeah we don't know what happened you blew into town we have a first for those who don't know we uh we had our first blizzard warning and then actual blizzard since 1989 and uh well we use the term blizzard

Tony Olzak:

lately i mean like one inch of snow is a blizzard for la county right

Todd Gallina:

oh my god it's a blizzard yeah oh i know it's uh i was in a starbucks and uh it started to hail and um i hadn't noticed looking out the window, but I sure heard it from everyone inside. I swear, people thought that like a meteorite had hit the parking lot. They're like, oh my gosh, look outside. It's like, it was crazy, but dude, we need it, man. I mean, we could use some freaking water out here. Well, not

Tony Olzak:

anymore. It's been raining nonstop since I've been back. It's like, again, one of those things, like, did I do this? Raining nonstop, mudslides, flooding. The L.A. River actually has water in it. There's always something you can just, like, drive down, like, there's

Todd Gallina:

grease or something like that. Grease, they did it. Terminator 2. There's never water in there. Now it's like a whitewater rap. Someone in Hollywood's going to, they're going to shoot a boat chase in there just to prove that it can actually handle actual actual water um that's super funny our guests that we're going to be having on is is a banner guest he's also going to be from california we're dialing him in from from los altos also living through the apocalypse yeah i mean it's it's it's even worse there i think oh yeah it's like i don't know it's i don't i don't I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what we're going to do with all this water. You know, maybe people can start watering their lawns. We could drink it. No, I won't take my water from the bottle from France.

Tony Olzak:

I only drink it from a can.

Todd Gallina:

We still, we've got to get that guy on. Yeah. How did he become cooler than us?

Tony Olzak:

Marketing.

Todd Gallina:

All right, man, let's get to our guy. You ready? Yeah, let's do it.

Unknown:

Okay.

Todd Gallina:

Our guest is an entrepreneur, engineer, and venture capitalist. He is the chairman, co-founder, and CEO of Rubrik and a venture partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to Rubrik, he was a partner at Lightspeed where he focused on software, mobile, and internet sectors. His investments included Nutanix, Pulse News, Bromium, and Pernix Data. Before Lightspeed, he worked at Bloomberg Capital, where he was the founding investor and board member of Nutanix and Hootsuite. He sold engineering positions at Oracle, American Megatrends, and IBM. He completed his MBA in finance from the Wharton School, where he was a Palmer Scholar, and he also holds several patents in distributed computing. Please welcome to the show, Bipal Sinha. Bipal, thanks for

Bipul Sinha:

joining us. Thank you, Todd and Tony. Really appreciate to be here. Yeah, we're very excited

Tony Olzak:

to have you. Well, let's dive right in. I know we've got a limited amount of time with you today. We just want to hear a little bit more about Rubrik and why you started it.

Bipul Sinha:

Rubrik is a data security company focused on cyber resilience and cyber recovery, helping businesses and governments around the world protect and recover from data security attacks such as ransomware and more. When we started Rubrik, we saw this opportunity that the legacy backup was not protecting businesses against cyber attacks because it was designed for natural disaster or human error, but not designed for cyber. And our vision was if we take that backup and recovery platform and transform that into a data security, extensive data security platform that not only serves the purposes of the legacy backup functions, but also delivers fundamental cyber resilience, recovery from ransomware, recovery from cyber attacks, then we can really transform this industry. With that vision, we started the company, and here we are.

Tony Olzak:

And it's always a security-led discussion, which is really interesting. When Rubrik first started, the concept was great, technology was great, and we've actually seen our security teams leading a lot of those discussions, and over time, even reorganized how we... how we represent that portfolio more from a security perspective. So I think you've nailed the market that on with what your guys' ideas were and what you think the big problem was.

Bipul Sinha:

Thank you so much. And look, Trace3 was one of the first partners that we signed on in Rubrik. I personally made the call to sign up Trace3. So I'm hugely appreciative of your support and championship over the years. And we look forward to building a big business with you guys. I mean, look, the opportunity with Rubrik and Trace3 is humongous. Any business with any data and application of any significance is really our opportunity because we can help those customers protect themselves against cyber attacks such as ransomware, which is a big thing because you're not selling bits and bytes in infrastructure. You're selling strategic protection of the company, talking to chief risk officers, talking to CISOs, and about how do we provide cyber resilience, compliance, governance, because data is the most critical asset, and this is what the opportunity is.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, we're thrilled to be partnered with you, Bipple. And yes, the opportunities are there and we're excited to explore them together. So thank you so much for thinking of Trace3 when you were getting this thing off the ground. We're proud to be partnered with you. Hey, we are getting you at a terrific time because Information Week carried a contributed article that you had just written And it landed just a couple of days ago before the podcast. And Tony and I, we really enjoyed reading it. It's one of many contributed pieces you've done. You've also done contributed pieces for Forbes. But this particular article talked about the economic environment that we're in. And there's a quote here that says, fear of uncertainty is actually hardwired into our brains that comes from you. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about this article you wrote?

Bipul Sinha:

Absolutely. If you think about human mind, we all have a large dose of cognitive dissonance when we see something new, when we come across an uncertain environment. And we try to simplify that worldview by creating some kind of analogy. So you might have heard a lot of entrepreneurs go to the VCs and say, we are Uber for X. What they're trying to do is instead of describing their idea in isolation, they are trying to reduce the cognitive dissonance and perception of risk by creating an analogy. And that's how human mind works. But when the business leaders see the uncertainty in the market. There's no way for them to get out of that uncertainty. So instead of getting too much worried about it and being paralyzed by analysis and fear, how do you navigate such uncertain environment? And if you think about life of an entrepreneur when you start a business, that's the most uncertain environment. So what an entrepreneur's navigate, the choppy waters of the early stage business is similar to what business leaders, when they have to navigate the choppy waters of a microeconomic situation that we face today. So I was trying to create some kind of an analogy and formula that how does a leader operate? in such an environment. And then the most important thing, which is number one thing is, is you have to really control what you control and maximize the moment that you have, the time that you have, maximize this time. Because tomorrow is a reflection of today. If you maximize now, you will have a better tomorrow. And now is only thing in your control because the way we have evolved over the last thousands of years, we have already always been a temporal animal. What is a temporal animal? We think about past, we think about future. But in an uncertain environment, past is not going to be your guide and future is completely up for grabs. But there is no future if you're not maximizing now. So the number one thing is maximize here and now. And then number two thing is to really think about things, try to think about things in a super linear way. Again, as we have evolved as a human being, we have always been live today, live tomorrow, live day after tomorrow, live day after tomorrow. We think linear. But every phenomena, whether it's a business growing fast or pandemic coming to us, it always happens super linear. We think that it is far off and then it's suddenly upon us. And same thing with the markets. We see the markets every day, but we say that, hey, it changed too fast. Because it was happening super linear. But in our mental framework, we always think linear. So business leaders in such uncertain environment, you have to think super linear. You have to think that the things that you are seeing today, they will only get accelerated because of uncertainty. Uncertainty doesn't, or a thousand year event doesn't bring any new things into picture. They only accelerate existing stuff. How do you grab that opportunity of acceleration, super linear thinking in a linear day-to-day environment? So that's the number two. The number three thing is we all are animals of psychological safety. What is psychological safety? We try to resolve the conflict. And conflict resolution leads to suboptimal decision-making. You have to live in conflict and being able to operate and make a decision. So ability to live in conflict, not go for psychological safety, make harder decision is the number three thing. I'll give you an example. As a business leader, you always look for team members and executives in your company. When you meet a good enough person, You say, hey, if I hire this person, I will have somebody on the seat and I'll get psychological safety because I'll feel like somebody is taking care of the house. So that decision gives you psychological safety, but it's not the right decision or may not be the right decision because you have to really look for an outstanding individual to join your team, not just an average individual. But if you were optimizing for psychological safety, you will pick the first person or first average person that you come across and hire them. How do you control yourself, live in the conflict, still look for the best and strive for the excellence? And that's how you have to think about your decision-making in an uncertain environment because pain now, avoidance of pain now will create significant pain in future. And then final thing is over-communicate because what happens is that if as a leader, if you are living in this situation conflict, it's like duality in your mind, your team will be in the emotional upheaval. Because you are considering both sides of the equation, but you can't let your team be in the same kind of psychological state. So you have to over communicate to create a solid ground for them to operate on. These are the four things that I feel is important to navigate the choppy waters of the macroeconomic situation.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, it was a fantastic article. Todd and I were reviewing it last night and this morning and just spectacular advice in there. And just also looking at the way you talked about over-communicating or removing the anxiety because everyone almost has more uncertainty in the absence of communication because they're left to wonder versus truly understanding what's going on and having that being removed from the equation. Now, you as also as a CEO yourself, When you think about the advice that you gave in that article, are there any decisions and things that you're doing at Rubrik this year that reflect some of that advice that you've given? A

Bipul Sinha:

number of them. I mean, look, we are actually out in the market to look for a marketing executive right now. And I'm applying this psychological safety framework. How do I keep the bar high, continue to look for the best in class, the world-class leader, while the seat is empty because empty seat doesn't give you psychological safety. It actually creates psychological feeble because you feel like nobody's minding the house. And at the same time, you have to keep the bar high and keep going to look for somebody who will do an excellent job as opposed to an average individual.

Todd Gallina:

It's funny because the marketplace has totally changed where when you're talking about hiring, It must have been really hard to apply that six months ago when everyone's getting snatched up left and right. Now things might be breaking a little bit in your favor where maybe you can spend a little bit more time finding the exact person you're looking for. And by the way, I really love my job at Trace3. I'm very happy here.

Bipul Sinha:

Look, at the end of the day, I have a belief that that the strong things always are in demand. If you are a great company, there is always demand for your, if you are a public company, your shares. If you are a great executive, your existing employer loves you, they make sure that you can't go away, and there is a lot of demand for you in the marketplace. So the demand fluctuation is for the middle of the pyramid. Top of the pyramid, there is very little demand fluctuation. because those people, great people are fewer and they're always in demand. So you have to really go out there and apply yourself and show that you have a better career opportunity for them than their current place. And that's what this is all about. And this has been true from day one of Rubrik. We said that we are only going to hire, we'll not hire ourselves for the job we are in, which means that we are going to raise the bar with every hire. Not easy thing to do and creates whole lots of psychological upheaval. But psychological upheaval is the path of success. The avoidance of immediate pain or near-term pain creates a lot of long-term pain.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah. Yeah, I could dig into a lot of the hiring you're talking about. Like, I'm curious when you come into the hiring process, you're looking for a marketing leader. Do you wait to a bunch of people or say, you know, people this, we've narrowed them down to three. Are you very active early on in these conversations?

Bipul Sinha:

I don't believe in outsourcing. So I'm in the front end of hiring. In many cases, I do the first call. But we are not like trying to boil the ocean and look for everybody. We identify who are the 20, 30 people who matter and then try to find cultural fit. And how do we get the right set of people excited? If you're trying to kind of boil the ocean, then I can't do it because I can't do 200 screening calls. You already have two jobs. So we try to kind of narrow it down. Look, I mean, my main job is Rubrik. That is the 99.9% of my time. I'm a venture partner at Lightspeed, which is really a title to help them time to time on deals and opportunities. But I'm not actively working on during my day on anything other than Rubrik.

Todd Gallina:

Okay, good. That was a question we were going to talk about, but you just answered that. So let me ask you this. So we're talking a little bit about hiring. We're talking about the fact that that you're a founder, but you also have to meet and assess founders with your job at light speed. Maybe you're not doing it right now, but before Rubrik you were. What are you looking for in a founder? What are some of the key elements?

Bipul Sinha:

For me, and again, many years as venture capitalist, I always look for a founder who has this relentless learning mindset. relentless learning mindset. And it is all about the opportunity view of the world. What do I not know that can hurt me? And that's the learning mindset that how do I maximize every learning opportunity? So I look for that. I look for that. And then the second thing that I look for is that do they have a unique point of view for the market? And that's the vision piece, that this person has a vision. That vision may not become a business. They have to change the vision or tweak the vision, but at least they have a vision to start with. Do they see world in a certain way that is not accepted as of today? And that's where the value is created. You need to have a unique point of view, which is non-consensus, as in like the world has not accepted it. So if you take a step back, I'll give you a framework to think about venture capital or value creation. I classify the world as two worlds, known world and unknown world. So think about when Zuckerberg started Facebook, nobody knew that people will put their real identity on internet and with their kids picture. So he started something in the unknown world. And then he convinced the world and pulled the edge of the known to him and created a huge value. So that's the non-consensus idea. When you start something, people will say, hey, I don't agree. Or majority of people will say that it can't happen. And then you make that thing happen. You create significant amount of value. So you have to look for a founder who has a vision in the unknown world. that he is relentlessly determined to pull the edge of known to himself or herself.

Tony Olzak:

I love that. We've talked to a lot of different people around the significance past the idea in assembling the team and the advantages of being in a location like Silicon Valley. And prior to the pandemic, there were a few other areas around the globe that were kinda on the rise to try to rival what you can get out of that area. You know, if you think about the advantage really being the community that you have at your disposal, being a startup in a place like Silicon Valley, has that changed much with, you know, kind of like a global workforce, hybrid work, the ability to tap into talent from everywhere? Do you still see the value in being in a place like that when you're trying to launch a startup?

Bipul Sinha:

So I still believe that for launching a startup, there's no other place like Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is not a geographical thing. Silicon Valley is this mindset. And the mindset has many components. The mindset of talent mobility, willingness of people to leave their day job to believe in an idea and jump, number one. The willingness of the capital allocators, which are venture capitalists, to fund such a thing and stand behind these fledgling ideas. And then finally, once you start to get some traction, then you have the talent scale to quickly grow. Because the venture funded business is different from a bootstrap business. Because bootstrap business grow at a slower pace. But the venture backed business has to grow at a higher pace. And because it has to create disproportionate value because of cost of capital is so high. And so to be able to create disproportionate, like super linear growth, and that's why startups suddenly grow too fast, is because you can leverage the capital that has been given to you to grow fast. And for you to grow fast, you need to have talent to scale and quickly talent to scale very quickly, which is hard to find in anywhere else in the world. So if you think about very esoteric area of like growth marketing, you can find like 50 people doing growth marketing in Silicon Valley. But if you go outside of Silicon Valley, it'll be hard to find one. So those are the things that are unique to the Valley. Obviously, a lot of people are looking at Valley, trying to emulate Valley, but I still feel that this is a very special place. Well, you talked a little

Tony Olzak:

bit about, you know, how do you, grow very quickly and leveraging the funding that you have at your disposal. I think you also discussed in your article around growth for the sake of growth or growing quickly for the sake of growth, but managing your funds or your funding conservatively during a time like this. How does an economic time like this change the way that you think about the funding that you have and growth at that kind of scale and that kind of pace?

Bipul Sinha:

thing that always have to remember that the venture capital is given to you to create a leveraged growth leveraged growth means that you have to grow quickly and and because otherwise if you go too slowly you're not creating enough value but having said that if you're trying to grow too quickly by burning too much capital then you are essentially also not creating value And this is the dichotomy of running a startup, that you have to create fast growth while having the discipline of minimization of burn or minimization of the cost while you're trying to create growth. And that's what is tricky about running a growth company or scaling a business in Silicon Valley. It's not a traditional scale because traditional scale is go slow because you don't have enough capital to go fast. But you have been given capital to grow fast, but don't burn too much of that capital. It's not like you're jumping off a plane and trying to build a parachute and hoping that you will land with the parachute, not just you and the parachute being two separate entities. So that's the challenge and that's what makes it tricky and that's what is hard about scaling a business. But having said that, if you can figure that formula out, you can create a really, really large company. I mean, look at Facebook and Cisco and Oracle and other companies really built a massive business because if you figure out a formula of profitable growth, there is no end because the technology is going to every corner of our lives.

Todd Gallina:

You know, Bipol, you talk about finance and burn rate and growth. Your MBA is from the Wharton School in finance. We talked about Silicon Valley, you know, so much talent. I'm sure a lot of that's being fed by schools like Stanford and Cal. How important is bringing on college educated people into your organization? Is that critical? Is it a must have or have you found talent maybe outside of that traditional avenue?

Bipul Sinha:

It depends upon what you're trying to hire for. So if you're trying to hire for highly analytical business planning strategy, then you need people who have some educational framework so that they can think about business problems systematically and can create an output that can be communicated and understood by a wider set of people. So you need like some... educational framework, some foundational stuff. But if you think about if you are doing, say, sales or you are doing marketing where you don't need to have this strategic strategy I mean, you need some strategy always in your life, but it's not predominantly a strategic framework kind of thing, but it is a combination of creativity, which doesn't need education, intuition, which doesn't need education, and ability to communicate, which also doesn't need education. So if you think about that framework, there are a number of people who are highly qualified to be able to do this job if we can create the right enablement framework for them so that they understand what they're marketing or selling or building. I mean, I am of a strong point of view that the world is like, it needs two skills, knowledge-based skills and intuition-based skills. So the knowledge-based skill, you need to have education to have knowledge. But the intuition-based skills in terms of in an uncertain environment, like how to make a sales, you need intuition. Intuition doesn't need any education or background. So you need to find the people who fits in these profile sets.

Todd Gallina:

Your head of marketing is going to need both, right? Like I said, I'm not available. I was just curious.

Tony Olzak:

You're going to keep wooing each other here until you just can't say no.

Bipul Sinha:

At the end of it, let's see who we hire.

Todd Gallina:

If you need me to meet

Tony Olzak:

with them, I'm available. Okay, sorry. One of the things that we love to hear about, you talk about being a founder, you've got a great vision, bring something from the unknown world into the known world. And you start and you've got a great idea. And then at some point in time, that idea is actually consumed by a client, a customer of some type. And, you know, that first moment where you hear something that really brings that joy, that your idea is coming true. And, you know, you've had like some kind of gratifying moment with a new customer. Do you have a moment like that you could share with us on one of your first customers and how it really made you feel?

Bipul Sinha:

Obviously, when you start a company, it is a thought experiment. And then when you hire people, then it's a lab experiment. And then when customer pays for it, then it's actual business. So there is definitely a seminal moment when somebody writes a check, which converts your thought experiment and lab experiment into actual business, because now you are responsible for delivering a product and connected with it, the experience to the customer. Our first big moment was in 2016, one of our customers, which was a hospital in Southern United States, was attacked by We didn't know back then something called ransomware. And every system was down other than Rubrik. And the leadership called us and they said, you saved our hospital. I don't know what you guys do. You are the only system that was available and we could recover all other systems using you and ransomware didn't touch you. And that was the moment when we realized that what we do matters, which is very, very important. You can make money by selling a lot of things, but when you sell something that matters, it makes a difference. And that really kind of, and then we sent our engineers, learned about what is ransomware and how it attacks, and then learned that we have our architecture is like a unique architecture built for this problem or cyber attack. like creating resilience against cyber attack and delivering cyber recovery. And that really changed the trajectory of our thinking and our business.

Todd Gallina:

That's great. What high praise. That's an amazing story. Thanks for sharing that, Bipol. I think it's safe to say that I think I might have learned more during this conversation than probably any that we've had,

Tony Olzak:

Tony. This conversation Well, it's incredibly insightful. I love the way that you've kind of put a framework around everything that you think about. Every question that we've asked you, you not only have an answer, but here's how you think about it. And I think that's been incredibly valuable. Absolutely.

Todd Gallina:

Bibble, before we wrap up, is there anything that you'd like to share with our listeners that maybe we haven't covered?

Bipul Sinha:

I mean, look, I will say again, we love Trace3. There is a significant opportunity for us to do great work together, what we'll do for our customer will matter. And I'm here as a sponsor of this relationship. I'm all ears, any feedback, any questions, any opportunity that you and your team wants to get involved in. And at the end of the day, I will say is that the framework that I live by, and I try to inculcate that into Rubrik, we are all prisoners of our own imagination. There is really no limit to what we can achieve. Some people go for goodness. Some people go for greatness. I aspire to be at potential. Since there is no definition of at potential, you can be striving for at potential all your life. You'll create tremendous outcome, always be dissatisfied, but will change the world. Nice. Speechless.

Todd Gallina:

Yeah, yeah. Hey, Bipol, thank you so much. It's been so great to finally chat with you at length. I love reading your stuff. We're just very blessed to have spent some time with you.

Tony Olzak:

Yeah, we loved having you today and especially, you know, such a special episode for us celebrating the 40th episode of the Founder Formula. We loved having you on. We've been trying to get you on for a very long time and it finally happened. So it's like a dream come true for us.

Bipul Sinha:

Thank you so much for this opportunity.

Tony Olzak:

Love you all.

Outro:

Trace3 is hyper-focused on helping IT leaders deliver business outcomes by providing a wide variety of data center solutions and consulting services. If you're looking for emerging technology to solve tried and true business problems, Trace3 is here to help. We believe all possibilities live in technology. You can learn more at trace3.com slash podcast. That's trace the number three dot com slash podcast. You've

Todd Gallina:

been listening to The Founder Formula, the podcast for all things startup from Silicon Valley to innovators across the country. If you wanna know what it takes to lead tomorrow's tech companies, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts. Until next time.