A small group of Indian immigrants have helped propel each other from technical roles at Oracle and Google to found and lead a number of Silicon Valley’s top enterprise software startups, from Nutanix to Glean and Rubrik, which went public on Thursday.
By Alex Konrad, Forbes Staff
At Oracle’s former Silicon Valley headquarters in Redwood Shores, a small group of engineers gathered weekly in 2005 for what amounted to a mini-MBA: an exclusive crash course in product quality, customer support, basic sales and marketing. Out of hundreds, if not thousands, of applicants, this small group of a dozen or so employees included a few with a common background: immigrants from India, graduates of one of the country’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology schools.
They didn’t know many business basics, like how to put together a balance sheet for financial statements. But the group learned fast. And the companies they launched — including cloud companies Nutanix and Rubrik, which is listing its stock on Thursday — now carry combined market values in the tens of billions. “I’ve always jokingly said that one roomful of 12 engineers can beat most classes at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, or Harvard Business School,” said Skyflow CEO Anshu Sharma, who attended alongside Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha and Nutanix’s former CEO Dheeraj Pandey.
Data security provider Rubrik, which priced its IPO on Wednesday night at $32, at a valuation of $5.6 billion, has proven a rare bright spot in a drought of such public exits over the past two years.
“Great companies are not looking for timing, they’re working on their own timing,” Sina told Forbes in an interview on Thursday. “What happens or doesn’t happen today is not of much consequence if you look three years, or five years out at building a generational company, a company with no finish line.”
Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha
RubrikFor Sinha and cofounders Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar and Arvind Nithrakashyap, it’s a major achievement; for investors including Blumberg Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Greylock Partners, it’s a welcome liquidity event. But among this small group of highly technical immigrant founders and executives, it’s far from the first major outcome; nor the last. Two of those cofounders are already working on new startups, enterprise search unicorn Glean and stealth data startup WisdomAI.
“When you talk about famous networks of founders like the PayPal Mafia, I would not put ourselves in that category,” said Jain, whose company Glean is now a fixture on the Forbes AI 50 list. “But there’s probably something special about the culture of people we created.”
Initially underestimated as better engineers than businesspeople, the founders of Nutanix, Rubrik and the others now share an entrepreneurial bond. They’ve mostly co-invested in and advised each others’ companies, occasionally teamed up and, in one tense moment, clashed head-to-head. They’re too busy to see each other often, they told Forbes, but barbecues, birthdays and morning commute calls keep them in touch. And now, as some have exited their initial successes, the cycle has repeated, even as a new generation of Indian programmers and founders look to them as examples.
THE IIT STARTUP MAFIA
What might look like an oversized herd of unicorns is really the result of a “grueling” self-selection process that began with IIT admissions and continued in Silicon Valley, said Asheem Chandna, a partner at Greylock who led Rubrik’s Series B funding round in 2015. “These are founders who went to MIT, but 1,000x harder,” Chandna said. “Startups are hard, they require you to be obsessive, persistent and take risks. And that’s very much an extension of the immigrant story.”
Sinha’s was particularly arduous. The son of an entrepreneur whose business ventures failed, Sinha and his family moved frequently in their lower-income state of Bihar in India growing up. At one point, they lived in a basement without running water, according to one report. Urged by his father to apply to IIT despite poor grades, Sinha stopped attending class to focus solely on the entrance exam and English, a language needed to study. After more than a year of effort and a failed attempt, he got into IIT Kharagpur, landed a job at IBM in India, and then reached Oracle in the U.S.
Sinha was a greenhorn investor at VC firm Blumberg Capital when he reunited with Pandey, who had left Oracle to work at another data startup, Aster Data Systems, alongside fellow IIT Kanpur grad and Oracle alum Ajeet Singh and Mohit Aron, an IIT Delhi grad and ex-Googler. The three were now working on a new startup, Nutanix; Sinha and Blumberg wrote them one of their first checks in 2010. When months later, Sinha was recruited to a larger firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners, he teamed up with firm cofounder Ravi Mhatre to keep investing in Nutanix. Lightspeed would eventually pour a cumulative $40 million into the company, and quickly promoted Sinha to investment partner.
But by 2012, Singh had departed to launch ThoughtSpot with another former IIT Kanpur classmate, ex-Googler Amit Prakash (Glean CEO Jain, an IIT Delhi grad, discussed joining them but remained for a time at Google instead). The following year, it was Aron’s turn to leave Nutanix, this time to launch data management company Cohesity.
ThoughtSpot cofounder Ajeet Singh and Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha at the Nutanix IPO in 2016.
Ajeet SinghFast forward to 2014, and Nutanix was still led by Pandey and still two years from IPO. After its cofounders departed, board director Sinha decided to leave as well to start a new data management company, Rubrik. When Sinha informed Lightspeed cofounder Ravi Mhatre, by then a major investor in both Nutanix and ThoughtSpot, that he planned to leave the firm, Mhatre tried to convince him to stay. “I was surprised and extremely excited, but also frankly bummed out, all in one,” said Mhatre. But Sinha wouldn’t reconsider, to the surprise of some peers. “There’s only so much you can do as an investor. As a founder, you can do more,” Skyflow’s Sharma, who personally invested in Nutanix, remembered Sinha telling him then. “It’s more concentrated, it’s riskier, but you can have outcomes that are 100x bigger.”
Once he was sure that Sinha couldn’t be convinced to reconsider, Mhatre shifted gears to encouraging him to partner with the firm on the new venture. Lightspeed led Rubrik’s Series A in 2015 and eventually bet more than $350 million on the company over the years, per a source with knowledge, giving it a position worth more than $1.2 billion at IPO.
To get Rubrik going, Sinha finally convinced Jain to leave Google as one cofounder; Nithrakashyap, an IIT Madras grad and another Oracle coworker, signed on as CTO, while Mazumdar, from the IIT Kanpur and Google alumni branches of this founder tree, joined as fourth cofounder and chief architect. Initially focused on backing up and protecting server data, Rubrik eventually shifted to tracking that data more efficiently by the time it reached a $3.3 billion valuation in 2019. “We are taking this market [that] has been a bit of a backwater, and we are redesigning and rethinking the whole thing,” Sinha told Forbes at the time.
Rubrik founders Arvind Nithrakashyap, Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar and CEO Bipul Sinha.
RubrikTo industry trackers, it sounded a lot like what Cohesity was doing. Cofounder and CEO Aron hadn’t sought out Lightspeed as an early investor in his new company when he started it in 2013. Sinha, as a director representing the firm on Nutanix’s board, however, would have heard about Aron’s plans as they mapped out his departure, and some close to Cohesity muttered in the years that followed that Rubrik’s business model looked suspiciously similar. In 2019, one report described the situation as “one of the tech industry’s most bitter rivalries.”
Both companies grew over the following years at a healthy clip, appearing on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. They also both shifted focus to data security: In February, Cohesity announced it was acquiring Veritas’ data protection business, resulting in combined annual recurring revenue of $1.3 billion and a market value of $7 billion. Rubrik, meanwhile, launched a cloud security offering in 2022. It reported annual recurring revenue of $784 million as of January 31, 2024, per its IPO filings.
Reflecting on Rubrik’s IPO day, Sinha said that iconic tech companies like Nvidia hadn’t started with one idea and clung to it. As early as 2016 or 2017, Rubrik had built a first version of data security platform, he added. “The market wasn’t there yet,” Sinha told Forbes. “But as the market came our way, we actually aligned ourselves more and more, and continued to build those products and services — and here we are.”
Aron, who changed his job status on LinkedIn this month to “founder emeritus” at Cohesity, wrote Forbes in a statement: “Nutanix was a great breeding ground and learning ground. I have a healthy respect for everyone doing these companies.” He declined further comment.
When the ‘IIT Mafia,’ as peers have called them, were still early in their careers in the mid-2000s, there weren’t many Indian CEO success stories in Silicon Valley yet. Sun Microsystems and IIT graduate Vinod Khosla was already a billionaire, leaving established VC firm Kleiner Perkins to launch his own firm, Khosla Ventures, in 2004. Palo Alto Networks was getting started with an IIT cofounder overseeing engineering, Rajiv Batra. At Google, a young product manager named Sundar Pichai was just getting started. And at Oracle, IIT dropout Thomas Kurian was overseeing ever-larger divisions of the database giant. (Now the CEO of Google Cloud, Kurian reports to Pichai, Google’s overall CEO.)
But Indian immigrants were mostly expected to defer to others to launch new startups. “When I was thinking of starting my first company, investors would say, ‘you should look for somebody who’s more American looking, whatever that was supposed to suggest,” said Sharma, now on his third startup, Skyflow, which recently raised $30 million. “Everyone thought, these guys can be successful developers. Then maybe they could be managers, then maybe do product design. It’s been this evolution to get closer to the consumer,” Pandey agreed.
“One of my lifetime goals is that I want 10 people to leave my companies and start unicorns.”
To change that paradigm, the founders embraced mentors from outside their Indian roots, noted Singh, who turned to former Snowflake and Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman as a crucial early adviser in building ThoughtSpot. Then there was the unnamed mid-level executive at Oracle — none of the founders could remember her name — who took a chance on the raw engineers with her business class.
Now, many of the founders are naturalized U.S. citizens, but you’ll still hear Hindi in the hallways at Rubrik, one said. And over dog walks and car ride commutes, they’re consciously investing in advising the next generation of founders, to keep the flywheel going. (Although it must be noted that among these interconnected companies, the founders are all men.)
“One of my lifetime goals is that I want 10 people to leave my companies and start unicorns,” said Singh at ThoughtSpot. “Whenever someone wants to leave to start a company, I never try to retain them. I feel like it’s almost a religion.”
In 2020, after twelve years in charge, Pandey left Nutanix. His next move: launching a new AI-based product development startup, DevRev, after being inspired by a chat with Khosla, the first institutional VC to back OpenAI. Recently, Pandey raised $100 million for DevRev at an undisclosed valuation in one of tech’s largest-ever seed rounds.
Even as a new wave of Indian founders look up to Pandey, he finds irony in the fact that he’s now turning to more recent successes, like Rubrik and Glean, for his own inspiration. “It’s very humbling that people look to us as role models, and I feel a burden to make time for them, and give back,” he said. “Meanwhile, these founders are now my investors, and I’m the one hoping to learn from them.”
Already, new startups are shooting off from Glean, the enterprise search company led by Rubrik cofounder Jain. He credits Glean, and Rubrik before it, for setting a “really transparent culture” that included early employees in board meetings and encouraged engineers to meet with their sales and marketing peers, as well as engage directly with customers.
Another Rubrik cofounder, Mazumdar, recently departed to start a new company, WisdomAI, whose website promises to use AI to make data insights more accessible throughout an organization. The company is believed to have raised funding but not announced it yet, a source with knowledge said; Mazumdar didn’t respond to a comment request.
Speaking from Rubrik’s IPO at the New York Stock Exchange, Sinha said that talent leaving to start a business was always part of his pitch to bring on the smartest people — that they’d learn how to start a business at Rubrik: “My philosophy has always been to let 1,000 flowers bloom.”
And for all their success, Sinha argued that the experience of the IIT alumni in Silicon Valley need not be unique. With the right combination of experiences — technical background, immigrant drive and strong education — such success could come from anywhere. “I’m very lucky to be an American, and I’m very lucky to have the opportunities that I got,” he said. “We want this opportunity for everybody.”
This story has been updated to include comment from Rubrik CEO Bipul Sinha.
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