When Aseem Chandna drove into Rubrik's offices in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was excited to see what the young company, which had yet to develop a product, would have in store. Greylock's partners did not disappoint.
The company's CEO, Vipul Sinha, whiteboarded Rubrik's plans to revolutionize the data management and recovery market. “The old and new architecture he presented was very convincing,” Chandna said. “Based on my knowledge of the field, I knew it had the potential to be built into a large business.”
It was a visionary call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik launched as a publicly traded company with a market capitalization of more than $6 billion. Greylock owns a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. By the market close on Friday, the stock price was $38, making those approximately 19.9 million shares worth more than $756 million.
But Chandna says it was more than Rubrik's desire to take on the esoteric data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik's $40 million Series B in May 2015. (The Series B round was sold for $2.45 per share after adjusting for the split, according to people familiar with the matter.) Greylock also participated in subsequent rounds at a higher price, but Chandra's profits in this round were lower, according to SEC documents. is big. )
“The longer you do it, the more you fundamentally believe that ventures are people's businesses,” said Chandna, who has been an investor for more than 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He helped grow Palo Alto Networks from his Greylock office and until last year served on the company's board, which was worth about $100 billion. Chandna was also an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, and Arista Networks.
Chandna looks for people who are not only driven and ambitious, but are also aware of their weaknesses and can hire people who can get things done in areas that are not the founder's strong suit.
Another must-have for founders is grit. “If you had enough skill and were very self-aware and persistent, even if you were slightly inferior to my skill, you would beat me,” he said.
That's what he saw in Sinha. The founders of Rubrik had a lifelong dream of starting a company. When he founded his data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn't find qualified engineers who wanted to work there, Chandra recalls. The business he was trying to build wasn't inherently sexy at the time.
Despite investing in Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent proved to be a major challenge for Sinha. But he didn't give up. He messaged the engineers on his LinkedIn and invited them to meet for coffee away from where they worked.
“Even for the most successful companies, the startup journey is extremely difficult,” says Chandna. “We're looking for people who won't take 'no' for an answer.”
Perhaps Sinha's grit and ambition forced him to take the company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.
“Rubrik's annual recurring revenue is just under $800 million,” Chandna said. “This is bigger than most companies that have gone public in the last few years. I think they just wanted to keep going.”
Mr. Chandna declined to say whether he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Mr. Rubrik's lead, but said the company's best-performing late-stage businesses include Abnormal Securities and Cato.・He emphasized that these are Networks, Discord, Figma, and Lyra Health.
We will keep a close eye on their fate.