Bipul Sinha. Rubrik.

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: Building a business is creating a religion. Bipul: When you create a religion, who do you try to find? Believers. Bipul: First half year of Rubrik, we sold $5 million. Bipul: First full year of Rubrik, we sold $47 million. Bipul: Second year of Rubrik we sold $168 million. Bipul: And third year of Rubrik we sold $350 million. Bipul: I was driving back from work. Bipul: I started thinking that this is the company where I put all my life. Bipul: I'm not spending as much time with my family. Bipul: I gave this everything and it is falling apart.

Nakul: Nakul: Bipul Sinha's story is truly extraordinary. Nakul: Having grown up in pretty dire circumstances in India, Bipul went to IIT and then immigrated to the US in search of the American dream. Nakul: By the age of 40, he had become a successful VC at Lightspeed, but never one to be satisfied with what he's already achieved, Nakul: he then founded Rubrik, which today is a $10 billion publicly traded company and one of last decade's fastest growing enterprise software businesses.

Bipul Sinha: Nakul:

Nakul: But what I find most interesting about Bipul is how he thinks and moves through the world. Nakul: He operates from a set of mental models that are genuinely his own and his belief in himself is second to none. Nakul: I first met Bipul 13 years ago, before Rubrik existed. Nakul: His self-belief, his drive and his ability to think larger than life were evident even back then. Nakul: Today we get into all of it. Nakul: How he built this company, the mental models that got him here, and how he's rebuilding Rubrik for the AI era.

Speaker: Nakul: Bipul, welcome to the show.

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: My pleasure, Nakul.

Nakul: Nakul: Now I want to focus this conversation on you as a CEO. You were a VC for a decade at Lightspeed before starting this company, so you had a lot of exposure to founders and startups, but still, what's the one thing that nothing prepares you for to be a founder, and CEO?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: Human beings have two mindsets: a state of intellect and a state of will. In the state of intellect, you are always thinking about downside. What could go wrong? You plan, and in the state of will you execute. You don't think about downside. You see a portfolio of one and a hundred percent chance of success. Bipul: And VCs live in the state of intellect because they meet hundreds of entrepreneurs and they invest in two companies. So they're eliminating all the things that could go wrong. But when you start a business and you are a founder, you are always in this positive will mindset. You want to walk through the wall, you want to manifest yourself onto the world, and you want to succeed. You want to create something that is bigger than you. And I wanted to live in that state of, uh, will. Nakul:

Nakul: Were there, uh, things you had to unlearn that you had learned as a VC—some good lessons that you had to unlearn as soon as you became a founder? Bipul: Absolutely.

Bipul Sinha: As a VC, since you think about the downside, you try to diversify your bet. As an entrepreneur you want to maximize your bet because maximizing that bet is what creates the outrageous, large returns. So the idea is how do I maximize the risk given my resources, given my people, given my market opportunity.

Nakul: Nakul: Now let's get to the crux of it. One of the hardest and the most mission critical things when building a business is the founding team or the team itself. How did you go about finding those first 10 hires?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: Most of the entrepreneurs delude themselves because they think that I'm hiring the top people, but my experience as a VC has been that the majority of them say that—but do not follow up. I really wanted a world class team. So the first thing I did was to become a recruiter myself because I wanted to take the pain of hiring people that were better than us as a company. Bipul: And we created this line by saying, we'll not hire ourselves for the job we are in. That brought clarity of what are we looking for? And when you're going after the top of the top people. You have to work really, really, really hard. We had to create a pitch deck, just like we pitched to the customer—for engineering recruiting. I used to sit all day and cold call people on LinkedIn and pitch them on why Rubrik would matter. And that level of pain for recruiting first, second, third, fourth engineers really transformed the trajectory of Rubrik. Nakul:

Nakul: How much of your time in that first year did you spend on recruiting versus other things—product, sales?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: I was recruiting all the time. So I was recruiting probably 80% of the time, and then 20% of the time was going into building the product.

Nakul: Nakul: That's kind of crazy, nobody talks about it this way—80% of time on recruiting. Most people would say if they're spending 20% of their time on recruiting, they already feel, should I be spending 20, 25%? So you took the stance that the team is everything. Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: My philosophy in business is, work on the problems that are the most important problems for the company. For a newer the most important thing is talent density. If you're not solving for talent density, if you're just getting headcount in the company, your company will not last.

Nakul: Nakul: And then how did you get to know that you were hiring top talent, to your earlier point? How did you assess it in the beginning? And I would love to understand also, how do you assess Rubrik is still at the top of its game on hiring? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: My thinking was that if I cold called someone who looks at my title and thinks that Bipul will be successful as an entrepreneur, those are not the people I wanted to hire. I wanted to hire people who asked me very, very hard questions and rejected me a few times. In fact, our first EMEA sales hire rejected me for three continuous months, and I used to call him every week religiously to convince him to leave his current job to join Rubrik. We were maniacal about recruiting. Nakul: But how do you assess that this person's job?

Nakul: Is it through back channel references?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: We spend time with them, we understand why they do what they do. What is their life story? Have they done something in their life Uh, that for them, is the driving force. Do they have a chip on their shoulder, and are they relentlessly passionate and relentlessly gritty? Nakul: Do you have, um, interview hacks that you go for?

Nakul: How do you separate the bullshitters versus the real deals— people who interview very well versus people who are actually good? Bipul: I always ask this one question. That is my favorites question.

Bipul Sinha: Nakul: So we are giving away secrets here Bipul: Absolutely. My favorite question is, what have you learned in your past two jobs about yourself that you didn't know before? And based on this answer, you can assess self-awareness. You can assess learning mindset, you can assess how they view the world, you can assess are they evolving. Nakul: The other piece then is to win the candidate.

Nakul: How do you think about winning that top talent? One of your own quotes I think is recruiting is like starting a religion. You need to find true believers. How do you find true believers? Bipul: The bottom line is this,

Bipul Sinha: if you think that somebody is joining your business because you have a great business idea, you are deluding yourself. People want to join other people—they wanna join you as a founder because they believe that you are going to make a difference in the world. Do you have the passion for this business? Are you demonstrating that passion? Or exuding that passion to the candidate? If you are, then you'll be a magnet. Nakul:

Nakul: Did you take that on yourself or also were your founding team members leading that charge on showing that passion? How do you kind of take that passion and institutionalize it at the top level of the company? Bipul: We followed a very systematic process.

Bipul Sinha: So my job was to get folks interested in Rubrik and interested in me as the front face of the company. And then you bring them in and expose them to the talent pool of the company—that will open their eyes, 'oh my God, I wanna be part of this winning team'. I remember in the early days of Rubrik, one of my friends who used to be my partner at Lightspeed, he came to my office and he said, Bipul, "there is a unique energy in this office." Bipul: I can't define it—what it is. The way I read that, is the talent density—there was something unique—When you have great people passionately working hard, it creates that energy.

Nakul: Nakul: The other difficulty of building a company on the people side is scaling culture. The first 10 people  —that energy that you just talked about—nothing is easy in life, but slightly easier than maintaining that same level of energy and passion at the 500 people mark. How did you scale Rubrik—today it's 3,000 employees. How do you ensure that this energy, the culture has actually scaled? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: The question is: have you hired the first 10 people with the same cultural principle and context that you're trying to do right now. The cultural context has to be set at the inception. So we created Rubrik's cultural principles before we hired our first employee because if you wanna build an enduring institution, the foundation of that enduring institution has to be set on the contract that you have among Rubrikants. Bipul: We are sleeping here in Palo Alto—in the night, one of our team members is selling in New Zealand. How do we ensure that they do the right thing by the customers and don't lie? How do we make sure that we don't lie to each other? How do we make sure that we do things fast? How do we make sure that we have entrepreneurial energy in everything that we do? Bipul: So what we did was we created the cultural deck and context before we hired the first employee. Every new hire, Monday— me or one of my co-founders will go 'pitch' what is our cultural context? What is expected out of a Rubrikant? That really propagated this cultural context as we grew. But look, we have made lots of mistakes because these things are not once and done. Bipul: You have to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it. And whenever you see slack, you have to go in there and make sure that you create an example and fix it. So it's a living and breathing thing—it's not once and done, and we are maniacal about our culture. Nakul: I'm actually curious, did some of the operating principles or the cultural doc evolve?

Nakul: Or has it somehow maintained itself as that original founding doc?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: The same original founding doc continues. There's zero change because in my mind, America is the biggest startup. And this startup was created against, European incumbency, and America was the insurgent force. How did America make sure that we all behave in a certain way? That cultural context was institutionalized as our constitution. Bipul: And the Constitution, although we have had amendments, has not fundamentally changed. So for a startup to be an enduring institution, you need to have that cultural context ingrained in the institution—that's what we did in the early days. Nakul: I was talking to Qasar Younis the other day he said, "either you got it or you don't".

Nakul: Where do you fall on coaching versus somebody's got the gift of leadership or not? Bipul: Two things—as we talked about, will and skill.

Bipul Sinha: You can teach people a skill. You cannot teach people will. Will comes in many forms, how you behave with, uh, others. Do you control your ego or not? Do you have humility? Do you have a learning mindset? Do you have self-awareness? Are you living too much in the past, which means that you are too much of an egotist? All of that is inherent in you, but you can't find ideal people. So one of my learnings as a CEO has been to not look for myself in everybody. Understand your team—as long as there is a cultural context that matches, then accentuate their strengths and diminish their weaknesses. Meet people where they are. Nakul: Can you talk about a mistake you may have made as a leader in the early years that

Nakul: you kind of fixed as you yourself grew and scaled to the CEO you are today? Bipul: We are all, uh, prisoners of our own experience.

Bipul Sinha: And as an immigrant, when you come to a new country, you are very self-reliant because you know that you have no social network or there is no uncle who can come and rescue you. So that idea of self-reliance, I actually thought too much and applied too much into Rubrik. Bipul: So in the early days of Rubrik, when an, uh, alliance partner or business development partner, came to me to talk about how they can partner with Rubrik, I had this thinking that nobody was really going to help you. If there's a large company that you're talking to, they're never going to help you—because you have to be self-reliant. Bipul: So I didn't fully fathom the value of partnering with larger companies and riding on the shoulder of giants. I ignored that concept, that idea that you can partner with larger companies and really, uh, accelerate yourself. And after several years, I realized my mistake. In fact, I frequently say that I get back to my senses after a few slaps. Then we went ahead and partnered with a number of companies that have really helped accelerate Rubrik. Nakul: Can you talk about how your week is today,

Nakul: as an operator, CEO— how does it break out today?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: So I stopped doing one-on-ones with my team because I feel like. I have only 168 hours a week, and given the breadth and the scope of the business, I want to do one-on-ones on more of an issue-basis, and then we go offsite and spend time with the team. But there's no need to do one-on-ones, so I stopped doing one-on-ones. Bipul: The second thing is that I do not plan or prioritize anything. I only work on problems that worry me most. There's a Sanskrit word called 'Adhogāmī' (अधोगामिन्), which means 'downward sloping'. So as a human mind, you are always looking for an easy solution, easy answer, easy path. So whenever you have a problem that nags you, you tend to procrastinate and do other things. Bipul: And I have taught myself over the years to only work on problems that worry me and to not procrastinate. So I do not plan anything. When I get up in the morning, whatever the two, three things that worry me most—I immediately work on them. Nakul: So it's not even like it's more sales,

Nakul: more product—it's what worries you today is the thing you will attack? Bipul: Absolutely. Nakul: But in terms of how the week breaks out in terms of culture, scaling, all hands, communication is all of that kind of a little amorphous right now? Bipul: I mean,

Bipul Sinha: we have some scheduled things like after our quarterly earnings we do all hands and things like that, but we don't spend too much time preparing for it. In fact, over the years I've stopped preparing for pretty much anything. I go in there and I think: what is the right thing to do in this situation and circumstance? If I don't have some information that is needed for me to understand the problem, then I ask questions—otherwise, just move. Nakul: So all of this is how you run the company today.

Nakul: But underneath all of this is a lot of frameworks that you've over the years have been generous enough to share with me. One of your core concepts is product market fit is dead. And you said it like three, four years ago, maybe longer to me. Today, it's more relevant than ever before— can you talk about what you mean by that? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: We are living in an age of acceleration and so anything that you think about— the time to scale and time to decay has really shrunk. Think about companies such as NetApp that started 30 years ago. They had the advantage of 12 to 15 years of product market fit. When Rubrik was started, we had three, four years of product market fit. Today, the product market fit is three months because if you look at the product development cycle, it has shrunk. Maybe it's 5% of what it used to be, and soaking time is also shrinking. Because there are so many ways that you can reach your customers, create awareness. Customers are knowledgeable, so the time it takes to put the word out and make the customer aware, understand their problem is also shrinking. Bipul: So as a result, if you are relying on your product market fit to take you 3, 4, 5 years to hundreds of millions of revenue, it's not going to happen. So the fundamental principle that you have to apply is: as soon as your first product or current product starts to see traction, you need to build the next product. So essentially you have to stack the S-curves so that even when the cycles are shrinking, you have layers of protection. Nakul: Yeah. So how do founders in today's world think about the long-term vision—or do you

Nakul: think long-term has also shrunk and it's become three years, not 10 years. Can founders have a 10-year vision for their company today? Bipul: The difference is the 10-year vision has to be philosophical. The three-year vision has to be an idea and the six-months vision has to be about

Bipul Sinha: market conditions and you have to blend the three. Nakul: So you also have this other framework,

Nakul: which I think is related to this—which is forward motion versus lateral motion. Can you double click on that for us?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: So we talked about like stacking the S-curve. Once you have something that is working, you need to scale it to the max as fast as possible while you are trying to figure out the next S-curve. If you have the same team doing both, then you're going to fail because people love making money. And if they're making money on something that is working, they like to triple down because again, the human mind—they want to see success, they want to tell themselves 'I'm successful'—because creating a new product is going from zero to one, which is nothing but full of disappointments. So you need to separate teams. We created a 'forward motion' team and a 'lateral motion' team. The forward motion team's goal is to amplify the success that we are already having and the lateral motion team's goal is to create new success. Nakul: Even today, this exists? Bipul: Even today that exists and they're separate teams. The idea of the lateral team is that even if they do a $50k deal, you do triple high five and the forward motion team, you want them to create million-dollar deals. Nakul: The other thing that you have, which is, I think,

Nakul: core to your mental model is nobody knows anything—that should be your first and only thought. If nobody knows anything, how do you even get advice from people? Bipul: Constantly thinking about building new products.

Bipul Sinha: We are both in the business of futures, and my fundamental contention is that the future cannot be created from the past, otherwise the stock market would not exist. So if you are in the business of creating the future, then you have to fundamentally assume that nobody knows anything about the future. No amount of experience, no amount of serial entrepreneurship, no amount of investing in hundreds of companies can give you any ideas about how to create this future. So your own intuition and your own thinking are the only friend you have in terms of creating that future. Nakul:

Nakul: How do you think of people who can be mentors, who can have expert insight into a domain that you're entering? How do you separate who I should learn from versus nobody knows anything? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: See, the thing is that experts never start a company because they're prisoners of the past. So you need to use experts, but you have to use experts expertly. So there are two things in the world. One is the known world, which is whatever has happened in the past, which are low risk things because they have been done, and what has not yet happened—will happen in the future, which is the unknown world, which are high risk things. Bipul: If you think about driving home from work, is that a low-risk or high-risk activity? It's a very low-risk activity because you have done it hundreds of times. If you think about starting a restaurant in San Francisco and making it successful, it's obviously a very high-risk activity. So you want to go talk to experts, talk to experienced people, to get the best practices for low-risk activities, but for high-risk activities such as starting a restaurant, you have to go with your own intuition because nobody knows anything. Nakul: This is such an interesting framework, and relevant for almost everyone in the world,

Nakul: but what's the line between intuition and arrogance?

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: Look, arrogance by definition comes from pride in past achievement. But when you are in the intuition mindset, you are not taking the past into account because you are saying nobody knows anything. Where do people know things from? The past. So you are in this state, which is T [time]= zero, and thinking about: what should I do in the current situation accepting the reality of now. By definition, arrogant people are not in the reality of now—they're in the reality of yesterday. Nakul: Another quote of yours that,

Nakul: I think has been super impactful, even for me is "averages don't apply to individuals". If the startup success rate is 1% for everyone, it doesn't mean it's also 1% for you. Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: Somebody asked me this question when I was leaving venture capital, why are you going to start your own company? Because you have been in venture capital and you know that the success rate is one in 10,000 for you to become a public company. And you are saying that you're leaving venture capital to start a public company and create an enduring institution. Bipul: And my answer was, averages don't apply to individuals because averages exist in the past, because an average is the 'average' of all the past events. But people don't exist in the past, people exist now. The past has no relationship to what's happening now—because now will become the future. Nakul:

Nakul: With all of that framework in mind, I want to shift gears towards how Rubrik is being run today. How you are dealing with this moment in time, which is one of the most transformational times ever. So Rubrik was started in the pre AI era, and today you're running a public company with the biggest technological shifts happening—How has AI changed your life as a CEO? Bipul: So when ChatGPT first came into being, we learned about it, we started using it.

Bipul Sinha: I thought that this is a very transformational time. I didn't understand all the implications of it, but at least we thought that was a very transformational time. Bipul: So I brought the brain trust of Rubrik into a room. This was all our founding engineers, my co-founders, and really seven, eight people who have seen Rubrik from its origins, and have an intuition about the company. I posed three questions to them. Can AI kill Rubrik— are we going to survive? The second question I asked was if we are going to survive, then can we thrive in the world of AI? Which means can we deliver more products and more services to our customers? Can we sell more? And the third question was if we are going to survive and if we're going to sell more, can we actually be more efficient doing that? Bipul: So surviving, our top line and efficiency—there are three questions I asked. The first answer was, look, Rubrik has a decade of customer experience feedback, enterprise readiness across thousands of enterprises that we have worked into our software. It's not just somebody creating the software, so Rubrik cannot be vibe-coded. So we answered that question: we are going to be a successful company, AI is not going to impact us. Bipul: When it comes to the second question, can Rubrik deliver more products and services to our customers? There are two aspects to this question. One aspect is what are we selling today? Does this change in the world of AI? And then second aspect is that since AI is going to open up so many other opportunities, what are those opportunities relevant to us? Bipul: So two things. Do we have AI-specific products? And are we doing AI-ification? So that's the second aspect. The third aspect is, since the knowledge piece of technology work is going to be done by agents and human will only do new dot connections—which means real-time selling customers, interacting with customers or creation, how do we create a structure where we can compress time on the knowledge work? So that's how we thought about it. And as a CEO, I'm maniacally focused on AI-ification and taking advantage of the new opportunities the AI world. Nakul: So that's on the product side.

Nakul: How has your day-to-day changed as a CEO with AI? How does your Monday feel different or Tuesday feel different? In today's times versus five years ago. Bipul: I mean,

Bipul Sinha: it feels very different in the sense that the rate of change that I'm experiencing is breathtaking. In some ways it is very energizing—because think about it this way. We have built a great business, we're scaling our business, but what goes through my mind is accelerating the business. Bipul: When everything is normal and everything is operating normally, gaining more market share, disrupting more is harder. But when you have disruption, it creates tremendous opportunities because not everybody has the same reaction to disruption. So how do we teach Rubrik to lean into this disruption. Can we change the game of our market that we are operating in, and can we also change the game of the new markets that are opening up? That's how my thought process has changed. And now I'm interacting more with Cowork, more with Gemini, so that I'm soaking in the state of the world as it is today. Nakul: Is the Lateral team that is focused on new products now? New opportunities? Bipul: The lateral team has always been focused on new opportunities. So we launched a product called Rubrik Agent Cloud. LLM fine-tuning—an inference serving platform by virtualizing GPU. Last year, some people asked me: for a backup company, what is the need to acquire a model company? But we are not living for today or tomorrow. We are thinking about how the world is going to look like and what is our play in that new world. We created Rubrik Agent Cloud based on the platform that we acquired. Nakul: Let's start with engineering.

Nakul: Have you seen a meaningful impact in terms of the productivity of your own engineering team, or is it not quantifiable enough yet? Bipul: I'll tell you,

Bipul Sinha: in the last 12 years of Rubrik—I always go and talk about products and where things are, when I'm gonna deliver more roadmap to our customers. For the first time in the history of Rubrik, during my last product review, the engineering team told me that they're accelerating the product delivery by a quarter. We build large enterprise ready solutions. These are hard problems to solve, and need very hardened products that just work in very large enterprises, in a very heterogeneous environment. So this is, again, a leading indicator of where the world is going. And we are seeing more and more of that acceleration—the customer roadmap, acceleration of the vision. That's where we believe that we are in this kind of AI-driven, acceleration moment.

Nakul: Nakul: What about the rest of the org: sales, marketing, customer support? Are you beginning to see those teams also become pretty AI-enabled, or even to the point of calling them AI-native? Bipul: We are leaning in very significantly.

Bipul Sinha: We are rolling out AI tools across the company, and our idea is that all kinds of knowledge work has to be done through AI and enabling people to be able to do that. And the question is not that, can AI make you better? Can AI do disruptive shifts in the sense that can you create something 10 times more? Because that's where AI does work for you and you are the master who is, directing. My idea is do not micromanage AI. Let AI 'cook' and you become the orchestrator. Nakul:

Nakul: But are you finding a difference in some of your own teammates who— some are embracing AI dramatically faster, some are actually more insecure and slow.

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: We are actually seeing even different skill level improvement. We have had evidence where engineers became A++ by leveraging AI. So their own aura and capability went tremendously up because of AI. So we are in this very interesting moment where it's not that if you use AI as your co-pilot, then you're missing out. You have to think about AI as a junior member of your team. You are not micromanaging them, you are directing them, creating accountability and clear communication frameworks so that they're doing work for you. And if you take that mindset, then it's a disruptive quantum shift. Nakul: Is there a top-down mandate within Rubrik that,

Nakul: hey, everybody needs to adopt this as fast as possible. You have to become AI-enabled? Bipul: There is a top down initiative to roll out modular tools that can support our scale, to everybody.

Bipul Sinha: Nakul: But adoption also? Bipul: Yes. So we are actually telling everybody that we are not just rolling it out, but we want to make sure that it is being used.

Nakul: Nakul: Does Rubrik need to become an AI-native company? So you talked about the brain trust got together, talked about how can we survive this, can we thrive? is this, in your mind, a 'need to go through' exercise for every single company in the world, or will there be companies who will survive this—incrementally make their organizations more AI- enabled, not really change their product portfolio.

Bipul Sinha: Bipul: We are in an era that either you go AI or you die. Because this era demands companies to be AI-native, because then only you have the chance to compete with your peers. Because if you think about it, AI companies are more efficient. More efficient means that they can deliver more dollars to their employees. If you're not efficient, your top talent will leave. So it's not something that is optional, it is the business imperative. Nakul: We've already talked about product market fit being dead as a concept,

Nakul: and now with AI, engineering velocity has gone to the next level. So what's the new bottleneck in company building? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: There used to be two things for enterprise, B2B, for example—there's a product engineering build time, and then the second phase is the soaking time. Soaking time is when product managers, product marketing managers, salespeople, sales engineers, customer service people all interact with the customers to take the product and market feedback and incorporate it into messaging—incorporate that into the product, fix all the bugs. All of those activities still take very significant time before you can have scaled adoption. So this is the new game. So we have moved from hiring engineers upfront, and building the product, to really accelerating the soaking time, so companies and teams that can shrink that soaking cycle will be the winners. Nakul: Do moats exist in an AI world? Bipul: There is only one moat, which is time. How do you create time-based moats? You have to be non-consensus in your ideas and thinking. What is non-consensus? 70% of people will not believe in your idea, and 30% of people will be hardcore supporters. There is a fine line because either you are visionary or you are crazy. Bipul: Similarly, there's a fine line in non-consensus because non-consensus can remain non-consensus forever. But you have to be right on non-consensus ideas. That's what gives you time advantage and that time advantage is your moat, because as soon as it becomes consensus or semi-consensus, you have hundreds of followers jumping in. That's when you want to stack that S-curve and start to build the next thing. Nakul: Yeah, so you are actually saying that being non-consensus and right leads you to have the

Nakul: only moat that is possible. If you're non-consensus forever, you don't actually have product market  fit at all. Bipul: Then you are wrong. Nakul: And if you have non-consensus initially but it becomes consensus, okay, you had a good thing going, but now it's consensus, everybody's coming and then time is your only edge and you need to start stacking up that next product. Bipul: So time between non-consensus and consensus is your only moat.

Bipul Sinha: Nakul: Has that time shrunk? Bipul: That time has not shrunk because non-consensus is a human state. It's a psychological state. Nakul: So in 2019, the company went from triple digit growth to about 30% growth in two quarters,

Nakul: and that led to exec turnover, other cultural question marks. How did you deal with those moments? Bipul: We grew very very rapidly in the early days of Rubrik.

Bipul Sinha: But we didn't build the operating infrastructure of the company: the collaboration infrastructure for the executive team, the accountability infrastructure, the proper business metrics, —because we grew, back in the day—in three years, what an average company would take eight years to grow. Nakul: Actually, maybe just walk us through the growth. Bipul: The first half-year of Rubrik, we sold, uh, 5 millon. In the first full year of Rubrik we sold 47 million. Second year of Rubrik, we sold 168 million, and third year of Rubrik we sold 350 million. Nakul: Amazing. Bipul: We were the fastest growing software enterprise back in the day. There was no other comparison. But we ran into this air pocket, and what we realized was we were lacking the infrastructure and lacking the communication, the accountability metrics. We kind of lost control of the business and we missed a few quarters by significant numbers. And we were a four, five years old company, and that put us in a very, uh, difficult situation. Bipul: And I distinctly remember in November, 2019. I was driving back from work, and we had just missed two quarters in a row, significantly, and I started thinking that this is the company where I put all my life. I'm not spending as much time with my family. I gave this everything and it is falling apart and I don't know why. I don't know why we are missing—I started crying, so I had to stop the car on the side of the street to control myself. And this was a very important moment where I had to realize that maybe I don't understand every aspect of this business. I don't have the command of the business because there's something bad happening and I don't know. And so I called two of my colleagues and we went back to the beginning of the company and looked at every deal we sold, every metrics we generated, everything that we did in the span of like the next two, three weeks to really understand and come up with a thesis as to what was happening. And that was really the transformational moment for the company, for me. Bipul: It also made me a better CEO because I had better understanding and appreciation of the business, and I also understood that just because you have a fast growing business and you throw top top executives from other company and throw into the situation, doesn't mean everything will work out. Because as a VC, I overcompensated for the fact that I saw a lot of founders who were micromanaging executives. Bipul: So my idea was that hire the top people, give them a lot of leeway and they will figure it out and through this experience, what I realized was that as a founder, first of all, you have some unique intuition about the business, so don't override your intuition by others' experience. And then second thing is while you want to give your executives freedom to execute, be the doting parents who are actually in the playground watching their kids. Bipul: And make sure that kids don't walk onto the side street. And if they're starting walking to the side street, you have to bring them back. Give them latitude to execute but keep an eye. Nakul: But also on the mental energy side, you know, to stop at the side of the freeway,

Nakul: have that emotional moment what went through your mind as you were fixing all of this? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: I used to be intoxicated by success, and whenever I had any setback, I used to be physically sick. That whole experience made me even more down mentally, because I used to think like, why is this happening to me? I'm doing all the right things. I'm out there, I'm selling, but why is this happening to me? And then I realized that there has to be a better way to build a business because lots of other people through humanity— tens of thousands of people have gone, created businesses without dying of a peptic ulcer. So there must be a formula to run a highly uncertain, disruptive business without falling sick. Bipul: So I started reading scriptures. I read Gita—I read Upanishad, I read Jiddu Krishnamurti . I read Viktor Frankl—a number of \books. I did that over six, nine months and I didn't understand much from it. But what I realized later was that after a few months of just thinking through what I read or just the soaking time based on what I read, it occurred to me that we're all living in time and what has happened to us in the past is what creates time. Bipul: We are stuck in time because we want to see everything current and compare that to the past. So if anything bad happens to us or if I lose a deal, I'd say, why did I lose this deal? Because in the past I won this deal. Or why did this person leave me? Because in the past I hired everybody—so because of that comparison, because of that living in the time state, I'm creating this artificial down for myself. So I have to be in this state where I am not impacted by time. And that was my beginning of self-understanding of who I am, how I operate. And that really brought a lot of clarity to me. In fact, uh, over a span of 12 to 18 months, it actually made me more ready to be a more energetic and hard fighting entrepreneur I was before. Nakul: And that led to your framework called maximal thinking. You talked about that even in the s-1 for Rubrik.

Nakul: Can you give us a brief overview of what maximal thinking is? Bipul: So as I was thinking about the problems that I was going through and I was thinking there must be some formula for success in the midst of high uncertainty.

Bipul Sinha: My framework is influenced by everything that I read, but I wanted to create a theory for myself, a formula for how do you succeed in the midst of uncertainty? Bipul: And I came up with this framework of 'maximal thinking'. There are three parts to maximal thinking. The first part is instead of having a numerical goal, have a fantastical large goal that you can't numerically define. So you want to say, I want to be the biggest entrepreneur ever. I want to build the greatest company ever. You can't put a number on the greatest company. You can't put a number on the biggest entrepreneur—so you want to have this fantastical, large, undefined goal. Bipul: The second thing that you do is you accept the reality that is in front of you. Whenever we see a situation that we don't like, we typically try to rationalize it, and that rationalization is what creates difficulty for us because we don't accept the reality. Bipul: For example, if you lose a person, somebody leaves you in the company, you have to accept that you didn't do a good job. You can't say that this person was bad anyway—I was supposed to fire him and better he leaves, because then you're living in a delusion. Unless you accept the reality, there is no progress. So that's number two. Bipul: And the number three is without prejudice and without judgment, whatever is in front of you, bring all your power and energy to solve that problem. So like I'm here talking to you. Every ounce of my energy, every ounce of my experience, every ounce of my memory I'm bringing in here to maximize this moment for this podcast. And this is the only thing that is in your hands. It's the only thing I'm capable of without prejudice, without judgment. That's it. Bipul: One thing we say is Rubrik has no finish line, Rubrik is an infinite game. So when you have no finish line, would you be daunted by one failure that you had or one success that you have? No. Because when you're in this infinite game with no finish line, which means that you are in this constant struggle to discover yourself and your potential, so we are translating some of this thinking. So instead of a fantastical, undefined goal, just say Rubrik has no finish line. We are translating that into something that people can easily understand so that we can all operate without prejudice, without judgment, dwelling on the problem and maximizing the moment. Nakul: Does maximal thinking work for everyone, or does it require a specific type of person?

Nakul: Bipul: It works for everyone.

Bipul Sinha: At the bottom of the maximal thinking is you kill the psychological time because when you have an infinite fantastical goal, there is no numerical value. Therefore, there is no time associated with it. Can you say, when you will become the biggest entrepreneur ever—you can't put a time on it. Also, when you say accept the reality, when does reality happen? Time Zero. So you're outside of the time and then maximize the moment. When do you maximize the moment? Time Zero. Nakul: Alright, we are going to move to our quickfire round. Are you ready? Bipul: Let's go.

Nakul: Nakul: Red flag you never ignore when recruiting? Bipul: If somebody's ambition is bigger than Rubrik's ambition, do not hire.

Bipul Sinha: Nakul: Can you say more? Why would somebody's ambition be bigger than Rubrik's ambition?

Nakul: Bipul: No. But if you hire an executive— and that executive is doing self-promotion as opposed to promoting Rubrik.

Bipul Sinha: If that executive is making decisions with respect to their employees to make themselves look happy, make themselves look good, as opposed to doing the right thing for the company. Nakul: Something you believe about building companies that most people would disagree with you on?

Nakul: Bipul: Look, building a business is creating a religion.

Bipul Sinha: When you create a religion, who do you try to find? Believers. You don't want to convert non-believers into believers—there are a lot of people that you can convert into believers. When you have a business and when you start selling the product, if you meet somebody who is skeptical, do not try to turn them around. Go find people who will like your idea, the whole world is your customer. Your job is to find believers. Nakul: Worst advice that VCs commonly give to founders? Bipul: VCs say, "here is the money, but we are very careful with this money." In my mind, venture capital should be the most careless money, because the job of the venture capital is the most expensive asset class, and it has to be used in the most risky way to create disruptive growth. Because disruptive growth is what creates value. Bipul: If you are a 10% growing company, you are creating zero value. So when I say most recklessly used— doesn't mean that you put the money to fire, but how do you create more risk to ensure that the company's acceleration happens even faster? Nakul: Something about company building that you've changed your mind on since starting Rubrik?

Nakul: Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: When I was a venture capitalist, I used to think that the combination of team, particularly CEO, and the market are the most important. But over the years, as I've seen the product market fit shrink or disappear, the only variable is CEO and the team. So today, business building is all about the psyche of the management team, specifically the CEO, to navigate the market, to stack the S-curve. Nakul: Okay.

Nakul: So, in terms of my closing question, Bipul—you've had a phenomenal journey. You've reinvented yourself many, many times over the years. There's been no better time to be nimble than today, in the history of business. If there's a 25-year-old version of Bipul out there listening to this, what would be your advice for them today? Bipul:

Bipul Sinha: If I go back in time and think about what I was thinking when I was 25 years old, I was very uncertain of myself because I used to think that you have to gain certain knowledge, certain experience, you have to learn. What I have realized is that learning is, uh, overrated because you learn knowledge that others have created and how others have created knowledge is through deduction. Bipul: Nothing in this world has come dramatically—it's all deduction. So knowledge is deductive, it is overrated. You have to truly think for yourself because all great things happen in now or in future. And how do you trust your own instinct to leverage the deductive knowledge to create the future? Nakul: Bipul, thank you so much for having me here. Bipul: Nakul, great to see you.