Letter #178: Bipul Sinha (2024)
Rubrik CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder | S-1 Letter from our CEO
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Today’s letter is Bipul Sinha’s CEO Letter for Rubrik’s S-1. In this letter, Bipul shares his beliefs on, and defines, maximal thinking. He then shares how his unique background gave him a unique perspective on company building and capital markets, discusses the vision Rubrik was founded on, the factors that will determine their success, and their aspirations for the future. He then calls back to maximal thinking, thanks his parents, and expresses gratitude to be building Rubrik. He ends by reaffirming the importance of the work they are doing at Rubrik and invites the reader to join them on their journey.
Bipul Sinha is the CEO, Chairman and Co-founder of Rubrik, as well as a Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to founding Rubrik, Bipul was a Partner at Lightspeed, where he invested in companies including Nutanix, Pulse News, Bromium, and PernixData. Before Lightspeed, he was an investor at Blumberg Capital, where he was the founding investor/board member of Nutanix and Hootsuite. He joined Blumberg from Bank of America’s tech investment banking group, where he worked (briefly) on M&A and equity financing transactions. Bipul started his career in a varity of software engineering and sales roles, first at IBM as a software engineer, then American Megatrends as a Software and Sales Engineer, and then a decade as a Director of Database and Middleware Products at Oracle.
I think it’s worth highlighting Bipul’s career because he bucks two conventional Silicon Valley beliefs: 1) lean into your strength(s) and hire for your weaknesses, and 2) VCs make for horrible entrepreneurs. If we look at Bipul’s career, he’s been at companies of all stages and all roles. He started off as an engineer at a large company before joining a startup to be in technical sales, before joining a fast growing market leader to do product. He then jumps into the world of sell-side finance doing investment banking before transitioning to venture capital. Only then he does start his company. But he builds his company to a multi-billion dollar valuation and takes them public, no doubt thanks to his understanding and experience in engineering, sales, product, strategy, and fundraising for small, scaling, and large companies.
I hope you enjoy this letter as much as I do!
Relevant Resources
Lightspeed Investors
Jeremy Liew Compilation (798 pages)
Lightspeed Portfolio Companies
Letter
I believe in maximal thinking — constantly imagining a limitless, extraordinary future, while accepting contradictions and maximizing present opportunities. By accepting contradictions, we accept reality — that is the starting point for progress.
I have been fortunate to be able to sit on multiple sides of the table — from software engineer to people manager to venture capitalist to founder and CEO. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on how to weave together complex software platforms, company culture, risk capital, value creation, and market transitions to create durable businesses. When market transitions occur, opportunity arises to transform and massively expand existing markets. These disruptions allow new products to gain market relevance quickly and set the agenda of the new market order. This is precisely why I left my venture partnership to start Rubrik. The legacy backup and recovery market was ripe for such a transformation into data security based on cloud and cybersecurity trends. There was an opportunity to build a lasting company.
Rubrik was founded on a vision to deliver business resilience by securing the most critical asset of any organization — data. We built a distinct architecture to combine data and metadata (application context) from business applications across the cloud to ensure data security and availability irrespective of incidence. This allowed us to transform backup data into a strategic asset that sits at the epicenter of security and artificial intelligence. Our original architecture uniquely enables application of artificial intelligence directly between data and security to deliver resilience against cyberattacks. We aim to build an enduring institution underpinned by a unique platform that delivers data security products to solve critical problems and delight our customers. Our goal is to lead the data security market which we believe is the future of cybersecurity.
Rubrik lives on the frontier of innovation, and our long-term success depends on our ability to continuously create and commercialize pioneering products. However, vision is useless by itself. We believe a strong culture and disciplined execution are required to build a durable company. That’s why we defined our cultural principles before hiring our first employee. Our culture is encapsulated as RIVET — Relentless, Integrity, Velocity, Excellence and Transparency. RIVET is our north star to empower our colleagues to do their best work, foster long-term thinking, and grow professionally without limits. From the beginning, we have intentionally designed Rubrik to be a living, breathing system. RIVET encourages debate and constructive conflict in order to render high-quality decisions and reduce blind spots when operating at speed. Our ability to continue to adapt, overcome adversity, and leverage emerging technologies and market transitions rests on fostering our unique culture.
We aspire to be a truly exceptional company with no finish line. Building an enduring institution requires maximal thinking. From very early investments in go-to-market to rapidly expanding platform scope, we have taken a unique approach to risk capital since day one to accelerate the business. While our company has grown in organizational size and experience, our mindset, sense of urgency, and risk posture remain as if we were still in the same tiny room as on day one. We will continue to invest in yet-to-be-certain markets and non-consensus ideas, with the approach to create customer and shareholder value. Our goal is to ensure Rubrik has the best opportunities to achieve its highest potential.
Maximal thinking is how I lifted myself out of poverty, built a life in America, and created Rubrik with by co-founders. I am very lucky to have amazing parents who taught me to think that way. I feel very lucky to be building Rubrik.
We are defining the future of cybersecurity. In today’s world, no government or business is immune to cyberattacks. What we do matters.
We hope you’ll join us on this journey to secure the world’s data and build an impactful company along the way.
Best,
Bipul Sinha
CEO, Chairman & Co-Founder
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Wrap-up
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