Founder Perspectives on Company Building from Day One

Over the past few months, Greylock has published profiles of founders from companies like Rubrik, Cato Networks, and Chronosphere. These profiles reveal a few lessons about the company building journey from day one.

From a repeat founder, to a seasoned exec and VC, to an engineer, each of these founder's professional journey to starting a company was vastly different. Yet it's clear that embracing risks, tackling tough challenges, and staying true to core values are important reasons the companies are where they are today.?

Hear their advice for entrepreneurs, and read more about their stories.

Bipul Sinha, Founder and CEO of Rubrik

“The real outcomes happen when people aren’t sure if the value can be created or people think it’s too hard.”?

Guided by that conviction, Bipul Sinha founded Rubrik in late 2013. Well before ransomware was a thing, the company focused on backup and recovery, helping businesses and organizations secure their data from cyberattacks. The legacy back-up vendors at the time were built for natural disasters and human error, not cyber. Sinha reasoned that someone needed to disrupt the market with a solution that would allow companies to quickly restore their data after a cyberattack, thus avoiding a major business disruption. Today, Rubrik is publicly traded (NYSE: RBRK), and has grown into a company with subscription annual recurring revenue north of $900 million, with more than 3,000 employees and over 6,000 customers. (Read more)

Shlomo Kramer, Founder and CEO of Cato Networks

"Startups are a very human experience. They’re all about taking calculated risks. It’s okay to fail as long as you learn as much as you can from that failure, and continue to have real human ambition and dreams.”

Shlomo Kramer ’s third multi-billion-dollar startup, Cato Networks , has redefined network security. Cato entered the market with the first fully integrated cloud-based networking security solution – essentially creating a new IT security category that would become known as Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE. In five years, the company reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue, a milestone few - if any - cloud companies have achieved faster. (Read more)

Martin Mao, Co-Founder and CEO of Chronosphere

“If you’re just going to build a successful business but the culture is terrible, no one is going to enjoy the company or enjoy the journey… There is one thing I believe you can control, and that’s your core values.”

Founded in 2019, Chronosphere 's “observability” products help keep digital businesses up and running by quickly focusing on the data and insights that matter. Customers include Snap, Zillow, and DoorDash, and Martin Mao estimates that the company’s platform reduces the volume of a company’s observability data — and the cost of maintaining that data — by up to 60 percent (representing up to $15 million in annual savings), saving developers thousands of hours per year along the way. But how has Chronosphere been able to grow quickly and have great traction among top brands? One of the most important, he believes, is a positive culture that starts with “no egos.” (Read more)

Congrats, Orb!

Orb announced its Series B, which Greylock participated in. Over the last year, the company has experienced remarkable growth, tripling its customer base since the beginning of 2024 and adding industry-leading companies like Vercel, Pinecone, and Perplexity as customers.

Orb is also hiring! Check out some of the company's open jobs.

• Full Stack Engineer
• Infrastructure Engineer?
• Site Reliability Engineer?
• Head of Recruiting

Get in touch if you want to learn more about joining a Greylock portfolio company.

Portfolio News

Chronosphere

Chronosphere?announced that Ashley Alexander, who was most recently at Front, has joined the company as Chief People Officer. The company was also recognized by?Comparably?in its annual list of the highest-rated companies with the happiest employees.

Dazz

Dazz and CrowdStrike announced a partnership to enhance unified visibility and protection through CrowdStrike Falcon? Cloud Security, integrating security remediation insights from Dazz.

Discord

Discord announced audio and video end-to-end encryption (“E2EE A/V” or “E2EE” for short), which the company refers to as their DAVE protocol.

Figma

Fast Company profiled Figma's rebrand, quoting the company's creative director Damien Correll who notes, “Design is the gravitational center for us, and we are making sure that we’re making a platform that works for a lot of people and for a lot of people to do their job really well."

Obsidian Security

Obsidian Security announced that it is enhancing the detection and response capabilities of security teams by integrating with the CrowdStrike Falcon? cybersecurity platform.

Treat

Treat was acquired by Typeface, to help enrich the company's multimodal capabilities.

Upwind Security

Upwind was named the Fastest Growing AppSec Company in the IT-Harvest Cyber 150 and received an Innovator Spotlight in Cyber Defense Magazine.

Greylock Perspectives

Greylock partner Asheem Chandna was quoted in a Wall Street Journal piece by Steve Rosenbush on how companies like Rubrik and Wiz have raised the bar for other software startups in a tough funding environment, noting that "higher interest rates and slowing growth for software businesses have pushed institutional investors to raise their sights to $300 million in ARR."

Edge: Start a New Company at Greylock

Partner with Greylock to initiate a new company from idea to early revenue and product market fit. Greylock Edge is a bespoke 3-month company-building program designed to advance select pre-idea, pre-seed and seed founders from inception to product-market fit, with fully flexible financing. Apply here.

Executive Briefings

Greylock hosts CXOs for highly curated briefings and makes targeted introductions based on a company’s priorities — with the goal of arming organizations with vital insights to help them address its current and future challenges. Greylock portfolio companies benefit from product feedback, advice on product-market fit, and opportunities to co-develop in support of an organization’s technology needs. Reach out at [email protected] to schedule an executive briefing.

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