\n<\/p>\n
When Asheem Chandna drove up to Rubrik\u2019s office in Palo Alto on a Friday night in early 2015, he was looking forward to learning what the young company that had yet to build its product would show him. The Greylock partner wasn\u2019t disappointed.<\/span><\/p>\n The company\u2019s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik\u2019s plan to revamp the data management and recovery market on a whiteboard. \u201cThe old versus new architecture he presented was very compelling,\u201d Chandna said. \u201cBased on my knowledge of the sector, I knew it could be built into a large business.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n That was a prescient call. On Thursday, nine years after that meeting, Rubrik began its life as a publicly traded company with a <\/span>market cap of over $6 billion<\/span><\/a>. Greylock holds a 13% stake, <\/span>according to the latest SEC filings.<\/span><\/a> By the close of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, those nearly 19.9 million shares were worth over $756 million.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But Chandna says it was much more than Rubrik\u2019s desire to take on the arcane data recovery market that motivated him to lead Rubrik\u2019s <\/span>$40 million Series B<\/span><\/a> in May 2015. (The Series B round sold for $2.45\/share, adjusting for splits, according to those SEC documents. While Greylock also participated in later rounds at higher prices, Chandna\u2019s returns on this one are hefty.)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThe longer I do what I do, the more I fundamentally believe that venture is a people business,\u201d said Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable track record of successful exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock\u2019s offices and was on the nearly $100 billion-worth company\u2019s board until last year. Chandna was also an early investor in <\/span>AppDynamics<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Sumo Logic<\/span><\/a> and Arista Networks.<\/span><\/p>\n Chandna looks for people who are not only motivated and ambitious, but are also self-aware of their weaknesses, and can recruit people who can get things done in areas that are not the founder\u2019s strong suits.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Another essential ingredient for a founder is grit. \u201cIf you had technology that was adequate, but slightly inferior to my technology, but you were very self-aware and persistent, you will beat me,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s what he saw in Sinha. Rubrik\u2019s founder had a lifelong dream of starting a company. When he founded the data management and recovery startup in 2013, he couldn\u2019t find strong engineers who wanted to come work there, Chandna recalled. The business he was trying to build was inherently not sexy at the time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite having been an investor with Lightspeed for four years before launching Rubrik, recruiting talent turned out to be a big challenge for Sinha. But he didn\u2019t give up. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn and then invited them for coffee blocks away from where they worked.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cStartup journeys are very hard, even for the most successful companies,\u201d Chandna said. \u201cI want people who won\u2019t take \u2018no\u2019 for an answer.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps it was Sinha\u2019s grit and ambition that compelled him to take his company public despite the lukewarm IPO environment.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cRubrik has just under $800 million in annualized recurring revenue,\u201d Chandna said, \u201cThat\u2019s larger than most companies that went public in the last many years. I think they just wanted to get on with it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Chandna declined to say if he expects other Greylock portfolio companies to follow Rubrik\u2019s lead but added emphatically that the firm\u2019s best-performing late-stage businesses are Abnormal Security, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Health.<\/span><\/p>\n