Built Two Unicorns in 12 Years. The Rule Has Never Changed | Glean, Arvind Jain

Intro

00:00for a startup you have one weapon always which is that you have focus and you have the ability to move fast and we have to sort of use those as our primary weapons to stay ahead but I think like partly it's also strategy like as I was saying we don't want to reinvent the wheel here we want to make use of all the great technologies that's available to us and then we focus on the rest where others are not wanting to spend time customers they are looking for solutions to problems they're not looking to buy great technology it sort of really allow allows us to actually

00:31focus and dedicate our time, engineering time on problems that others are not investing in. So I think that focus that investment and the speed and the agility like making the right strategic choices where we don't for example have to train our own models and we benefit from the industry's innovation.

00:46Those are some of the approaches that will help us um you know stay ahead in this market. My name is Arvin Jan. I'm the founder and CEO of Glean. Glean is an enterprise AI company. Think of it as a more powerful version of chat GPD that's connected to all of your company's data and knowledge.

01:02So you can go to it and ask any questions or give it any task and gain will use all of that enterprise context as well as the world's knowledge to answer those questions for you or complete those tasks. We started in early 2019 that makes us one of the first enterprise genai companies in the world.

01:18We have so much opportunity to transform how people work. Fundamentally change the nature of how humans are going to be working.

Why I Started Over After a Unicorn Company

01:38Well, I'm certainly an engineer by training. I studied computer science in college and since then I worked at five different startups over the last 25 years. I worked at Google when it was a privately held company and then we started Rubric in 2014.

01:46So yeah, so I've been in tech industry for quite some time and since then I've been an engineer I've been a programmer and that's my core identity. I also never like set out to start these two companies uh rubric and then glean you know these were sort of you know things that happened as I was sort of working through but primarily like you know I've been like I always thought of myself as a product builder.

02:09I love working on technology. I love taking complex problems and figuring out how software can actually go and solve those problems. In fact, the journey for Glean also started the same way. So I was actually remember I was already a founder of a successful company when I started Glean, you know, Rubric had pretty good success.

02:25We were growing fast and as we grew fast like you know we started to see our company started to struggle on the productivity front. all of our business metrics, how much code we were writing, how much business we were doing, all of those started to look much worse on a per person basis.

02:41And when we try to understand like you know what was happening there, our employees complained the most about they couldn't find information within the company and also they couldn't find uh the right people who could go and help them with their tasks.

02:57And I started to think well this is not a unique problem like you know we are like any other company. we have knowledge, we have data and every single person in our company struggles with it and their productivity drops. So for me it was obvious like you know when I saw that well here's an opportunity to go help every single person in every single company in the world become more productive if I can reduce their frustration that actually means a lot to

03:20me like you know I feel very motivated to solve a problem like that and so when people complain then they're not able to find information inside the company we had to go and solve that problem that was not at all like you know I didn't have to think twice like you know was I was super excited to actually go and build this product so that sort of led me to then go and create cleans it was not as if I was trying to start a company.

03:35I wanted to be an entrepreneur. The idea was more that I wanted to solve a technical problem and I wanted to build a product like clean and to build that well maybe I should start a company.

The 2-Year Stealth Mode That Built $7B

03:52So search as a product is quite hard to build. You have to bring a lot of data together in one place. Data is in different formats. Different types of data is there. You know images, tickets, documents. You have to sort of build a deeper understanding of all of those different types of data.

04:01You have to understand activity and patterns inside the business. So it's a pretty complex you know piece of technology and doing a good job is super important because most search systems in the past in enterprise were systems that people didn't like and similarly we were building a product that there was a fatigue in that category in enterprises.

04:24Enterprises that tried buying search products in the past and they had all failed in fact universally failed. We had to really battle that perception that enterprise search products are all really really bad. We building this product and we wanted to get feedback.

04:38I would actually go on LinkedIn and connect with a lot of people in the industry leaders who I wanted to get feedback from. I wanted to learn like if they would actually benefit from the product that I was going to build. So when we try to do that when I try to connect with people most of the times you know nobody would respond back to me.

04:55well like that I can't actually manage to get even 30 minutes of somebody's time a stranger that has nothing to offer and just want say time because you know I had not yet built a product I couldn't actually show them a demo so being a seller being a business development representative sending cold outreach through email through LinkedIn that was a humbling experience for me helped me develop as a person and sort of building that stamina and building that mental strength and fortitude and you know it was difficult it was disheartening building a business is never easy And a lot of times you

05:28give up. You give up because you know there are so much struggle or there's so much negativity or or lack of support. But for me I had a surprisingly strong conviction in this. I knew how hard it is to find information at my work and how many hours I spent.

05:45And I talked to a lot of people around me and everybody readily agreed every single time with me. Like there's not a single person who says that oh for them it was so easy to actually go and find information at work uh get answers to their questions.

05:53So I knew that people needed it but I knew that leaders were not used to buying it but once we build a good product ultimately the the world will come come to it. So for us we knew that we would only have one chance to succeed and we have to build a product with very high quality because remember like the expectation that people have from a search technology is what Google delivered to them which was you ask a question and instantly you get right documents in such a small time that you have.

06:19So we were willing to wait. We were willing to spend the time, make the investment and only when we started to feel like well like you know yes you know I have a Google quality search experience is when we wanted to launch the problem that we're solving while it may not generate an immediate business success everybody understood that it's important problem to solve that it's high impact if somebody solves it.

06:43I think the conviction came from the fact that we used the product ourselves number one. So we know it was useful like even even in our own company we couldn't live without glean after we built our first version. So we were actually offering the product for free for the first 2 years.

07:00I think you see usage like even when we're not charging like our design partners like we had 20 of them and people inside those companies were raving about the product. They loved it and in fact we had one or two situations where the security teams wanted this product to be turned off because you know it connects with a lot of systems and so when they tried to turn it off there was a revolt inside those companies you know people just won't let the product disappear so I think these were like enough powerful

07:25signs for us that like look we had built something that was useful to people in 2022 invested in glean and it was not that I had to actually go and convince them you know wingpack didn't go to them they came to us because by that time everybody got to use the beta product for free and we had word of mouth.

07:42People had started to figure out that we we had built a good product. So it was a natural expectation that was built in. We told our customers that now we are actually going GA so everybody can now go and buy this product and they had the choice to go and buy it and of course each one of them bought it and everybody's expectations was already set for a long time that at some point they'll start charging and so so it went pretty smoothly.

Build Less, Win More

08:08For a startup, you have one weapon always, which is that your focus and your the ability to move fast. And we have to sort of use those as our primary weapons to stay ahead. Fundamentally, like our engineering philosophy at the company is, and it's a very obvious one, is that we don't want to reinvent the wheel here.

08:25We we want to make use of all the great technology that's available to us and we want to focus on innovating in areas where others are not wanting to spend time building products. These are you don't get to actually say that like look I'm just going to build some cool technology and hopefully people will go and buy it.

08:39When you think about models, we have so many companies out there building these foundational language models and they're all amazing and great. And instead of us actually going and making that same investment, we want to actually leverage these amazing technologies that companies like Google and OpenAI and Anthropic are building.

08:55And in fact, for our enterprise customers, they actually love the fact that we are not building models. Customers, they are looking for solutions to problems. They're not looking to buy great technology. So that's sort of like you know been the working model for us at Gleen which is partner well and whoever is building great technology try to see how you can incorporate that technology in your product and then we focus on the rest

09:26you know others are not yet paying attention to so in in our case to make AI work in the enterprise you know you know that these models are they don't really know anything about your enterprise they don't have that context they have no idea how your company works to still make use of this technology inside your enterprise you have to bring in that enterprise context for any task that you're trying to solve.

09:42So if you don't have to build the same technology that others are building, if we can make use of it, like for example, we can make use of GPD5 and cloud and Gemini, it sort of really allows us to actually focus and dedicate our engineering time on problems that others are not investing in.

09:57Glean is now over a thousand people. So we're also no longer a small startup. We're fairly large company and we are in fact investing more in making AI work in the enterprise than any other company out there in the world. We are a pure play enterprise AI company.

10:13We don't have any other product lines, no legacy products to support and all of our attention goes into how do you make AI really really effective in the enterprise. So I think that focus that investment the speed and the agility like making the right strategic choices where we don't for example have to train our own models and we benefit from the industry's innovation.

10:28Those are some of the approaches that will help us stay ahead in this market. I think the number one thing for any aspiring founder is belief and conviction. You start with an idea because you thought about a problem and it exists. Now again make sure that you know you talk to a good number of people so that you see that yes you know it's a problem that impacts a good number of people but once you've done it now it's your job to actually stay true to that idea like because you know you're going to talk to more people you're going to

11:06talk to investors you know some investors will be sort of lukewarm on the idea some employees that you're trying to hire may not believe in it as much as you do but that's all okay like you got to sort of keep that belief in it because ultimately that problem you started thinking world for a good reason and that reason still exists.

11:22Keep the conviction. Don't become the person who kills your own idea.