Two Unicorns Built in 12 Years. The Principles Have Never Changed | Glean, Arvind Jain

Name: Two Unicorns Built in 12 Years. The Principles Have Never Changed | Glean, Arvind Jain
Uploaded: 2026-05-14T13:30:35.000Z
Duration: 11 min 58 s
Channel: EO

EOMay 14, 202611m

Topics13

Startup Weapons: Focus, Speed, and Strategic Choices0:00 Introduction to Glean and Arvind Jain0:31 Background and Journey to Founding Glean1:38 Identifying the Universal Productivity Problem3:00 Technical Challenges of Building Enterprise Search4:01 Early Customer Outreach and Challenges4:31 Strong Conviction Despite Rejections5:30 Validation Through Internal Use and Design Partners6:32 Transition to Paid Product and Funding7:30 Engineering Philosophy: Leverage Existing Tech8:00 Incorporating Enterprise Context9:01 Glean's Scale and Focus10:00 Advice for Aspiring Founders10:30

In a Nutshell

Arvind Jain, founder of Glean—a powerful enterprise AI like ChatGPT connected to company data—built two unicorns (Rubrik and Glean) by solving universal productivity issues like information overload, starting from personal frustrations at Rubrik in 2019. Despite early rejections and search fatigue, strong conviction, internal validation with 20 design partners, and a free beta led to seamless paid adoption in 2022, fueled by word-of-mouth. Core principles: leverage existing tech like GPT-4/Claude instead of reinventing, focus engineering on enterprise context, move fast with agility, and maintain unshakeable belief in the problem despite naysayers.

AI-Generated Notes

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For a startup, you have one weapon always, which is that you have focus and the ability to move fast, and we have to use those as our primary weapons to stay ahead. It's also strategy: we don't want to reinvent the wheel; we want to make use of all the great technologies available and focus on the rest where others are not wanting to spend time. Customers are looking for solutions to problems; they're not looking to buy great technology. This allows us to focus and dedicate our engineering time on problems that others are not investing in. Focus, investment, speed, agility, and making the right strategic choices—such as not training our own models and benefiting from the industry's innovation—help us stay ahead in this market.

My name is Arvind Jain. I'm the founder and CEO of Glean. Glean is an enterprise AI company. Think of it as a more powerful version of ChatGPT that's connected to all of your company's data and knowledge. You can ask it any questions or give it any task, and Glean will use all of that enterprise context as well as the world's knowledge to answer those questions or complete those tasks. We started in early 2019, making us one of the first enterprise GenAI companies in the world. We have so much opportunity to transform how people work and fundamentally change the nature of how humans are going to be working.

I'm an engineer by training. I studied computer science in college and worked at five different startups over the last 25 years. I worked at Google when it was a privately held company, then we started Rubrik in 2014. I've been in the tech industry for quite some time. I've been an engineer, a programmer—that's my core identity. I never set out to start these two companies, Rubrik and Glean; these were things that happened as I was working through. Primarily, I've always thought of myself as a product builder. I love working on technology and taking complex problems and figuring out how software can solve them.

The journey for Glean started the same way. I was already a founder of a successful company when I started Glean. Rubrik had pretty good success; we were growing fast. As we grew, 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—started to look much worse on a per person basis. When we tried to understand what was happening, our employees complained the most that they couldn't find information within the company and couldn't find the right people to help them with their tasks.

This is not a unique problem. Every company has knowledge and data, and every single person struggles with it, dropping their productivity. It was obvious: here's an opportunity to help every single person in every single company become more productive by reducing their frustration. That motivates me. When people complain they can't find information inside the company, we had to solve that problem. I was super excited to build this product, so that led me to create Glean. It was not that I was trying to start a company or be an entrepreneur; I wanted to solve a technical problem and build a product like Glean, so maybe I should start a company.

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Two Unicorns Built in 12 Years. The Principles Have Never Changed | Glean, Arvind Jain

Startup Weapons: Focus, Speed, and Strategic Choices00:00

Introduction to Glean and Arvind Jain00:31

Background and Journey to Founding Glean01:38

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