From 0 to IPO: The Rubrik Origin Story

It’s incredibly rewarding to be a venture capitalist. You get to fund the dreams of visionary leaders and be a critical part of their team as they grow. Being involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem is what drew me to venture capital initially, and what kept me there for several years. But after years of supporting other people’s company-building efforts, I began to recognize that I was looking for a different path to fulfillment. I was ready to drive my own vision and build an institution. I co-founded Rubrik - where I had my first experience serving as a Co-founder and CEO of a startup, or even working at a startup at all - and 10 years later, our little startup has transformed into one of the biggest players in the cybersecurity industry. For me, going from 0 to IPO has been a remarkable journey.

The Idea

From the start of Rubrik, we were embarking on an unorthodox path. Rather than create an infrastructure storage platform, or any of the other flavors of cybersecurity strategy that were in vogue at the time, we set out to do something bold. We wanted to transform the traditional backup and recovery process into a new category - one that focused on data security, because data is every organization’s most critical asset. We saw that those who had built the legacy back-up vendors at that time had accounted for natural disasters and human error, but not for cyber disasters…which were an ever-present threat, and a major business disruption when they did occur.?

We reasoned that there was an opportunity to disrupt the market with a solution that would allow companies to quickly restore their services after an inevitable cyberattack. And, ironically, it was skeptical venture capitalists who showed me that we were on the right path: many called backup & recovery a “C-” market at the time, but I knew from my own experience that real opportunities often lie in markets in which conventional wisdom deems too difficult to enter. So we got started on our unorthodox strategy, in our unorthodox corner of the market.

The Execution

Of course, as Mike Tyson once quipped, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Our punch in the face came when we got started on hiring. I assumed, with my VC background, that I’d have people lining up around the block to join us…but that turned out not to be the case. After 45 days, we had 0 hires. I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake in starting a company, but I pushed through the fear and got creative about my hiring practices - doing things like staking out Silicon Valley coffee shops and throwing parties for engineers’ families. Like our company’s premise, our hiring was a little unorthodox, but it eventually worked: we began to build the team we were looking for.

With the right team in place, we were able to start providing our service to customers. Soon afterward, we had our proof of concept: one of our first customers got hit with a ransomware attack, and we were able to successfully help the organization recover and bring their services back online quickly. It was a big accomplishment in our journey as a company, and it told me that Rubrik was poised to scale to take on even bigger challenges.?

Scaling

As Rubrik grew, I hired experienced executives to help us manage that growth. But as I began to leave much of the day-to-day management to my team so I could spend more time with customers, I noticed that decision-making grew sluggish. Newer hires, unfamiliar with our organization's ethos, were tentative about taking risks. So I built new collaboration processes, replacing twice-a-month 30-minute executive meetings with 3-hour working sessions each week. In these longer sessions, I taught and encouraged risk-taking and firm decision-making. This dedicated time paid off, and as we continued to grow, my team took more and more off my plate so I could focus on Rubrik’s larger vision.

In the years since, Rubrik has gone from a disruptor to a leader in cybersecurity: a true pioneer in cyber recovery and resilience in the market. In our first-ever earnings report for Q1,? we surpassed? $850 million in subscription annual recurring revenue, and we currently count more than 6,000 customers. We’re proud to work not only with businesses but with hospitals, schools, and government agencies. Our days of struggling to hire anyone in 45 days are long behind us.

IPO

In April, I was proud to take Rubrik public. This was the first IPO in cybersecurity since 2021, and it was one that exceeded our own expectations. We raised $752 million in a rather difficult market for IPOs. This was an exciting moment in our history, and I’m grateful for it, but I’m not dwelling on it - because there’s so much more ahead of us.

We’re ready to keep growing and learning. We’re incorporating AI into our platform, deploying machine learning models like our GenAI-powered assistant Ruby to help companies better understand their risk profile, respond to attacks, and recover with resilience. We’re also continually refining our zero-trust architecture, and we’re excited to bring its benefits to even more customers.

Rubrik is on track to becoming the institution I dreamed of long ago, and I couldn’t be more proud. We’re ready to take on whatever challenges come our way as we strive to cement our legacy in the cybersecurity industry - and the world.