How Rubrik’s IPO paid off big for Greylock VC Asheem Chandna

When Asheem Chandna drove as much as Rubrik’s workplace in Palo Alto on a Friday night time in early 2015, he was trying ahead to studying what the younger firm that had but to construct its product would present him. The Greylock companion wasn’t upset.

The corporate’s CEO, Bipul Sinha, drew Rubrik’s plan to revamp the info administration and restoration market on a whiteboard. “The outdated versus new structure he offered was very compelling,” Chandna mentioned. “Primarily based on my information of the sector, I knew it could possibly be constructed into a big enterprise.”

That was a prescient name. On Thursday, 9 years after that assembly, Rubrik started its life as a publicly traded firm with a market cap of over $6 billion. Greylock holds a 13% stake, according to the latest SEC filings. By the shut of market Friday, with shares priced at $38, these almost 19.9 million shares have been price over $756 million. 

However Chandna says it was rather more than Rubrik’s want to tackle the arcane information restoration market that motivated him to guide Rubrik’s $40 million Series B in Could 2015. (The Sequence B spherical offered for $2.45/share, adjusting for splits, in keeping with these SEC paperwork. Whereas Greylock additionally participated in later rounds at greater costs, Chandna’s returns on this one are hefty.) 

“The longer I do what I do, the extra I essentially imagine that enterprise is a folks enterprise,” mentioned Chandna, who has been an investor for over 20 years and has an enviable monitor file of profitable exits. He has helped incubate Palo Alto Networks in Greylock’s places of work and was on the almost $100 billion-worth firm’s board till final 12 months. Chandna was additionally an early investor in AppDynamics, Sumo Logic and Arista Networks.

Chandna seems to be for people who find themselves not solely motivated and impressive, however are additionally self-aware of their weaknesses, and might recruit individuals who can get issues achieved in areas that aren’t the founder’s sturdy fits.  

One other important ingredient for a founder is grit. “Should you had expertise that was enough, however barely inferior to my expertise, however you have been very self-aware and protracted, you’ll beat me,” he mentioned.

That’s what he noticed in Sinha. Rubrik’s founder had a lifelong dream of beginning an organization. When he based the info administration and restoration startup in 2013, he couldn’t discover sturdy engineers who needed to come back work there, Chandna recalled. The enterprise he was making an attempt to construct was inherently not horny on the time. 

Regardless of having been an investor with Lightspeed for 4 years earlier than launching Rubrik, recruiting expertise turned out to be an enormous problem for Sinha. However he didn’t hand over. He pinged engineers on LinkedIn after which invited them for espresso blocks away from the place they labored.

“Startup journeys are very laborious, even for probably the most profitable corporations,” Chandna mentioned. “I would like individuals who gained’t take ‘no’ for a solution.”

Maybe it was Sinha’s grit and ambition that compelled him to take his firm public regardless of the lukewarm IPO atmosphere.

“Rubrik has slightly below $800 million in annualized recurring income,” Chandna mentioned, “That’s bigger than most corporations that went public within the final a few years. I feel they only needed to get on with it.”

Chandna declined to say if he expects different Greylock portfolio corporations to comply with Rubrik’s lead however added emphatically that the agency’s best-performing late-stage companies are Irregular Safety, Cato Networks, Discord, Figma and Lyra Well being.

We will likely be following their destiny carefully.