Bipul Sinha (Rubrik) on CEO Scaling

Bipul’s Framework for Company Building

Prior to starting Rubrik, Bipul was an engineer turned venture capitalist. His main observation from his time as a VC was that VC is meant to be the “riskiest asset class” and its purpose is to fund companies capable of generating “animalistic” growth. Therefore, Bipul designed Rubrik to achieve these goals

Bipul Sinha’s framework for building and scaling Rubrik revolves around three core principles: leveraging risk capital to maximize growth, addressing challenges with urgency, and building a talent powerhouse proactively.

1. Risk—Maximize growth with risk capital

Bipul designed Rubrik to embrace calculated risks, leveraging venture capital as a tool to drive exponential growth. A key pillar of his framework was allocating ~10% of each funding round to high-stakes bets capable of significantly inflecting the company’s growth curve. His philosophy was that venture capital, as "risky" capital, should be purposefully deployed to achieve exponential outcomes. This paid off, with Rubrik scaling from $5M TCV at launch to $47M just 12 months later and $168M in the following year.

Tactic: Launching at VMWorld to Accelerate Rubrik’s path to Product-Market Fit

Strategic Goal

• Create urgency to compress Rubrik’s time to find Product-Market Fit.‍

Plan

• Bipul allocated $1M of the $10M Series A funding to secure booths at VMWorld, a critical event for enterprise buyers, even though the product was not ready for general release.
• He emphasized urgency by telling the team, “10% of our funds are gone if we don’t deliver the product.”

Outcome

• The goal was to generate over 3,000 high-quality leads quickly, targeting beta customers who would be committed to Rubrik’s success.
• This worked—by anchoring the team’s efforts to the VMWorld deadline, Rubrik avoided the typical 18-month journey to product-market fit.

Tactic

• Manufacture urgency and allocate capital to opportunities that can drive “animalistic” growth

Tactic: Creating a Sales Gravy Boat to Accelerate Rubrik’s go-to-market fit

Strategic Goal

• Discover the maximum selling potential of Rubrik’s sales team (“power curve”) quickly to define sustainable and scalable quotas.

Plan

• Following Rubrik’s Series B funding, Bipul allocated $3M of the $40M raised to test how fast and how much the sales team could sell per quarter.
• Bipul understood that GTM teams are commission motivated, so he introduced a $300K ACV (Annual Contract Value) quota per quarter with a doubling commission incentive for exceeding the target.
• Bipul positioned the experiment as a temporary “gravy train” opportunity with unlimited earning potential. Bipul further committed to supporting the sales team by personally flying out to help close deals, fostering a shared belief in the experiment.

Outcome

• The experiment revealed the sales team’s “efficient frontier,” and helped Bipul determine the maximum amount a salesperson could sell in a quarter.
• One salesperson at Rubrik earned $330K in a single quarter, surpassing their previous best annual earnings of $291K.
• Based on these insights, Bipul reduced the efficient frontier by 20% to set realistic quotas, acknowledging that not everyone can sustain peak performance.
• Even after the “gravy train” incentives were removed, GTM teams continued to perform at the levels achieved during the experiment, proving the scalability and effectiveness of the strategy.

Tactic

• Regularly employ experiments to identify operational limits, then refine processes for scalability

2. Speed—Confront Your Biggest Problems with Urgency

Bipul emphasized that CEOs must confront the biggest risks in their businesses with unrelenting focus and urgency. It’s human nature to avoid difficult problems in favor of comfortable tasks, but scaling a company requires targeting and resolving the most significant challenges head-on. Early on, the biggest risk is typically finding Product-Market Fit; as the company scales, the focus shifts to Go-to-Market and to discovering your Act-2 or new product potential. The biggest mistake Bipul sees in young CEOs is problem avoidance.

Tactic: Identify Risks by Planning Backward

• As a CEO, identifying risk is a key part of your job. Risk is the inability to solve your pressing problems.
• Risks are clear when working backwards from an outcome. Plan backwards, and execute forwards.

Approach

• Define a clear outcome (e.g., “By August next year, we want 3,000 customers using our product”).
• Work backward month-by-month to identify the blockers that impede achieving this outcome.
• Tackle these risks head-on—If you do not, it will become the reason your team begins to move slow

Example: How Rubrik Quickly Validated Customer Demand

Risk

• Most companies take years to find PMF—early on, Bipul identified finding PMF as Rubrik’s risk

Strategic Goal

• Manufacture customer buy-in to increase Rubrik’s chance of reaching PMF quickly

Plan

• 1) Launched at VMWorld, targeting a high density of enterprise buyers to generate awareness and early interest.
• 2) Created a simple 1-page contract to secure buy-in from beta customers:
  • Offered three weeks of product access.
  • Outlined evaluation criteria.
  • Provided an opt out mechanism.
  • Required a $3,500 deposit.
• Bipul’s framework was that if a customer can’t fight for you for $3,500, they won’t fight for you for $100,000 when a deal is on the line.

Outcome

• Attracted 100 beta customers, generating $322K in deposits.
• Converted 22 of these beta customers into full contracts.
• Compressed the timeline to PMF by focusing efforts on high-intent customers (“believers”) instead of wasting resources on low-interest buyers.

Tactic: Maximalist Thinking

Strategic Goal

• Identify bottlenecks for “10xing” the business in the next 12 months

Approach

• Similar to “risk”, Bipul works background from a goal to identify blockers in the way of the next 10x
• While 10x is likely not achievable in 12 months, it forces thinking about key bottlenecks/constraints

Example: Applying Maximalist Thinking

Situation

• Company A is at $25M ARR. PLG has driven all growth to-date and they are just building out sales
• While growth is good, they are less than 1% penetrated on their TAM. They could be growing faster

Bottlenecks

• Working backwards, we identified the key bottleneck is that a large part of the TAM doesn’t understand why they should use the product over alternatives. Once they understand, they convert. Because growth has been driven by word-of-mouth, they haven’t had to become really good at crisply explaining the product.
• Company A recognized this gap and was already hiring for product marketers. However, Bipul urged the team not to wait for those hires. Instead, he asked, “What is the one thing you could highlight to differentiate your product?” When the founder identified “cost” as the key differentiator, Bipul suggested running a test campaign focused on that.
• Fear of burning capital or running a failed experiment often slows down progress, particularly in GTM efforts.

‍3. Recruiting—Build a Talent Powerhouse Proactively

Bipul understood that building a great company requires exceptional talent density. His framework for identifying the “best people” for each role involved acting as the first recruiter himself. When Rubrik launched, he took an unconventional approach by bypassing his personal network and instead built his team entirely through cold outreach.

Tactic: Be the First Recruiter for Every New Role

• While leveraging your network is valuable, Bipul believes it’s impossible to truly understand what “great” looks like without directly engaging with candidates.
• He hired Rubrik’s first set of GTM employees and engineers entirely through cold calling and direct outreach.
• After meeting various GTM leaders, he realized he needed a leader who could sell effectively rather than just manage.
• This insight led him to focus outreach on newly promoted managers at top companies like EMC and Palo Alto Networks (PANW).
• By cold outreaching candidates and building his mental model, Bipul was able to refine his understanding of the ideal profile for each role—something his network alone couldn’t provide.

‍Tactic: Do Not Negotiate with Yourself. Do Everything Possible to Hire Great Talent

• Don’t preemptively disqualify potential candidates by assuming they’re unattainable
• He often reached out to people he liked many times before they replied to his outreaches
• Just like in enterprise sales, refine your campaigns by focusing on common connections, interests, etc
• Remember that products are a means to an end. You need to sell yourself to hire great people
• You need to sell yourself in a way that convinces them you are will create value for them/their family
• Example #1: Rubrik’s first Product Marketing hire took months and months of outreach. Bipul identified an early Google PMM from Stanford, Wharton, and VMWare as a candidate. For months, she didn’t respond. One day, he finally got through and set up coffee and was able to hire her to join the team
• Example #2. Bipul spoke with the parents of a IIT graduate to convince them Rubrik was a good fit

Tactic: Build Talent Maps of Lookalike Companies

• Bipul identified “lookalike” companies with exceptional talent that aligned with Rubrik’s needs, particularly in Go-to-Market (GTM) roles. He emphasized the importance of finding the right company and timeframe that matches the stage and needs of your own company.
• To uncover these sources of talent, Bipul asked candidates, “What companies have great sales talent?”
  • This approach led him to EMC’s Commercial team (2007–2014), where he met the current and former team members to identify and hire potential sales talent for Rubrik.
  • After EMC, Bipul discovered PTC as another target company with strong sales talent and repeated the process of networking and hiring.
• Meta Insight:
  • Continuously identify when and where the best talent for your company exists, as markets and talent pools evolve.
  • Always monitor companies that share your culture and excel in critical functions like EPD and GTM. You or someone on your team should aggressively meet these people to build a roster of potential candidates

Tactic: Companies Run on Incentives. Align Incentives to Functional “Risk Tolerance”

• Within a company, employees can be categorized based on their “risk tolerance”
• On-Risk Employees:
• Engineering, Product
  • Focused on long-term outcomes and can take calculated risks
  • Compensate with higher equity and lower cash compensation to align to long-term value
• Off-Risk Employees:
  • Sales, Customer Success
  • Focused on short-term results and operate under more immediate performance needs
  • Compensate with lower equity and high cash compensation to align to short-term value
• Both employees win, just on different timeframes
  • At Rubrik’s IPO, over 1,000 employees became millionaires—most of them engineers benefiting from long-term equity incentives. Salespeople earned significant cash as Rubrik scaled revenue
• Lead by example for other on-risk employees—Bipul took a $65k salary and no bonus for 6 years

Tactic: Create Mechanisms to Keep Engineering Close to Customers

• The Sales and Engineering team need to be integrated, otherwise engineers aren’t building for anyone
• Slack was critical for this—Every customer would get a Slack channel. Engineers, Deployment, and Sales would all be invited to the channel. The team deploying the customer would live quote in Slack updates and feedback from customers
• This connectivity created tight loops between EPD/GTM that helped Rubrik respond to requests fast

Tactic: Design Systems to Drive Trust and Accountability

• Bipul’s strategy to drive trust and accountability was to build a company with radical transparency
• In his view, transparency fosters trust, aligns teams with the company’s mission, and creates a shared sense of ownership in solving challenges.
• Radical Transparency at Rubrik:
  • Bipul ran open board meetings with the entire company for the first seven years.
  • Employees could ask questions and get answers from Bipul and the board.
  • Shared both successes and challenges helped create alignment during scaling.
• Open board meetings won’t work for everyone. The meta point is build systems to drive trust/belief

Intuition and Knowledge: A Framework for Decision-Making

Life operates in two distinct realms: knowledge and intuition. Knowledge pertains to the past—problems that are already solved or understood. Intuition pertains to the future—guiding you through unknown future problems

The Role of Intuition

• Intuition is deeply personal, shaped by your unique experiences, making it irreplaceable.
• The most challenging decisions often lie in the realm of intuition and should not be outsourced.
• Example: Deciding when to pivot your company’s strategy or enter a new market. Such decisions rely on your instincts, insights, and ability to synthesize incomplete information about future opportunities.

The Role of Knowledge

• For problems rooted in the past, rely on proven best practices and learn from others.
• Examples: Hiring and managing executives and building a high-functioning sales enablement process.
• There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for these types of challenges that have proven answers.
• Instead, adopt or adapt established approaches to avoid costly and time consuming mistakes.

Balancing Advice and Intuition

• Advice is valuable but should never be treated as absolute truth. Instead, let it inform your intuition.
• Listen to perspectives and decide whether to take them into account or to ignore the advice / feedback
• The worst thing you can do is average all the advice you receive to make a future-looking decision
• Your intuition is the reason you reached your current point, trust yourself and your intuition

PMF is Not Static. Great Teams Re-find PMF to Reach Public Scale

PMF is not static—it evolves as markets shift, competitors adapt, and new platform opportunities emerge. In today’s world, maintaining PMF has become increasingly challenging. The half-life of PMF is shrinking, forcing companies to continuously refine and reinvent themselves.

The Ephemeral Nature of PMF

• Historically, companies had decades to establish dominance. For example, Microsoft took 25 years to become a household name. By contrast, modern products like ChatGPT achieved widespread adoption in just 6–12 months. On top of this, AI is forcing companies to change roadmaps almost daily to respond to market changes 
• Once you find an initial PMF, competitors quickly adapt, and replicate functionality and messaging with customers. Once this happens, the comparison becomes a feature battle and velocity slows down
• For these reasons, Bipul estimates that PMF lasts just 6 to 9 months in today’s world. For a company to reach an IPO, the company needs to constantly re-find PMF. Therefore the most successful companies are the ones that can re-find PMF continually—otherwise you will get stuck at $100M ARR
• That’s why “big company” executives can be so value destructive at startups. Many of these executives come in and spend 6-8 months devising a plan. By the time they present a plan to the board, the market has changed and the competition has caught up

Tactics for durable PMF: Change the Rules of the Game

• As markets shift and competitors react, you need to proactively alter customer’s decision frameworks
• Salesforce has reinvented customer perception throughout its history despite offering the same CRM
  • Salesforce shifted from Cloud to Chatter (consumer) to Einstein (AI v1) to Agentforce (Agents)
  • When Salesforce adjusts messaging, customers make decisions based on new criteria
  • It is no longer a decision on feature A or feature B, but it is do you also have agent capabilities?
  • If Salesforce didn’t make these adjustments, they likely would not be relevant as a CRM today
• Customers don’t just buy products—they buy narratives and you need own the rules of the game 

Trust your intuition. Don’t be afraid to pull the team in a new direction to win the market

• Pulling vs. Getting Pulled: If the team is pulling you in the right direction, empower them. If you’re pulling the team and need to make a big decision, give orders.
• Often when you are making big shifts in Product, you are pulling the team. Do not be afraid to push the team in a direction if you think it's right. Present your rationale, gather feedback, and move forward
• The key is to forget the past (you likely made a mistake or two) and think from first principles on the path forward. Bipul did this many times in the history of Rubrik, but most recently in 2020 when he pivoted the whole company to focus on Cybersecurity

Example: Rubrik’s Zoom Moment

The Situation

• While Rubrik initially scaled fast, they ran into issues as the company grew driven by internal dynamics
• After growing to $350M in a few years, Rubrik missed their Revenue goal the following year by ~$50M
• On top of this, Bipul didn’t slow down hiring because he thought the team would accomplish its goals
• All of a sudden, the company was missing topline targets and was burning more money than planned

Initial Diagnosis

• Bipul sat down with his President and reviewed every deal that went through the pipeline that year
• Per his framework, they identified risks backwards to be able to identify a strategy to execute forwards
• First realization was they had too many ineffective executives—They got rid of 22 VPs at the company

COVID-19

• Before they could rectify the situation, COVID happened. They saw a Revenue decline of 17% in Q1’20
• Bipul immediately laid off 10% of the company (120 people) and raised emergency capital for the team
• Bipul then forced the team to do Quarterly Business Reviews each week, which helped drive rigor
• The company started to recover in Q2’20 and Revenue began to flatten instead of decline

Rubrik’s Pivot to Cybersecurity

• During this period, Bipul realized there was a huge adjacent market and they needed to Pivot towards it
• He created a deck called “Rubrik’s Zoom Moment” where he outlined Rubrik’s shift to cybersecurity
• Almost overnight, Rubrik went from selling backup and recovery software to Cybersecurity software
• He received a lot of pushback from executives on the team and from customers that felt abandoned
• But Bipul trusted his intuition and pushed forward. They ended the year flat, but positioned to grow
• Fast forward to today, Rubrik is a $5.5B company and has a totally new revenue base and product

Key takeaways: Trust your intuition. To build a great company, you need to re-find PMF multiple times