Arvind Jain was a Distinguished Engineer at Google. He made Google “faster than the blink of an eye”.
Then he got bored— so he quit.
He co-founded Rubrik, which grew to $500M in revenue and just filed to go public.
But it wasn’t enough— Arvind quit Rubrik and founded Glean to solve enterprise search.
He did everything lean startup tells you not to do.
- He didn’t focus on launching an MVP.
- He ignored early market feedback.
- He didn’t charge beta users anything— for 2 years.
He went from $0 to $3M in revenue the year he launched publicly.
He tripled to about $9M the year after.
This year, he crossed $100M ARR—just 3.5 years since he launched publicly.
This week, he raised $150M at a $7.5B valuation.
Most founders can’t do exactly what Arvind Jain did. He’s a proven founder who raised $15M with just a deck.
I interviewed Arvind Jain from Glean and Kyle Hanslovan from Huntress last month at WebSummit.
After spending 10 years building 2 unicorns, here’s his number 1 advice for early-stage founders:
“If you see a problem…don't think too much about who else is solving it or how big the market is. There's going to be ups and downs. There's going to be people telling you they wouldn’t pay for it.
Don't worry about all of that.
Having conviction & staying on course is the most important thing."
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Listen to the full episode from WebSummit with Arvind and Kyle on The Product Market Fit Show.
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