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

EO11:57Added Aug 31, 2026

Arvind Jain had already built a unicorn. He could have stopped there. But when he saw his own team drowning in information they couldn't find, losing hours e...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Intro

  2. 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
  3. 00:07weapons 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
  4. 00:15the great technologies that's available to us and then we focus on the rest where others are not wanting to spend
  5. 00:22time 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
  6. 00:31focus and dedicate our time, engineering time on problems that others are not investing in. So I think that focus that
  7. 00:38investment 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
  8. 00:46industry's innovation. Those are some of the approaches that will help us um you know stay ahead in this market.
  9. 00:53My 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
  10. 01:02connected to all of your company's data and knowledge. So you can go to it and ask any questions or give it any task and gain will use all of that enterprise
  11. 01:10context 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
  12. 01:18first enterprise genai companies in the world. We have so much opportunity to transform how people work. Fundamentally change the nature of how humans are going to be working.

  13. Why I Started Over After a Unicorn Company

  14. 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
  15. 01:46years. I worked at Google when it was a privately held company and then we started Rubric in 2014. So yeah, so I've been in tech industry for quite some
  16. 01:53time 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
  17. 02:01companies 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
  18. 02:09been like I always thought of myself as a product builder. I love working on technology. I love taking complex problems and figuring out how software
  19. 02:17can 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
  20. 02:25founder of a successful company when I started Glean, you know, Rubric had pretty good success. We were growing fast and as we grew fast like you know
  21. 02:33we 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
  22. 02:41were doing, all of those started to look much worse on a per person basis. And when we try to understand like you know what was happening there, our employees
  23. 02:50complained 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
  24. 02:57their tasks. And 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
  25. 03:05single 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
  26. 03:13go 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
  27. 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
  28. 03:28had 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
  29. 03:35me to then go and create cleans it was not as if I was trying to start a company. I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
  30. 03:40The 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.

  31. The 2-Year Stealth Mode That Built $7B

  32. 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
  33. 04:01data is there. You know images, tickets, documents. You have to sort of build a deeper understanding of all of those different types of data. You have to
  34. 04:08understand 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
  35. 04:16search 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
  36. 04:24category in enterprises. Enterprises that tried buying search products in the past and they had all failed in fact universally failed. We had to really
  37. 04:33battle that perception that enterprise search products are all really really bad.
  38. 04:38We building this product and we wanted to get feedback. I would actually go on LinkedIn and connect with a lot of people in the industry leaders who I
  39. 04:46wanted 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
  40. 04:55most of the times you know nobody would respond back to me. well 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
  41. 05:04say 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
  42. 05:11sending 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
  43. 05:20and 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
  44. 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.
  45. 05:36But for me I had a surprisingly strong conviction in this. I knew how hard it is to find information at my work and
  46. 05:45how many hours I spent. And 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
  47. 05:53says that oh for them it was so easy to actually go and find information at work uh get answers to their questions. So I knew that people needed it but I knew
  48. 06:01that 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
  49. 06:10only 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
  50. 06:19delivered to them which was you ask a question and instantly you get right documents in such a small time that you have. So we were willing to wait. We
  51. 06:28were 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
  52. 06:35experience is when we wanted to launch the problem that we're solving while it may not generate an immediate business
  53. 06:43success everybody understood that it's important problem to solve that it's high impact if somebody solves it. I think the conviction came from the fact
  54. 06:51that 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
  55. 07:00actually offering the product for free for the first 2 years. I think you see usage like even when we're not charging like our design partners like we had 20
  56. 07:06of them and people inside those companies were raving about the product.
  57. 07:10They 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
  58. 07:18of 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
  59. 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
  60. 07:34that 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.
  61. 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.
  62. 07:48We 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
  63. 07:56each 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.

  64. Build Less, Win More

  65. 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
  66. 08:17weapons to stay ahead. Fundamentally, like our engineering philosophy at the company is, and it's a very obvious one,
  67. 08:25is that we don't want to reinvent the wheel here. We we want to make use of all the great technology that's available to us and we want to focus on
  68. 08:34innovating in areas where others are not wanting to spend time building products.
  69. 08:39These 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. When you think about models, we have so many
  70. 08:47companies out there building these foundational language models and they're all amazing and great. And instead of us actually going and making that same
  71. 08:55investment, we want to actually leverage these amazing technologies that companies like Google and OpenAI and Anthropic are building. And in fact, for
  72. 09:04our enterprise customers, they actually love the fact that we are not building models. Customers, they are looking for solutions to problems. They're not
  73. 09:11looking 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
  74. 09:19great technology try to see how you can incorporate that technology in your product and then we focus on the rest
  75. 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
  76. 09:35enterprise 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
  77. 09:42in that enterprise context for any task that you're trying to solve. So if you don't have to build the same technology that others are building, if we can make
  78. 09:50use of it, like for example, we can make use of GPD5 and cloud and Gemini, it sort of really allows us to actually
  79. 09:57focus and dedicate our engineering time on problems that others are not investing in. Glean is now over a thousand people. So we're also no longer
  80. 10:06a small startup. We're fairly large company and we are in fact investing more in making AI work in the enterprise
  81. 10:13than any other company out there in the world. We are a pure play enterprise AI company. We don't have any other product lines, no legacy products to support and
  82. 10:21all 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
  83. 10:28agility 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. Those
  84. 10:36are some of the approaches that will help us stay ahead in this market.
  85. 10:41I 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
  86. 10:50it 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
  87. 10:58people 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
  88. 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
  89. 11:14much 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
  90. 11:22and that reason still exists. Keep the conviction. Don't become the person who kills your own idea.