The Scene
Bipul Sinha has long had an unconventional approach to leading Rubrik, the Palo Alto cybersecurity company he founded with three friends in 2014. In its early years, he let staff tune in to its board meetings. More recently, he has reorganized its 3,000-plus employees into two distinct groups, with one focused on pursuing riskier new opportunities and the other concentrating on scaling current successes.
Sinha, an Indian-born engineer-turned-VC-turned-entrepreneur, took Rubrik public last year at a valuation of $5.6 billion. Its market capitalization has since topped $17 billion. Here’s how he explains the rationale behind its two teams, and what he has learned about making such a structure work as he sets out to build “a generational company” that can thrive for the next 50 to 100 years.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
The View From Bipul Sinha
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson: What are the biggest external forces at work on Rubrik’s business right now?
Bipul Sinha: We are truly living in an age of acceleration. It took ChatGPT just three months to become a household name, so the rate of change happening around us is the fastest ever, and will only get faster from here. So what does it mean for any business? It means that there is no product-market fit, which means that every moment you have to be thinking about how the market is changing, and can we keep ahead of this market?
There was a big discussion with [co-founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator] Paul Graham about founder mode. That whole discussion missed the point completely, because the fundamental problem is, there is no product-market fit permanency. And when you don’t have product-market fit, then everybody has to think like a founder because they have to go zero-to-one all the time. So whether you are a founder or an executive, you have to always be in the creation mode. There is no sustenance mode.
How do you address that and operate at that speed?
You cannot have one team in any company. You need two teams: One team is the forward motion team; their job is to amplify current successes. And there is a lateral team that finds new successes. So their job is to take risks and take a basket of risks, like a portfolio approach, to always be experimenting, so that two or three years down the line, they become a scale business as the current successes start to decline.
You have to go tell your forward team, “You guys are paying us the bills, so we love you and we appreciate you, and keep going.” And then you go tell your lateral team, “If you guys don’t produce, we’ll be dead in four years. So even if you’re doing small deals, this is what will make this company a long-term, enduring institution.”
Have you faced resistance in making this work?
It causes lots of resistance, because the forward team [is] doing big deals and the lateral team [is] doing smaller, experimental deals. So you’ve got to create different compensation structures. Just because somebody is doing a small deal, you can’t penalize them, because the child will become an adult someday. And you have to communicate, and communicate, and communicate, because when the change rate is high, it creates emotional upheaval for everybody in the company.
Does this structure give you more comfort in taking risks on investments that may not pay off in the short term?
Comfort is something CEOs will never have, because comfort comes from memory and history. But in a fast-changing industry, if you look for comfort, it means you are living in the past. You’re not confronting the future.